My Most Important Albums of the Millennium (So Far)

My Most Important Albums of the Millennium (So Far)

I posted a status update a while back soliciting input on the best album of the last ten years, and was delighted to be reminded of some great records, as well as excited to learn about some CD’s that I had not heard before.

After much consideration I am ready to submit my short list of the records of the last ten years that have been most important to me. This is a very subjective list. There are some records that I discovered too late for them to have had super-meaningful impact on me personally, so I left those off, knowing they might be objectively “better” than some of those I included. That’s the shakes.

Explanatory remarks below.

Note: some of these bands/artists may well deserve to have more than one record on this list, but I only included one-per.

“A Squad”

Wilco: Yankee Hotel Foxtrot
Radiohead: Kid A
Sigur Ros: Takk
Sufjan Stevens: Come on Feel the Illinois
David Byrne: Grown Backwards
The Books: The Lemon of Pink
Lift to Experience: The Texas Jerusalem Crossroads



“Junior Varsity”

Johnny Cash: The Man Comes Around
The Flaming Lips: Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots
Bjork: Medulla
Death Cab for Cutie: Transatlanticism
Beirut: Gulag Orkestar
Low: Drums and Guns
Arcade Fire: Funeral
Iron and Wine: Our Endless Numbered Days





The “A Squad” are the seven albums that had the strongest, lasting impact on me. Age twenty-seven to age thirty-five hipsters should not be surprised to see Radiohead and Wilco on this list. The Wilco CD is an absolute revelation. I wonder if the youngsters with great taste can feel the impact of this CD? It really brought widespread hipster credibility to a very interesting roots-driven indie music. A trend that paved the way for Devandra, Sufjan, and countless others. The record reinterprets the production innovations of Radiohead and blends it with Tweedy’s already brilliant brand of country-roots-rock. The album speaks for itself.

I could have chosen any of four Radiohead records, and they have the distinction of thriving in (at least) three wildly different styles since they first hit the radio waves with “Creep.” I give the nod to Kid A because it was their first album of the decade and their first since OK Computer. It is also their first album with synthesizers and such. This album (and OK Computer) opened the doors for a lot of stuff. I seem to remember them acknowledging Mogwai and Sigur Ros as bands that influenced them at the time, but in the tradition of the “favorite uncle,” it was precisely because of the fact that Radiohead said they were influenced by Sigur Ross that we even know who they are.

Sigur Ros is the best of the self-consciously “post rock” bands out there. Takk is likely their best album, though Me› su› í eyrum vi› spilum endalaust is also brilliant. If you have never listened to this band, the best introduction is the beautiful, perfect documentary about their tour of Iceland: Hvarf (which means “home” in Icelandic). They are too good.

Sufjan Stevens is truly unequivocal. He plays a roots-folk music with a heavy Steve Reich influence. He has apparently boundless creativity and energy. Illinois is as good a place to start as any, but really, you will need to have it all. I appreciate his Wes Andersonesque post-ironic enthusiasm.

The David Byrne album may surprise some people. For some reason this record did not get as much publicity as it should have. Byrne was the lead Talking Head back in the 1980’s and has busied himself with countless endeavors, such as starting a world music record label, publishing several books/picture books, and doing installment art. And occasionally he makes a brilliant CD. He is as witty a song writer as he ever was, which is saying something. When it is all done we will discuss Byrne in the same breath as Bob Dylan, Neil Young, Andy Warhol, and Lou Reed. This is his best album ever in my opinion, including the Talking Heads brilliant catalogue.

The Books make roughly aleatoric music. What is amazing to me about this band is not only the creativity of what they do: sampling hours of audio from home movies they bought at garage sales and thrift stores and splicing it together with home made sounds--slamming filing cabinets and such--to make a music that is the analogue to rhythms of speech and daily sounds, never using synthesizers or drum machines of any kind, and adding their own concert-quality banjo, guitar, cello, piano playing. That is all quite amazing...seriously. What really gets me though is how they do all this high-intellect stuff without the slightest hint of cynicism or irony. It is deeply, deeply human and affirmative. The sound bytes they build their music around are stirringly real and beautiful to hear. I cannot say enough about this band.

The last CD on the “A Squad” is the solitary release of Texas loud-rockers Lift to Experience. The record is a concept album built around a vision that the lead guy ostensibly believes that he had. In this vision, an angel of the Lord came down while our hero was working as a ranch hand and warned the young man that judgement was coming and that he needed to make a CD to warn the faithful. The message of warning: USA is the center of JerUSAlem; Texas is the new holy land and will be the only place that is saved from God’s wrath. I cannot scream this loudly enough: the record is great.


I will give less explanation for the “Junior Varsity” list.

Johnny Cash reminded us why we love him (even before the movie reminded us again). The opening song about the coming apocalypse is breathtaking. And his covers of Nine Inch Nails and Depeche Mode are phenomenal.

The Flaming Lips never have equalled the genius of The Soft Bulletin, but their shows remain special. Yoshimi is a memorable CD.

If you have never listened to Bjork’s Medulla, I recommend you give it a go. She recorded Medulla almost entirely around vocals. There is a bit of electronic rhythm (which may be digitally manipulated vocals), but no real instruments. The CD was disappointing at first, but over the years, I keep coming back to it. It may be her best CD.

Death Cab peaked with Transatlanticism in my opinion.

When I first heard Beirut, I wilted.

I have discovered Low late. Drums and Guns is a great CD. Dragonfly is my favorite. Best first-song-of-the-record of the decade.

Don’t let the hyperbolic hype turn you off to Funeral by Arcade Fire. It is great.

Who can listen to Our Endless Numbered Days by Iron and Wine and not love it? I ask you.




Some of the biggest musical disappointments of the decade:

Spiritualized failed to build on the genius of their 1990’s output. In interviews Jason says that he doesn’t want to get stuck in a rut where is is always redoing Ladies and Gentlemen, We Are Floating in Space. That sounds respectable. The problem? The new stuff is a rut of another sort. In my opinion, he is avoiding doing a rinse-and-repeat on his best work from the old records by recycling his weakest work of the 90’s. There are some good CD’s (Amazing Grace is better than a lot of stuff). He simply never made anything that blew my mind.

Lift To Experience dissolves into oblivion. They made the one good CD and then the crazy came. Too bad.

Bob Dylan had a couple really really good albums at the end of the 1990’s but never really made a perfect record in the new millennium, though he remains (almost unbelievably) relevant and listenable.

Rolling Stones make it hard to appreciate their body of work by showing their actual bodies...which are old and arhythmic. On the other hand, Michael Jackson died, therefore making it possible to go back and fall in love with his great songs again.

I am starting a Podcast

The podcast will feature music from my past and present. I encourage you to go check it out.

I have posted a song I recorded this morning called "Are You Bored By Life My Neighbor?"

I have also posted an EP I recorded in 1996 with my friend Jason Hensley.

The Perfect Unequivocal Act V. 1 "Traversing the WTC" by Phillipe Petit

Several years ago, my wife and I were half-ironically taking some kind of personality-assessment test. One of the questions was something to the effect of “Who would you rather spend time with a. a kind-hearted person, b. a visionary.” I answered without pause “a visionary.” There is something incredible to me about a person that can manage to do something unequivocal, to live a life that is only loosely comparable to other lives. With such a wealth of human experience that is already out there, so many songs and book already written, so much science already settled, so many acts of daring already experienced, it is easy to add all this up and say, as Kohelet did, “There is nothing new under the sun.” But that is because we are not visionaries. We do not live lives that are unequivocal; we can only admire those who do. In 1974, Philippe Petit became one such man.

Of course, the incredible deeds of Petit are recently brought to my attention by the Oscar-winning documentary “Man on Wire.” And I could certainly be writing this blog about that film as a perfect documentary. Director James Marsh did a fantastic job of telling the story, but I suspect that Marsh himself would be the first to tell you that, even though his story-telling is perfect, the power of his film is entirely wrapped up in the person of Philippe Petit and his perfect unequivocal act.

In 1974, 25-year-old Petit and a rag-tag group of accomplices managed to break into the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center and fix a 450 pound cable from peak to peak. Then Petit walked out onto the 140 foot long cable and traversed the distance eight times, performing for a crowd 1,368 feet below him. He bowed; he lied down on the cable and talked with a sea-gull; he taunted police officers on the roof of the towers. Then forty-five minutes later he stepped back off the wire and was promptly arrested. Charges against Petit were eventually dropped, but several members of his crew were punished, including at least one member who was permanently exiled from the United States.

It took Petit and his friends six years to plan. The obstacles were many and formidable. How would they get their hundreds and hundreds of pounds of equipment to the roof? How would they cope with the wind and mist? How would they get by the guards? How would they get the cable across the immense distance? (By the way they decided to use a bow and arrow for this last bit).

My first thoughts upon hearing about this are probably the same things you are thinking right now. Why did he do it? Who would help a man do something so clearly dangerous and illegal?

Petit himself is irritated by the question “why,” and sees it as stupidly American. In one interview he said simply, “When I see oranges I juggle them. When I see towers I walk on a wire.” I think that part of what made this adventure worthwhile for him was the caper aspect of it: the illegal scheme. As one of his associates remarks, Petit liked to do things that are illegal but not evil, not malicious. It was like a bank-robbery without victims. They called the plan “Le Coup.” It was a decisive and somewhat subversive.

One of my favorite scenes from the film is when you see one of the police officers describing what his experience. This man stood at one end of the wire, trying to get Petit to step back onto the building. He speaks as a representative of conventional authority, one who enforces rules, and he certainly tried to do this with Petit. But even as he describes Petit, you see the awe in his eyes and his voice. He is clearly moved by what he saw. He is forced (to some extent anyway) to take account of his previously comfortable way of looking at things. What does a law man do about this kind of crime with no victims? A crime so beautiful and daring? This is the subversiveness of Petit’s act: not political, supporting some “cause” or another, but fundamental. He stood for forty-five minutes over a chasm that might as well have been Styx, and those who saw it were changed.

So who were these people that helped him? It was a strange crew, including a few long time French friends of Petit (some of whom helped him in his earlier schemes, for example when he walked a wire between the Notre Dame towers), one Australian, his French girlfriend, two pot-smoking American hippies, and one upper middle class, suit-wearing businessman who worked in the WTC. Petit had the charisma and singularity of vision to inspire such diverse people to devote themselves to his vision completely. Young mena dn women of talent, often with much to lose, risking it for this crazy Frenchman’s suicidal dream.

Part of his persuasiveness was his undeniable talent as a tightrope walker. One associate, Albert, says that he was convinced to join the firs time he saw Petit walk a wire. When he stepped out on a wire, “his face became an ageless mask of concentration.” Albert admits that he has never seen anything like it since. “His face became like a sphinx.”

Petit admits that as he stepped onto the wire that he thought he was probably stepping out to probably the end of his life. “Death was very close.” His best friend and number-one accomplice remembers his anxiety as he watched from the opposite tower as Petit first walked onto the wire. He could see the nervous concentration on Petit’s face. Petit slowly edged out into the middle of the void, testing carefully each step. Then Petit’s expression changed. He smiled. His friend weeps even now, retelling the relief he felt.

There is a photograph of the event from the ground. You can see Petit on the wire and in the background is a plane either taking off or landing at JFK. It seems in the photo that Petit is closer to the plane than he is to the people on the ground. The distance is so great, that even photographs from that height make me a little dizzy.

Petit’s act lacks anything remotely approaching wisdom. It is so stupid really. But what can we roughly compare this to? It approaches has the daring of Magellan or Neil Armstrong. Could those men have been in any more danger than Petit? Could they have had doubts greater than he, any more certainty that their crazy explorations would not end in their own death? It approaches the grandeur and scale of Galileo dropping two stones with different masses from Pisa, or Marie Curie formulating the theory of radioactivity. But those acts had a lasting measurable value. They made a contribution that other visionaries and less-than-visionaries could build on. Petit did not do that. Perhaps his feet is closer to that of Tenzing and Hillary, or Amelia Earheart. But even this is a bad comparison, since their feats were not illegal. But were those visionaries any more sane?

No comparison is fair. This is exactly what makes it unequivocal. I wonder if Kohelet had stood on the top of one of those towers on August 7, 1974 between 7:15 and 8:00 a.m., would he be able to say, “There is nothing new under the sun”? It would be an unimaginative man indeed who could.

“It seems obvious to me that life should be lived on the edge of life, to exercise rebellion, to refuse to repeat yourself, to live on a highwire.” Phillipe Petit

The Perfect Albums V. 2 "The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan" by Bob Dylan

A review of a Dylan record that is not new is basically pointless at this point, for two reasons. First, the music industry is vastly populated with Dylan fans, so he gets a lot of public praise. I mean a lot! Dylan fans has access to an incredibly large Shakespeare-esque body of secondary research on the work and life of Bob Dylan written by smarter people than you or me. So why add more?

Second, people who are not Dylan fans may not have read much of this secondary literature, but they also are very likely disinclined to do so. Recommending a Dylan record to the uninitiated is like recommending “Citizen Kane” to a casual movie fan. Every erudite and self-important critic in the country will recommend Bob Dylan from a sense of requirement, and if there is ever a list published of great American Musicians/albums, you are basically duty-bound to include Bob Dylan near the top of the list, even if you don’t really like him. File Dylan under “With some things, you don’t judge them, they judge you.”

And yet, I am going to do this anyway. The reason? Not only is Dylan in general worth every bit of the hype in my opinion, but also this record is so good you should buy it an play it until you wear out the record / break you CD player / grow ill from malnutrition.

And as much as this may be both obligatory and unnecessary, it is my blog and this is what I want to do.

***

Bob Dyaln’s eponymous debut album was released in March 1962. The record was mostly covers, including, in fact, only two original compositions. Although the record was released on a major label (Columbia) it was basically ignored by critics and barely sold 5,000 copies in the first year. The label was on the brink of dropping Dylan’s contract, and if it was not for the intervention of Johnny Cash, they might have done just that.

Roughly a month after the release of the first record, Dylan went to the studio with his producer John Hammond. At this point they probably did not know that both of their careers were on the line. They started slow, and it was not until July they they finally recorded something worth keeping, Dylan’s signature “Blowin’ in the Wind.” Over the next ten or so months Dylan wrote and recorded thirty or more songs—an astonishing number of songs really, especially considering that until this point his catalogue of music was almost entirely traditionals and covers.

During this same period there was a trip to Minnesota, then England, then Italy. There was a girlfriend that lost interest and drifted away. There was the strain of abysmal record sales. There was a new contract with a new publishing company as well as a new manager and producer. There were many many concerts. And just before the album was set to release, Dylan was booked to play on the largest stage in America: The Ed Sullivan Show. Producers of the show learned that he intended to play “Talkin’ John Birch Society Blues.” They were concerned that the song was libelous and asked that he play something else. He resisted the censorship by declining to play at all. As a result, his label pressured him to take the song off of the upcoming album, so he went back to the studio and recorded three new songs to replace the one he removed.

A few months later in May of 1963, the first of many perfect albums* by Bob Dylan was released: “The Freewheelin Bob Dylan.”

(*Note: Bob Dylan may well be the winner of the “Most Perfect Albums in a Lifetime” award.)

***

You do not have to look very far to find seemingly hyperbolic praise for this simple little record. For example, not that I especially respect them, mind you, “Rolling Stone” Magazine (among many others) listed it as one of the top 100 albums of all time. And how about this one: the Library of Congress chose it as one of only 50 albums ever recorded to add to a recorded-music-time-capsule-thingy that supposedly was to represent the sum of American culture. The greatest praise for the album though is the dictionary-length collection of quotes you could find of legendary musicians talking about the impact of this record on their own personal souls and careers. Jimi Hendrix, the Beatles, Donovan, Van Morrison, Joan Baez, etc etc. Also, the songs on this record have been covered (I estimate—but do not exaggerate) 6,000 times by major recording artists and notable indies.

So what makes this album so good?

At the time of the release this record was like a Whole New Thing. Folk music was so far outside the mainstream at the time, so the idea of a fella just strumming a guitar and singing was sort of novel and interesting. Plus the harmonica thing. We take for granted the acoustic-guitar-plus-harmonica folk cliché now, but this was actually somewhat of an innovation at the time.

But what you read over and over if you begin to look into this at all is that people were captivated by the lyrics. To give you a “for instance”: in one of the final recording sessions, they brought in Tom Wilson, an African America producer who had worked mostly with Jazz musicians. He was all, "I didn't even particularly like folk music. I'd been recording Sun Ra and Coltrane...I thought folk music was for the dumb guys. [Dylan] played like the dumb guys, but then these words came out. I was flabbergasted."

You see folk music at the time was essentially anachronistic, sentimentally tied to the Great Depression and a life that just no longer existed. It was quaint and fundamentally silly. But Rock and Roll was even worse. The Beatles are geniuses and can give Dylan a run for his money in terms of total perfect albums ever recorded. But look at their music in 1963: “Love Me Do”? I ask you this: WTF? And it doesn’t really get better in Motown. Little Richard? The Big Bopper? Roy Orbison? What about Elvis? This is all fine music… maybe even great in its way. But no one on the radio had anything to say; or at least they were not saying it in their songwriting.

Few songwriters truly stand up to close scrutiny as poets. Even when they are terrific and write top-notch lyrics, if you take away the music… well there is no music. You see, good poet’s are essentially musical. But they must create the music with their words alone. Musicians on the other hand make music with music. The words may be clever and captivating, but they are also basically the thing that you can hang the melody and rhythm of the song on. Real poets (again this is not a judgment against songwriters) create melody and rhythm with the language itself. Paul Simon is in my opinion an example of a phenomenal song writer, whose lyrics just absolutely make the music work, but whose lyrics simply do not work without the music.

In my arrogant opinion, Bob Dylan is a great poet, and that is never as true for him as it is on this album. Before long, Dylan learns to be more evasive in his writing. He resists clear interpretation more and more, especially through his breathtaking troika of perfect rock albums (“Bringing It All Back Home,” “Highway 61 Revisited,” and “Blonde on Blonde”). This is a reasonable response to the violent attempts of various cultural groups to “own” Dylan or to misapprehend his work. In “Freewheelin” Dylan’s voice and vision are very clear and reverberate with an unmistakable earnestness and integrity. Plus he is clever as all get-out.

***

Decontextualized Quotes:

“I’m looking for a woman / Needs a worried man”

“’I will let you be in my dreams if I can be in your dreams’ / I said that.”

“As easy ass it was to tell black from white / It was all that easy to tell wrong from right. / And our choices were few and the thought never hit / That the one road we traveled would ever split.”

“I was feelin’ kinda lonesome and blue, / I needed somebody to talk to. / So I called up the operator of time / Just to hear a voice of some kind. / ‘When you hear the beep / It will be three o’clock.’ / She said that for over an hour / And I hung up.”

“You wanna be like me / Pull out your six-shooter / And rob every bank you see / Tell the judge I said it was alright”

“I’ve been looking all over for a gal like you / Can’t find nobody / So you’ll have to do”

“Everybody sees themselves walking around with no one else”

“I ain’t sayin’ you treated me unkind / You could have done better but I don’t mind / You just sort of wasted my precious time / But don’t think twice it’s alright”

“We longed for nothin’ and were quite satisfied”

***

Songs:

“Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright”

For my money, this may be the best Dylan song of them all. It is simply heart breaking. As a song writer myself, I find that writing a good song about love is nearly impossible. It is so hard to not come off as emo and sentimental. Yet love is so important, and so is heart break. We need good songs about these topics that give us the linguistic and emotional tools to sort out our love and heart-break in a sophisticated manner.

Basically what we get in this song is this very conflicted guy who is leaving a woman. He can tell its over, but he also really wants to find a reason to stay. And he is trying to be a grown up about how everything turned out, but he hurts, you can just tell. The self-deception is thick and incomplete. It is like the stuff you say to yourself to try to convince yourself.

And the English teacher in me is keen to notice the light v. dark opposition and the time motif.

Incidentally, Dylan gives another gorgeous love-themed song with “Girl of the North Country” which is an adaptation from the traditional “Scarborough Fair,” and which I once had to pull over on the side of the freeway because my insides had spilled all out, and I could not drive with my guts all deliquescing around the floor of my car, metaphorically speaking.

***

“A Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall”

This is a great song that has perhaps become somewhat banal through excessive repetition (the same is true of “Blowin’ in the Wind”). But I invite you to listen to this thing with new ears. Take this stanza:

“Oh, who did you meet, my blue-eyed son?

Who did you meet, my darling young one?

I met a young child beside a dead pony,

I met a white man who walked a black dog,

I met a young girl, she gave me a rainbow,

I met one man who was wounded with love,

I met another man who was wounded with hatred,

And it’s a hard, it’s a hard, it’s a hard, it’s a hard,

It’s a hard rain’s a-gonna fall.”

The next stanza the “blue-eyed boy” is asked what he will do now. “I’ll walk to the depths of the deepest black forest” where he will face the ugly stuff, the “pellets of poison filling the waters,” the hungry and forgotten souls etc. Then he will “tell it and think it and speak it and breathe it.”

What is this hard rain that is coming? Should we feel hopeful? Is it the crops-bringing rain of spring? Is it the flood-bringing rain of judgment? And if it is that, should we fear or beg for this judgment? Should look forward to the coming justice? Or will we also be left off the ark to drown?

***

“Master of War”

One of the very few polemics in all of Dylan’s work. The guitar work is repetitive and haunting that keeps a kind of angry tension throughout. The lyrics are about all the injustices and deceptions of the American war machine, basically. The lyrics are so scathing and directed at the persons responsible. My favorite part is the ending:

“Let me ask you one question

Is your money that good

Will it buy back you forgiveness

Do you think that it could

I think you will find

When your death takes its toll

All the money you made

Will never buy back your soul

“And I hope that you die

And your death’ll come soon

I will follow your casket

In the pale afternoon

And I’ll watch while your lowered

Down to your deathbed

And I’ll stand o’er your grave

‘Till I’m sure that you’re dead”

***

“Oxford Town”

This was one of Bob Dylan’s self-described “finger pointing” songs. Basically that means it was topical, inspired by real events going on at the time. This was a major genre in Dylan’s early work, but something he did less and less of as time when on. This particular song was inspired by James Meredith, the first black student at U of Mississippi. September 1962, Kennedy ordered the U.S. Marshals to go down to Oxford and forcibly desegregate the college. Meredith is a hero really for braving the angry and violent crowds that accompanied him around the campus for some weeks. The racial tension sparked riots, where many were injured and two were killed.

Dylan resented the way the “hippies” eventually co-opted his work, but one value that endured all his Madonna-like style and personality makeovers was his outrage about racial injustice.

Also of note: the song “Blowin’ in the Wind” was adopted by the Civil Rights Movement and was probably the most well known of any early B.D. songs.

***

Final thoughts:

When I came back to this album some months ago, the thing that struck me most was the quality of Dylan’s guitar work. Also the vocals are really, really great.

“Corina, Corina” is a traditional song, and he plays it beautifully on this record.

The Perfect Poems: V. 1: "In the Waiting Room"

Elizabeth Bishop's "In the Waiting Room"

My first two blogs were very long, and I do not want to try anyone’s patience, so I will try to keep this one a brief as I can. I have included the full text of Elizabeth Bishop’s perfect poem “In the Waiting Room.”

Strange to say, but I am not really a poetry kind of guy. In fact, until the first year I was in graduate school, I used to say “Any poet worth his/her salt would be writing fiction by now.” Happily, I have come to really appreciate brilliant poems though.

When I teach poetry in my classes, we spend several days discussing poems that are for one reason or another emblematic of a certain period or form, or else we study poems that have excellent examples of different literary devices. This sort of thing is compulsory to be sure—I am, after all, supposed to give them the tools to make sense of poems. However, I always save some room at the end of our poetry unit for a handful of poems that (at least for me) peal back the edges and give me a passing glance of what is on the other side. Wallace Stevens “Sunday Morning” always makes the list, as does this poem by Elizabeth Bishop.


For me, great poems are always concrete, at least initially. I am not much for lyric abstractions. I don’t want unicorns or butterflies. Bishop’s poem puts you in a dentist’s waiting room with a young girl who is accompanying her “Aunt Consuelo.” You can feel the discomfort of the child as she sits and tries to read. The mind of this girl is distinctly child-like (note phrases like “full of grown-up people,” “I was too shy to stop,” and “wound round and round with wire / like the necks of light bulbs”), but at the same time very intelligent (“spilling with rivulets of fire”) even condescending (calling her aunt a “foolish, timid woman”). To pass the time, this girl awkwardly reads the National Geographic, horrified by the "large sagging breasts" of the native women photographed there.

Then in the second stanza, she hears her aunt cry out in pain from the next room. This sends her mind spinning because for some reason she strangely recognizes the voice that calls out as her own. Not in a metaphorical way either. He has this kind of transcendent moment, where she realizes in a flash that “Without thinking at all / I was my foolish aunt, / I—we—were falling, falling.”

In the third stanza, we find the girl has this strange sort of anxiety attack where she feels a startling emotion that is equal parts empathy and alienation. She struggles to individuate her own identity from everyone else around her by reciting, chant-like, her own biographic details. He is connected to everything at once, but also finds everything distinctly foreign. The poem turns deeply philosophical, and I choose no to paraphrase her questions or argument, except to say that she keenly articulates how strange it is (how “unlikely”) to be human in a sort of David-Lynch-Presents-The Lion-King's-"Circle-of-Life" kind of way.

"Why should you be one, too?
I scarcely dared to look
to see what it was I was.
I gave a sidelong glance"

For me this is the real power of the poem: how strange it is to be human. How generous of Elizabeth Bishop to share her "sidelong glance."

Enjoy:




In the Waiting Room

In Worcester, Massachusetts,
I went with Aunt Consuelo
to keep her dentist's appointment
and sat and waited for her
in the dentist's waiting room.
It was winter. It got dark
early. The waiting room
was full of grown-up people,
arctics and overcoats,
lamps and magazines.
My aunt was inside
what seemed like a long time
and while I waited and read
the National Geographic
(I could read) and carefully
studied the photographs:
the inside of a volcano,
black, and full of ashes;
then it was spilling over
in rivulets of fire.
Osa and Martin Johnson
dressed in riding breeches,
laced boots, and pith helmets.
A dead man slung on a pole
"Long Pig," the caption said.
Babies with pointed heads
wound round and round with string;
black, naked women with necks
wound round and round with wire
like the necks of light bulbs.
Their breasts were horrifying.
I read it right straight through.
I was too shy to stop.
And then I looked at the cover:
the yellow margins, the date.

Suddenly, from inside,
came an oh! of pain
--Aunt Consuelo's voice--
not very loud or long.
I wasn't at all surprised;
even then I knew she was
a foolish, timid woman.
I might have been embarrassed,
but wasn't. What took me
completely by surprise
was that it was me:
my voice, in my mouth.
Without thinking at all
I was my foolish aunt,
I--we--were falling, falling,
our eyes glued to the cover
of the National Geographic,
February, 1918.

I said to myself: three days
and you'll be seven years old.
I was saying it to stop
the sensation of falling off
the round, turning world
into cold, blue-black space.
But I felt: you are an I,
you are an Elizabeth,
you are one of them.
Why should you be one, too?
I scarcely dared to look
to see what it was I was.
I gave a sidelong glance
--I couldn't look any higher--
at shadowy gray knees,
trousers and skirts and boots
and different pairs of hands
lying under the lamps.
I knew that nothing stranger
had ever happened, that nothing
stranger could ever happen.
Why should I be my aunt,
or me, or anyone?What similarities
boots, hands, the family voice
I felt in my throat, or even
the National Geographic
and those awful hanging breasts
held us all together
or made us all just one?
How I didn't know any
word for it how "unlikely". . .
How had I come to be here,
like them, and overhear
a cry of pain that could have
got loud and worse but hadn't?

The waiting room was bright
and too hot. It was sliding
beneath a big black wave,
another, and another.
Then I was back in it.
The War was on. Outside,
in Worcester, Massachusetts,
were night and slush and cold,
and it was still the fifth
of February, 1918.

Copyright by Elizabeth Bishop

The Perfect Novel V. 1 Infinite Jest

David Foster Wallace

Infinite Jest

Tonight my good friend Jason Hensley sent me a text message: "david f wallace killed himself."

I have spent the last few hours reading new stories, listening to/reading/watching interviews, and thumbing through his books. It is hard to explain how deeply this news hurt me. At the moment, I am less sad than I would be if a sibling of mine died, but decidedly sadder than I would be if my dog died. I am much sadder now than I was April 5, 1994, when I was crossing the Mexican border with some friends, andI heard on the radio that Curt Cobain died. And that was the only other time that I was legitimately sad when I heard a celebrity died (unless you count Mother Teresa).

Some years back a guy on sports radio was mourning John Ridder, and I thought , John Ritter is getting you that worked up, really?! I have always been a little disgusted by people's false-intimacy with celebrities. When Kobe said in his press conference that he slept with that girl in Colorado, I was disappointed a bit, but not much. I did not know him or think He was a good guy; why, oh, why did he do it?! I don't know what kind of guy he is. To be disappointed by celebrities is to believe naively that knowing their public persona is the same as know them. Imagine the youtube videos of the teens pleading for people to "Just leave Britany alone," as if they truly believe that they know that she actually wants to be left alone. This sort of false intimacy with celebrities, as I see it, is evidence that a person is intellectually squishy. To borrow an expression from my old friend Little Big Jay, this sort of foolishness clearly indicates that someone does not "knows what's what."

And even though, despite myself, I can't help but feel as though I know something of DFW from his work, this is not the main reason that I am sad. Wallace was 46 years old. I am 32. Wallace was the greatest writer of my generation. I will never get to read the follow up novel to what I consider the best novel written in my lifetime: Infinite Jest.

Should you decide to look it up at your local book store, the first thing that will strike you about the novel, Infinite Jest, is that is seriously huge. I do not mean big the way that books are sometimes big; I mean big like "Wow, books should never be that big." There are 1079 pages, but truly that does not communicate the size. Looking at a random line of print on page 513, I count seventeen words. By comparison a random line from page 177 of Kurt Vonnegut's Breakfast of Champions contains only nine words. That page from Vonnegut has thirty-one lines; Infinite J p.513 has forty-three lines. Thomas Pynchon's epic Gravities Rainbow is only 760 pages. A light read by comparison. As far as I can tell, the only books I own that are longer than Infinite Jest are my dictionary, Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, and the Bible.

Furthermore, the actual text of the book ends on page 983. Three-hundred-eighty-eight endnotes spread over almost one hundred remaining pages. These are typed out in a font that is decidedly smaller than the main text, which is (as I have explained) typed out in a font decidedly smaller than your average novel. You will be reading along, and run into a little superscript indicating an endnote. Then you will have to flip to the back of the book and look up the endnote. Sometimes it is short, like a sentence or two. Sometimes the endnote is huge, longer than the entire chapter where you found it. For example, endnote 110 is an entire chapter in its own right, stretching from page 1004 to 1022. This endnote includes pages of dialogue, full transcripts of mail correspondence sent between Mrs. Incandenza and her son who is a punter in the NFL, and (you are going to love this) endnotes (i.e. when you read the endnote it contains endnotes, so that you must flip to the end of the endnote to read additional stuff).

One of those people who read this book is my friend and colleague Doug Eisner, who confessed to me that he found the book so engrossing that at one point he was sitting on his chair reading and spilled a glass of red wine on the carpet in his condo and could not break himself away from the book to clean up the mess.

***

So what is the deal with Infinite Jest?

Setting:

The years in which the novel takes place are named after products because in the near future, after the United States joins with Mexico and Canada to form the Organization of North American Nations (ONAN for short), the new nation accrues an enormous dept and begins to "subsidize time" by selling the year to the highest bidder. Thus "Year of the Depends Adult Undergarment" and "Year of the Wopper." Most of the American north east and Canadian east has become a giant nuclear waste dump. The radiation drifts mostly into Canada, and they don't like it. In fact a group of wheelchair-riding-Quebecois-assassins/terrorists figure prominently in the plot of the book.

The actual action is split between The Enfield Tennis Academy where we mostly follow adolescent Hal Incandenza and his junior-tennis-star peers/classmates, and Ennet House—a half-way/twelve step sort of place that is just down the hill.

Plot:

Seriously, it is a really big book. Therefore I will not even try at this. But here are a few things. Hals' father is a multitalented genius who eventually killed himself be cooking his head in a microwave. Hal's father, amoung other things directed some films, including something called Infinite Jest. The movie stars a woman who now resides in Ennet House with a veil over her face. The film is so entertaining that anyone who watches it is immediately sent into a deep unrecoverable-from catatonic state. This video is wanted by the Wheelchair Assasins as a weapon, and ONAN tries to get it as well.

The tricky thing:

The book starts with Hal in the admission office of a NCAA college where he is at a conference related to a tennis scholarship. They suspect that he is guilty of plagiarism, and they want him to explain himself before they will grant admission. When he tries to explain himself he cannot control his speech, and you hear the reaction of the other in the room, and they are all, "Gross, what is he doing with his hand!?" and "Good God in heaven, I have never in my life…" and so forth. His mind is sane and lucid, but when he tries to speak it is all crazy-sounding/looking.

Well it turns out that this scene takes place some months after the very end of the book. Then the real beginning comes and we get pages of building and building toward something. But about two-hundred pages from the end, you begin to suspect that the thing you are building toward will not be actually revealed because in order for that thing to come the pace of the book would need to increase by about 100,000 times. So you get to the end, and you never get to see it. See it? See what? I don't know. I didn't get to see it because the book ends.

Then you go back read the beginning again in that "Did I miss something" kind of way, and you notice a couple things that are raise-the-hair-on-the-back-of-your-neck interesting. Like Hal mentions going into the toxic waste of the north east and digging for his father's head. But if his father's head was melted in a microwave, how could he…

And you realize that whatever you didn't get at the end of the book must have been really, really good.

As my good friend Sterling put it: you get the exposition, and you get the fall-out at the end, but you don't get good stuff, like the plot… you know like the climax.

***

So why is this a good book again?

Because in Ennet House the addicts working through the twelve steps are engaging the existential questions in an absolutely accurate American idiom. And as I read about it I find myself to moved indescribably by the following and more: the impossible paradox of our trite and profound dilemma; the perilously feeble linguistic/semantic and epistemological/intellectual tools we have to confront our own deep and unknowable hearts; how stupid everyone sounds when they try to explain this… everyone but DFW that is; the recondite mysteries locked in the stupidest and most banal of clichés.

Because I am terrified by the beauty of this woman in the veil. Madame Psychosis. She has an intoxicating/toxic beauty akin to Helen of Troy. And I am always terrified of the truly beautiful, especially when it happens to be a woman. Physical esthetic beauty is so dreadfully powerful, but mostly in a destructive way. I never realized that before I read this book.

Because I always knew that sports are important, but I always assumed that this was not compatible with intellect and literary stuff. But Wallace approaches sport (tennis in particular) in a way that make it important on the grand scale, even though it isn't really. Hemingway made sports matter for a generation. But his reasons seem a bit silly now. Wallace gave us new reasons.

Because no writer has captured the self-consciousness of our age as Wallace has done. I.e. the moment we say "I should not feel guilty," it makes us feel guilty that we are not able to make ourselves stop feeling guilty.

Because it matters whether Hal decides to put his socks and tennis shoes on left foot, left foot, right foot, right foot, or left foot, right foot, left foot, right foot.

Because it defamiliarizes the familiar, by presenting something unfamiliar but making it normal, and by presenting familiar and making it seem so strange.

Because postmodern authors such as Pynchon, Barth, early Delillo and others may have put their finger on something inescapable, and their irony is a deeply sane reaction to the world we inhabit, but Wallace pinpointed the problem with this sort of irony and found a way out of their irony that is also sane… probably more sane. Not pre-postmodern, not retreating back, not denying the truth in Foucault, Baudrillard, Pynchon, Derrida and the rest. Not backing away and hiding in naivety, stubbornly pointing to something that is clearly already and always gone. Not that. Something else. He found a way to work through the irony.

***

Irony? What the heck are you on about Floerke?

Yeah I need to explain this the best I can because for me this is the heart of what makes this book so very very good. The irony I speak of is the one we turn on ourselves as a defense against our age. We begin to shrug at everything, the bigger the shrug and the more expansive it is, the cooler you are. Try it. We must discipline ourselves to have a posture that shrugs at our words as we speak them. We must even shrug at our posture that shrugs.

Think of Thom Yorke's posture and facial expression. Think of Vonnegut "And so it goes…" Think of Curt Cobain on the cover of Rolling Stone with a white tee shirt that he has written on with a magic marker: "Corporate Magazines Still Suck."

But this shtick is reasonable. We do it as a defense against the monster of our age.

A few specimens of the sorts of thing that makes us shrug:

A life insurance commercial that concludes with a quote from Henry David Thoreau—the guy who held everything with a loose hand, selling at one point all his possessions to live day-by-day in a cabin by Walden Pond.

A Nike commercial with Yo Yo Ma playing Bach so beautifully that I can barely stand it—a thirty second commercial with sentimental shots of athletes turning double plays and such that makes my chest hurt.

***

You know what? I can't explain it here. I will try another day.

Suffice it thus: Wallace does not shrug, though he knows how to write it when someone does (shrug I mean). Instead he stands up with Wayne Coyne and says "yeah!" It is tentative. This is not a Hallmark "yeah," and it is easy to miss if you don't look just right, but it is there.

More importantly, he makes "yeah" believable. His affirmation is no lie, no cheap or phony consolation. Not the sort of thing for a coward to rely on.

Hemingway tells us that a writer is a bullfighter, that his line should be straight, that he can't fake it. His feet and vulnerable side must really be in harms way. Confront it head on and don't lie about it, don't write a line that would leave a bad taste later. And boy o boy are Hem's good books great. And that line he writes is straight too, mostly.

Problem is that Hemingway's straight line is great fiction, but hard to believe in. At least it is hard to believe now. It was God's truth for a generation of serious readers, but now Hem's straight line ain't straight. Not faking it… seems fake.

So Pynchon taught us to bend the line. Accept no straight line. And he bent it most beautifully. He bent it so crooked you could never straighten it back out. So Wallace writes a bendy line too.

But David Foster Wallace's bendy line is somehow straight.

The footnotes are a part of it. Wallace looks in the human mind and sees many voices inside. I don't mean like multiple intelligences or demon-possession. I mean we have the voice of psychologists, and teachers, and parents, and friends, and other voices we can't even place all rolling around in there. We cannot just say what is on our mind and expect that to be what is real to us. In fact, the human mind and heart and soul are so… distance from us. You will hear people describe how our perception of reality is so "mediated" and that is a good point. There is something in between us and the real—like TV or mobile phones, or computers, and so forth. But Wallace recognizes that this is not only a result of technology, but an essential part of the human experience. The mediated reality is in our head already and shapes how we see the world, but even more importantly, it shapes how we see ourselves in the world.

The trite Americanism: "follow your heart." What is that? My heart says ten conflicting things. And my mind can add seven more to the mix. What now?

So Wallace bends the line with endnotes. He fractures the narrative, and we feel that fractured consciousness in there.

But you know what else Wallace does? And I ask that you try to appreciate how hard this is to imagine: out of the trite, worn out, banalities—commercial manipulations, industry jargons, pseudo-psychological-day-time-talk-showisms, high-culture esoteria, MTV rock-star drivel, and everything else—he creates an idiom that is true and real. Genuine and stunning. Heartfelt and important. Bendy and straight. Right.

I will never read the follow up to Infinte Jest, but he left behind some great reading material:

Novels

* The Broom of the System (1987)

* Infinite Jest (1996)

Short story collections

* Girl with Curious Hair (1989)

* Brief Interviews with Hideous Men (1999)

* Oblivion: Stories (2004)

Nonfiction

* A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again (1997)

* Up, Simba! (2000)

* Everything and More (2003)

* Consider the Lobster (2005)

If you want more:

http://www.charlierose.com/shows/1997/03/27/2/an-interview-with-david-foster-wallace an interview with Charlie Rose

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GwS5pEfcQNk him reading his own work

http://www.salon.com/09/features/wallace2.html an interview with Salon

http://www.davidfosterwallace.com/news.shtml his unofficial website

The Perfect Albums V. One

Miles Davis

"Bitch's Brew"

I was reading a bit of my Masters Project the other day—brushing up on my "Taming of the Shrew" for Honors Intro to Literature—and I read a certain combination of words, and some wires in my brain crossed and a shot of music surged into my body, accompanied by a feeling that I had forgotten all about, but that was immediately familiar again. The music that I heard was Miles Davis's "Bitches Brew." The feeling that I felt… that is harder to explain.

Miles had formed a reputation for himself as one of the most progressive musicians in jazz well before the 1969 recording of "Bitch's Brew." His "Kind of Blue" (which may be his best album) is notable among other things because of the quixotic composition process that Davis brought to the record. It is well documented that Davis "wrote" the songs on "Blue" in only the loosest sense. He would take a hint of a melody or a mild suggestion of a key or mode, a couple chords, a few notes, a tempo, a few words about the feeling he wanted… that was it. Then they rolled the tape and the band played. The results are stunningly beautiful, even for the uninitiated into the world of jazz. Any fan of music will attest to the amazing pathos of that record.

But even for its innovation, "Kind of Blue" is still very much jazz in a conventional sense. Davis's trademark on the trumpet was a cool, luscious style and rich tonality. This is never more keenly felt than on "Blue." Simply stated, when one listens to "Kind of Blue" you can tell immediately that your ears are in good hands. Davis is gonna take care of you.

All this to say: "Bitch's Brew" was no "Kid of Blue."

Legend has it that Davis was inspired by Jimi Hendrix, and the wildness of the rock music scene he saw at Woodstock a few months prior to recording. Here we see Davis breaking all the rules, in an almost adolescent way. Imagine an electric bass, and upright bass, three drummers, two or more electric pianos, and a bass clarinet all playing at the same time. Now imagine that Miles called these people together into the studio, not only without ever practicing any of the songs, but often with no clear idea of the song at all. With the prominent rhythm section wailing, rattling, collapsing, resurrecting, exploding, breaking, diving, halting, whimpering, spanking, barking, pouting, and slipping its way along, Davis plays simple yet aggressive melodies over the top, occasionally accompanied by a sax.

What are the results? Frankly, it is a complete mess. If "Blue" makes you feel like it is under control, "Brew" makes you feel like nothing, absolutely nothing is in control. In fact listening to this album is more than anything else like reading the worst parts of Thomas Pynchon's long novels. For those of you who have never been in the guts of one of Pynchon's novels, I will not try to approximate it, but let me say this: his novels are 1000 pages or so and feel like 5,000. Tedious, arrogant, chaotic, difficult, esoteric, and frustrating.

So why on earth is this album under my "Perfect Albums" list. Well, first of all, I put it here for the same reason that I would probably put something from Pynchon's difficult fiction on my "Perfect Novels" list. The work that is demanded of you to listen to the CD is rewarded by rare but breathtaking payoffs. The accumulated effort that is required to grind through the esoteria prepares your mind perfectly—just perfectly—for the moments of brilliance. The dis-ease builds up and builds up and the frustration grows until, unexpectedly, there is a moment of sublime culmination. In fact, there is no other way to get this exact kind of experience with art. There is art like "Kind of Blue" that feels right from the start. But there is also art like "Bitch's Brew" that feels wrong almost all the time.

I liken it to Chuck Yeager's descriptionsof breaking the sound barrier for the first time. Every time anyone got close to the speed of sound, the jet craft would start to shake madly and the pilot would become afraid it might fall apart all together. So the pilots would decelerate and the engineers would go back to work. But after trying and failing several times, Chuck finally just said "to hell with it," and when his jet started to shake itself to pieces, he punched the throttle all the more. Maybe it would come apart, maybe not, but he was determined to find out what it felt like to go faster than sound. What he discovered is that once he hit the speed of sound, the sonic boom would crack through the air and the jet would flatten out, smooth and still like the morning. This is how it feels to work through "Bitch's Brew" and to find those moments of culmination. Is it fun to when you are shaking around, fearing for your life? No. But without that work, you could never get where you want to go.

The first time this album worked for me, I was about twenty-five or so, and I lied on the floor of my family room, placed the speakers of my stereo on the floor beside me pointing at my ears from each side. I was determined to make it all the way through (I believe that I read somewhere that J. Spaceman listed this as one of his favorite albums), so I cranked the volume and let it fly.

The physical discomfort that I felt was measurable, but I stuck with it. And when the clouds broke and I found myself on the mountaintop with the light of God shining on me… well it was really something. Something in fact that I could never have gotten without doing the work of enduring through it. That work, you see, made me ready for the eventual revelation.

It turns out I have had many good experiences with the CD, although none of them has equaled the first time. Interesting note that I cannot fully explain: each time I achieve the white light with this CD it has been at a different point of the recording. Hm.

So when I was reading my MA project the other day, the words I read triggered a neural reaction, and I found myself in the basement of the California State University, Fullerton Library, in the computer lab. My project was in the final deadly throes. The words were thrashing about the pages and pages of notes I was writing from, snapping at the screen, tearing my sentences apart. I was facing a cruel and ruthless deadline, and I simply had no choice but to get the words written and the project done. I would use violence if I had to. I wore headphones and blared music through my portable pre-mp3 CD player. I tried various CD's, but the only two that worked (seriously I couldn't write single stinking word without one of these CD's blaring in my ears) was Medeski Martin and Wood's "Tonic," and Miles Davis's "Bitches Brew." The music was maddening. It nearly drove me crazy, but it was the right kind of crazy. A madness that got me through my project.

And that was the feeling I felt in my office the other day. And I was reminded of what a great and perfect album this is.