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PostPosted: Wed Oct 02, 2013 2:28 pm 
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I'm a literary scholar and pop culture critic researching for a book about Flannery O'Connor's influence on contemporary singer-songwriters. A fellow pop culture critic directed me to Harvey's Is This Desire? recording. Three of the songs on that recording bear considerable evidence of O'Connor's influence, and in fact quote from and draw on three of O'Connor's short stories.

My question: Has PJ Harvey mentioned an interest in O'Connor's fiction in a published interview somewhere? I know that Nick Cave is also a reader of O'Connor, and references her in a song on Henry's Dream. Did PJ perhaps learn about O'Connor from Cave?


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PostPosted: Wed Oct 02, 2013 10:55 pm 
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hmm, I seem to recall that she has been quoted in a previous interview or interviews that she had read or was reading O'Connor, but I don't recall if she had ever made a specific reference to O'Connor influencing her work on ITD?

Given their relationship prior to the release of ITD?, which was her first album since their breakup, it would be plausible that she had been turned on to O'Connor from Cave.

I'm sure someone around here remembers more about PJ and her O'Connor influences during that time as this subject has come up more than once on various PJ related forums over the years. Perhaps it was discussed more in depth on the old/now gone atforumz site? If so, maybe it can be revisted via an archive search.

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PostPosted: Thu Oct 03, 2013 7:58 pm 
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Thanks for the quick response Yes-No-Maybe-So. Reviewers of ITD? that I have read, on both sides of the Atlantic, did not pick up on the O'Connor connections on the album. One reviewer, fora example, thought the song "Joy" made reference to the poet William Blake. PJ is in fact singing about a character in an O'Connor story titled "Good Country People."

I am most eager to find an interview in which PJ mentions O'Connor. I'm hoping someone in the fan community can steer me to something in print.

Thanks for the suggestion about looking through archives on this site. I will look into that.


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PostPosted: Fri Oct 04, 2013 5:15 am 
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The defunct web site room509.net had a bunch of lengthy, full text articles (many from the ITD era), but it's long gone. Some of it was accessible on archive.org, but I can't seem to get it to work now:
http://web.archive.org/web/200806010341 ... om509.net/

You could ask your question over on the unforumzed.com PJ forum (which is what the original atforumz site morphed into):
http://www.unforumzed.com/forumdisplay.php?33-PJ-Harvey

There are a lot of long time PJ aficionados there. As near as I can tell there are no archives available there these days.

Try a search here on this site for "Flannery" or "O'Conner". Perhaps some leads will come from that. This topic has come up many times before. You can also search the unforumzed site.

I'd be pretty surprised if PJ ever mentioned O'Conner in a formal interview. She's well known for being reluctant to discussing the origin of her lyrics. In the last two albums, she has gotten better about attribution (right on the album 'sleeves'), but not the older ones.

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PostPosted: Fri Oct 04, 2013 1:45 pm 
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I remember Polly mentioning Flannery O'Connor more than once in various interviews, the first time (that I heard this) was on Gary Crowley's Show (BBC Radio 10 November 2007) where Polly was talking about what influenced her while writing Down By The Water. this was prompted by a question about "stories behind the song": "does that one sort of, you know, ignite any when you do hear it?" and here is Polly's response (that I just transcribed):

"I remember vividly where I wrote that. I was living in a big old barn in Dorset, in the middle of nowhere, and the whole album actually, the whole of the [inaudible word] on that album, was very informed by being in this 300-year old house in the middle of a field, and I really feel like I can hear the view that I was looking at every day in every song, so initially that informed this song. but also, I had just bought a second-hand Yamaha SK20, which is an old '70s synth, and it was the first time I was really playing around with this synthesizer. and that's kind of the roots where the song came from. and I forget exactly what I was reading at the time, but I think at that time I was reading about Flannery O'Connor short stories and that probably was also shaping the way that my third-person narrative was becoming in the whole record actually. I often find that I might suddenly become very excited by a particular writer or a painter or a film-maker even, and the way that they present their work will somehow make me think differently about how I present mine, and I think I was reading a lot of Flannery O'Connor at the time."

that was the first time I ever heard of Flannery O'Connor and thus it was Polly that effectively introduced me to her writing. and I have to say that, if no reviewers of ITD noticed the O'Connor references, it is a really sad reflection of how less-than-widely-well-known this author is, while in my opinion she belongs in the category of the most excellent prose writers ever.

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Last edited by Pollyphoniac on Fri Oct 04, 2013 2:40 pm, edited 1 time in total.

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PostPosted: Fri Oct 04, 2013 2:39 pm 
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that interview was a webcast, captured and torrented (on DIME, I think) by "zeez". now I have uploaded it here:

http://www.mediafire.com/folder/vhvisl4 ... rowley_BBC

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PostPosted: Fri Oct 04, 2013 8:52 pm 
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Thanks for the leads DrDark. I am intrigued that the topic of O'Connor's influence "has come up many times before" in earlier forums on PJ. I hope some of those commentators will be willing to revisit the topic and pass on their insights.

Recorded remarks like the one you have supplied me with Pollyphoniac are extremely helpful to my scholarship. Thank you very much for taking the time to track and type the quotation and to send the link to the webcast. I look forward to listening to the recorded interview this weekend. PJ's story reminds me of Springsteen's story of how he came to write and record the highly O'Connor-influenced Nebraska songs. He, too, was in a remote farmhouse, with 4-track TEAC recorder and a battered Gibson acoustic, and was, in his words, "deep into O'Connor" when he wrote the songs on that exceptional album.

Prophets, as it is written, are accorded little honour, even in their home country. The late monk and mystic Thomas Merton compared O'Connor to Sophocles and added, "I write her name with honor, for all the truth and all the craft with which she shows man's fall and his dishonor."

Thanks again to you both. I will keep casting for more on PJ and O'Connor.


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PostPosted: Sat Oct 05, 2013 8:03 am 
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There's a ITD thread over on unforumzed that may be a good place to ask your question:
http://www.unforumzed.com/showthread.ph ... is-Desire/

I recall PJ saying at one point that she thought ITD was the best thing she's ever produced and likely could never top it. In my opinion, she could be right.

It's interesting that heavily O'Conner influenced "The River":
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b0q8dV5oZ8A
http://fromnovelstonotes.wordpress.com/ ... pj-harvey/

was never performed live during the ITD era. Only in the last few years has she played it live:
http://pjharveyshows.thegardenforum.org ... yList.html

I've always thought that The River must have some special significance for her. It's certainly one of the most intense songs on ITD. There's only a handful of songs she's never performed live during an album's era. The ones like that from White Chalk also tend to be really intense (maybe too intense), like Before Departure, Broken Harp and To Talk to You.

Although it doesn't address issues like PJ's lyrical sources much, the (unauthorized) biography by Blandford has some interesting descriptions of what she was supposedly going through at the time of ITD. It took PJ an enormous amount of work and turmoil to produce it.

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PostPosted: Sun Oct 06, 2013 2:24 am 
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The administrator of the unformzed site has closed registration, so I cannot ask my question there. I scrolled through the ITD discussion thread and found no comments on O'Connor, though the O'Connor-influenced songs "Joy," "The River," and "No Girl So Sweet" are often listed as favourites.

I've ordered the Blandford biography Siren Rising through my university's interlibrary loan system. I look forward to reading the reportedly lengthy discussion of the ITD recording sessions.

"The River" is very interesting among the many (more than 25) O'Connor-influenced contemporary songs I have collected to the extent that it is somewhat of a found lyric: PJ has produced a kind of pastiche of words, phrases, sentences, and paraphrased narrative details from O'Connor's story to create her lyric. And the result is a remarkably powerful song with hauntingly beautiful lyrics.

Thanks again for your help.


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