Honkymagic

One More Poem for the Anthology

2010-03-23T11:27:00.003-05:00

What follows is the last of the poems I chose for the Personal Poetry Anthology project. If I think of it, I'll post the introduction to the anthology itself in a day or two.

Introduction to "Brian, Age Seven"

2010-03-23T11:26:00.002-05:00

The poem, for me, comes alive in the second stanza as the “impossible legs” descend from the “ball of his torso.” It’s a picture that we all recognize, I think: a child’s drawn conception of the human figure, of what we look like. Elongated legs, blocky or spherical bodies, wide heads, eyes way up at the top, ears wherever they fall, and somewhere above, perhaps fit neatly into the triangle of a corner, a yellow sun, rays extending in perfect straight lines. “He breathes here,” Doty writes. At the same time, the poem catches fire with a simultaneous reflection of the world (what I recognize already as truth) and reconfiguration of the world (what I learn to see as the truth).

If art is, in some way, a reflection of who we are inside, or even of who we want to be as we reshape the world and ourselves and present them to the world anew, then consider what Brian holds inside: a giant smile, happiness almost uncontained by the borders of his face, and the sheer pleasure that the world might offer if we dare to catch hold of it – the sheer pleasure, for example, of a “towering ice cream” half as tall as Brian himself. “So much delight,” the poem insists. A gift from a soda fountain, but imaged here as “the flag of his own country held high,” as if this should be the visual representation of what we believe in, or who we belong to, of what we’ll fight for, or of what we should pledge allegiance to.

I pledge allegiance to sheer delight.

And I feel okay about that. But, then, the last three lines pull me back, stop me, or stop me and then pull me back. I start to feel like I’m running ahead of the poem. What am I to make of, “He shows us pleasure / And what pleasure resists”? What does pleasure resist? I get the penultimate line – a statement of fact – but what to do with the conclusion? I understand that the towering ice cream, the giant flag, might dwarf, in some ways, the boy himself, but why show us the boy as “frail”? Why “frail beside his relentless standard”? Has the drawing gone too far? Has Brian, in imagining such pleasure, in imagining such an impossibility turned it into something negative? Has the illusion, the human creation (rather than the world’s reality) become too much?

Mark Doty: "Brian, Age Seven"

2010-03-23T11:25:00.000-05:00

Grateful for their tour
of the pharmacy,
the first-grade class
has drawn these pictures,
each self-portrait taped
to the window-glass,
faces wide to the street,
round and available,
with parallel lines for hair.

I like this one best: Brian,
whose attenuated name
fills a quarter of the frame,
stretched beside impossible
legs descending from the ball
of his torso, two long arms
springing from that same
central sphere. He breathes here,

on his page. It isn’t craft
that makes this figure come alive;
Brian draws just balls and lines,
in wobbly crayon strokes.
Why do some marks
seem to thrill with life,
possess a portion
of the nervous energy
in their maker’s hand?

That big curve of a smile
reaches nearly to the rim
of his face; he holds
a towering ice cream,
brown spheres teetering
on their cone,
a soda fountain gift
half the length of him
—as if it were the flag

of his own country held high
by the unadorned black line
of his arm. Such naked support
for so much delight! Artless boy,
he’s found a system of beauty:
he shows us pleasure
and what pleasure resists.
The ice cream is delicious.
He’s frail beside his relentless standard.

Introduction to "No, Superman Was Not the Only One"

2010-03-18T07:47:00.001-05:00

It’s a sonnet. And there’s a wonderful dissonance between the tradition of the sonnet, the formality of the sonnet, the aura that surrounds the sonnet, and what we keep running into in the text of this poem – Superman, Lois Lane, Clark Kent. There’s a wonderful friction between what we assume a sonnet should be and all of the associations we have with comic books, with superheroes, with those over-familiar tropes: the superpowered man, the damsel forever in distress, the secret identity, the bizarre triangle between the fronted identity, the superhero, and the female. In turning over our expectations of what a sonnet should be about, Machan also turns over our expectations of what Lois Lane was, of what she could have been. See, it turns out, we never truly understood her; our knowledge of her, our understanding of her, is just as limited as the average Metropolis policeman’s knowledge of Clark Kent. Simple Clark Kent. Mild-mannered Clark Kent.

See, Lois Lane, too, was just a front, just another public identity. She, too, had a secret. She, too, could tap into powers that the rest of us might be too timid to do more than dream about. She, too, could seem “almost to fly.” She, too, could become “a bird, a plane, super in midnight sky.”

As could, I think the poem insists, all of us, were we not so intent on keeping those truly powerful parts of ourselves hidden, on keeping those things that we love, that we care about, hidden even from those we share so much of the rest of our lives with.

We all have secret identities. We all keep our selves hidden. We might not hide them in such obvious ways as, say, Superman or Batman, but we hide them nonetheless. We hide them by pretending not to care about the things we love. We hide them by prefacing otherwise passionate claims with clauses like, “Well, I’m not sure, and I probably haven’t thought enough about this, but” and “I don’t know but” and “I know it sounds silly but.” We make reference to “guilty pleasures.” We distance ourselves with irony. We reach tentatively toward caring from a stance of light mockery and sometimes never extend ourselves beyond that.

Katharyn Howd Machan: "No, Superman Was Not the Only One"

2010-03-18T07:34:00.000-05:00

In secret, Lois Lane wore coins and jewels
draped perfectly against the naked skin
she perfumed with wild jasmine, taunting fools
who’d denigrate her dance as snaky sin.
She called for drumbeat, shook the stage apart
with shift and shimmy, crescent arms upraised
to show the world the power of her art
and how on Earth the Goddess should be praised.
In silvered silk, her pinned-up hair set free,
she swayed and turned and seemed almost to fly
above the smoky air, almost to be
a bird, a plane, super in midnight sky.
No newspaper reported what she did;
even from Clark she kept her cymbals hid.

Introduction to "Louie Louie"

2010-03-17T09:00:00.000-05:00

The proto-rock ‘n’ roll shout. The pure chunk of three-chord adolescent nonsense. The primevalest of the primeval garage rock riffs. The teenage attempt at grunting and singing what can’t be said (and, judging from this song, can’t really be sung, either). Pinsky takes his title from the Kingsmen’s two minutes of supposed obscenity, two minutes onto which you can project whatever lyrics, whatever interpretation, whatever meaning you want.

Listening to the song becomes a sort of act of willful fantasy: I declare that he’s saying these lines, these lines and no others. What I hear is the reality of what he sings. What I want to hear is the reality of what he sings.

And, in the same way, I think the poem is a fantasy. A fantasy of a different world, a world that you get to create. A fantasy of ignorance, an impossible ignorance in which you can never have heard of Buck Rogers or Will Rogers. A fantasy of a world in which you were never forced to know, to hear of, Pearl Buck. An impossible world in which an individual can manage to never hear of George W. Bush, which can only mean that he never became noteworthy, that he – in this world – never became President, never became anything more than another failed businessman with a lot of family money keeping him safe.

But, as read it again, I’m not so sure. On a sixth, or seventh, or seventeenth reading, other aspects of it start to stand out, making me question that reading. In the end, while it makes sense that the speaker (of a poem) would have heard of “I Hear America Singing,” why can he not fully remember? If this is fantasy, why not know Whitman better than that? Why erase Whitman along with someone like Bush? Why put Whitman in terms of a book read sometime in high school – or a book simply possessed, simply “had in high school”?

For that matter, I assume that he’s being critical of Pearl Buck, lumping her in the “never heard of” category with the Beastie Boys and Bush, but that assumption, I’ll admit, may be based more in my unpleasant high school memories of The Good Earth than in the text of the poem itself.

Maybe anytime we start to substitute an imagined reality, an illusion, for the world itself, we risk that same tension, that same pulling apart that’s rooted in to being able to have truth cut two ways. That friction, that rubbing where the illusion joins the reality, will wear and wear, erode and flake, while we keep covering it over with temporary patches and band-aids, unwilling to look too closely at the fracture that’s truly there.

Robert Pinsky: "Louie Louie"

2010-03-17T08:59:00.000-05:00

I have heard of Black Irish but I never
Heard of White Catholic or White Jew.
I have heard of “Is Poetry Popular?” but I
Never heard of Lawrence Welk Drove
Sid Caesar Off Television.

I have heard of Kwanzaa but I have
Never heard of Bert Williams.
I have never heard of Will
Rogers or Roger Williams
Or Buck Rogers or Pearl Buck
Or Frank Buck or Frank
Merriwell At Yale.

I have heard of Yale but I never
Heard of George W. Bush.
I have heard of Harvard but I
Never heard of Numerus Clausus
Which sounds to me like
Some kind of Pig Latin.

I have heard of the Pig Boy.

I have never heard of the Beastie
Boys or the Scottsboro Boys but I
Have heard singing Boys, what
They were called I forget.

I have never heard America
Singing but I have heard of I
Hear America Singing, I think
It must have been a book
We had in school, I forget.

Poetry Anthology Introductions

2010-03-16T07:14:00.002-05:00

Students' anthologies are due Wednesday and Thursday. I'm almost done, too: a couple more introductions to edit and the "overall" introduction to write and then it's time to move on.

I'm in the middle of another Rolling Stone "100 Best" reactions, this time to Joni Mitchell's Blue. Anyone have thoughts on that record?

Introduction to "Deeper Than Love"

2010-03-16T07:12:00.003-05:00

When I read DH Lawrence’s “Deeper than Love,” I was immediately taken back to my sophomore year of college, to my class on Latin American short stories, a class in which all of the reading, all of the writing, and all of the discussion was in Spanish. I thought of Gabriel Garcia-Marquez’s short story “Muerte Constante Mas Alla del Amor” and my struggle, in our discussion of it, to explain that we all carry around with us a belief, an illusion, that love can and will transcend death, but that this might be merely wishful thinking. It’s a hard story to discuss, as I remember, without words like “bromide” or “platitude” or “myth” or phrases like, “It’s possible that I’m just a cynical college student and that I’ll probably grow out of this arrogant cynicism in a few years.”

It seems to me that this is what Lawrence’s poem is doing: not discussing a great story with only limited (if technically proficient) Spanish, but asking us to look at what we believe about love, at what power, what strength we ascribe to love and why we insist on giving it those qualities. The poem, for what it’s worth, is not willing to cede the kind of ultimate power, ultimate authority to love than many poems are. “There are deeper things than love,” Lawrence writes. And then, while praising love as life, as like the flowers, as lovely, as like the living life on earth, he proceeds to demolish many of these cherished ideals of love.

You love? Great. You’re still alone.

Love grows like flowers? Great. Underneath is solitary rock.

Love is twoness? Great. But underneath that twoness, you’re still alone.

Underneath, the poem keeps insisting. Underneath. Consider what is underneath. And what is underneath is not worse than love, nor uglier than love, but different: a fiery primordial imperative, a primordial consciousness. Justice.

Clearly, love matters. Connection matters. I believe that. And I very well may believe that love, that a connection between people, can be stronger than death. I’ve certainly argued it before: if I am changed by another person, by the love of another person, and that person dies, am I not still changed? And, in that respect, isn’t love – what it creates, how it manifests itself – stronger than death? The truth, the beauty of the trinity lies not in its religious overtones, or its papal mystery, but in its recognition that any strong love between two individuals creates a third individual. Not a sentient being. Not a sentient spirit. It’s dependent upon the two, but independent of the two. It manifests itself in the world. It affects the world. It changes the world.

Why does that matter?

We know love affects us. We know love changes us. But that does not mean that we have to ascribe to it supernatural power, or that we have to construct myths around it.

We can live quite contentedly, quite complacently, with a surface-level understanding of the world. We can even live relatively contentedly (or at least complacently) only presenting the surface of ourselves to the world. But doing so involves a fundamental denial. You must deny that there is more to yourself. You must deny that you hold things back. You must deny that any part of you wishes to probe further, to ask more questions, to dare more amibiguity, to confront more mystery, or to live more honestly.

Let us confront the occasional myth. Not for the sake of demolishing it, but for the sake of pursuing a genuine, personal understanding. For the sake of taking a potentially rewarding risk: living beyond the surface of the world. Living beyond the surface of yourself.

DH Lawrence: "Deeper Than Love"

2010-03-16T07:11:00.000-05:00

There is love, and it is a deep thing
but there are deeper things than love.

First and last, man is alone.
He is born alone, and alone he dies
and alone he is while he lives, in his deepest self.

Love, like the flowers, is life, growing.
But underneath are the deep rocks, the living rock that lives alone
and deeper still the unknown fire, unknown and heavy, heavy
and alone.

Love is a thing of twoness.
But underneath any twoness, man is alone.

And underneath the great turbulent emotions of love, the violent herbage,
lies the living rock of a single creature's pride,
the dark, naif pride.
And deeper even than the bedrock of pride
lies the ponderous fire of naked life
with its strange primordial consciousness of justice
and its primordial consciousness of connection,
connection with still deeper, still more terrible life-fire
and the old, old final life-truth.

Love is of twoness, and is lovely
like the living life on the earth
but below all roots of love lies the bedrock of naked pride, subterranean,
and deeper than the bedrock of pride is the primordial fire of the middle
which rests in connection with the further forever unknowable fire of all things
and which rocks with a sense of connection, religion
and trembles with a sense of truth, primordial consciousness
and is silent with a sense of justice, the fiery primordial imperative.

All this is deeper than love
deeper than love.

Introduction to "Each from Different Heights"

2010-03-15T12:38:00.001-05:00

There’s a wonderful honesty in Stephen Dunn’s “Each from Different Heights,” a willingness to push against what we might assume to be true or what we might want to be true. In this case, Dunn asks us to examine the distinction that we want to draw between those times we claim to have been truly in love and those times it turned out not to have been love, and to ask to what extent that distinction is real. How big is it, really? Does it exist at all? Or do we just assume that it should, or wish that it did? How different is that time “I thought I was in love” from the time “I was truly in love”? If I can speak of my love calmly, does that mean that the love is not real? If I sleep poorly and find myself speaking to the wall, does that mean that my love is true?

The distinctions get flattened.

And the hurt that we carry from the loss of love and the falls we take, the pain that seems so overwhelming when love is lost, when a relationship ends, when someone hurts us – that, too, might be subject to this same flattening. Perhaps the “longer fall” leaves a bigger bruise, a darker bruise, a deeper bruise, but it, just like a small one, just like a mild one, fades. Fades to perfect whiteness.

Now, clearly, you don’t want to take that flattening too far. To claim that all hurts are, in essence, equal because all bruises fade is to deny, I think, at least some fundamental emotional truth. But I don’t think Dunn takes it that far. The poem remains grounded, wonderfully grounded, especially in moments like this: “Sometimes even the false is tender.”

And that’s true. Hard, but true.

I appreciate that honesty, but, really, what I respond to most in the poem is the speaker, truly in love, discovering “the hidden genius of [his] hands.” Is there any greater spur to creativity, to expression, to getting up and getting out and Getting Shit Done, than love? Have you ever been as inspired as when you decide that you’re “truly in love”? Have you ever felt more like a genius? More like someone capable of creation? More like someone capable of expression? More like someone who should create?

Stephen Dunn: "Each from Different Heights"

2010-03-15T12:37:00.000-05:00

That time I thought I was in love
and calmly said so
was not much different from the time
I was truly in love
and slept poorly and spoke out loud
to the wall
and discovered the hidden genius
Of my hands.
And the times I felt less in love,
less than someone,
were, to be honest, not so different
either.
Each was ridiculous in its own way
and each was tender, yes,
sometimes even the false is tender.
I am astounded
by the various kisses we’re capable of.
Each from different heights
diminished, which is simply the law.
And the big bruise
from the longer fall looked perfectly white
in a few years.
That astounded me most of all.

The Brothers Grossman

2010-03-15T11:02:00.003-05:00

In English 11, we bracketed our study of transcendentalism and Into the Wild with two choice books. For each, we went to the library and chose books from a cart that one of our librarians was nice enough to put together for me. For the first, I read Lev Grossman's The Magicians, which has some fantastic moments and is absolutely worth reading. It's a lot of fun watching Grossman simultaneously celebrate and deconstruct both fantasy and coming-of-age-private-school literature. Plus, it has this passage:

“If there’s a single lesson that life teaches us, it’s that wishing doesn’t make it so. Words and thoughts don’t change anything. Language and reality are kept strictly apart – reality is tough, unyielding stuff, and it doesn’t care what you think or feel or say about it. Or it shouldn’t. You deal with it, and you get on with your life.”

Not bad, huh? It's even better in the context of the novel's consideration of just what kind of life fantasy literature (of the "kids find fantasy world that's kind of like ours but has kings and queens and talking animals and treasure and torches" sort) leads us to expect.

For the second, I read Austin Grossman's Soon I Will Be Invincible, which engages in its own act of celebration and gentle mockery, in this case of superhero comics. It's funnier, but maybe ultimately a little less satisfying than his brother's The Magicians.

Marquee Moon

2010-03-11T14:07:00.002-05:00

Television’s Marquee Moon is #38 on that Rolling Stone list from 1987. I didn’t hear this record until my sophomore year of college, after I started working at WCBN, hosting the stereotypical 3-6 a.m. slot one night every two weeks and spending those three hours running back and forth between the broadcast studio and an old production studio so that I could not only get music out over the air, but also dub four albums every shift. One of the first tasks I gave myself was to track down as many of those 1987 top 100 albums as I could. Marquee Moon was one of those.

And I loved it. The vinyl that I taped it from was a little beat up, and the whole thing just barely fit on one side of a tape, but I loved that thing. It was one of my go-to tapes that winter and I have clear memories of walking to my logic class listening to it and taking an extra lap around a hallway so that I could hear those last few desperate notes of “Prove It” before I sat down to an hour of Venn Diagrams.

And God, it’s still good. The tape has been replaced by two different CD issues, but the thing is still magic. It still crackles with this intensity, this tension, this electricity that’s unmatched, for me, by anything else from that mid-1970s New York punk scene. It’s not just the twin guitars of Tom Verlaine and Richard Lloyd, either (though they are justly lionized). It’s the skittering drums, always solid, but rarely predictable. It’s Fred Smith’s bass weaving its own melodies around the guitars. It’s the songs themselves, with their interlocking riffs and the bizarre couplets that emerge from Verlaine’s pen, like

My eyes are like telescopes
I see it all backwards, but who needs hope?

Yet it’s the guitars you remember. Lloyd’s more traditional solos and Verlaine’s unexpected jumps and leaps, the flashes of Neil Young rumblestorms and the moments of Richard Thompson fury, the psychedelic raveups and the third-eye explorations. It’s the neurotic, tense quality of Verlaine’s solo on “Friction.” It’s the way the notes of “Prove It” seem choked off, emerging from whatever the guitar equivalent of clenched teeth is. It’s the way the riffs of “Venus de Milo” run around the lyrics with what seems like complete abandon. It’s hearing Lloyd’s solo in “See No Evil” and comparing it to Verlaine’s in “Friction” and wondering just how much of the band’s greatness was driven by fundamental tension between their differing approaches to the guitar.

The only song I’m impatient with now is “Guiding Light,” which, in the context of so much that seems otherworldly, that taps this anxious, desperate nerve so effectively, comes across as predictable, as pat, as out of place. It feels like a song that anyone could have done, whereas the rest of the album is almost dauntingly singular. I remember really liking it in college, appreciating its relative calm, its chiming arpeggios, even Lloyd’s melodic solo, but now I just feel like it drags, and I find myself impatient to get to the glorious barbed wire solo of “Prove It.”

And last thing: this is Television’s debut. The debut. The first record. How many other groups can claim such a debut? How many other first albums are this strong? Big Pink, maybe? Freak Out? Appetite for Destruction? Please Please Me? Slanted and Enchanted?

I don’t know that I’d move it any higher than #38, but I have absolutely no problem with this making the list.

Introduction to "Rock Polisher"

2010-03-10T10:47:00.002-05:00

What an illusion this one presents. What a dream this one becomes. What a fantasy. What a wish: take all the less-than-perfect aspects of your life, all of the nostalgic longings, the disappointments, the memories that hurt and the memories that simply drag, the embarrassing haircuts, the useless items, the hopes that went unfulfilled and the seemingly promising moments that slipped by without delivering anything that mattered, anything that would last. Take all of this and toss it in the rock polisher. Let it churn for a week, let it all tumble around, the disappointments with the loss, the petty nonsense with the hurt, and let it emerge brilliant, perfect, and pure.

A fantasy. A beautiful fantasy (at least at first), but a fantasy nonetheless. And in this fantasy, even God’s mercy gets perfected (“at last”). I love that, love the implication that the mercy had been imperfect, had been in need of polishing – that that mercy, like a Christmas without snow when snow was all one wished for, had disappointed. And I love how the poem compresses everything that gets put in the polisher, how it equalizes everything: your school shoes, your eighth grade haircut, your parents, your God, all get elevated to the same status, to the same level. They are made equal. The poem reminds us that it’s a nonsensical pursuit to try to rank our disappointments, our failings, to try to claim that one thing hurt more than another. It’s not a matter of one thing needing polishing more than the next, but that all things are imperfect, and that if we’re going to polish one, we better be prepared to polish them all.

And with that, the poem reveals that this fantasy is not as beautiful as it may have appeared. It took me a while to catch this fragment of a line from about the middle of the poem: “It’s way past lights out now.” But there it is. See it? See the suggestion that this process becomes a trap, becomes a prison? Once you start, once you make the decision that all of these disappointments should be polished, should be perfected, you become trapped in the process. You can’t stop. It imprisons you. You try to perfect the way you love. You try to perfect the ocean, itself a rock polisher, but one that works too slowly. You try to perfect the sky, the sky that was good enough for Christ, good enough for Mozart – but not, in this prison, good enough for you.

Why can’t the moment when the girl on the track team touched your wrist be enough? Why can’t you see that as a perfect moment in and of itself?

Or, as Robert Bly, in “Wanting Sumptuous Heavens,” puts it: “There is no end to our grumbling: we want comfortable earth and sumptuous heaven.”

Chris Forhan: "Rock Polisher"

2010-03-10T10:47:00.001-05:00

Your father bought it, brought it
to the basement utility closet, waited
while a test pebble tumbled in it.
One week: he’d willed it to brilliance.
The grit kit’s yours now, the silicon
carbide pack. Split it, have at it.
Jasper, agate, amethyst crystal,
it’ll churn to a luster. Listen
to small rocks grind the big one down.
Stones in the driveway, pry them up, why not,
they’ll fit, glass knobs on your mother’s
bathroom cabinet, your baseball
and mitt, polish them, polish that
zero-win Peewee League season.
The thing your sister said and then
took back, you still have it, polish it,
polish the snowless Christmas
when all you’d hoped for was snow.
It’s way past lights out now, you’re crouched
above the barrel, feeding it
your school shoes, your haircut
in eighth grade—flat bangs
to the bridge of your nose—the moment
that girl on the track team touched
your wrist, then kept her fingers there,
the way you loved dumbly
and do. If the sun’s up, it’s nothing,
you’re polishing, you’re pouring in
the ocean rolling rocks into cobbles
too slowly, and the sky, it was
Mozart’s, was Christ’s sky,
no matter, dismantle it, drop it
into the tumbler, and you too, get in there
with your Dad and your Mom and the cat,
one by one, the whole family,
and God’s mercy, perfect at last.

Introduction to "Practicing"

2010-03-09T12:21:00.002-05:00

I first heard this poem when Orlean Anderson read it at a Northern Virginia Writing Project party in the summer of – what was it, 2002? 2003? I remember her reading it to us as we sat on the floor of someone else’s living room, the lot of us, for the summer, if not forever, writers, professionals, teachers, committed to our teaching and our writing, our learning and our students’ learning. And I remember thinking, as I heard the poem, that someday, maybe, I’d bring that poem into my classroom.

I never did.

As the file of poetry grew – first on overhead transparencies and later simply stored on the school’s server as a whole mess of zeroes and ones – it somehow never made the cut. It was just a little too much, I thought. It went just a little too far, like the one line about a “stifled come-cry” in Galway Kinnell’s “After Making Love We Hear Footsteps,” a poem that, like “Practicing,” I’ve also never read in class. And while I like the poem, like both poems, there never really seemed to be a compelling reason to offer it to the class. It’s somehow more acceptable, I suspect, to read something like Sherman Alexie’s “On the Amtrak from Boston to New York City,” with its line about “Don-fucking-Henley” than it is to read of girls sucking each other’s breasts and leaving marks, lifting their nightgowns and letting the straps drop.

But maybe I’m wrong. Maybe they’re both unacceptable. Maybe I’m fooling myself into thinking that either one was so much merit (either as poetry or as motivation to kids to read more poetry) to warrant its presence in my classroom. Maybe it’s just an illusion I sell myself: that we’re old enough, mature enough that this isn’t a problem, that the fact that AP English is a college class justifies treating it as such, as possessing the kind of freedom you might find in public university classroom.

Here, in any case, is what I like most about Howe’s poem: the pretense of what the girls are doing, the artifice with which they cloak their actions: this is practice, just practice; now you be the boy (for one of us has to if this it to be merely practice).

And what is kept internal, what is thought but not said, and the two ways that that works in the poem: first, the girls thinking (but not saying) “that feels good” and “I like that, and, second, the truth of the first kisses kept, for the most part, unmentioned, though obviously remembered.

And how there is something left unrevealed in the daylight, kept hidden, no matter how pure that “unreluctant desire” might have been.

And the imagery that constantly reminds us of childhood and of youthful indiscretion and experimentation: we were stoned on kisses, sleeping bags, Linda’s basement being like a boat, etc.

Growing up might mean learning how to acknowledge the truth of such desires, learning how to bring them into the daylight, but it also means learning how to hide others, learning how to be less and less emotionally open, emotionally available in order that the world, the others, the other selves, the other lives, can’t press quite so insistently, quite so painfully, and quite so joyfully on your own.

The poem calls it “practicing.” And that is what we call it. Getting ready. We tell ourselves that so much of being young is practicing, is preparing. Preparing for adulthood. Preparing for real life. We call it practicing, but I’m afraid we rarely have the courage to actually participate in the game itself, to move beyond rehearsal, to stop getting ready and start being ready, to stop preparing and start living, start participating, and start being.

Marie Howe -- "Practicing"

2010-03-09T12:20:00.001-05:00

I want to write a love poem for the girls I kissed in seventh grade,
a song for what we did on the floor in the basement

of somebody’s parents’ house, a hymn for what we didn’t say but thought:
That feels good or I like that, when we learned how to open each others’ mouths

how to move our tongues to make somebody moan. We called it practicing, and
one was the boy, and we paired off -- maybe six or eight girls -- and turned out

the lights and kissed and kissed until we were stoned on kisses, and lifted our
nightgowns or let the straps drop, and, Now you be the boy:

concrete floor, sleeping bag or couch, playroom, game room, train room, laundry.
Linda’s basement was like a boat with booths and portholes

instead of windows. Gloria’s father had a bar downstairs with stools that spun,
plush carpeting. We kissed each others’ throats.

We sucked each others’ breasts, and we left marks, and never spoke of it upstairs
outdoors, in daylight, not once. We did it, and it was

practicing, and slept, sprawled so our legs still locked or crossed, a hand still lost
in someone’s hair… and we grew up and hardly mentioned who

the first kiss really was — a girl like us, still sticky with the moisturizer we’d
shared in the bathroom. I want to write a song

for that thick silence in the dark, and the first pure thrill of unreluctant desire,
just before we made ourselves stop.

Introduction to "Keeping Things Whole"

2010-03-08T11:10:00.002-05:00

Mark Strand’s poetry confuses me. It’s often, though not always, a pleasant confusion, but a confusion nonetheless. This might be what that AP prompt from twenty years ago refers to as a “healthy mix of pleasure and disquietude,” though I have a feeling they mean something more along the lines of the fractured chronology of, say, Catch-22, or the fantastic imposition of a nightmare upon reality in Metamorphosis. Strand’s words, his images, give me pleasure (think of “Eating Poetry,” with its panicked librarian, its dogs on the stairs), but they also unsettle me, not because they raise uncomfortable questions for me (like, say, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”), and not because they disturb me (as, say, The Road, might), but because I feel like I don’t quite get them, like I can’t quite put them together into a coherent whole. I understand the words. I can make sense of the images. He’s not writing sentences like “toothbrush flies painted a dog,” sentences that syntactically and grammatically work but which convey no meaning. But they resist – just a little bit, just enough to unsettle me – quick readings, quick understandings.

That said, I enjoy this poem a lot. I’m continuously startled by the opening stanza, by the sense I have, reading it, like I’m seeing a fundamental truth fresh and anew, like I’m seeing something that I should know but have never thought about, like I’m seeing something that was always there but whose thereness I couldn’t see until Strand pointed it out to me. “In a field / I am the absence / of field.” How perfectly true, no? If I step into a field, I fill a piece of that space that was formerly field. I replace a piece of field. I become, in essence, what simultaneously becomes missing from that field, from that space.

And then, when I move, the field returns, becomes whole again.

Wonderful.

And made better by the turn: the speaker then tells himself, insists to himself that this is why he moves: in order to keep things whole. What a perfect reason. I move to keep things whole. It’s justification and rationalization all at once. It’s what we tell ourselves whenever we can’t handle what we’ve become, whenever we don’t want to accept the responsibility for being the absence of the thing that we have replaced: this is what I do. This is who I am. It’s my responsibility. I have to move or things won’t stay whole. “We all have reasons,” Strand writes. And he’s right. We do. We might invent them, but that doesn’t change the fact that they’re there. Nor does it change the fact that we might invent them because we’re unable, or unwilling, to face the truth of what they cover, to face the reality behind the illusion they create.

Note, by the way, how the last stanza moves from four words, to two, to two again, and then back to four. Symmetry. And the total: twelve words out of four lines. Twelve words that could have been twelve lines, that could have been the foundation of a sonnet, that could have been everything but a sonnet’s payoff – that payoff that, in a sonnet, is revealed in the final couplet, in the final comment that tells us how to read what came before. In this poem, in this stanza, that final couplet is missing. It is the absence.

Note, too, the absence of sense in that last paragraph. It’s a nonsensical argument. It’s a desperate reach – albeit a deliberately desperate reach, an attempt to create an understanding where there isn’t one. An attempt to cover a truth that I might not be willing to face, to create an illusion that allows me to live, to live both with the poem and with myself. After all, we all have reasons. For moving. For creating. For believing.

Mark Strand: "Keeping Things Whole"

2010-03-08T11:09:00.004-05:00

In a field
I am the absence
Of field.
This is
Always the case.
Wherever I am
I am what is missing.

When I walk
I part the air
And always
The air moves in
To fill the spaces
Where my body’s been.

We all have reasons
For moving.
I move
To keep things whole.

Beloved - 2009-10

2010-03-07T21:26:00.004-05:00

Students sometimes ask whether it gets dull teaching the same books over and over again.

And it doesn't, really.

Or, to be more precise, when I find that teaching a book is dull, I take a year or two off of it and see if it returns to life again.

But books that I return to again and again tend to stay alive, tend to continue to spark a response in me for a few reasons:

1. Students have new insights into them.
2. Students get to encounter them for the first time.
3. I'm a different person every time I re-read these texts.

The first one is great when it happens.

The second one is a reason, in and of itself, to teach.

And the third one surprises me just about every year. And because I'm a different person -- even if only a little -- every time I re-read a particular text, different issues, different ideas, different questions, pop out at me with any given reading. And I notice things that I was apparently too dense to notice before.

Toni Morrison's Beloved gave me yet another how-was-I-so-dense moment this year as I read the final few lines before the internal monologues:

"When Sethe locked the door, the women inside were free at last to be what they liked, see whatever they saw, and say whatever was on their minds."

How did I miss that before? "The women inside were free at last..." How could I have breezed right past that over the last eight or nine readings?

Free at last. Deliberately taking from Martin Luther King, from the spiritual he cites itself, to shed light not on three women who are, finally, free, but who -- in the most terrible of ironies -- are probably less free in that moment than they've been in the last 18 years. Free at last.

Introduction to "What Work Is"

2010-03-05T10:18:00.001-05:00

I love the turn that Phillip Levine’s “What Work Is” takes, how it opens, essentially, with “You know what work is” and (assuming that you read on, that you’re not left behind either because you’re not old enough or because you know what work is but don’t do it) then ends with “You don’t know what work is.” And in between we get the picture of how much it takes to look for work, to wait for work, to stand in line in the rain trying not to surrender to despair, to the truth that there is no work, that your life, your status, your ability to provide (much less pursue the stuff, the life stuff, that you actually care about) is completely dependent on someone else. How much work it is not to have work to do. How much work it is to know that you’re wasting this time, that these hours will never be given back, nor accounted for, nor made right.

I’ve thought a lot about that kind of work in the last decade or so. It comes, I think, with the seemingly simple revelation that your parents, your mother and father, are real people. That they have lives. That they have – and had – dreams and desires and goals and passions. That at least some of them got subsumed into family, into the raising of a family, into the raising of you. That at least some of them got subsumed into responsibility. And responsibility is ever the enemy of dreams, of desires, of passions. Here, in the first third of the poem, I find that reflected, and I find the poem pushing me in that direction: think of how much work it is to exchange your life’s minutes and hours for responsibility and the need to stand in the rain waiting for work that won’t materialize.

But we understand, with the turn in the final third, that this work, this terrible backbreaking work, is nothing next to what it would take to do “something so simple, so obvious” as take your brother by the shoulders, look him in the eye and tell him that you love him. That, the poem insists, is work. We hide that away. We keep it from those around us. It becomes a part of our inner lives, our secret selves, what we sometimes (and maybe mistakenly) think of as our true selves. We make excuses for it (“I’m too young,” or “it’s too obvious,” or “I’m incapable of crying in the presence of another man”). But the truth is that we just don’t want to do the work.

Note, too, that the first time the brother comes up in the poem, it’s a mistake. The speaker, who becomes the “you,” misidentifies another man, a stranger, as his brother. And this blows the poem wide open – opens it to the possibility that not only can we not do this simple, obvious thing with our own families, our own brothers, but also that we willfully miss the opportunity to extend that love to the millions of unrelated brothers who, like us, stand in line and pretend that what we know to be true is false: that we’re not responsible to one another; that we don’t belong to anything larger than ourselves; that we know what work really is.

Philip Levine: "What Work Is"

2010-03-05T10:16:00.001-05:00

We stand in the rain in a long line
waiting at Ford Highland Park. For work.
You know what work is--if you're
old enough to read this you know what
work is, although you may not do it.
Forget you. This is about waiting,
shifting from one foot to another.
Feeling the light rain falling like mist
into your hair, blurring your vision
until you think you see your own brother
ahead of you, maybe ten places.
You rub your glasses with your fingers,
and of course it's someone else's brother,
narrower across the shoulders than
yours but with the same sad slouch, the grin
that does not hide the stubbornness,
the sad refusal to give in to
rain, to the hours wasted waiting,
to the knowledge that somewhere ahead
a man is waiting who will say, "No,
we're not hiring today," for any
reason he wants. You love your brother,
now suddenly you can hardly stand
the love flooding you for your brother,
who's not beside you or behind or
ahead because he's home trying to
sleep off a miserable night shift
at Cadillac so he can get up
before noon to study his German.
Works eight hours a night so he can sing
Wagner, the opera you hate most,
the worst music ever invented.
How long has it been since you told him
you loved him, held his wide shoulders,
opened your eyes wide and said those words,
and maybe kissed his cheek? You've never
done something so simple, so obvious,
not because you're too young or too dumb,
not because you're jealous or even mean
or incapable of crying in
the presence of another man, no,
just because you don't know what work is.

Poetry Anthology

2010-03-05T10:12:00.002-05:00

The other thing I'm working on, at the moment, is an anthology of poetry. My AP Seniors are putting together "Personal Poetry Anthologies," and I'm participating, too. Each student spends almost two weeks reading poetry in class, finding, over the course of those class periods, poems that speak to him or her, poems that matter to him or her, and poems that might fit together. Each student, ultimately, is responsible for collecting ten poems into a new anthology, a new collection -- a collection whose theme, whose organizing principle, is up to that student. The student then writes an introduction to the anthology and to each poem.

As I type them up, I'm going to post my introductions.

Because I can.

Sgt. Pepper

2010-03-04T13:04:00.004-05:00

In 1989, as I discovered an obsession with music that ran as strongly as any other obsession I had in high school, college, or after, I had two guides that kept me hunting for albums that I hadn’t heard, or might not otherwise have heard. Both were mainstream, unconcerned with too much out of the ordinary or in what Neil Young might have called “the ditch.” Any time I found myself in a bookstore, I searched for books of “the best albums of all time” or comprehensive collections of reviews, but it was these two lists – probably because I owned them – that I came back to more than others, that I read over and over, that, in the end, I almost memorized. Both were from Rolling Stone: in 1987, in celebration of the magazine’s twentieth anniversary, the staff published a list of “The Greatest Albums of the Last Twenty Years,” and in 1989, it published its list of “The Greatest Albums of the 1980s.” It’s that first list that I’m concerned with now.

Obviously, it’s limited by the two decade boundary, as well as by the magazine’s boomer bias and its insistence on focusing almost entirely on rock. But I’m not interested in complaining about that, really. Instead, now that I’ve heard, over the course of my own two decades of listening, all of those “Greatest Albums,” I want to go back and listen to them again and think about not only what they’ve meant to me (if anything), but what they mean now and to what extent they hold up.

I’ll choose albums more or less randomly.

But I’ll start with the magazine’s number one: The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.

Everyone’s heard it. Everyone knows it. It’s as enshrined as The Beatles themselves in rock ‘n’ roll history.

But it’s really not that great.

Now, I love The Beatles. I’ll stump all day for Please Please Me and Revolver as phenomenal collections. I’ll make a case for Rubber Soul and Hard Day’s Night as a tiny bit flawed but still great. I’ll argue for “Twist and Shout” as fundamental to what it means to be human. I’ll listen to “I Want to Hold Your Hand” or “Help” absolutely anytime. I’ll take Lennon’s vocals on “You Really Got a Hold on Me” over Smokey Robinson’s, even.

But I can’t get behind Sgt. Pepper’s. Not at this point. In high school, I loved it, but mostly because I felt like I was supposed to. I thought “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” was clever. Trippy, even – whatever that means. I figured “Fixing a Hole” had to be a wild metaphor for self-investigation and that therefore it was awesome.. I justified my love of it by pointing to the album’s supposed “concept,” and to the sound effects, and to the way that instruments moved around the stereo spectrum. In college, I stopped listening to anything on it beyond “A Day in the Life.” Now, I find myself most drawn to a couple of tracks that I tended not to like twenty years ago: “Lovely Rita” (mostly for the introduction; after that, it’s maybe a little too cutesy) and “Good Morning” (for the rhythm shifts and for the way it runs perfectly into the title track’s reprise). I still love “A Day in the Life” and probably always will. “Getting Better” is a solid song, but it’s the first one on the album and it’s the fourth track in.

“When I’m 64,” though? Awful. “Will you still need me / will you still feed me.” That’s what McCartney actually sings. “Will you still feed me?” As if the relationship is already one of medical dependence. Meanwhile, “Within You, Without You” is insufferable. “Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite” is a throwaway, a solid vocal melody obscured by sound effects and silliness. And “She’s Leaving Home” is maudlin and about four minutes too long.

I know that the album has fallen from its lofty mid-80s position as the great rock record, and I know that it was a big part of that Kill Your Idols book, but, even given that, it’s still overpraised. Should it make a list of the 100 best albums of 1967-1987? Maybe. Especially if “importance” is at all a factor in the judging. But should it be number one? Absolutely not.

Writing Again

2010-03-04T13:04:00.001-05:00

Two ongoing assignments: for one, I’m working on the Personal Poetry Anthology that my AP Seniors are completing; and for the other, I’m taking a look back at Rolling Stone’s 1987 list of “The Greatest Albums of the Last 27 Years.” Onward.

Sad Animals

2010-02-24T07:22:00.001-05:00

A little bit of Robert Hass, maybe to pretend that it hasn't been, like, seven months since I managed to call this page up:

"Often we are sad animals
Bored dogs, monkeys
getting rained on."

-- from "Cuttings"

Vacation

2009-07-30T20:27:00.004-05:00

I've been on vacation.

I'm still on vacation.

I'll still be on vacation for another few weeks.

So, I haven't been writing about Gravity's Rainbow, or 2666, or even Anti-Oedipus, nearly as much as I need to in order to put them together in my head.

And that lack of writing will probably continue, shame as that might be for my own comprehension of these books. Heck, much as I enjoyed Alexie's The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, I'm sure I would have taken more away if I had found time to write about it as I read it.

Intentionality + My Morning Jacket

2009-07-30T20:02:00.004-05:00

And so, as a teacher and a student of literature, I tend to assume intentionality when I read. That is, if I read something on page 200 of a novel that seems like it connects to something from page 3, or if an image toward the end of a book dovetails perfectly with a question that gets raised earlier in the book, or if a particular verb in a poem works exceptionally with a specific idea that the poem seems to explore, I assume that the author intended exactly such connections.

Thus, I assume it's no accident, no coincidence, that Borges has the narrator of "The Babylon Lottery" specify, of all things, a mask factory.

Likewise, I assume it's no accident that in Cormac McCarthy's The Road, the boy not only has a nightmare of a penguin that moves without winding, without anything to move its mechanical insides, but also that a gang of marauders, of road agents, are likewise described in very mechanical terms. Not that the boy's nightmare is explicitly about evil roving gangs, or that the penguin is (god forbid) a symbol of such gangs, but that the sum of an image of something moving without purpose, without intent, without any motivation at all and an image of Definite Evil winds up (as you might guess, or as might be obvious) being greater than either individual image. If that makes sense. What, after all, could be more frightening to most humans than the notion that we're all moving / existing / living without purpose, without reason? (Isn't Ahab's greatest fear that he might punch through the mask, punch through the wall, and find that there is nothing, absolutely nothing behind it?

Likewise, I assume it's no accident how often words and images associated with blindness arise in the opening of Joyce's "Araby."

And films, too. I have to assume that even Steven Spielberg was thinking when he inserted that shot of the truck's tailpipe kicking out exhaust five minutes into E.T.

But I don't tend, except in isolated cases, to give the same benefit of the doubt, if that's what it is, to music. Or, not to lyrics, anyway. Sure, if something is explicitly put together as a "concept album," then it kind of begs that sort of attention. Or, if an artist goes out of his way to use the same words or names or images (like Van Morrison's use of "Cypress Avenue" as a setting), I might go looking. And, certainly, I'll find myself assuming musical / chordal associations between songs on an album. But not that often. And not in the same way as I do with books or poems. So, when I was running earlier today and My Morning Jacket's "Anytime" shuffled up and I heard Jim James sing, "Words only got in the way / But then I found another way to communicate," I wanted to assume a connection between that claim and the fact that the opening song on the album (Z, maybe a top ten entry for the last decade, for whatever that's worth) has a "Wordless Chorus." But, ultimately, I had the exact reaction that I try to push my students away from when reading: must have been an accident. A happy one. Maybe even a meaningful one, but an accident nonetheless.

McDyess

2009-07-07T20:58:00.002-05:00

A quick post (and maybe incentive to return to writing):

If Antonio McDyess goes (and I won't weigh in on whether or not he should, as, clearly, that decision is entirely up to him), I hope -- perhaps for irrational reasons -- that he goes to San Antonio.

That's all.

(But, McDyess: if you're debating: stay. We don't deserve you, or your effort, but stay. Please).

The Goldenrods

2009-06-18T21:31:00.005-05:00

I've been reading probably too much about Detroit lately, but, in the course of some of that reading, I came across this photo, to which I can only say (and this comment has nothing, nothing, nothing to do with the photo series itself): Farewell, los Goldenrods. El mundo hardly knew ye.

In any case, check out the photo essay: the Urban Prairie.

Another School Year

2009-06-18T09:59:00.003-05:00

I'm a lucky man who gets to teach, who gets to learn, who gets to love his job, who gets to feel thankful.

So, thanks, students. Thanks to the class of 2009. Thanks to those first freshmen I taught when I started here at Lake Braddock and to those students in between as they moved through English 9, or Creative Writing, or English 11, or Honors English, or AP Language and Composition, or AP Literature and Composition, or Film Study. And thanks to those in the Hayfield ISP during my first year in Virginia. Thanks to all you Outward Bound students who spent time in the Beartooth Mountains with me. Thanks to all those kids who spent a week at Storer Camp.

Thanks for being students, for being learners, for being, so many of you, fully present and alive on so many of our days together. For taking risks. For thinking. For taking your education, your lives, in your hands and for claiming that education as your own. And thanks for being teachers, as well, and for never failing to teach me.

Brewery Update

2009-06-15T10:13:00.003-05:00

I think we've closed for the summer.

Maybe.

Still debating getting a Flanders Pale going sometime in the next two weeks so that by next spring, it might be ready to sit on top of some fruit (maybe a third on top of cherries, a third on top of apricots, and a third simply bottled as is) for another year or so. At the same time, though, having it ready for fruit by the spring doesn't make a lot of sense, given that there is, essentially, no good fruit available at that point. Might as well brew it in the fall and get it sitting on fruit in the late summer or early fall of 2010 when I could get good fresh cherries, apricots, etc.

So, probably closed until the end of the summer and things are looking good at this point.

The two saisons made with Wyeast 3711 are good, but probably a touch undercarbonated. I tried to get them up around 3 volumes of CO2, but I suspect they came in a little under that. They don't pop and sparkle quite like they should. Maybe call these the Slightly Disappointing Saisons, not because they're truly disappointing, but because they might not live up to their tremendous potential. Thus, the SDS.

The saison-spiked-with-Orval tasted fantastic when I bottled it last week. Strong, but not overpowering, Brett-y flavor and aroma. As long as it carbonates well, it should be a good one and, as I gave it a little fresh yeast when I bottled it, I have high hopes. thanks to the bottling music, it's the Campaigner Saison ("where even Richard Nixon has got soul.")

The Orvalish thing I made with Wyeast 3789 (supposedly the Orval strain + Brettanomyces) didn't have quite enough sour-tang going into the bottles. And, as it was already pretty damn dry, I'm not sure how much more, if any, Brett flavor will develop. I gave this one extra yeast at bottling, too, and maybe that was a mistake. I probably should have just let any remaining Brettanomyces work on the priming sugar and get a little extra leather/spice/horse blanket flavor that way. We'll see. I'll bring a few bottles to Michigan and give them a shot with anyone who is around in late July or so. Might call this one the Banso Pale. (Not So Orval -> NSO -> Nso -> Banso. Makes sense to me).

Racked the Flanders Red onto almost an ounce of oak cubes; time to let it sit for nine months or so. Gestate, really. Let the Brettanomyces and the Lambicus and whatever else inhabits that Roeselare blend work some magic.

Kegged the pale ale. Once that's carbonated, I'll bottle up as much as I can and get it to Michigan. Incandenza's Pale Ale?

Brewed a rye IPA as what will probably be the last beer of the season. I purposely didn't make this as another version of "Denny's Rye IPA," which everyone makes. And, admittedly, that recipe makes a fantastic beer, but one that is essentially (you might argue purely) a showcase for Columbus hops, with Mt. Hood lurking in the background. I went for Centennial front and center for citrus and spice, Ahtanum for extra grapefruit, and Columbus hopefully providing some non-citrus earthiness in the background. I look forward to seeing how the Centennial might work with the spiciness of the rye.

This Is Uncalled For

2009-06-12T07:53:00.007-05:00

A couple of days, the iPod shuffled up, back to back, the Beatles' "Ticket to Ride" and the Wallflowers' cover of "I'm Looking Through You."

A completely random occurence, obviously. A roughly one in 12,000 chance that "Ticket to Ride" gets shuffled up. And once that song ends, a roughly one in 12,000 chance that the Wallflowers' cover of "I'm Looking Through You" gets shuffled up. Not that big of a deal. Trivial, really.

But it's exactly that kind of random occurence, of course, that gets people to believe in a higher intelligence directing the chaos that surrounds us. After all, is it not a sign of intelligence that the iPod knew to follow a Beatles' song (particularly a track that, in many ways, pointed the way toward Rubber Soul) with not just another Beatles' song, but a cover by a different band. That's some Intelligent Design, no? Some Wise Old Benevolent Being Shit, no?

It's the chaplain, in Catch-22, who "would have yielded to reason and relinguished his belief in the God of his fathers... had it not been for such successive mystic phenomena as the naked man in the tree at that poor sergeant's funeral weeks before and the cyptic, haunting, encouraging promise of the prophet Flume in the forest only that afternoon: Tell them I'll be back when winter comes."

Right, Mr. Tappman. It's mystic phenomena. Or maybe, maybe, it's just Yossarian without his clothes.

It's our ability to reason run through (or perhaps clouded by) our need to find a reason.

Incidentally, I liked Catch-22 more this year than either of the last two years. Not sure why. At the end of last year, I was ready to leave it on the shelf for a few years and teach something else instead. Now, it's back in consideration for next year's rotation.

Truth + Annie Dillard

2009-06-09T10:21:00.003-05:00

As I revised that piece last week, I tried to decide whether to distort the truth on a (relatively) insignificant detail: what tape is playing in my car at one point. For the sake of the piece, it works best if it's something like Al Green's Let's Stay Togther. In truth, though, it was probably something like Love and Rockets' Earth, Sun, Moon, or the first album by the Stone Roses.

Ostensibly, it shouldn't matter.

But the piece is about telling the truth, about trying to find the confidence to live my own stories, to live my own ideas, and not those of others.

And I know that lies, distortions, fictions can be as effective (even more effective sometimes) as the "truth" in revealing what's true about a particular story, a particular moment. It is, after all, how metaphors work. And it's ground that Tim O'Brien covers repeatedly in The Things They Carried. But, somehow, it felt awkward to lie in this particular piece.

In any case, it reminded me of Annie Dillard's "Transfiguration" and her insistence that, while she actually was reading a biography of Rimbaud when a moth flew into her candle and stuck there, she certainly would not have hesitated to invent that detail if it didn't happen to be true.

Vandersambos

2009-06-08T13:43:00.003-05:00

While revising a piece of writing about high school last week, I thought about those little lawn jockeys that you rarely see anymore (at least around here) and that were not-so-strangely ubiquitous in Grand Haven when I was in high school. You know the ones: the black guy, usually in a red jacket and white pants, perhaps holding only a hitching ring (in case Some Dutch Guy on a Horse shows up at your house) or perhaps holding a lantern, making sure that Massuh makes it up the sidewalk and into the house safely.

Specifically, what I remembered was a conversation I had with Melanie in which we dreamed up a new lawn jockey: The Vandersambo. What we should do, we decided, was steal a whole bunch of these ornaments, paint the faces white, maybe hint at a little blonde hair poking out from underneath the jockey's cap, and color the eyes blue. A lawn jockey that looked more like the population of Grand Haven. A lawn jockey that might light the walkway to Russ's Family Restaurant (though not, of course, on a Sunday). A Vandersambo.

Update: it turns out that some company has made just such a product. In fact, as far as I can tell, the company sells both the "traditional" jockey and the "updated" jockey. They don't, however, have the name. And the name is everything.

More Rain in Virginia

2009-06-05T08:35:00.006-05:00

We're essentially underwater here in Burke on another rain rain and more rain day. It's a beautiful rain, though, and a beautiful morning. One of those fully saturated, completely green, somewhat dark, but somehow not gray mornings. Would I take it over sunshine and crystal air on a late October afternoon? No, but I sure ain't going to get mopey over it either.

A student claimed a few days ago that Charles Mingus' "Better Git it in Your Soul" is fundamentally life-affirming, fundamentally joyful. And he's right, of course. I replied that I couldn't imagine hearing that song and not feeling good, that, in some way, if an individual hears that song and does like it, well, then that individual probably doesn't actually like music. And it reminded me of a conversation from, like, 18 years ago, and my attempt to express that, no matter how straightup ugly the world might be at times, and no matter how theoretically bleak any particular aspect of the future might look, and no matter how frighteningly empty the prospect of Old Mister Fucking Death He Self might be, I couldn't imagine getting too, you know, like, depressed about it because Bob Dylan existed, because 100 Years of Solitude existed, because Astral Weeks existed, because A Love Supreme existed. Maybe it's a copout, to let art, even challenging art, be a consolation, but I suspect that's only the case if you make art nothing but a mask for pain, or a distraction from hurt.

Plus, there are rivers, mountains, and trees. And the sound that water makes running over rocks. And the end of "When Doves Cry." And Terence Malick's Days of Heaven.

In any case, if you don't have a copy of the Mingus track with you at the moment, get yourself a quick fix via the Interwebs. And if the "Oh yeah!" just before the one minute mark doesn't raise at least a small smile, and if the fundamental drive of the song doesn't at least make you want to get up and move just a tiny bit, then, um, rewind and try again.

("Rewind" just threw me, all adolescent-y into my family's 1987 Chevrolet Nova. For a few seconds, I could sense, exactly, with the first two fingers of my right hand, how it felt to push the rewind and fast-forward buttons simultaneously in order to activate the tape deck's auto-reverse function and flip to the other side of the cassette. And how it felt to root around one-handed on the floor of the car for a tape that had slipped down behind the passenger seat, trying to keep an eye on the road, a foot near the clutch, and another foot in relatively constant pressure on the gas pedal).

Sidenote: OMFD He Self is via Pynchon.

Sidenote: In a 1916 letter, Wallace Stevens wrote, "Unfortunately there is nothing more inane than an Easter carol. It is a religious perversion of the activity of Spring in our blood."

Post War And Peace Reading

2009-06-04T20:22:00.004-05:00

After Henry, by Joan Didion. She can write. And the essay on '88 Dukakis campaign is sadly relevant. Bonus feature: reading about that '88 campaign sent me back to Bloom County and its essential query during that race: vote for the wimp? Or vote for the shrimp? Unrevised blog bonus feature: multiple colons within a single sentence.

The Given Day, by Dennis Lehane. The opening chapter -- a prologue, really -- is excellent. Give yourself twenty minutes in a bookstore and read it. The rest of the book never hits the same height, but remains compelling. In that respect (but no other), it reminds me of DeLillo's Underworld, which opens with the 1951 Giants-Dodgers pennant race and Cotter Martin, Frank Sinatra, J. Edgar Hoover colliding in a brilliant 50-page setpiece and spends another 750 pages never quite getting as good.

Wallace Stevens: Questions are Remarks

2009-06-03T11:17:00.002-05:00

Goldbarth’s poem about the typo in Simak’s A Heritage of Stars did, in fact, send me back to Wallace Stevens and I read this:

Questions Are Remarks

In the weed of summer comes the green sprout why.
The sun aches and ails and then returns halloo
Upon the horizon amid adult enfantillages.

Its fire fails to pierce the vision that beholds it,
Fails to destroy the antique acceptances,
Except that the grandson sees it as it is,

Peter the voyant, who says, “Mother, what is that” –
The object that rises with so much rhetoric,
But not for him. His question is complete.

It is the question of what he is capable.
It is the extreme, the expert aetat. 2.
He will never ride the red horse she describes.

His question is complete because it contains
His utmost statement. It is his own array,
His own pageant and procession and display,

As far as nothingness permits… Hear him.
He does not say, “Mother, my mother, who are you,”
The way the drowsy, infant, old men do.

Wallace Stevens

Today, I read it again and now I’ll write about it for a little while. An initial response, hopefully taking me further into the poem.

In some ways, it reminds me of Emerson’s “Nature,” especially Emerson’s claim that only a child perceives the sun, only a child can truly see the sun. In other ways, it is its own entity, full of its own insistences, like Stevens’ usual reminders of the primacy of perception, of individual perception, of an individual’s take on the world, constructed of both the world itself and the individual’s imagination.

Peter, in the poem, “will never ride the red horse she describes.” None of us will. None of us can. It’s impossible. Even if we ride red horses, they will never be identical to the one seen and described by her, the one constructed, in part, by her imagination, her perception.

What I respond to most, I think, in the poem, is this notion of “antique acceptances,” this notion that we’re so full of what we’ve already seen and what we’ve already heard that the very light of the sun itself cannot pierce the veils of our assumptions and presumptions and pre-conceived notions. It’s our “antique acceptances” walling our imagination off from its natural relationship with the world, walling us off from the sun.

Except, of course, that the grandson sees it as it is, sees it uncolored by 3000 years of solar writing, solar assumptions, solar study, solar theorizing, solar worship, solar poetry, and solar so forth. Even if, says Wallace, even if the boy stops to ask what that thing is, he still apprehends it fully. His question, says Wallace, is complete.

There is no desire to make that sun other than what it is, no desire to transform it into a symbol, into a metaphor, into a suggestion, into memory, into something to worship or to fear.

In the same way, the child – even as he may ask his mother who she is – has no desire to change her. He does not see her as anything other than what he sees her to be. His question, again, is complete. (Is this, in its own way, unconditional love?) This is contrasted with the “other” form of infant in the poem: the drooling, toothless old man, the drowsy old man. He, the old man, may ask the same question, but his is tinged with a desire to see something different, to know something different. Think of just a few of the different ways we can ask that question:

Who are you? (I honestly don’t know who you are and I’m curious).
Who are you? (Who is this person that I thought I knew?)
Who are you? (Have you changed? Have I changed?)
Who are you? (Was I wrong about you?)

And consider how we might, even if we're not as old as the toothless and drowsy guy, ask that same question of those we love, or those we claim to love, and how often we imply a desire to see something different.

I’m out of time now, but I must add this, for myself, so that I might remember to think about it later: I have no idea what’s up with the “2” in the fourth stanza.

Brewery Update

2009-06-03T08:16:00.003-05:00

I'd like to brew one or two more batches before things shut down for the summer, so last week I picked up another package of Wyeast's Roeselare blend (a mix of a neutral ale yeast and a variety of lambic cultures) and a pack of US-05 (essentially a dry version of the ubiquitous California Ale (or Sierra Nevada) yeast). If time permits, I'll use the US-05 make an IPA (with rye) and hit it hard with Centennial and Amarillo hops for floral, spicy, citrusy goodness, and the Roeselare blend to start either a Flanders Red or some kind of Flanders Pale (with the other one put on the back burner until September).

Kinda still fermenting: an Oud Bruin (malty sour brown ale) that has soured nicely in the last month and a half but that still, I think, wants another six months or so before it's ready for packaging. At that point, I'll decide whether to bottle all of it, or split it and bottle half of it and put the other half on top of some cherries for another six months. I may do something similar with the Flanders Pale whenever that gets brewed.

Probably done, but still waiting to be bottled: the small batch of Saison spiked with Orval dregs and the Thing Made with Wyeast 3789 Trappist Ale Blend. With luck, the TMW3789TAB will wind up at least vaguely Orval-ish after sitting in bottles for a few months.

Waiting to be kegged: a summer ale with the gravity and body of a pale ale, but hopped for flavor and aroma a little more like an IPA. A fair amount of that one will head to Michigan, I suspect.

In kegs: an amber ale (some of which, like the pale ale, will probably get bottled and carried to Michigan); another dozen or so pints of an English Bitter; a Dubbel from the fall that may get dumped if it doesn't come together relatively soon.

In bottles and heading to Michigan: two different Saisons, made with essentially identical grain bills and the seasonal 3711 yeast, but one with citrusy American and one with spicy European hops; an assortment of various Dubbels, Tripels, old barleywines, etc, to give to those who might want them.

A Little More Big Star

2009-06-02T12:47:00.003-05:00

And, by the way, if you can imagine a way to improve the drums in "September Gurls," I'd love to hear what it is. If they got any closer to the edge, the song would fall apart. Any tighter and the song would lose its perfect ragged edge.

Big Star

2009-05-29T10:33:00.004-05:00

I've been on a bit of a Big Star kick lately, especially Radio City. Today, listening to it, I was struck by the perfection of these lines:

Sometimes I think
She'll make me forget
What I need the most to remember.

Now, those are perfect lines of poetry, necessarily, but they are perfect popsong lines. They capture so well the simultaneous longing, fear, desire, and uncertainty that is adolescence and that is rock and roll.

Radio City. The song is "Way Out West." The band is Big Star. If you buy the CD as it's currently available, you also get the band's debut (#1 Record). 24 great songs, folks, including "Thirteen," "Ballad of El Goodo," and "September Gurls." About as good as ultra-polished (but ragged) 1970s poprock magic could get.

Paul Westerberg: "I never travel far without a little Big Star."

Typos in Poetry

2009-05-29T07:57:00.000-05:00

I read through last year’s “this is what I believe” paper before I started work on my response to a new version of that assignment that I’m giving this year’s AP English students and I found this poem, a poem I had completely forgotten:

“Off in the darkness hourses moved restlessly”
- a typo in Clifford Simak’s A Heritage of Stars

We believed they were horses; and so
We saddled up, we rode expectantly
Through the long day and into the night.
Then we dismounted; and slept; and still
They continued to carry us
- The hours. They wouldn’t stop.
They carried us clean away.

- Albert Goldbarth (2005)

In my paper from last year, I used the poem as a little bit of a joke, but also as an illustration of the power of perspective and how every individual controls his own perspective. If you want, the poem is depressing. If you want, the poem is funny. If you want, the poem is instructive. If you want, the poem is a reminder of the wonderful elasticity of language. When I read it, I think about perspective.

Several years ago, a student (with an absolutely phenomenal eye for film, for images, incidentally) gave me a copy of The Lorax. And in it, he wrote, “For someone with the mind of a cynic and the heart of a romantic.” And since perspective is everything, I’m free to disagree with him. I’ve never been sure, after all, that he got it quite right. But in the seeming paradox of that dedication, there is truth.

I teach. I’m a teacher. But I’m also a father, a husband, a son, a brother, and a friend. I’m a student, a reader, a writer, a musician, and I used to be a climber. I’m a cook and a brewer. I’m a runner, a listener, and, at some point, I’d like to be a gardener. I think I’m probably, in some ways, a hermit.

At any given moment, I can perceive myself as more or less of any one of those beings – to say nothing of countless others I could list. And it’s in my power to do so. It’s my choice.

But the poem: the poem is fantastic. Fantastic. The beautiful human capacity to make and remake the world at will. Exactly what Wallace Stevens returns to again and again in his poetry.

Which means that I need to read some Wallace Stevens today.

Neil Young's Archives (Take Two)

2009-05-28T12:40:00.004-05:00

I'm a little ashamed to admit it, but I ordered the Blu-Ray version of the Archives box. I can't justify it, necessarily, and I'm sure that, like Dave Eggers writes, "None of this was necessary," but I thought about it, considered it, decided against it, considered it some more, laughed it off, thought about it, and finally ordered it.

The way I figure it: if nothing else, getting older, getting a job, achieving some form of financial independence and (relative) comfort, must carry with it some perks, right? And one of those perks -- at least as I have found -- is that, within reason, if there is, let's say, a book I want to read, or a piece of music I want to hear, or some crazy spontaneously-fermented barrel-aged funkness from Belgian that I want to try, I can buy the damn thing.

So I bought the damn thing.

And maybe the Blu-Ray set is not within reason, but, you know, it's not like throwing the money into a retirement fund is any more within reason.

The Road

2009-05-28T12:38:00.000-05:00

Some thoughts on the trailer for The Road:

I’ve waited a long time for this. The movie, as many of you might know already, was supposed to be released last autumn. Obviously, it didn’t make that deadline. It looks, though, like it will be released this coming autumn. Thus, the trailer.

I’m not pleased with what appears to be some manner of sorta kinda little bit of an explanation for what the hell happened to the world. I love the fact that McCarthy never specifies, that he leaves it at “a long shear of light and then a series of low concussions,” that the book never becomes, explicitly, a political screed or environmental warning.

Maybe, though, the kinda sorta explanation won’t make the film itself. Maybe?

And I’m not pleased with the truck that belches smoke from both sides. Sure, the image communicates, as an image should, and sure, it looks threatening, and, sure, it conjures up a lot of associations (all scary), but it goes too far. It’s too much.

And I’m worried about the camera that swoops up into the sky during what appears to be a chase scene.

And I recognize that the trailer may very well be sending a dramatically different message about the film than would otherwise be warranted. In some ways, it makes sense, financial sense, to market the thing as a post-apocalyptic thriller. And, hell, in some ways it is a post-apocalyptic thriller. It is the tone, though, the tone that needs to be right.

But, I’m excited about a lot of what I see, too. The look of the bridge with the abandoned semi is fantastic. And I love the bulk of the clothing the father is wearing and the desolation and fatigue visible on the characters. The dunes and the beach look amazing.

I’m intrigued by the way in which some of the father’s thoughts have been given to Charlize Theron as dialogue. I look forward to seeing how they handle other aspects of the strong “interiority” of the novel.

And, especially, I’m glad the thing is going to get released.

Neil Young's Archives

2009-05-18T08:15:00.003-05:00

For those interested in such things, there is a quasi-demo for disc eight of Neil Young's archives. Not a demo for the CD version, clearly, but the DVD or Blu-Ray rendition. It's not a complete look (video doesn't play, for example), but it is an intriguing taste (if I may mix my sensory appeals).

Dylan Stops Time

2009-05-15T10:54:00.002-05:00

I let Bob Dylan back into my life this winter. I do this every couple of years. He’s never fully banished, but in an off-time, I might listen to the occasional record (say, one a week), maybe put on a live recording every month or so, and focus my energy elsewhere – Neil Young, perhaps, or Sam Cooke, or Bill Evans, or the Hold Steady, or A Tribute to Jack Johnson.

But then something happens: a new outtake is found mouldering in an obscure Columbia vault somewhere, or Dylan puts a new song on a soundtrack, or the particular spiral of a falling leaf strikes me, or I get fascinated by the shape of a snowflake, or I read an out-of-context quote somewhere about the sound of the second acoustic guitar on “Desolation Row” and I’m off. Three out of four records I play are Dylan’s. Eight out of ten songs. I read or re-read books, articles and essays. I construct playlists with nothing but alternate takes of released songs. I revise my Infidels running order. I evangelize on the holy beauty of “Shelter from the Storm” and its relationship to “Up to Me.” I compare the three different studio takes of “Idiot Wind” (the test pressing, the one on The Bootleg Series Volume Two, and the one released on Blood on the Tracks). I pretend that there is some value in the time I spend considering how the post-2000 live arrangement of “Tryin’ to Get to Heaven” fundamentally alters not just the mood of the song but its very meaning.

In any case, here’s what I’m obsessed with today (and if I knew how to embed an audioclip, I would, so feel free to step up and help out): the way that Dylan played and sang “Mr. Tambourine Man” in 1966. Now, I love the slow, scarred 1995 examples (the pathos of a line like “My weariness amazes me” sung in the ravaged but unbeaten mid-90s voice is undeniable), and the more stately arrangements of late 2000, but these versions from 1966 are on an entirely different planet. Part of it is the warmth of the voice: it’s that thick Blonde on Blonde voice as it works its way through the cascading images, that voice already so different than the one that sang it upon the song’s completion two years earlier. And part of it is the suspend-time, suspend-disbelief harmonica solo, particularly the final one, as Dylan whirls around two or three motifs, circles them again and again before finally settling on a piercing, insistent, and ex-ten-ded high note, holding it, holding it, holding it before finally releasing. Part of it is the knowledge that that final, breathless crash into the song’s conclusion would be followed by a short break and then the Sonic Death Monkey wallop of Dylan and the Hawks crashing at terminal velocity into “Tell Me Mama” and the rest of the electric set. But mostly, and in particular, it’s this: in the final verse, Dylan sings, “Let me forget about today until tomorrow.”

(And it’s not just that line that’s killing me, although it is a quintessential bit of Dylan writing: an impossibility pushed across as a wish, its seeming positive nature undercut by the knowledge that even if we could arrive at tomorrow today, every today we’ve ever lived is now yesterday, is now behind us, and living for the sake of the past, like living for the sake of the future, takes us, if nothing else, firmly outside of today. It’s annihilation. It’s the desire to escape today and the promise that tomorrow, he will focus on today, but some part of him knowing (as it must know) that, of course, by tomorrow, today is the past. And, perfectly, the preceding lines are, “With all memory and fate / driven deep beneath the waves”).

In this version, on this night, on this tour, Dylan sings it as, “Let me forget about two-mah… row.” He inserts this pause, this space, this emptiness, this possibility in between the second and third syllables of “tomorrow.” It stops time. And that hesitation, that pause, that breath, sends me back to the song over and over (and reminds me of Paul Williams’ insistence that the performance of a song is, in fact, the song).

It’s that pause. It’s all of the tension created as Dylan makes you wait. And makes you wait. It’s what he does with the harmonica a minute later, but here it’s his voice. Worlds are created in that pause. And then, fully, thickly, wonderfully, he finishes it. Resolves the tension. Puts time into motion again. Takes us out of suspended animation (a state of bliss, perhaps, but also a living death) and sets us free.

It’s a good thing.

You can hear it, by the way, on The Bootleg Series Volume Four: Live 1966. Which you should own already: the concert contained within, truly, is Some Important Shit.

Torture News

2009-05-13T13:07:00.002-05:00

While I finish War and Peace at home, I am reading William Vollmann's Rising Up and Rising Down: Some Thoughts on Violence, Freedom and Urgent Means.

Which is good.

Which is not the 4000 page version, but the "condensed" single volume.

Which is not fun. The violence thing. The study after study of assault, of conquest, of liquidation, of infanticide, of patricide. The study of Cortes. Of Stalin. Of Pol Pot. Of murder by starvation, by hanging, by sword, by gun, by arrow, by work. Of war for land, for honor, for glory, for revenge, for faith.

And of torture.

Which ties all too well to every damn torture memo that I've read over the last two months, to every revelation of destroyed records, to every empty rationale for approving "new" methods.

Which ties all too well to this story that a former student sent me this morning: "The Torture Business."

And, see, I want to be shocked by this. I want to be stunned that no only can we torture, will we torture, will we attempt to figure out and justify torture methods that we previously shunned, but that we will also bid this work out to independent contractors so that said contractors, said business, can profit from our government's belief that torture is acceptable. That torture, in essence, can be profitable. The business of government is business, I guess, even when that business is torture, degradation, and dehumanization.

But I'm not. Not shocked. Not at this point. Angry, yes. Sad, yes. But not shocked. Which also makes me angry. And sad.

Read it, if you wish.

And read the Vollmann, too. It doesn't fit the beautiful spring that finally arrived here after 117 days of rain, but it is worth reading.

Maya

2009-05-13T11:08:00.002-05:00

Because it's spring and that girl is beautiful.

War and Peace and Henry Fonda

2009-04-15T13:35:00.004-05:00

About 800 pages into War and Peace now and more and more believing that I loved it the first time around on its own merits and not purely the context for the reading. Yes, the characters are all still rich, still often largely clueless, and still worlds removed from me, but they're also, with every chapter, increasingly human.

I took some time to read Paul Williams Love to Burn and the first two Performing Artist books he wrote on Dylan (more on those three books later), as well as Michael Chabon's Maps and Legends collection, but I'm trying to keep my focus on Tolstoy for the next couple of weeks.

But that's not the point.

The point is that I read today that in the big ol' midcentury American film of War and Peace, someone chose Henry Fonda to play Pierre.

And that's idiotic. No matter his other qualities as a person, the novel insists, again and again, that Pierre is fat. Really fat. His bulk must be mentioned at least once in every one of his chapters. And yet, Henry Fonda.

That's not inspired counter-casting, like bringing him in to play Frank in Leone's amazing Once Upon a Time in the West. It's just a mistake, as bad as casting Robert Redford as Jay Gatsby.

Infidels

2009-04-03T12:25:00.002-05:00

I finally figured out a running order for a revised Infidels that I'm relatively happy with.

Not that this changes the world or anything, but here's the tracklist:

Side A:

Jokerman
License to Kill
Sweetheart Like You
Man of Peace
Lord, Protect My Child

Side B:

Foot of Pride
I and I
Blind Willie McTell
Don't Fall Apart on Me Tonight

I'm even satisfied with it on a single CD without the side breaks. The key, it turned out, was keeping "Man of Peace," which I had always left off of previous attempts. It's not a great song, necessarily, and certainly outclassed by its contemporaries, but it's also, I think, necessary to hold the thing together. It keeps the first side from dragging too much.

Prog Rock Glory

2009-04-01T07:04:00.008-05:00

Thanks to a roundabout link from a link from a link to a link, I happened upon what everyone else in the world, in the Facebook Nation, has already done: the album cover generation cultural meme game internet funkness. So I played along. Who doesn't like two minutes of diversion, especially when those two minutes cloak themselves in a quasi-scavengerhunt costume.

Here's how it works:

1. Get a random Wikipedia page. That's the name of your band.
2. Get a random quotation. The last four or five words of the last quote of the page is the title of the band's album.
3. Get a random flickr photo. The third picture, no matter what it is, is your album cover.

And, should you wish, you can then Photoshop the bajeezus out of the photo, layering in your band's name, your album title, etc.

Fantastic. It's Wu-Name magic.

Here's what I came up with:

Garden of Allah: As If Men Were Listening

Of course, it didn't stop there: the two minutes it took to click through (and revel) then became twenty minutes of imagining the sound, the biography, the press materials, and potential reviews of the album. But, really, when you're given such a gift as that name, that title, and that photo, how can you not play with it?

At first I thought the band would be a lost one-album wonder from early 1970s England, another anonymous pastoral-prog outfit with its roots in fuzzy psychedelia but attempting to hitch a ride on Ian Anderson's flute by playing a lot of acoustic intros to otherwise riff-heavy songs, and to capitalize on the fact that the bass player once shared a flat with one of the guys from Caravan.

But then I saw that album cover, screaming its allegiance to the digital Now, to 37 minutes with Photoshop, and the bio shifted, jumped thirty years forward.

It turns out that Vancouver, as I imagined it, has a crazy underground progrock scene (rife with divisions between the folk-proggers, the neo-metal proggers, the secret Rush fans, the obscure Italian scenesters, and those who hold all their rehearsals in German). Garden of Allah, first formed in 1999, initially fancied itself a King's X-style power trio, but has since added two members -- keyboard and a multi-instrumentalist who plays mandolin, mandocello, and mellotron -- and now swears allegiance to all things Frippish, but sounds like a poor man's Tull.

As if Men Were Listening is a concept album of sorts, albeit one whose storyline is much more suggestive than overt, perhaps a nod to Roy Harper circa Stormcock (and, in fact, on the band's My Space page, you can download a cover of Harper's "The Same Old Rock.") Both of the side-long suites open with acoustic passages, decorated with the occasional mandolin riff, building to grandiose segments of layered vocals, crashing electric chords and, inevitably, an organ solo. The tracklisting:

1. Millenial Blues

A. White Saturday
B. Time's Passion
C. The Shadow of History
D. Year of the Manticore

2. Infinite Regress (a fragment)

3. Eight Stones Left

A. The Lonely Iconoclast
B. Humanity's Fountain
C. Never the Shire
D. Twilight Oracle

4. The Future is Then (finale)

Signing off with a Wu-Name flashback: The Illegitimate Muslim Fundamentalist is over and out.

Return of the Son of the Jedi Prince

2009-03-30T10:08:00.001-05:00

We're finishing up Hamlet in AP English (to the extent that you "finish" that play) and, while trying to track down a working Xerox machine, I thought not about Shakespeare, but about Lucas, and not about Hamlet, but about Return of the Jedi.

(Serious Daddy Issues in both works, after all).

Specifically, I heard the Emperor croaking, "All is happening exactly as I have foreseen."

And here's my question: what the hell good is foresight if it can be wrong? Isn't it pretty much just "guessing" at that point? If I put MSU in the Final Four, is that foresight? Or just a prediction, a guess?

New Dylan

2009-03-30T07:45:00.005-05:00

It's another month before Dylan's new album drops (see that? "Drops." That's how I roll, kids. See that? "Roll." That's how I roll, kids. See that? Pete and Repeat were in a boat. Pete fell out.) but you can pick up a track (downloadable) from bobdylan.com if you get there today (Monday).

It's "Beyond Here Lies Nothin'" and, if the song is any indication, the album should be pretty damn good. Not necessarily better than Love and Theft or Modern Times, but right in that same vein of consistent, pretty damn good craftsmanship that he's been mining pretty damn well for the last decade. And the accordion that leads off every story about the album works for the song, the whole thing an odd-at-first-glance melange of loping shuffle and dirty guitar, of border trumpets and 1950s Chicago studio magic. It's a little like the swampy mudfunk of Time Out of Mind but with the production approach of the last two records -- not too much of the Lanois reverb (though the drums are fairly wet). Plus, it might just redeem the "Black Magic Woman" beat (and progression, for that matter).

See that? Melange...

Et Tu, Church Lady?

2009-03-30T06:46:00.003-05:00

Okay, with a minimum of Chicken Little madness, of "things are darker now than ever before" nonsense, of "we're all doomed! Doomed! Dooooooomed!" screaming, I present to you the following:

(Again, trying oh-so-hard not to histrionicize).

1. Nightline held a debate on the existence of Satan. And I know, I know, I know that Nightline is not news, not journalism, but it presents itself that way, ultimately -- as a part of the industry of news, of journalism -- and there are plenty of people who take it as such. And I know, I know, I know that this is no different than other commentator-based television or radio programs. And I know, I know, I know that this recognition of the non-news-ness of Nightline is, likewise, not news. But, return to that first sentence: Nightline held a debate on the existence of Satan. Invited guests on to their "news" program to argue about this. As if maybe if each side receives an opportunity to state its case, then this becomes responsible journalism; after all, weren't "both sides" presented? Isn't this the very definition of unbiased journalism? And, given both sides of the argument, what can a reasonable, logical, otherwise intelligent viewer-at-home do but conclude that, "Gee, the truth must be somewhere in between those two sides."

2. This quote from a story about the debate: "Nobody in the Bible talks about hell or Satan more than Jesus," said audience member Mike Garcia. "If Jesus talks about Satan and the reality of hell, then it has to be true." (Hulk want to smash. Want to smash. Must smash. Smash!) Wonderful logic, isn't it? If Jesus says it, it must be true. What more can you say after a conclusion like that? Can there be any further discussion, any further questions?

But, Chicken Little be damned: obviously, this sort of thinking (thinking?) has been around forever and not solely in the context of religion. Politics. Advertisements. Wartime announcements. Be like Mike. It's a Crab Step, not travelling. Science, too.

I used to give students Edward Abbey's essay "Science with a Human Face," in part because it made for an interesting companion to Emerson and Thoreau and Whitman and Barry Lopez (and not, clearly, because they all agree with each other) and in part because the essay works as a fine example of how "essay" does not mean "easily digestible three-prong thesis that no one is going to dispute anyway because it's both simplistic and already believed by just about everyone" and how an author's conclusion may be more complex than you immediately assume. Any attempt -- whether by religion or by science -- to reduce the world down to something abstract, something ultimately incomprehensible, is wrong. And any hands-up acceptance of such a reduction -- whether through religion ("Oh, well, you know, God works in mysterious ways, so I can't possibly understand why things happen the way they do, but I believe that they all happen for a reason, even if I can never have access to those reasons because God works in such mysterious ways") or through science ("Oh, well, you know, science is so complicated that I don't understand it, but the whole universe works in really, really complex ways that I can't understand and I can't have access to different models of how the universe is constructed because I'm not a scientist") is, likewise, wrong.

Anyway, check out Abbey's essay if you never have. It's worth a reading. Not in order to accept everything he says, but in order to consider it. To think about it. To think.

Beloved

2009-03-17T12:10:00.003-05:00

We read Beloved last month in AP English. Is this the sixth time that I've read the book now? Seventh?

Regardless, how did it take so long for me to make the link between "When the four horsemen came" (in all of its intentional apocalyptic obviousness) and the description of the sick camp of Cherokees that Paul D encounters after escaping from the flood in Georgia? Here's the Cherokee:

Decimated but stubborn, they were among those who chose a fugitive life rather than Oklahoma. The illness that swept them now was reminiscent of the one that had killed half their number two hundred years earlier. In between that calamity and this, they had visited George III in London, published a newspaper, made baskets, led Oglethorpe through forests, helped Andrew Jackson fight Creek, cooked maize, drawn up a constitution, petitioned the King of Spain, been experimented on by Dartmouth, established asylums, wrote their language, resisted settlers, shot bear and translated scripture. All to no avail. The forced move to the Arkansas River, insisted upon by the same president they fought for against the Creek, destroyed another quarter of their already shattered number.

So far, so good, no?

It's a wonderful, and terrible, compressed history of a civilization. It's not a complete history, of course -- it's not meant to be -- but it is a window between two plagues. Literacy, government, craft, agriculture, religion, etc. Even higher education, here given the awful irony of "been experimented on by Dartmouth." It's enough, right? It has to be enough, right? Isn't that enough to ensure your civilization's survival? Isn't that enough to ensure the continued existence of your people? Isn't that enough story?

Nope: all to no avail.

Here's the rest of the relevant passage, though:

That was it, they thought, and removed themselves from those Cherokee who signed the treaty, in order to retire into the forest and await the end of the world. The disease they suffered now was a mere inconvenience compared to the devastation they remembered.

It's hard to miss the "now vs. then" appeal to memory, to the potential terror of the past, the echoes of the struggles of Sethe (and Baby Suggs, and Stamp Paid, and etc etc etc) to remember as little as possible. And, I suppose, for a lot of people, it's hard to miss the "end of the world" echo in the later description of Schoolteacher and Company as the "four horsemen," but I hadn't seen it until this year. Even after being prepped for it by Morrison concluding the Cherokee's 200 year window with "translated scripture."

And that's why I re-read. Not just because I have a pretty damn mediocre memory, making too many books feel like first-reads even on a second go-round, but because I love how re-reading adds layers and layers and layers to my understanding both of the questions that a given text is raising (and how it seeks to answer them) and of how that text is put together, how it works, and why it works.

(War and Peace, by the way, now that I'm about 400 pages in, is feeling more like a first-timer than a true re-read. And that's okay).

War and Peace

2009-02-17T20:42:00.003-05:00

Seriously. War and Peace.

A couple of years after working through the Volokhonsky/Pevear Anna Karenina (which didn't hold up quite as well as I expected it would, given how much I loved the novel when I read it (via Constance Garnett) 13 or 14 years ago, I decided to re-read War and Peace, this time (like AK) in the Volkhonsky/Pevear translation.

Given that I first read the book while backpacking alone on the Pacific Crest Trail as a 22-year-old -- the same summer that I read The Adventures of Augie March, Henderson the Rain King, Narcissus and Goldmund, and re-read The Brothers Karamazov, I'm probably setting myself up for disappointment.

But, I made it through the first 75 pages of "remind me again of why I should care about these impossibly wealthy mofos," and am now firmly entrenched in the second seventh of the book, so, I guess, all is well.

For the sake of trying to get a solid handle on the thing, I'm going to try to write about it when I can. We'll see how it goes.

Kalamazoo Brewing

2009-02-04T09:57:00.002-05:00

Bell's HopSlam has arrived, folks.

It's probably gone by now, too, for that matter, but it's still worth looking if you haven't yet done so.

The HopSlam. How do they get so much grapefruit goodness into the thing? That big ol' citrus face sitting on top of a bit of warming mojo? My sensibilities cannot compute; my metaphors get mixed.

Harper's Band

2009-02-04T09:49:00.003-05:00

Harper -- to be four in April -- has a band.

I'm in favor of that.

(And I'm fully aware of the dangers of And Then My Kid stories, but will that stop me? No, it will not).

Its name is Mex Fluoride. Its members are as follows:

Vocals: Beef
Guitar: Buller
Drums: Flyer
Keyboards: I'm The Tallest Mouse

Harper typically takes the role of Beef.

Mex Fluoride is most well-known for its songs "Texas Texas (Won't You Go Away)" and "Put Your Hand Down," but those who see the band frequently may have heard "Drop the Cheerio" or perhaps a cover of "Suffragette City" or "Run to the Hills."

I have no idea where this comes from. I mean, I know where the Bowie and Iron Maiden covers come from, but the rest of it? Do I know its origin? No, I do not. It's like when he opened his own restaurant over the summer and named himself, as cook and owner, Greasy Sanders.

Regardless, I'm proud of the kid.

Springsteen's New Album

2009-01-30T13:02:00.000-05:00

I like Bruce Springsteen. I do. He’s never going to be a member of the Pantheon (Bob Dylan / Neil Young / Van Morrison / Stevie Wonder), nor will any of his records, outside of, say, Born to Run, ever crack the personal top thirty. Much as I might like them, I’ll never evangelize for Darkness on the Edge of Town like I have for the Band’s second album, or listen obsessively to Nebraska like I have to Al Green’s Call Me. I’ll collect the occasional concert recording to get a sense for what people mean when they refer to particularly legendary concerts by him. And I’ll even await new records with some degree of enthusiasm. Not as any kind of superfan, but as someone who is interested.

All this by way of saying that I’ve heard Working on a Dream and I’m not impressed. The songs are ultimately okay, if not necessarily as “worked” as those on Magic, but the production kills the thing. Just kills the thing.

(A sidenote: I’m not a fanatical “loudness is killing everything” prophet o’ doom, but there’s no doubt that a lot of recordings are brickwalled, over-compressed, and hard to listen to).

It’s this friable, high, trebly, bright, mechanical shine that holds us at arm’s length. It becomes not fun as a listening experience. And, for Mr. Springsteen, that must be a sort of nasty irony: you write fun, sunshine radio songs that, thanks to the mastering, no one can enjoy listening to.

And it’s not like I have phenomenal ears. A few years of club shows and too many hours in the basement with loud guitar and drums have, I’m sure, left me with at least a few gaps in my audible tone range, but even I can hear how ridiculous the production is and how poorly it frames the songs. Same thing with Magic, really – and those were better songs, even.

Maybe I have to get over that with Mr. Springsteen. Maybe I have to accept that, with the exception of three, maybe four records, he’s not going to make something with a sound I like as much as the songs.

(Those exceptions: The Wild / Innocent, Born to Run, Nebraska, and, arguably, Darkness, though even that last one has a disappointing drum sound that keeps something like “Badlands” from being the piledriver it could be).

Born in the USA and Tunnel of Love both suffer from dated sound (instrumentation) and awful, dated production (those gated drums and that keyboard-wash over everything). I like those songs, for the most part, but I can’t, just can’t, listen to “Dancing in the Dark” because of how it sounds.

Most problematic about Magic and Dream: the older albums (even USA and Tunnel) have a sense of dynamics. Everything, essentially everything on the two latest – every note, every riff, every cymbal splash – is placed at the same (maximum) volume throughout the records. Any place that a song could get louder, any moment in which a dynamic shift might be natural, winds up distorted instead. And, in almost every case, the instrumentation is the same from the beginning of each song to the end. There’s no build, neither in dynamics nor in arrangement. That accelerating race through “Thunder Road”? Won’t happen. You know that moment when the drums, the guitars, finally crash in on the piano figure in “Backstreets,” how that makes you feel? You won’t (and can’t) find that here.

And I know that an album is an ultimately disposable product, and no one’s asking – or, at least, I’m not asking – for the same song to be written over and over again, but to make entire albums that sound like “Night” (maxed out and crashing all the way through) doesn’t seem like the way to make a product that might last. Songs like Magic’s “Living in the Future” or Dream’s “This Day” deserve better.

Why School?

2009-01-16T11:55:00.002-05:00

Or, to put it another way, from school, why school?

(A strange word to look at closely, as it turns out: school).

Or, to put it another way, here's a poem by Thomas Lux:

YOU GO TO SCHOOL TO LEARN

You go to school to learn to
read and add, to someday
make some money. It – money – makes
sense: you need
a better tractor, an addition
to the gameroom, you prefer
to buy your beancurd by the barrel.
There’s no other way to get the goods
you need. Besides, it keeps people busy
working – for it. It’s sensible and, therefore, you go
to school to learn (and the teacher,
having learned, gets paid to teach you) how
to get it. Fine. But:
you’re taught away from poetry
or, say, dancing (That’s nice, dear,
but there’s no dough in it). No poem
ever bought a hamburger, or not too many. It’s true,
and so, every morning – it’s still dark! –
you see them, the children, like angels
being marched off to execution,
or banks. Their bodies luminous
in headlights. Going to school.

A few things I like here. I like how the - money - in the third line (making sense) implies that the whole proposition set up prior to that assertion (that money makes sense), in fact, is senseless. And that it does it so quietly, so easily.

And I like the sigh of "It's true" (that no poem ever bought more than too many hamburgers) toward the end and how it leads so naturally into "and so." How the children, like angels, going to school are doing so as a result of that truth. It's true. And so. There's a sigh there, I think.

But it's not only a sigh, and I like that, too. Just prior to "It's true," Lux insists that, "No poem ever bought a hamburger, or not too many." He writes, "or not too many." Not "or not a lot, anyway" or anything like that. "Or not too many." And so, even a fungible poem, even a work of art, a poem, as commodity, while it might ultimately be exchanged for food, would always only be exchanged for enough food. Never too much. Never too many hamburgers. Never more than the poet might need.

Pistons vs. Smallball

2009-01-15T20:23:00.003-05:00

And so, yes, the Pistons lost to Charlotte. And Indiana.

And, yes, the team seems lost, particularly during the fourth quarter of any given game (Denver being an exception).

And, yes, now that Hamilton is back, Curry seems relatively determined to pursue this "smallball" thing further than seems healthy.

And, no, the last two losses cannot be blamed entirely on running a three-guard, Tayshaun-at-power-forward (!) offense.

But still.

So, here's something for anyone out there with either (1) a passing interest in the Pistons or (2) a passing interest in literature. And additional kudos (and Kudos, all chocolate + granola goodness) for anyone who already finds those interests intersecting on a daily basis:

It's a post + comment thread on detroitbadboys.com about Curry, smallball, anger, literature, malice, and, with any luck, catharsis.

You'll like it.

I won't claim to have posted.

But I won't claim not to have posted, either.

I figure it's obvious.

Calvin without Hobbes

2009-01-14T08:26:00.004-05:00

In last Sunday's New York Times Magazine, there's an article entitled "Who Would Jesus Smack Down?" about Mark Driscoll and an apparently surging movement of neo-Calvinism in the Pacific Northwest.

Yep, Calvinism. As in John Calvin. As in the Puritans. As in predestination. As in every man, woman, boy, and girl, is predestined, preselected for heaven or hell. As in beyond a rather fuzzy notion that those chosen for paradise are likely to engage in the sort of good works we would associate with being heaven-bound, nothing that you do during your relatively short life makes any difference vis-a-vis the eternal results -- not even, presumably, whether you, say, actually believe in God.

Now, that may, in fact, be a endpoint of logical necessity given a few other tenets of traditional Christian theology (namely, God knows everything and nothing that you do could ever, ever, ever make you worthy of such a gift as God's grace), but, you know, come on.

The article, in any case, is fun. As it should be. There's a great quote from Driscoll claiming the modern conception of Jesus to be "a Richard Simmons, hippie, queer Christ... a limp-wristed popular Sky Fairy of pop culture."

Nice.

But what struck me, really struck me, what made me actually want to write about the thing for a few minutes, to use this online journal to make some thoughts relatively permanent, was this paraphrased claim from a member of Driscoll's church: Reducing God to a projection of our own wishes trivializes divine sovereignty.

Right. And then, of course, you have to make a choice, a choice that any honest person should make: believe wholeheartedly (and, again, honestly) in a God that is truly omnipotent, that truly acts in the world in all things, that truly has a plan-with-a-capital-P, that not only grants you the life that you have but also takes it away, that not only grants some people freedom from pancreatic cancer but also gives it to others, that not only made the acorn but also the Huntington's disease; or wholeheartedly (and, again, honestly) reject the very premise of the existence of such a sovereign being.

No fuzzy middle-ground. Take your beliefs all the way to their logical ends. No subscribing to ultimately contradictory notions like "everyone chooses his own fate" or "everything is a part of a grand plan and I choose to be a part of that plan."

But, then, even the theoretically non-fuzzy Calvinism has, at its heart, fundamental fuzz, as the article's author points out: "God has predestined every human being's actions, yet we are still to blame for our sins; we are totally depraved, yet held to the impossible standard of divine law."

(No need, even, to point out the fuzz in the point at which John Calvin's beliefs and his life meet, the point that allows him to order heretics burned to death).

By chance, we just finished reading The Stranger in AP English.

And, in another pleasant dovetailing, the "Uber-Jesus" article is followed by Steven Pinker thoughtpiece exploring our genes' influence on our behavior.

LBJ

2009-01-07T20:56:00.003-05:00

Not the Lyndon, folks.

But he of the crab dribble. Or, I don't know, maybe it's the Crab Dribble. Either way, though, I figure I don't need a link here; either you already know about it or you don't care. And regardless, the Crab Dribble? Are you serious? And we're still talking about it? Debating whether it's a travel or not?

Come on, as Gob might say.

Meanwhile, Rodney Stuckey is on fire, the Pistons have won seven straight, and they play the Trail Blazers tonight. If I'm still up grading papers by halftime, I'll try to find a feed for the game and see what's happening.

In the Brewery

2009-01-06T14:57:00.004-05:00

It was a busy fall for brewing. From our return from Michigan in late August, here's what happened:

A Strong Golden Ale made with yeast from a Duvel bottle.

A Strong Golden Ale spiced with coriander, ginger, and grains of paradise, and made with yeast from a DT bottle.

An American Barleywine with Chinook, Centennial, and Amarillo hops.

An American Stout bittered with Magnum and flavored with Cascade hops.

An American Brown Ale with Amarillo hops.

An American Pale Ale with a whole mess of wild hops from the Upper Peninsula.

An English Mild.

An Ordinary Bitter.

A Robust Porter.

An Amber Ale with the remainder of the wild UP hops.

Another English Mild.

A Scottish 70 Shilling Ale.

A Dubbel with Wyeast 3787, supposedly sourced from Westmalle.

A Dubbel with Wyeast 1762, supposedly sourced from Rochefort.

A Tripel with Wyeast 3787.

An IPA with a lot of Columbus and Centennial hops.

I think that's all -- and sort of kind of almost in order. Some went into bottles, some into kegs. Three are still in fermenters: the second Dubbel and the Tripel need to be bottled; the IPA needs to go into a keg.

But it's 2009 and that means it's time to make more. Planned for the future, then:

Another English Mild. This is my new favorite style. It's small, but surprisingly rich and flavorful, a little caramelly, a little fruity, and fairly bready. Plus, I don't know of any bottled commercial examples, so not only do I have to make it if I want it, but I also don't have to worry about comparing what I make to anything else.

Another Robust Porter.

A Dry Stout, made small, maybe 3.5% or so.

An English Pale Ale -- maybe something like Fuller's ESB.

A Belgian Dark Strong Ale with the yeast from Rochefort.

Maybe a Double IPA for the early spring, round about the time that the cherry blossoms emerge, we get near spring break, and the HopSlam arrives.

And yet I want to get back into climbing shape, too. These goals may, in fact, be incompatible.

Winter Reading - The Holiday Break

2009-01-05T10:06:00.004-05:00

Charles Baxter: The Soul Thief. I didn't care for this. I kept almost putting it down, letting it go, but then I'd hit an ndividual moment, an individual vignette, that was stunning enough to keep reading. In the end, though, I guess I didn't care. The setup is a little contrived, and while, yes, I know, most plots are, ultimately, contrived in some way (see, for example, "Maniacal one-legged captain obsessively hunts single whale while narrator contemplates free will, art, the soul, slavery, the nature of reality and the reality of nature," or "In a post-apocalyptic wasteland, a man and boy try to survive grueling walk toward the sea"), I never got beyond the contrivance of this one.

(Note that Ahab is not pursuing an unmarried whale, but that he's after a particular whale. Sorry about the ambiguity).

Richard Russo: The Bridge of Sighs. I wasn't a huge fan of Empire Falls, but I loved Nobody's Fool, most of Mohawk and The Risk Pool, and Straight Man is a perfectly hilarious excuse for me never to pursue teaching at the university level (that, and, you know, like a doctorate and stuff). This one is good. Real good. I was a little worried that the whole "who were the man and woman outside the box" mystery might drive the plot too much, but that turns out to matter much less than the comparable "mysteries" do in Empire Falls. And Russo can write. Check out this passage:

The line of gray along the horizon is brighter now, and with the coming light I feel a certainty: that there is, despite our wild imaginings, only one life. The ghostly others, no matter how real they seem, no matter how badly we need them, are phantoms. The one life we’re left with is sufficient to fill and refill our imperfect hearts with joy, and then to shatter them. And it never, ever lets up.

Okay, so the "new day is dawning; light is coming; with light comes epiphany" opening is a little tough to take, but after that? C'mon. Those two last sentences? They don't reach you?

The English Major

2008-12-25T12:05:00.006-05:00

A less positive thought on The English Major -- and not my college degree, which I have no regrets about at all, unless you count not dropping the class with Cowboy Hat Lady, but the Jim Harrison novel.

One of the blurbs, this one from Publishers Weekly, claims that "Harrison is consistently witty and engaging as he drives home his timeless theme: that change can be beneficial at any point in life."

Seriously? "Change can be beneficial at any point in life"? That's it? That's the "timeless theme" that Harrison explores in the book? That's what we should take away from our reading? "Uh, change is good, kids. You know, like, change. It's good -- the change thing."

And I bother to insist, in class, that any discussion of a work's ideas, any exploration of a novel's questions, can (and, perhaps, should) extend beyond platitudes and cliches? Beyond easy-to-digest bromides?

I know that Publishers Weekly is probably not a forum for the working out of ambiguity or difficulty, but, still, that's the best you can do, guys?

Random iPod Song

2008-12-22T09:44:00.002-05:00

The Whatnauts: "Why Can't People be Colors Too?"

If the bouncing bassline and the occasional wah-wah licks couldn't place it, the title alone should date this one fairly clearly to the early '70s. Nothing wrong with that, of course, and if you're looking for medium-tempo generic soul, that's a fine era to do a little diving.

And there's nothing wrong with the song, either.

And, for that matter, there's nothing particularly right about it.

It comes in, nods its head a few times, makes its point

Roses are red
Violets are blue
Why can't people be colors, too?

and gets out before overstaying its welcome. Nothing surprising, nothing enlightening, no hint of tension and, thus, nothing to get released from.

Did A Tribe Called Quest sample these drums for something?

Winter Reading

2008-12-22T08:47:00.005-05:00

Neal Stephenson: Anathem. Not quite as much fun as Cryptonomicon or The Diamond Age, and, oddly enough, not as immersive as the Baroque Cycle, but still worth its 900 pages. It takes much longer to get going than anything else by him, but the middle third or so is excellent, especially a fine set-piece covering a frozen journey across the tundra and over a pole to a remote island, a set-piece complete with a last-minute rescue by mathematical ninjas. And, sure, maybe ninjas are a bit played out at the moment, but, c'mon, they're like Platonic math ninjas, y'all. Not even Raekwon had a mythology like that.

Jessica Anya Blau: The Summer of Naked Swim Parties. She can write, yes. And her 14-year-old narrator is likable, intelligent but not overly-precocious. And I guess I know more about wealthy adolescents in California in 1976 than I did before I read the novel. And I wasn't in any danger of not finishing it. And Stephen Dixon blurbed it. And John Barth blurbed it. But beyond that? I dunno. Once the story arrived at its tipping point, its moment of significance, it felt rushed, surface-y, and, surprisingly, I started to care a lot less about the narrator. She binged and I didn't care. She got drunk and I didn't care. She went to group therapy with her parents and that was funny but then there was a bizarre run-in with the therapist's daughter and I didn't care. Maybe I'm not the audience. Maybe I needed the phrase "fifth freedom." Maybe the Barth and Dixon blurbs are more about Johns Hopkins' writing program and less about Frog and The Sot-Weed Factor.

Jim Harrison: The English Major. This was much funnier in the first half and much more moving in the second half than I expected. I don't think it's going to stand next to True North or the three pieces of The Woman Lit by Fireflies, and if it's a little reminiscent of Warlock, which left me cold, it also has a much more interesting narrator and a more natural structure. What Nick Hornby would call a Good Book That Isn't Boring? Maybe. I certainly won't begrudge the time spent reading it.

Moore + Gibbons: Watchmen. It had been a long time. Still works, though. Still captivating and, even with (or maybe because of) lines like "You argued that human life was more significant than this excellent desolation, and I was not convinced. You attempted to compare the mere uncertainty in your existence with the chaos of the world beneath us. But where are the pinnacles to rival this Olympus? Where are the depths to match those of... the Valles Marineris?" still managing to rise above its time and place and the cultural baggage it has accumulated in the last two decades.

National Board

2008-12-19T23:07:00.004-05:00

A serious thank you to last year's English classes for letting me videotape them, take their papers to write about, take their projects to discuss, and use their assessments to reflect on.

Thanks to the bounty of material that they provided me with, I just managed to get National Board Certified.

Again, thanks guys.

Long Shadows

2008-12-18T11:03:00.003-05:00

Two little bits of Dylan today:

1. In an interview in Uncut, Chris Shaw, an engineer on Dylan's last several albums, talks about recording "Moonlight," a song from Love and Theft. As part of that discussion, he relates this anectdote:

The thing was, there’s a lyric on the song where Bob sings, "The leaves cast their shadows on the stones," and, when he was singing it live, he was reading his lyrics off a piece of paper, and, I guess, for a split-second, he got dyslexic, because on the live take, he actually sang, "The leaves cast their stadows on the stones." So, the only time I did any editing on that song, was when I heard this word "stadows" go by, I knew he meant shadows, because I had the lyric sheet in front of me. So, when I tried a remix, I took the vocal, and I found a "sh" from somewhere else, and I chopped the "st" out and put that in, so he was singing "shadows," y’know. And Bob was listening to all these mixes, and he kept saying, "Nah, man, I really wanna use that rough mix." Finally, I said, "Well, you know, on the rough mix, you don’t sing 'shadows,' you sing, 'stadows.'" And he took a long hit on his cigarette, and he kind of looked at me deadpan, and he went, "Well, you know: stadows." So, at the final mastering, we figured that we really couldn’t let that stadows go by, because everybody would give him shit about it, so we did sliver edit, literally just for the "sh," like a 15 milisecond edit.

I love that, the image of Dylan sitting for a second, taking a drag of his cigarette, and then saying, "Well, you know: stadows." Perfect. Poetry.

The whole interview is here at Uncut.

2. This longish piece on recording Blonde on Blonde, which includes a fair amount of discussion of the New York sessions for the album. Well worth reading.

The Mynah Birds

2008-12-17T11:18:00.004-05:00

Hip-O Select's The Complete Motown Singles, Volume Six has an otherwise unreleased single by the Mynah Birds, the short-lived group that at one point boasted both Neil Young AND Rick James as members.

Yep, that Neil Young.

And that Rick James.

I've listened to the single (both sides) a few times in the last week and it's pretty good. Not life-changing, as two songs by Rick James and Neil Young could be, but still pretty damn good. The A-Side, "It's My Time" is a sort of Nuggets-esque piece of fuzzy garage-soul that works well. Not particularly similar to anything else Motown had going in 1966, but still effective. The B-Side "Go On and Cry" is almost British in its sound and tone -- and while that might seem even more bizarre than the whole idea of the group, according to what I remember of Young's biography Shakey, Rick James, more than anything else, wanted, at this point, to be Mick Jagger. (And that's awesome in its own right. Here you have Mick Jagger trying desperately to be a black American and, in so doing, inspiring Rick James to be a white Englishman. How can you not love that?)

And then James got busted for being AWOL from the Navy.

And Neil left for Los Angeles.

And Motown never released the single (until now).

And there's supposedly a whole album somewhere that Motown threw in its vaults when Gordy and Company canned the Mynah Birds' single. Perhaps to emerge when Neil's Archives get released? Someday?

Rabbits and Ghosts

2008-12-17T09:44:00.002-05:00

It's been a while since I've written about Wallace Stevens and I read a few poems of his during a planning period yesterday and after spending way too much time with "The Dwarf," I came to "A Rabbit as King of the Ghosts," which opens like this:

The difficulty to think at the end of the day,
When the shapeless shadow covers the sun
And nothing is left except light on your fur --

There was the cat slopping its milk all day,
Fat cat, red tongue, green mind, white milk
And August the most peaceful month.

It goes on from there, but I'm most interested in those two stanzas and the insistence, the realization, the recognition that there's a certain bitterness, a certain sadness, at the end of any day -- not just because the day is ending and you'll never have that day again and you have that sort of purple twilight wistful feeling (of the sort embodied in the opening chords of Van Morrison's Astral Weeks) and you know that every day, no matter how good, will end, but also because you can't help, regardless of how you spent that day, but see something else at the end of the same day, fat, content, and peaceful. And presumably not thinking about the day as you are, not happy to see it finally draw to a close nor sad to see it over so soon. Simply red of tongue and full of milk, full of its day in the sun, full of its self in the best sense of that phrase.

And I know that that's not a complete understanding of the poem, or even an attempt at a complete understanding, looking, as it does, only at two of the eight stanzas. And I'm not tempted, over the course of the poem, to read the rabbit, the King of the Ghosts (as the title has it) as somehow symbolic of me, or of mankind, or of Bill Fox, or of Adlai Stevenson, or whatever. Not even suggestive of me or Adlai. But, just as there is pleasure in the whole of the poem, of a poem, there is pleasure in the part, in the shard, in the language of those six lines, in the potential truth even in that fragment.

The Lost Dylan Album

2008-12-16T08:31:00.003-05:00

Not Columbia's Dylan, the one with "Spanish is the Loving Tongue" and "Big Yellow Taxi," but the potential extra record contained within the outtakes and soundtrack work on Tell Tale Signs, the latest volume of the Bootleg Series.

Along with the pleasure of the collection itself, one of the great things about this volume is the possibility of creating an entire additional record to stand alongside Love and Theft and Modern Times. As those are both fantastic records in their own right, and each better than 1997's "comeback" Time Out of Mind, how could a person not want another? And not just a different reading of the songs, as in the "New York" version of Blood on the Tracks, and not just an ideal version of an otherwise mediocre record, like the one you can create from Infidels and its outtakes, but an entirely new thing, an entirely new companion, an entirely new set of googley-moogley eyes with which to see the world.

Or mostly new, anyway.

Here's what I came up with, using studio material only, and while striving for a (relatively) concise single disc and a (relatively) unified sound. And, with the exception of the leadoff track, using only material from Tell Tale Signs.

Things Have Changed
Someday Baby
Can't Wait (version one)
Mississippi (probably version one)
Red River Shore
Marching to the City (version one)
Tell Ol' Bill
Huck's Tune
Cross the Green Mountain

(And those who order early get a "Red Cadillac and a Black Moustache" bonus track).

The two uncertainties I have with it are the use (and/or placement) of "Marching to the City," which is a great song, but one I can't quite get to fit in the sequence, and the version of "Mississippi" to use. Soundwise, and sequencewise, the best fit for "Mississippi" would actually be the released Love and Theft version. If I use that one, then I move it to the two-slot, flipping it with "Someday Baby." That's a better sequence, but I can't quite, in good conscience, simply give up and use the already-released take. Not yet, anyway. Maybe later.

The other consideration is that this is, for all intents and purposes, a CD-based track order. If I were releasing this on vinyl, I'd make a couple of other changes. That version would look like this:

Side One:

Things Have Changed
Mississippi
Can't Wait
Marching to the City

Side Two:

Someday Baby
Tell Ol' Bill
Red River Shore
Huck's Tune
Cross the Green Mountain

Provided, of course, that the math works for song and side timings.

"Dreaming of You" gets left out for not quite working with the sound of the rest of the record, by the way. And "Can't Escape from You" becomes a b-side. And, while I like it, I can't get "Ain't Talkin'" to fit anywhere.

I don't know. Maybe I'm too easily amused.

Tell-Tale Signs

2008-12-15T15:28:00.003-05:00

Okay, so the Hold Steady made another solid record this year, and, okay, I enjoy the Fleet Foxes album more than I thought I would, but the best release of 2008 -- that I heard -- is the latest volume in Dylan's Bootleg Series: Tell-Tale Signs. Seriously.

And I know it's a compilation.

And I know it's material that was recorded, in some cases almost 20 years ago.

But nothing else this year can come close to it for consistency, for coherence, for brilliant moments, and for the way that it makes you rethink what the musician (Dylan) is capable of at any given moment.

As a single volume in the series -- technically the "Eighth," but only the sixth to be released as the first three volumes were released as a box set -- this is up there with the original collection and the 1966 Judas Concert. It's that good.

Consider the way that it reinvents "Most of the Time" as an acoustic companion piece to "Wedding Song" from Planet Waves. Or the way that "Someday Baby" becomes viable, becomes an actual song instead of merely a placeholding downtempo shuffle on Modern Times. Or the way that "Born in Time" acquires passion, interest, humanity, and perhaps even beauty. Or the way that the first "Can't Wait," stripped of Lanois' sturm-und-echo-drang, discovers the anguish at its heart.

And on and on. The demo of "Dignity." The Supper Club version of "Ring Them Bells." The wholescale reinvention of "Tryin' to Get to Heaven" (from the special edition third disc, which is, um, available in a variety of ways). The World Gone Wrong outtake "32-20 Blues."

Not everything is magic, of course. The three versions of "Mississippi," while intriguing, ultimately don't make for a completely new listening experience in the same fashion as "Can't Wait" or "Most of the Time."

And, and, AND, you get "Cross the Green Mountain" (otherwise available only on a soundtrack to a movie nobody cares about) and "Huck's Tune" (another soundtrack piece) and, critically, "Red River Shore," one of the finest (and most perfectly Dylan-like) pieces he's recorded in two decades. And if you can listen to "Red River Shore" and not want to hear more from the man, then you probably never will.

Seriously -- "Red River Shore." It's revelatory. It's like hearing "Blind Willie McTell" and wondering how the hell that got left off of Infidels back in 1983. It's that good. As is the whole of the set.

Good enough to create an entire "lost album" just from the last decade of the outtakes and soundtrack work, an album to rival Love and Theft and Modern Times. No easy feat.

The Mind

2008-12-05T14:00:00.002-05:00

In How the Mind Works (as he does with more detail and elaboration The Stuff of Thought), Steven Pinker brings up the way in which we do not (perhaps cannot) naturally conceive of our bodies as vessels.

No matter that the Church sometimes refers to Mary in this way. (Doesn't it? Or am I imagining that? Is that a dream?)

So, for example, we find it immediately odd if someone says, "I drove to school today with a gallon of blood in the car. Human blood, too."

Or, as I asked yesterday when a student got up from his chair, "How did you get all that blood off your chair?"

Reading

2008-12-05T13:47:00.004-05:00

As an occasional break from Steven Pinker's How the Mind Works (more on that later) and Neal Stephenson's Anathem (no more on that later), I picked my way through FreeDarko presents The Macrophenomenal Pro Basketball Almanac: Styles, Stats, and Stars in Today's Game.

It's an unwieldy title, to be sure, but the book itself is fine fine fine. If you've ever read the FreeDarko blog, you'll recognize the tone, but given that it's the dominant tone of so much current writing (think Esquire, etc), even if you haven't read the blog, nothing about the style will shock or awe. It's that combination of analysis and commentary, of intelligence and humor, of respect and snark. It's that "we take this seriously, but we also realize how ridiculous it is to take this seriously, so we don't take it seriously even while we take it seriously" thing. It's that gimmick thing, yes, but all analysis ultimately hangs its hat upon a gimmick.

A taste, from "Jerseys for Every Occasion," and its instructions for what NBA jersey might be appropriate attire, for example, for a funeral: "Len Bias, Boston Celtics. The Celtics took Len Bias with the first overall pick in the 1986 draft, after which he promptly died of a cocaine overdose. This tragedy derailed a dynasty; wearing this jersey says to the family, 'I know you'll never be happy again, and that's okay.'"

Brilliant Marketing, Really

2008-12-04T14:38:00.002-05:00

If you're so inclined, check out the Pistons official website (pistons.com, naturally) and look for ads for "Ladies' Night Out."

Now, remember that not only is the country's economy tanking, but Michigan's is worse than just about any other individual state in the US. Now, imagine that you're trying to attract people to a basketball game, to spend a whole mess o' money on what amounts to a diversion, a luxury. And, sure, maybe there is a certain extra temptation to distraction, to diversion, to entertainment when things are terrible, but keep in mind that Michigan's rates of foreclosures, unemployment, job loss, etc, are essentially off the charts at this point.

So, how do you get people to buy tickets?

Well, if they're ladies, you tempt them with souvenir martini glasses and Walter Herrmann.

Walter Herrmann.

Walter Herrmann + Martinis = Ladies' Night Out.

That's brilliant.

(And it's an autograph session, no less).

There Will Be Blood

2008-12-04T13:58:00.002-05:00

I watched this for the second time a week or so ago. And here's the deal:

I'm not sure it's making all that complex an argument.
I'm not sure I like the Johnny Greenwood score that much.

But I like the movie. A lot.

Maybe it never gets better than the opening sequence (excepting the big ol' crash-em-up Greenwood chord), but the whole thing works and works well.

And if it gets better than Daniel Day-Lewis underground, or in the early oil-digging shots, it does so only when Plainview and HW are first on the train together. Brilliant, almost-silent filmmaking.

My Sticker

2008-11-04T11:20:00.003-05:00

You're goddamn right I voted.

And, Scantron and all, I was proud of that sucker.

In honor, I copy here a few lines from Mark Craver's poem "Alexandria as Center of the Universe."

"The world itself lets dogs be dogs and I saw genius
in that. But when the work as done the instant faded in

a rush of pedestrians, in the water running past me
in Alexandria, in the concrete and bricks making up
the town. Was this enough? To love the ugly world

is to find yourself at its center and to let it be
enough; to refuse to be saddened by it; to let it end.
That's where it all started for me: at the end."

Perhaps not perfect for the moment, but enough.

24 Hours

2008-11-03T13:35:00.006-05:00

It can't go the other way. We can't go back.

We can't.

Because fuck that.

Because, let's face it, your heart and your mind both say that it's right.

Because I just re-re-re-read The Road and there's no way I'm allowing the world to become a song for what once was rather than a song for what, if we're lucky, could be.

Because like Joe Henry says, "This was my country / This was my song / Somewhere in the middle there / Though it started badly / And it's ending wrong." And the ending, you know, doesn't have to mean the end.

Because you betcha.

Because I have a family.

Because when is the last time you wanted, I mean really wanted, to listen to a State of the Union address?

Because Wallace Stevens wrote, "Have it your way / The world is ugly / And the people are sad." And while I'll never write enough about that poem, I won't write more at the moment other than to say it's November, leaves fall, empty branches dance against the sky, and you -- as the poem, of course, insists -- don't have to see the world as ugly and sad. It's a choice.

Because it's not going to fix everything, or even a lot of things, and it's not going to radically change the system, and it's not going to erase the debt, and it's not going to rebalance what is so desperately out of whack, and it's not going to bring back the dead, and it's not going to cast out all the darkness, and it's sure as hell no guarantee of happily ever after, but it might just make us want to be a little smarter, a little more thoughtful, a little more willing to deliberate, a litle more willing to think, to think, and to think. And, no, that's not a lot. But it is something.

DFW

2008-09-13T22:42:00.001-05:00

From the AP: Writer David Foster Wallace found dead at home.

Goddamnit.

Summer Reading, Part Nine

2008-08-22T21:33:00.002-05:00

After 28 Magic Treehouse books and a few miscellaneous detours (including, of course, a wonderful revisiting of Fantastic Mr. Fox), we've been trying to find more books to read with Harper.

Not that the Magic Treehouse isn't interesting (and, honestly, Harper loves them), but, after 28 of the suckers, I'm reading for a book or two that doesn't involve time travel or magic.

So, we tried the Boxcar Children, which I remember liking as a kid.

Uh.

As an adult, the writing is unacceptable. Absolutely unacceptable.

I can accept (and even understand the motivation behind) the stock characters (look, Benny is obsessed with food! And, look, every time food gets mentioned in the book, Benny will say something (or, more accurately, "cry" something) about how hungry he is), and I can accept the stock gender roles (the girls cook and clean, the boys explore and build shit), but I can't accept the page-by-page awful writing. Every dialogue tag is "he cried" and almost every line of dialogue merely reiterates what has been narrated in an earlier sentence and every dialogue tag is followed by a dependent clause that explains exactly what the speaker did while delivering his line.

But, then, we read two of them to Harper.

And we may read more in the future.

And I understand why it's that way.

And I understand why it's ridiculous to criticize a book meant for a younger audience through nothing but an adult lens.

But c'mon.

I mean, c'mon.

That said: for now, we're in the middle of Pirate Island Adventure, by Peggy Parish, another that I remember from my childhood. PIA is, technically, a sequel to a book called -- I think -- Key to the Treasure, but I couldn't find that one in my parents' basement before we left Michigan. And, if nothing else, the writing is an improvement over the Boxcar kids.

Summer Reading, Part Eight

2008-08-22T21:27:00.003-05:00

Still going.

And trying to catch up before the school year begins.

When You Are Engulfed In Flames - David Sedaris.

I enjoyed this more than his last collection (Dress Your Family...), as Sedaris seems to be settling into his role of a New Yorker essayist rather than, say, a writer for Esquire.

(I mean, can you see the New Yorker publishing "You Can't Kill the Rooster"?)

Not as many laugh-out-loud-in-the-middle-of-an-11th-grade-SOL-test moments as Me Talk Pretty One Day, but many more intriguing pieces than I found in Dress Your Family.

Maybe one, maybe two essays to pull out for class, but nothing on the level of "Jesus Shaves" or "A Plague of Tics" or -- of course -- "The Santaland Diaries."

Summer Reading, Part Seven

2008-08-15T09:31:00.001-05:00

Two books on The Beatles:

Tell Me Why, by Tim Riley
Revolution in the Head, by Ian MacDonald

Both books approach the band in the same fashion: song by song through the entirety of its career, sticking almost entirely to legitimately released tracks. And both books have their merits, though I ultimately prefered MacDonald's. Riley can't seem to find anything negative to say about a song (with the exception of unsalvageable dreck like "Only a Northern Song"), whereas MacDonald is willing to take shots at just about every sacred cow the Beatles have if he feels like an individual song is not up to the standards set by others.

MacDonald is also a bit more technical in his analysis of the songs, emphasizing, especially, the critical role of harmony in Lennon's numbers and melody in those of McCartney. When Riley does get technical, though, he tends to do so to push a particular interpretation, something that MacDonald avoids. When Riley does this well, or when his analysis (the intersection of style and theme, right?) seems justified, he's enjoyable (claiming, for example, that in "She Said, She Said," "phrases are extended from eighth notes into triplets to intensify the rhythmic stress, the thin line between confidence and anxiety"). But when the point is less apt, it can feel like he's flailing for something to say, as in this claim about the out-of-tune piano that wanders through the end of "Tomorrow Never Knows" as the song fades: "This is less a self-parody of the message than it is one more random sound tagged on to emphasize the lack of rational hierarchies in the altered state."

Reading the books meant that I got to listen a lot to the Beatles for a week or two, and that's a good thing to do once or twice a year. And there's pleasure, too -- as there tends to be reading criticism -- in finding the points of disagreement, the points where your opinion veers, perhaps sharply, from that presented. MacDonald, for example, has little positive to say about "And Your Bird Can Sing," whereas I love every damn thing about that song, from the little inhalation in the opening, to the rhythm of the guitar riff during the bridge, and from the glorious multi-part harmony during the final verse to the fact that there isn't a wasted second in it.

Summer Reading, Part Six

2008-08-13T21:25:00.003-05:00

Dave Hickey: Air Guitar

A sweet collection of essays and rants, mostly on art and occasionally on music and basketball.

Some highlights:

"A Glass-Bottomed Cadillac," a post-mortem look at Hank Williams' life, told from the perspective of the man himself. Hickey opens the essay with Hank describing heaven to Bocephus -- and it ain't that great. It's "a big cinder-block structure like the education building of a Methodist church in suburban Indianapolis. It's got beige walls, terrazzo floors, acoustic-tile ceilings, and there isn't any TV or movies. There are just these big felt boards in all the rooms with cutouts of Cain and Abel, David and Bathsheba, and the New Orleans Saints stuck to them, so that you can kind of move around and tell stories if you want to." And, c'mon, that's brilliant. Indianapolis? Perfect. The big felt boards? Perfect. The slightly bizarre inclusion of the New Orleans Saints? Perfect.

"The Heresy of Zone Defense," a simultaneous celebration of basketball (and Dr. J, in particular) and an analysis of the role of rules in facilitating great art. Hickey claims that much joy (including the sort of jaw-dropping play that Dr. J made on a regular basis) is possible only through civilizing rules, rules that "translate the pain of violent conflict into the pleasures of disputation -- into the excitements of politics, the delights of rhetorical art, and competitive sport." Unfortunately, of course, the "liberating rule that civilized us yesterday will, almost inevitably, seek to govern us tomorrow, by suppressing both the pleasure and the disputation." (And the glory of that phrase lies, for me, in the fact that Hickey writes "liberating rule that civilized us" and not "civilizing rule that liberated us." But maybe that's just me).

And "The Delicacy of Rock and Roll," an argument for the primacy of be-bop and rock and roll in twentieth century art. Could the art of Pollock exist without Charlie Parker? Nope. But could be-bop exist without Stan Brakhage? Yep. Likewise, Andy Warhol requires rock, but rock doesn't need Warhol. And I'll need a long passage here, because it's so good, and I have to record a copy of it somewhere:

"Both ages [jazz and rock and roll] make art that succeeds by failing, but each exploits failure in different ways. Jazz presumes that it would be nice if the four of us -- simpatico dudes that we are -- while playing this complicated song together, might somehow be free and autonomous as well. Tragically, this never quite works out. At best, we can only be free one or two at a time -- while the other dudes hold onto the wire... Rock and roll, on the other hand, presumes that the four of us -- as damaged and anti-social as we are -- might possibly get it to-fucking-gether, man, and play this simple song. And play it right, okay? Just this once, in tune and on the beat. But we can't. The songs's too simple, and we're too complicated and too excited."

And that essay ends with this sentence, which, in whole or in part, since Dan Wineman first showed it to me in a copy of Art Issues sometime in 1995, has crept into more journal reflections that I care to add up, anytime I need a quick way to sum up whatever I've been ranting about: "Because in the twentieth century, that's all there is: jazz and rock and roll. The rest is term papers and advertising."

Summer Reading, Part Five

2008-08-13T11:58:00.003-05:00

Ann Packer: Songs Without Words

I liked this more than I thought I would. Some of the I'm-so-depressed psychologizing gets a little old, but there is a great middle third in which the central marriage of the novel starts to fall apart that is pitched just about perfectly.

Summer Reading, Part Four

2008-08-10T21:42:00.001-05:00

Alistair MacLean: Where Eagles Dare.

Because it's also an Iron Maiden song.

Summer Reading, Part Three

2008-08-10T21:35:00.002-05:00

Richard Price: Lush Life.

I read a bunch of Richard Price five or six summers ago -- whenever Samaritan came out -- and got around to Clockers this spring. My parents happened to have Lush Life sitting around the cottage, so I read it back in early July.

It's good. Maybe not as good as Clockers, which was fantastic, but better than Freedomland. Like Samaritan, I guess. Lots of fantastic dialogue, an intriguing look at a piece of a city in transition, some guilt, and an occasional attempt at redemption, whether personal or social.

But a serious problem with trying to capture a reading experience that took place a month ago is that it's just not fresh enough, at this point, to be meaningful in the sort of way that might matter in a few years when I'm wondering what I did with the summer.

By the Time He Gets to Phoenix

2008-08-10T21:28:00.003-05:00

A sad day for soul.

Isaac Hayes is dead.

Killed by a treadmill, apparently.

He wrote "Soul Man."

He wrote the theme from Shaft.

He wrote "Hold On, I'm Coming."

Sure, the whole Scientology thing is a damn shame, but, still. No one should get killed by a treadmill.

Summer Reading - Part Two

2008-07-31T21:29:00.004-05:00

Don DeLillo's Falling Man.

It's about as good as you expect a DeLillo book about September 11 to be. Which is to say that it's good, and if you like DeLillo's writing, you'll probably like the book, but also that if you've read other books by him (especially Libra), little in it will surprise you.

(And as far as books that attempt to grapple with moments of individual historical tragedy, I found Libra to be much more thought-provoking, especially in its implicit claim that we make events like this happen. Not that they're our fault necessarily, but that we create them. We will them).

And this is DeLillo who, after all, in one of the best moments of White Noise, claimed that "All plots tend to move deathward."

But this is also DeLillo who so perfectly captured the entire second half of the 20th century in Underworld that Falling Man, in its introduction to the 21st century, is bound to feel a little anti-climactic.

Summer Reading - Part One

2008-07-31T21:08:00.003-05:00

July was good for reading, and I'll try to write about some of what I read so that the books don't fade from memory quite as quickly.

Harper took a break from the "Magic Treehouse" series after book 24 and we read Roald Dahl's Fantastic Mr. Fox together.

It's one of Dahl's shorter books, but it still has enough misanthropy to keep it moving: Farmer Boggis is tremendously fat and rather ugly; Farmer Bunce is a potbellied dwarf who stinks of goose livers; and Farmer Bean is a tall, thin drunk who subsists entirely on cider.

I wasn't sure how he would deal with Mr. Fox getting his tail shot off in an early chapter, but it turned out that one of Mr. Bean's employees -- a nasty old woman who wants Mr. Fox's head for herself after he's dead -- was all that bothered him.

My favorite part as an adult? When Mr. Fox refers to the intoxicated rat who haunts Farmer Bean's private cellar as a "saucy beast."

Saucy beast.

Nice.

The End of July

2008-07-30T20:38:00.005-05:00

More posts coming, if I can find the energy and, in a beautiful Michigan evening, a spare fifteen minutes that cry out "forget the sunset, forget the deepening twilight, forget the coming stars, forget the changing lake: fire up the laptop and write something for your blog, man."

And, to be honest, a few sets of fifteen minutes have cried out exactly that, but then they've always called me a loser, and reminded me that I'd probably regret that quarter-hour away from said lake/twilight/etc, so I've chosen to allow the computer to remain off.

So why not write something quickly during the day?

A couple of photos might adequately respond to that question:

There you've got Harper, playing a rather wild game of "Can't Touch the Waves."

And there you've got Maya, obtaining via sand whatever critical nutrients we aren't providing her.

June Books

2008-06-23T21:44:00.004-05:00

Not to be confused with junebugs.

It's been a hit-or-miss month for reading, and here are some brief thoughts:

Warlock, by Jim Harrison. Didn't like it. I mean, it's Jim Harrison, and from back in 1982, so its protagonist drifts, drinks, cooks lavish meals, and sleeps around, all while considering just how it is that he's supposed to live his life. But that was it.

Checkpoint, by Nicholoson Baker. I liked Mezzanine. I liked Room Temperature. I'm intrigued by the sound of Human Smoke, but this was a waste of 90 minutes. It's short, obviously, and reads more or less like a play -- but it's also the kind of self-indulgent, self-righteous sanctimonious nonsense that I would have written at age 17, if I actually knew how to write. I'm obviously not claiming that Baker can't write, or that he writes like a teenager, or that I could have done better, or even that I disagreed with anything in the book. Still, what's the point? You're upset with the administration. Not exactly a lonely position, is it? You think Donald Rumsfeld is an idiot. Daring, no? You think our country has committed atrocities overseas that our population is all too willing to ignore. Is this news? Are we supposed to be shocked (or tickled) that one of the two characters is actively considering assassination as a rational act of protest? And are we supposed to care?

Little, Big, by John Crowley. Now, this is much better. The first time I read it, I liked it, but didn't pay much attention to it. This month, I allowed myself to sink into it much more deeply, and was rewarded for it. It's good. Even really good. It has its indulgences, sure (come on, try to make an argument that Moby-Dick doesn't, right? "Cetology," anyone?), and its insistence on referring to The Tale every four pages gets tiring, but it holds together to present a world that is simultaneously beautiful, in its own way, and heartbreaking. Make your own comparisons to life from that, if you wish.

All the Pretty Horses, by Cormac McCarthy. I want to reread the Border Trilogy this summer, so I (obviously) started with this one. No particular surprises on this, maybe the sixth or seventh time through it. I've never read all three of the Border novels back to back, though (and don't remember liking Cities of the Plain much at all), so we'll see how this goes. At least in this rereading, sans the other two books, I'm still convinced that everyone who reads this as some great Western Romance has got it completely wrong.

It's June. Still.

2008-06-23T21:29:00.004-05:00

School is out.

And while I'm sure that I'll have years in my life, or parts of years in my life, that will feel tougher, I'm glad to see this one close itself out.

An extra class.
National Board madness.
Adopting our second child.
Somehow coming down with mono.
Only having a week off at Christmas.

Clearly, I wouldn't trade parts of that (at least the second child part of it) for anything else in the world, but, still...

Isn't mono something you get when you're 16?

In any case, one of the great things about teaching seniors is that you get to see them graduate in the same year that you teach them. So, while you miss out on the potentially amazing changes that can take place between freshman and senior years, when you might see a student realize that he can be a writer, decide to be a writer, and then become a writer, you get the ultra-compressed version of high school that a single senior year offers. And a week ago, I watched this year's students receive their diplomas, bound for whatever college, the military, or work brings them, and sifted through the incredible number of memories, stories, and moments of joy, frustration, laughter, and insight, that they gave me over the course of nine months.

I'm not going to detail them here -- at least not now -- but I will say thanks, as I would extend thanks to that group of every year's students that insist on teaching me, inspiring me, reaching me, and making me laugh, grit my teeth, question, and pound my head against the desk in wonder, frustration, or disbelief.

Thanks for reading at least some of Moby-Dick with me. Thanks for talking about Cormac McCarthy with me. Thanks for not falling asleep everyday. Thanks for only plagiarizing stupid shit from Sparknotes in September. Thanks for being willing to articulate what you believe and why you believe it. Thanks for taking an occasionally-honest look at Breathless. Thanks for giving Malick a few minutes of your time. Thanks for writing. Thanks for asking whether Borges was serious or not.

Quentin's Soundtracks

2008-04-25T08:21:00.003-05:00

I saw Death Proof a couple of months ago and didn't like it at all. It didn't work as homage, it didn't work as trash, and it didn't work as entertainment.

(Though I was entertained when a student insisted to me that it was a "perfect homage to all of those great 1970s drive-in movies and car chase movies and ultra-low-budget New York gore movies" and then couldn't name or honestly claim to have seen a single one such film).

I at least expected entertaining dialogue and, while there was certainly a lot of talk talk talk, all of it read like juniors desperately trying to write what they think Tarantino movies sound like.

But, what it did have was a brilliant soundtrack. And, sure, that's to be expected, but this one had truly surprising things on it. Most prominently, and most brilliantly (with an honorable mention for "Chick Habit") are these two:

1. "Hold Tight" by the improbably named Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick & Tich. How I had never heard this before is beyond me. It's the perfect blend of fuzzed-out guitars, melodic (but ever-evolving) simplicity, rhythmic complexity masquerading as simplicity, '60s harmonies, and the adherence to maxim that anything sayable in fewer than three minutes shouldn't be padded out to four. I picked up a collection by the group and much of it is just as good. There's no doubt that they're a bunch of Brits; the songs have got those little melodic quirks that you find in, for example, work by the Kinks, and that never seem to show up in otherwise-similar American songs (not after 1950, anyway).

2. "Staggolee" by Pacific Gas and Electric. A traditional song, and a badass one at that, and this group, whoever they are, take it and treat it like The Band had grown up not in Canada and Arkansas but in Watts instead -- and a Watts burning simultaneously with soul glory and psychedelic frustration. And while there are probably 38,000 versions of it in existence, at the moment, I'd be willing to argue that it's the best version of the song ever set down, easily eclipsing Dylan's version from World Gone Wrong, or that of RL Burnside, or (believe it or not) Neil Diamond, or Mississippi John Hurt, or even the Isley Brothers.

Thousand Page Novels

2008-04-22T09:50:00.003-05:00

I looked at one of the bookshelves in my classroom this morning and realized that, yes, David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest has defeated me again. It's been long enough since I picked it up that I wouldn't feel right starting anywhere but the beginning whenever I next get the urge to try it.

I remain confident, though, that I'll read it, in its entirety, well before Neil Young ever releases one of the Archives boxes. The bastard.

Ants with the Staggers

2008-04-22T07:40:00.004-05:00

It has been raining in Virginia. A lot. And while I’d like to say that it’s all puddle-wonderful, it’s mostly just wet. And muddy.

But it is spring, as I said last week. And, in honor of the leaves, of the flowers, and the sunroof days that insist on "Can’t Hardly Wait" and "The Kids Are Alright" and Al Green’s version of "I Want to Hold Your Hand," I offer this poem by Ted Kooser. Check out the image of the ants – and this is perfect – with the staggers. The staggers. Damn.

Decoration Day

It takes the hard work
Of a dozen ants
To open each bud
Of a peony.
For weeks, there they are,
Clickety-clack,
Biting the sutures
And licking the glue.
Then, one by one
On Decoration Day,
The blossoms explode,
Tossing the ants
All over the yard.
Early that morning,
We find these flowers
Opened, pink and white,
And in the wet grass,
Hundreds of ants
With the staggers, all
Watching the sky.

On Modern Poetry

2008-04-22T07:35:00.004-05:00

From Slate.com, this Robert Pinsky FAQ about unrhymed poetry, difficult poetry, free verse, Emily Dickinson, and more. I recommend it, partially for the Wallace Stevens appearance, but especially for the final question -- perhaps not coincidentally number nine:

9. Well, I like poetry that is amusing, that maybe makes me chuckle a little. I'd rather read something reassuring and light than something complicated or gloomy. Is that bad? Does that mean I am a jerk?

Yes.

That's brilliant.

One Long Sentence

2008-04-17T09:48:00.002-05:00

I'm reading CK Williams' collection Repair this morning. Here's one:

Droplets

Even when the rain falls relatively hard,
only one leaf at a time of the little tree
you planted on the balcony last year,
then another leaf at its time, and one more,
is set trembling by the constant droplets,

but the rain, the clouds flocked over the city,
you at the piano inside, your hesitant music
mingling with the din of the downpour,
the gush of rivulets loosed from the eaves,
the iron railings and flowing gutters,

all of it fuses in me with such intensity
that I can't help wondering why my longing
to live forever has so abated that it hardly
comes to me anymore, and never as it did,
as regret for what I might not live to live,

but rather as a layering of instants like this,
transient as the mist drawn from the rooftops,
yet emphatic as any note of the nocturne
you practice, and, the storm faltering, fading
into its own radiant passing, you practice again.

I can't argue with that. Not with the opening image of the individual leaves set trembling by the rain. Not with the flocks of clouds. Not with the movement toward and into the reality of the third stanza and the speaker's realization that living forever would not, ultimately, be about living every moment possible, but about the lengthening of individual, otherwise-transient moments into eternity. And not with the spinning out of the single, extended sentence of the poem, its individual moments becoming, in sum, its own eternity.