Axis 3 of twelve · HYP
Does the work reach elevation — beauty, terror, transport, grandeur — and how often? Both height and frequency count. A single summit moment in an otherwise flat work scores below a work that rises repeatedly. Elevation may be cold or warm, uplifting or dreadful; the axis is indifferent to which.
Ungated. A work may be great without being elevated, and several on the bench are.
8 works · ungated · the rubric
Dionysus Flambouras · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Elevation is frequent and it is compressive. The forty-eight-inch square; the warmth field reading Unfileable; the corridor that spends its alphabet and begins again elsewhere; three elevators arriving together unasked, and a brass light coming on above 42 where the panel has no number; the index closed by one sentence at a rented window, the glass not shaking, while a guard in Wessex finds himself looking at grass. Each transports by contraction, and the book does it again and again: a last man standing under a schoolyard lamp on a timer; “That’s one place. Keep it there.” Held short of the summit where a decree enters, in the kingdom’s vocabulary, what the scene has already made happen.
Dionysus Flambouras · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
Elevation arrives by compression and never by lift. A boy laying a failed roof again with the branches all running one way; a father matching paint for a room kept shut; a hole widened by the width of a hand so a body need not be folded to fit. The finest instance is a dog counted down a staircase one tread at a time, and the same dog held three steps below a man who cannot cross his own kitchen floor to reach him. The register would be falsified by any raised voice, and it never raises one. The axis is capped by a method that takes its height from contraction.
Dionysus Flambouras · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
Elevation is rationed and usually adjacent to disgust, which is a decision rather than a deficiency. The satirical parts hold deliberately low; the grotesque means to repel. Against that the book keeps its permitted heights: a boy on a Radio Flyer in a country that has not yet asked him for anything, a stairwell whose voices arrive out of phase, a coffin that will not go down, and a fourteen-hundred-word part after the removal that is the finest writing in the corpus. The last height is reached by act, not lyric: a man counts twenty-four dollars into a furnace in seven places and does not write it down. The book transports less often than it disgusts, and it means to.
Radiohead · Music
8.3 · Tier IV
Elevation arrives repeatedly and is always structural rather than rhetorical. The guitar architecture of the second track rises to a genuine height and then is revoked; the sixth builds to a collapse; the tenth transports by tenderness, a glockenspiel lullaby laid over a wish for a quiet life. The method is a raised voice that knows it cannot be trusted, which is a legitimate and unusual route to the sublime. Short of the top band because the elevation is always immediately qualified — the record will not permit a summit to stand unexamined.
Dionysus Flambouras · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
Elevation arrives by compression, and it arrives in nearly every movement. A party still visible on the rescuers — a champagne flute nobody put down, a paper party hat, glittered eye makeup above a pry bar — and a smell that reaches the adults before the boy is fully out and is not named, which the sentence calls both the kindness and the injury. Evan whispers the last numbers of the countdown from inside a wall. Mrs. Alvarez adds a second name to a prayer she has said for eight years. A coat stands whole in the lake while fireworks crack overhead. The register never lifts; the dread is the transport, and the height comes from contraction.
Radiohead · Music
8.2 · Tier IV
Elevation by subtraction and by timbre rather than by force. The ondes Martenot lines, the choral treatment of a single syllable, the sustained closing of the seventh track and above all the wordless coda that surfaces after the closing silence: each transports by removal of support rather than by addition. The Martenot is played by Jonny Greenwood and rises over the strings of the fourth track. This is a legitimate and unusual sublime, and it is capped by its own method — a record committed to withdrawal has forsworn the raised voice, and the heights available to it are therefore limited by design.
Dionysus Flambouras · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
The height is in the endings and in a handful of compressed acts, and it comes from refusal. A man stepping into a line already accounted for and told that this saves time; a navigation device resting warm in a hand; a boy turning a chessboard on its side between a crow and two fallen birds; a picture frame off the wall almost before anyone realises a woman has stood; a nurse signing her initials without looking up. Each transports by declining to interpret, and the moments recur in both halves. What the collection never attempts is elevation of voice, and the flatness of the first half is a deliberate deadening that caps the axis.
Dionysus Flambouras · Literature
8.2 · Tier IV
Height is rationed and cold, each instance earned by the flatness around it. The kitchen in the dark, which a dead man said was only the kitchen in the dark, and which he learned as a boy at the driver’s father’s table; the ninth section leaves the driver sitting in it. A hymn sung badly by people who learned it from different teachers. A stripped rectangle of brick at Geraldton, one corner of a sheet left under a staple. Superior in October from a rail painted green, where a father once said look at the water. In February a frozen bay goes unlooked at. The book rises perhaps five times, and means to.