Yes, lots of books are going out, but that doesn't mean nothing new is coming in, particularly when a birthday comes along. Mine was last week (42), and not surprisingly, I received several books, plus gift certificates to book shops.
The haul, fiction or literature-related (*=acquired w/gift certificate):
The Letters of Samuel Beckett, 1941-1956
Satantango by László Krasznahorkai
Tyrant Memory* by Horacio Castellanos Moya
Open City* by Teju Cole
Non-fiction (*=ditto):
The American Revolution: Pages from a Negro Worker's Notebook by James Boggs
The Modern World-System III: The Second Era of Great Expansion of the Capitalist World-Economy, 1730s-1840s and
The Modern World-System IV: Centrist Liberalism Triumphant, 1789-1914 both by Immanuel Wallerstein
Direct Action: An Ethnography by David Graeber
Works of Love* by Søren Kierkegaard
Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison* by Michel Foucault
And I notice these books were all written by men. How easily my apparent default re-asserts itself! To be fair, the bookshops are not awash with books by woman authors that I'm interested in. Almost picked up Marilynne Robinson's new book of essays, When I Was a Child I Read Books, and may still. Ditto Ellen Meiksins Wood's Liberty and Property, her follow-up to Citizens to Lords (which readers may recall I wrote about here), as she continues her social history of Western political thought.
I'm naturally very excited to finally have the second volume of Beckett's Letters in my grubby hands. It's enormous! The first volume, my first time reading an author's letters, was marvelous (see my post on it here; links to several other posts drawing from the volume can be found therein). Satantango will be my first Krasznahorkai novel, so I can finally see what some of the fuss has been about. Unless I foolishly acquire one of his others before reading it, like I might once have done. (I'm not going to do that.) The Moya was kind of a wildcard. I was looking for Senselessness, which had been much blogged about a while back; failing that I just wanted an interesting New Directions or Dalkey book. The shop I was in didn't have too many (fewer than they used to have, I think; but god do they have tons of NYRB Classics: and yet, somehow, none of the ones I'm interested in). Then surprisingly I noticed Tyrant Memory, so we'll see. Open City, I admit, has my attention because of the Sebald comparisons; a brief sample was inviting enough. And I like Cole's twitter feed, so there's that.
I read The American Revolution this past week (it's very short). It's good, though not nearly the great book that Revolutions and Evolutions is. I hope to have something more to say about both books in the coming weeks. I'm pleased to have the third and fourth volumes of Wallerstein's awesome Modern World-System study to hand. Though I'm eager to dive into them, I'm going to have to hold off, because I want to revisit the first two, make some useful notes, both towards a blog post or three and towards re-acquainting myself with his arguments. Suffice it to say that I find Wallerstein's theses persuasive (and the Marxist criticisms of them as unpersuasive; basically they amount to "you're not being Marxist enough", which oddly isn't terribly helpful). Direct Action is but one of a few David Graeber books on my list to read, after loving both Debt and, previously, Possibilities. This one is huge, too, and I still have yet to write anything about Debt (which I will, I hope, probably in conjunction with whatever I have to say about Wallerstein's work). So it may be a while before I dive into this one.
Works of Love crowded its way into my awareness by way of Simon Critchley's bibliographical essay at Ready Steady Book, in support of his new book Faith for the Faithless. His book looks interesting, too, but it'll have to wait. It's probably a little silly to have acquired Works of Love just now, given that I've yet to finish reading Either/Or, but I knew it had a decent chance at being available at the relevant bookshops, and so it was. And that brings us to Discipline & Punish. I'm wary of Foucault, for a variety of meta reasons, but I've actually yet to read him. I picked this one, on a whim, because I'm increasingly disgusted by our prison industrial system and wanted to see what he has to say about the origins of prison as such (I also expect to be reading more deeply into Angela Davis' writings about prison; not surprisingly, none of her books were on hand in the shops). (Note: the Foucault and the Kierkegaard books are both available in new editions from their publishers—Vintage and Harper Perennial, respectively—both of which publishers have revamped their lines of literature and philosophy, at least in the US. I only bring this up because the Harper Perennial covers are hideous; the Vintage ones are much better.) (Second note: I still have gift certificate cash to burn.) And so it goes.
Showing posts with label Meta. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Meta. Show all posts
Sunday, April 01, 2012
Tuesday, January 31, 2012
TBR
And again the blog lies fallow, with several draft posts hanging fire. I wanted to post something about what this year will hold, so here goes.
Three weeks ago, I finished reading James C. Scott's The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia, a book I'd been reading slowly over the course of the last year. It's not very long (336 pp.), but my general lack of familiarity with Southeast Asia itself (as opposed to the criminal American wars in Southeast Asia, about which I know all too much), let alone anthropology about upland Southeast Asia, slowed my reading down considerably. In truth, I was more interested in Scott's general points than in retaining specifics about the hill peoples who are his ostensible subjects, as fascinating as many of those specifics are. So I read slowly.
But this post is not about Scott's book. I finished reading it and looked at my book shelves for what to read next, expecting it to be non-fiction of some kind, since I'd been in that mode for months. Then I realized I felt a bit overwhelmed, over-stuffed with facts and ideas. It's true that the books I expect to get to were not immediately to hand, but all of sudden I couldn't bear to pile even more facts atop the others. And, really, I need time to process what I have read, and to write; a slowdown was in order. So, while in the coming year I do expect to continue following the non-fiction reading threads I've been following (i.e., feminism, history of capitalism, etc), my more immediate plans and expectations involve fiction. Fiction, which has lately so often seemed an imposition, an impertinence, not to mention a waste of my time. But then it does depend on what you're reading, doesn't it? Even so, it's not always the book's fault.
Helen DeWitt's Lightning Rods got the year off to a fine start, helping to break the fiction impasse. It's not the great book that The Last Samurai is, but it's a spot-on satire of business speak and human resources nonsense, capturing the cliché-ridden, vacant language of sales and business perfectly; it's very entertaining. Then I re-started Mathias Énard's Zone, a novel I'd read about 135 pages into last Spring, I think, before stumbling, taking a pause that became a break that dragged on and on and finally became too long for any kind of thread to be picked back up upon re-entry. This reading went much better, the sheer velocity of the writing carrying me forward with relative ease. There are some great pages in that book; I still think of it alongside The Kindly Ones, not just because both were translated from the French by Charlotte Mandell, but I think because of the focus on the unpleasant details of the labors of war. Then I noticed that several people in my Twitter feed were talking a lot about the Hungarian writer, László Krasznahorkai, a name that was vaguely familiar (probably from old Waggish posts), but which had not really registered with me till now. Comparisons to Bernhard, of course, got my attention, though I'm skeptical as to their accuracy or usefulness. (Comparisons to Bernhard rarely do anyone any favors.) All of a sudden, I felt excited about fiction again. Krasznahorkai's novels The Melancholy of Resistance and War & War were duly added to my wish list.
But I can't rush out and buy them just yet, because a big purging is upon us, and I must do some reading in order to make the purging at all effective. In the summer, we are planning to move, still in Baltimore, but to a somewhat smaller location. This means shedding some possessions, including of course many excess books. The problem is not just the fact that I've kept tons of books I've read that I no longer have any interest in seeing, let alone re-reading. (As much as he's become an easy target, with good reason, I'm not sorry to have read several Ian McEwan novels; after all, I needed to start somewhere. But do I really need them taking up shelf space?) The bigger problem is the large number of books I acquired fully intending to read, someday, which I've not yet gotten to. Worse, upon closer examination, I now expect that many of them will never be read. Some of these acquistions are a product of my days of despair, a period in which I was increasingly interested, so I thought, in more and more authors, more and more kinds of fiction. Why I wasn't using the library more often is beyond me. Just stupid, I guess. (It literally did not occur to me to use the library until a couple of years ago, which is just wrong for so many reasons.) In any case, I amassed piles and piles of books. For example, as noted here previously, I participated in one of those big Dalkey sales, where you could buy 100 books for $500. I split this with a friend, but still, this is a lot of books to get in one fell swoop (now, of course, they have smaller such sales available). It strikes me that it's time for another post revisiting the fruits of that purchase. Re-reading the last update, from 2009, I'm reminded that I didn't always look on my so-called "days of despair" with actual despair, that "I believed in the virtue of diverse reading, an expansive view of what constituted literature". But it was this expansiveness that caused me problems, that ultimately became untenable and more than a little silly. For along with the McEwan-ish books (your Booker winners and shortlisted, your NBA and NBCC winners, and so on) was the mass of "post-modern" books, before I ever had the slightest idea what modernism might be, not to mention various so-called "genre" books, a concept I once considered much less critically than I do now.
I'm not going to write about those conflicts again here, but the point is I have a lot of books and many of them need to go. I started to pull books from the shelves, read a few pages, and make harsh decisions. It turns out I'm not ever going to read Kathy Acker. I'm just not. That's two books. I read Walter Abish's How German Is It years ago, and I mostly liked it, I think (if memory serves, the second half is not as engrossing as the first), but did I like it enough to have also acquired two other Abish novels? Do I even remember which one I bought first? Flipping through How German Is It, I quickly realized I didn't want to read it again; reading the first chapter of Alphabetical Africa revealed to me that I no longer have the patience for those kinds of experiments; Eclipse Fever didn't hold my interest at all. Three books, and boom: off they go. Still in the letter A: look at all those Martin Amis books! Amis, of course, straddles the Booker/post-modern line, and though I've long since soured on him, and find him rather odious and boring anymore, he was once one of my favorite writers. I'd always thought I'd go back and re-read the better ones, to see if they held up. To that end, Money, London Fields, and The Information remain, but all the rest go, including the incredibly overrated memoir, Experience (again, it's not terrible, but this is when it started to go south for this reader, even before his ridiculous Stalin memoir and post-9/11 Islam-phobic blather), and probably The War Against Cliche. The idea is to re-read those three, and then discard them, so don't be surprised if I'm reading Martin Amis in the coming months. And Stephen Dixon. And Alasdair Gray. And A.L. Kennedy.
Before I get tempted to bore you further with a list of all the books I plan to re-read, keep, or discard (topic of another post, no doubt), I should probably come to a close here. The overall, brilliant strategy looks like this: read books I have before acquiring new ones, discard books that no longer need to be in the collection (be harsh), make use of the library. Repeat.
Three weeks ago, I finished reading James C. Scott's The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia, a book I'd been reading slowly over the course of the last year. It's not very long (336 pp.), but my general lack of familiarity with Southeast Asia itself (as opposed to the criminal American wars in Southeast Asia, about which I know all too much), let alone anthropology about upland Southeast Asia, slowed my reading down considerably. In truth, I was more interested in Scott's general points than in retaining specifics about the hill peoples who are his ostensible subjects, as fascinating as many of those specifics are. So I read slowly.
But this post is not about Scott's book. I finished reading it and looked at my book shelves for what to read next, expecting it to be non-fiction of some kind, since I'd been in that mode for months. Then I realized I felt a bit overwhelmed, over-stuffed with facts and ideas. It's true that the books I expect to get to were not immediately to hand, but all of sudden I couldn't bear to pile even more facts atop the others. And, really, I need time to process what I have read, and to write; a slowdown was in order. So, while in the coming year I do expect to continue following the non-fiction reading threads I've been following (i.e., feminism, history of capitalism, etc), my more immediate plans and expectations involve fiction. Fiction, which has lately so often seemed an imposition, an impertinence, not to mention a waste of my time. But then it does depend on what you're reading, doesn't it? Even so, it's not always the book's fault.
Helen DeWitt's Lightning Rods got the year off to a fine start, helping to break the fiction impasse. It's not the great book that The Last Samurai is, but it's a spot-on satire of business speak and human resources nonsense, capturing the cliché-ridden, vacant language of sales and business perfectly; it's very entertaining. Then I re-started Mathias Énard's Zone, a novel I'd read about 135 pages into last Spring, I think, before stumbling, taking a pause that became a break that dragged on and on and finally became too long for any kind of thread to be picked back up upon re-entry. This reading went much better, the sheer velocity of the writing carrying me forward with relative ease. There are some great pages in that book; I still think of it alongside The Kindly Ones, not just because both were translated from the French by Charlotte Mandell, but I think because of the focus on the unpleasant details of the labors of war. Then I noticed that several people in my Twitter feed were talking a lot about the Hungarian writer, László Krasznahorkai, a name that was vaguely familiar (probably from old Waggish posts), but which had not really registered with me till now. Comparisons to Bernhard, of course, got my attention, though I'm skeptical as to their accuracy or usefulness. (Comparisons to Bernhard rarely do anyone any favors.) All of a sudden, I felt excited about fiction again. Krasznahorkai's novels The Melancholy of Resistance and War & War were duly added to my wish list.
But I can't rush out and buy them just yet, because a big purging is upon us, and I must do some reading in order to make the purging at all effective. In the summer, we are planning to move, still in Baltimore, but to a somewhat smaller location. This means shedding some possessions, including of course many excess books. The problem is not just the fact that I've kept tons of books I've read that I no longer have any interest in seeing, let alone re-reading. (As much as he's become an easy target, with good reason, I'm not sorry to have read several Ian McEwan novels; after all, I needed to start somewhere. But do I really need them taking up shelf space?) The bigger problem is the large number of books I acquired fully intending to read, someday, which I've not yet gotten to. Worse, upon closer examination, I now expect that many of them will never be read. Some of these acquistions are a product of my days of despair, a period in which I was increasingly interested, so I thought, in more and more authors, more and more kinds of fiction. Why I wasn't using the library more often is beyond me. Just stupid, I guess. (It literally did not occur to me to use the library until a couple of years ago, which is just wrong for so many reasons.) In any case, I amassed piles and piles of books. For example, as noted here previously, I participated in one of those big Dalkey sales, where you could buy 100 books for $500. I split this with a friend, but still, this is a lot of books to get in one fell swoop (now, of course, they have smaller such sales available). It strikes me that it's time for another post revisiting the fruits of that purchase. Re-reading the last update, from 2009, I'm reminded that I didn't always look on my so-called "days of despair" with actual despair, that "I believed in the virtue of diverse reading, an expansive view of what constituted literature". But it was this expansiveness that caused me problems, that ultimately became untenable and more than a little silly. For along with the McEwan-ish books (your Booker winners and shortlisted, your NBA and NBCC winners, and so on) was the mass of "post-modern" books, before I ever had the slightest idea what modernism might be, not to mention various so-called "genre" books, a concept I once considered much less critically than I do now.
I'm not going to write about those conflicts again here, but the point is I have a lot of books and many of them need to go. I started to pull books from the shelves, read a few pages, and make harsh decisions. It turns out I'm not ever going to read Kathy Acker. I'm just not. That's two books. I read Walter Abish's How German Is It years ago, and I mostly liked it, I think (if memory serves, the second half is not as engrossing as the first), but did I like it enough to have also acquired two other Abish novels? Do I even remember which one I bought first? Flipping through How German Is It, I quickly realized I didn't want to read it again; reading the first chapter of Alphabetical Africa revealed to me that I no longer have the patience for those kinds of experiments; Eclipse Fever didn't hold my interest at all. Three books, and boom: off they go. Still in the letter A: look at all those Martin Amis books! Amis, of course, straddles the Booker/post-modern line, and though I've long since soured on him, and find him rather odious and boring anymore, he was once one of my favorite writers. I'd always thought I'd go back and re-read the better ones, to see if they held up. To that end, Money, London Fields, and The Information remain, but all the rest go, including the incredibly overrated memoir, Experience (again, it's not terrible, but this is when it started to go south for this reader, even before his ridiculous Stalin memoir and post-9/11 Islam-phobic blather), and probably The War Against Cliche. The idea is to re-read those three, and then discard them, so don't be surprised if I'm reading Martin Amis in the coming months. And Stephen Dixon. And Alasdair Gray. And A.L. Kennedy.
Before I get tempted to bore you further with a list of all the books I plan to re-read, keep, or discard (topic of another post, no doubt), I should probably come to a close here. The overall, brilliant strategy looks like this: read books I have before acquiring new ones, discard books that no longer need to be in the collection (be harsh), make use of the library. Repeat.
Saturday, October 01, 2011
"Hey, didn't you used to have a blog?"
So BDR asked me recently. Indeed, it has been very slow here these last few months. But fear not! I've kept busy reading and thinking (though, alas, not actually writing) about a variety of bloggable topics, and I hope to soon be able to return some focus here. I'd spent a huge amount of time on my long essay on Gabriel Josipovici's What Ever Happened to Modernism?, an essay that was in many ways a culmination, however imperfect, of several years of thinking and reading. In a sense, that piece serves as an ending to one period of this blog and a beginning of, or opening onto, the next. My desire to complete it prevented me from working on much of anything else, but I also had trouble mustering the energy and concentration necessary to attend to even it for weeks on end. Hence light blogging. In truth, I've also been distracted by other things; blogging hasn't been a priority. Those distractions continued after the post went up, plus I felt some relief at having finally posted it, to the point that I lacked the will to post anything else for a while. Hence no blogging. But, without making any promises of frequency, I expect that to be changing soon.
However, at risk of some awkward bleggalgazing, as BDR calls it, though not of the "why am I doing this" variety, the truth is also that there's been something unsatisfactory about blogging for me. In part this is because I have all too often wanted it to be too many different things at once and have, one by one, simply failed to make it be almost all of those things. And I've noticed that in the periods when posting is slow here, I've nevertheless had countless items I've wanted to share, whether it be in the form of links or passages from books, but which I have essentially been unable to do anything with. I opened a Twitter account (God, that must've been two years ago) in part to keep up with some of the bloggers I liked who had also done so, not wanting to miss their interesting links, etc. For a time, I was using it to pass on links myself, though I was aware that not everyone who reads this blog had migrated to Twitter. And, it turns out, Twitter is an even bigger time-suck than blogs are (ignoring for now the shittiness of the interface). It quickly became overwhelming, much like my huge volume of RSS feeds, except that with Twitter you have to stay on all the time in order to make any sense of it. So I stopped using it, or checking it, except rarely out of bored curiosity.
So much for links. As for passages I wanted to share, long ago I started posting some here in entries marked "Noted", but I was never really satisfied with that either. They seemed to sit oddly in the mix of whatever else I might have up on the front page, and, of course, like any other post, they quickly got lost in the archives. Worse, many passages I held off on sharing because I thought they warranted a real post, with my own long-winded thoughts. Sometimes these posts actually appeared but usually not.
I still haven't figured out what, if anything, to do about sharing links. But I'm seriously considering following the examples set by two top friends of the blog, Stephen Mitchelmore of This Space and Ethan of 6th or 7th, both of whom have set up separate entities for the purpose of sharing quoted passages. Stephen's is a tumblr page, Of Resonance (the title continuing the Blanchot phrase of his blog's title), which he uses for literary passages, as well as short quotations and YouTube clips, among other things, leaving This Space devoted to his essays and reviews; while Ethan's is simply another blog, intended as a commonplace site. I'm more likely to do what Ethan has done, if not as comprehensively, if only because I can't access tumblr from work, and it would be annoying to be unable to access my own site. So don't be surprised if something like that appears in the coming weeks. In the meantime, maybe actual blogging will have resumed here?
However, at risk of some awkward bleggalgazing, as BDR calls it, though not of the "why am I doing this" variety, the truth is also that there's been something unsatisfactory about blogging for me. In part this is because I have all too often wanted it to be too many different things at once and have, one by one, simply failed to make it be almost all of those things. And I've noticed that in the periods when posting is slow here, I've nevertheless had countless items I've wanted to share, whether it be in the form of links or passages from books, but which I have essentially been unable to do anything with. I opened a Twitter account (God, that must've been two years ago) in part to keep up with some of the bloggers I liked who had also done so, not wanting to miss their interesting links, etc. For a time, I was using it to pass on links myself, though I was aware that not everyone who reads this blog had migrated to Twitter. And, it turns out, Twitter is an even bigger time-suck than blogs are (ignoring for now the shittiness of the interface). It quickly became overwhelming, much like my huge volume of RSS feeds, except that with Twitter you have to stay on all the time in order to make any sense of it. So I stopped using it, or checking it, except rarely out of bored curiosity.
So much for links. As for passages I wanted to share, long ago I started posting some here in entries marked "Noted", but I was never really satisfied with that either. They seemed to sit oddly in the mix of whatever else I might have up on the front page, and, of course, like any other post, they quickly got lost in the archives. Worse, many passages I held off on sharing because I thought they warranted a real post, with my own long-winded thoughts. Sometimes these posts actually appeared but usually not.
I still haven't figured out what, if anything, to do about sharing links. But I'm seriously considering following the examples set by two top friends of the blog, Stephen Mitchelmore of This Space and Ethan of 6th or 7th, both of whom have set up separate entities for the purpose of sharing quoted passages. Stephen's is a tumblr page, Of Resonance (the title continuing the Blanchot phrase of his blog's title), which he uses for literary passages, as well as short quotations and YouTube clips, among other things, leaving This Space devoted to his essays and reviews; while Ethan's is simply another blog, intended as a commonplace site. I'm more likely to do what Ethan has done, if not as comprehensively, if only because I can't access tumblr from work, and it would be annoying to be unable to access my own site. So don't be surprised if something like that appears in the coming weeks. In the meantime, maybe actual blogging will have resumed here?
Saturday, November 20, 2010
“Yeah, well, you know, that's just, like, your opinion, man”
Damn, we're reaching the end of 2010 already and already people are generating music of the year lists and I can never seem to get anything done when I want it done and . . .
I used to write about music a lot here at the blog—with literature and politics, it was the third part of my intended three-prong approach to blogging. But it fell by the wayside to such an extent that I didn't even include any music posts in my clip show post from six months ago. Which is sort of too bad, because some of those music posts weren't too terrible. The most recent ones were those in response (1, 2) to last year's critical brouhaha about Sonic Youth (which is fitting, I guess, considering the more recent noise in response to Steve Albini's remarks about Sonic Youth's activities as major-label pimps, about which I may or may not have something of substance to blog, but for now suffice it to say that for all my considerable love of Sonic Youth, I tend to agree with Albini). There was one about mid-period Dylan and politics. There was the spate of posts (1, 2, 3, 4) dealing with "Indie Rock and whiteness", largely in response to the debate surrounding an article by critic Sasha Frere-Jones (notes: the third of those deals with literature as much as it does music; the fourth is really only an excerpt from related posts from Carl Wilson, but you should read those too). There was a post about my discovery that I unexpectedly liked a Stephen Stills album. There was another one jumping off of a discussion of free jazz into thoughts about literature and anxiety and artistic choices. Perhaps you're interested in my list of favorite jazz albums from the 1990s? Or my thoughts on the incomparable Bill Callahan/Smog? Or on the Beatles? Or my narrative upon discovering a mysterious, unplayed cd in my collection? My defense of the difficult (or even "boring") against the cult of the fun? My post about Richard & Linda Thompson? Or my post about post-punk, the history of my taste in music, and Simon Reynolds's Rip It Up and Start Again (which is of course not unrelated to my posts [1, 2] on rockism and authenticity, or my passing remarks about poptimism, or the one about interrogating bias in taste in music)? And, wow, I tend to forget I did these: there was that series of iPod rundowns, where I wrote about the songs that came up randomly on a given day; those ended up being less fun to do than I'd thought they would be (though they were fairly popular, relatively speaking), which is why it died three years ago. Or... um....
Anyway, I'm unlikely to post about music much going forward, so this serves as an ending of sorts. In any event, the pre-colon title to this post, if I could have figured out how to make post titles in Blogger exceed 90 characters, was going to be something pithy like: "A scientific survey of all the music of the decade comprising the years 2000-2009, culminating in an altogether objective list of the best albums from that self-same decade." Or not. But anyway, this post is, finally, about the music of the last decade, as experienced by yours truly, so the title would at least have had that right. Plus, you know, there's a list. It's not too late to post a list, is it? No? But it's still good that I got it in before most of the annual lists for the best music of the current year, right? Yes? Ok. But first a personal narrative:
In early 1999, I bought the March issue of CMJ's shitty little monthly music magazine. I bought this copy because it had Kurt Cobain on the cover. It was then five years since Cobain's suicide and so the copy read "The Day the Music Died" or something stupid like that (as if I'm not sure I quite remember what it said; in fact, that is exactly what it said). As I'm writing this, I am just now realizing that I must have been attracted to the issue, not just because I had been a fan of Nirvana, but because in a sense for me music had sort of died around then, or had started to. At any rate, I had long been at an impasse. This is fitting given what I'm about to relate, because the purchase of this magazine turned out to be a watershed moment for me and my music fandom and consumption. Naturally, the cover article itself was instantly forgettable, but as with all issues of CMJ Monthly, a cd came with the magazine featuring songs by artists reviewed inside. And, again, as with all such cds, most of the music was either terrible or forgettable or both. But the first song on this particular cd was "The Plan" by a band I'd barely heard of called Built to Spill.
Let me set the stage. By this time I already owned what any sane person would call a lot of music. I had passed 1000 cds the previous Fall (oh, how we remember the great moments in our lives!). I had worked at a record shop and had a fairly diverse taste in music, though by no means as diverse as I might have thought.
And Nirvana had, indeed, at one point changed my musical life. I was a classic rock guy through high school and most of college, spiced with a little REM, some Replacements, even Sonic Youth (though Goo), when I heard Nirvana for the first time: "Smells Like Teen Spirit" remains the only song by a theretofore unknown-by-me artist that I have stayed in the car to listen to the end the first time I ever heard it. It was, in a word, awesome. Then it turned out there was an underground bubbling up (I remember clearly hearing PJ Harvey's "Sheela-na-gig" for the first time the following year; but then it was the year-in-review show on WHFS: I was always late). But for me, it was the bubbling up that mattered. I didn't follow the threads down. Essentially, I learned about music through Spin magazine, and if it was really new, probably not till their own year-in-review issues. If it didn't get mentioned there, I likely didn't know about it. I was curious and open but not actively adventurous or confident. But still, I heard a lot of great independent music that way: Fugazi, Sleater-Kinney, Yo la Tengo. By the end of the decade, I was at a loss when it came to rock music and also felt I was losing the thread. I bought a lot of older jazz, folk, and classic country, and kept up with the indie rock bands I knew. I went to Bob Mould and Sonic Youth shows. I was obsessed with Kristin Hersh and Throwing Muses. I bought Yo La Tengo and REM albums the day they came out. I was into Bjork and Radiohead, and I liked Massive Attack and Tricky and Portishead and Cornershop. I cherry-picked the occasional rap album: Outkast's Aquemini, Missy Elliott's first album, cds by Bone Thugs-n-Harmony and Gang Starr.
There was obviously plenty of music for me to get into and plenty of stuff I enjoyed, but I was dissatisfied, without my own compass, and wanting something interesting, as well as something that rocked. (This is how I found myself buying, ::shudder::, a Korn album; in retrospect, that earlier me would have been much better off with the Deftones, if only because they're not Korn.) So, in the wake of this issue of CMJ, I bought Built to Spill's album Keep It Like a Secret. And, friends, it hit me like a ton of bricks. I listened to that cd over and over again, pressing it on roommates and friends, rocking out, singing along, singing along to guitar solos like it was Zeppelin or something, which it sort of was. I quickly bought everything in their back catalog. I was hooked. I read about them online extensively, spending a lot of time at CD Now (anyone remember that site?) following that site's flawed but addictive links to bands who influenced them or they influenced or whatever. And this dropped me square in the middle of the rock underground that I'd barely known existed. I was like a little kid again, obsessively tracking down leads, uncovering new-to-me bands, reading reviews and histories. My obsession with all things Kristin Hersh meant that I'd been spending a ton of time on the Throwing Music message boards, where in late 1999 someone posted a link to Pitchfork's list of the decade's best music, much of which I'd had no inkling (this list has disappeared from their site, by the way, replaced by a more recent stab at the same decade; the first list was aggressively indie rock). Built to Spill led me pretty easily to Modest Mouse and other current bands, but eventually and more importantly somehow also to Slint and forward and back from there. Then the rock or post-rock I got into dovetailed with the folk and jazz I was into, and I was doomed. (Example: I'd started buying John Fahey reissues as a consequence of my preexisting interest in folk music; around the same time, following my new threads, I bought Gastr del Sol's Upgrade & Afterlife because I erroneously thought band-member David Grubbs had been in Slint. I saw with excitement that the last track on that album was a cover of Fahey's "Dry Bones in the Valley" and my worlds collided.) I went sort of apeshit-crazy. It's hard to describe the ways in which my favorite musics crossed and spoke to each other and opened up giant avenues of exploration and thrilled me. Over the next few years, I estimate I bought between 250 and 300 albums a year. Obviously, huge amounts were backfills from the music I'd missed from the 90s, when I should have been more awake, as well as various and sundry post-punk, jazz, and reissues of what the hell ever—but even so, enough were from the 2000s so that the decade is the only decade for which I will ever have listened to enough new music to form an actual opinion about it while it was happening.
But then things got even more complicated. Some of the above-linked posts go into this in more detail, but I realized that I'd been missing stuff that I would have liked, music that my prejudices (in particular my pronounced anti-pop prejudice) prevented me from even hearing. Following the poptimists' challenge, I gave chart pop and dance music a chance; I listened to more new rap, started to buy new metal for the first time since Metallica was worth listening to. I had only just begun sampling non-Western music. And it all quickly became untenable. Around the same time I found myself happily in a new relationship, and I started to realize that I couldn't get to know what I already had let alone keep up with new music to anything like the same degree. Which, combined with my shifting political outlook, led me to re-assess my perspective on hyper-consumption. Which, combined with having a new baby and no time, led me to virtually stop buying music altogether.
But I still have what I have and I still listen to it and I have this list, see, the list of my top 101 albums of the years 2000-2009, and I'm going to share it with you. Why 101? Because I'd done all the trimming I'd wanted to do to get to 100 and then noticed I'd inexplicably overlooked Pan*American's gorgeous 360 Business/360 Bypass and didn't feel like finding room for it, so I just added it. Since the list is long, and it seems to me that further notes would be lost and unread if placed after such a list, some brief notes precede it. The albums are listed alphabetically by artist. I was going to limit the number of albums per artist but decided fuck it, I don't want to have to decide which Animal Collective album to remove, since they're so different from each other. In general, an album had to be more than just one or two great songs to be included (hence, no LCD Soundsystem, despite "All My Friends" being one of my favorite songs of the decade and possibly ever) and I generally had to have had some period of obsession with it (though even some of those didn't make the cut; hello Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, though it probably would have made it if the list bulged out to 110). Given the arc of the above-sketched narrative, you'll see that the list is very heavily, well, white. There are a few rap albums, a couple metal albums, a lot of post-rock or sort of psych-rock or stuff that once would have been called prog (possibly because I'm old, but also because I work in an office in front of a computer all day and that kind of thing sounds great in that context, not to mention sounding great when drifting off on a commuter train when too tired to read, which I really should be doing but motherfucker I'm exhausted a lot and why the fuck won't she sleep more?), not a ton of "indie rock du jour"-type records (for which I generally feel too old, as previously mentioned on the blog, but the definition of which may be meaningless to most, so whatever), almost no quote-unquote pop, a paucity of black artists (for which I routinely have felt guilty, but music is a social thing and few of the people I've run with after college have listened to much of anything other than indie rock or classic rock, or maybe jazz, so there's some older black music, but you know what I'm saying, so it was all on me, and it took too long before I became confident exploring pop and rap and whatnot, and it's way too late to effectively redress this or balance the scales or anything like that, etc); and I really wish more of my favorite jazz artists had released great and not just good albums this decade, or that I had them, but there it is (I'm especially sorry to not be able to include a Joe McPhee album, because dude is fucking awesome and also really nice). Artists of the decade for this listener? Animal Collective; Smog/Bill Callahan; Jackie-O Motherfucker; the Mountain Goats; Deerhoof. Enough. I could go on and fill in and expand and so on because inevitably I feel I'm leaving something personally crucial out of that narrative, but enough blather, enough. The list (sorry for the tiny type, but Blogger is annoying):
Acid Mothers Temple & the Melting Paraiso U.F.O., Univers zen ou de zero a zero, 2002
The Angels of Light, Everything Is Good Here/Please Come Home, 2003
Animal Collective, Spirit They're Gone Spirit They've Vanished, 2000
Animal Collective, Here Comes the Indian, 2003
Animal Collective, Sung Tongs, 2004
Animal Collective, Feels, 2005
Asa-Chang & Junray, Jun Ray Song Chang, 2002
Sir Richard Bishop, Improvika, 2004
Paul Bley/Evan Parker/Barre Phillips, Sankt Gerold Variations, 2000
Boards of Canada, Geogaddi, 2002
Bonnie 'Prince' Billy, Sings Greatest Palace Music, 2004
Boredoms, Seadrum/House of Sun, 2004
Boris, Akuma no Uta, 2005
Bowerbirds, Hymns for a Dark Horse, 2007
Broadcast, The Future Crayon, 2006
Broken Social Scene, You Forgot It In People, 2002
Burial, Burial, 2006
Califone, Quicksand/Cradlesnakes, 2003
Neko Case, Fox Confessor Brings the Flood, 2006
Neko Case, Middle Cyclone, 2009
Chumbawumba, English Rebel Songs 1381-1984, 2003
Deerhoof, Reveille, 2002
Deerhoof, Apple O', 2003
Deerhoof, Friend Opportunity, 2007
Dizzee Rascal, Boy in Da Corner, 2003
Double Leopards, Halve Maen, 2003
Do Make Say Think, & Yet & Yet, 2002
Bob Dylan, "Love and Theft", 2001
Missy Elliott, Miss E…So Addictive, 2001
The Ex, Dizzy Spells, 2001
Explosions in the Sky, The Earth Is Not A Cold Dead Place, 2003
Christine Fellows, Paper Anniversary, 2005
The For Carnation, The For Carnation, 2000
Fugazi, The Argument, 2001
Gang Gang Dance, God's Money, 2005
Geto Boys, The Foundation, 2004
Ghost, Hypnotic Underworld, 2004
Ghostface Killah, Fishscale, 2006
Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Yanqui U.X.O., 2002
David Grubbs, The Spectrum Between, 2000
Merle Haggard, If I Could Only Fly, 2000
Herbert, Bodily Functions, 2001
High on Fire, Blessed Black Wings, 2004
Jackie-O Motherfucker, The Magick Fire Music, 2000
Jackie-O Motherfucker, Fig. 5, 2000
Jackie-O Motherfucker, Liberation, 2001
Philip Jeck, Stoke, 2002
Jesu, Conqueror, 2007
Junior Boys, So This Is Goodbye, 2006
Labradford, fixed::context, 2000
Miranda Lambert, Kerosene, 2005
Love is All, Nine Times That Same Song, 2006
Low, Things We Lost In The Fire, 2001
Matmos, The Rose Has Teeth in the Mouth of the Beast, 2006
The Microphones, It Was Hot, We Stayed in the Water, 2000
Mission of Burma, Obliterati, 2006
Modest Mouse, The Moon & Antarctica, 2000
Juana Molina, Son, 2006
The Mountain Goats, The Coroner's Gambit, 2001
The Mountain Goats, All Hail West Texas, 2002
The Mountain Goats, Tallahassee, 2002
The National, Boxer, 2007
The Necks, Drive By, 2003
The Necks, Chemist, 2006
Alva Noto +Ryuichi Sakamoto, Vrioon, 2002
Om, Conference of the Birds, 2006
Jim O'Rourke, Insignificance, 2001
Pan*American, 360 Business/360 Bypass, 2000
Panda Bear, Person Pitch, 2007
William Parker Quartet, O'Neal's Porch, 2001
William Parker Clarinet Trio, Bob's Pink Cadillac, 2002
Pelt, Pearls from the River, 2003
Pinetop Seven, Bringing Home the Last Great Strike, 2000
Robert Plant, Dreamland, 2002
Robert Plant & Alison Krauss, Raising Sand, 2007
Polmo Polpo, Like Hearts Swelling, 2004
Radiohead, Kid A, 2000
Radiohead, Amnesiac, 2001
Scarface, The Fix, 2002
Shalabi Effect, The Trial of St. Orange, 2002
Shalabi Effect, Pink Abyss, 2004
Shellac, 1000 Hurts, 2000
Six Organs of Admittance, School of the Flower, 2005
Smog, Dongs of Sevotion, 2000
Smog, Supper, 2003
Smog, A River Ain't Too Much to Love, 2005
Songs: Ohia, Ghost Tropic, 2000
Songs: Ohia, Didn't It Rain, 2002
Songs: Ohia, The Magnolia Electric Co., 2003
Sonic Youth, Murray Street, 2002
Sonic Youth, Sonic Nurse, 2004
Sunburned Hand of the Man, Fire Escape, 2007
Supersilent, 6, 2003
Mia Doi Todd, Manzanita, 2005
Scott Tuma, The River 1234, 2003
US Maple, Acre Thrills, 2001
Vibracathedral Orchestra, Tuning to the Rooster, 2005
Volcano the Bear, The Idea of Wood, 2003
Gillian Welch, Soul Journey, 2003
Robert Wyatt, Cuckooland, 2003
Yo La Tengo, And then nothing turned itself inside-out, 2000
I used to write about music a lot here at the blog—with literature and politics, it was the third part of my intended three-prong approach to blogging. But it fell by the wayside to such an extent that I didn't even include any music posts in my clip show post from six months ago. Which is sort of too bad, because some of those music posts weren't too terrible. The most recent ones were those in response (1, 2) to last year's critical brouhaha about Sonic Youth (which is fitting, I guess, considering the more recent noise in response to Steve Albini's remarks about Sonic Youth's activities as major-label pimps, about which I may or may not have something of substance to blog, but for now suffice it to say that for all my considerable love of Sonic Youth, I tend to agree with Albini). There was one about mid-period Dylan and politics. There was the spate of posts (1, 2, 3, 4) dealing with "Indie Rock and whiteness", largely in response to the debate surrounding an article by critic Sasha Frere-Jones (notes: the third of those deals with literature as much as it does music; the fourth is really only an excerpt from related posts from Carl Wilson, but you should read those too). There was a post about my discovery that I unexpectedly liked a Stephen Stills album. There was another one jumping off of a discussion of free jazz into thoughts about literature and anxiety and artistic choices. Perhaps you're interested in my list of favorite jazz albums from the 1990s? Or my thoughts on the incomparable Bill Callahan/Smog? Or on the Beatles? Or my narrative upon discovering a mysterious, unplayed cd in my collection? My defense of the difficult (or even "boring") against the cult of the fun? My post about Richard & Linda Thompson? Or my post about post-punk, the history of my taste in music, and Simon Reynolds's Rip It Up and Start Again (which is of course not unrelated to my posts [1, 2] on rockism and authenticity, or my passing remarks about poptimism, or the one about interrogating bias in taste in music)? And, wow, I tend to forget I did these: there was that series of iPod rundowns, where I wrote about the songs that came up randomly on a given day; those ended up being less fun to do than I'd thought they would be (though they were fairly popular, relatively speaking), which is why it died three years ago. Or... um....
Anyway, I'm unlikely to post about music much going forward, so this serves as an ending of sorts. In any event, the pre-colon title to this post, if I could have figured out how to make post titles in Blogger exceed 90 characters, was going to be something pithy like: "A scientific survey of all the music of the decade comprising the years 2000-2009, culminating in an altogether objective list of the best albums from that self-same decade." Or not. But anyway, this post is, finally, about the music of the last decade, as experienced by yours truly, so the title would at least have had that right. Plus, you know, there's a list. It's not too late to post a list, is it? No? But it's still good that I got it in before most of the annual lists for the best music of the current year, right? Yes? Ok. But first a personal narrative:
In early 1999, I bought the March issue of CMJ's shitty little monthly music magazine. I bought this copy because it had Kurt Cobain on the cover. It was then five years since Cobain's suicide and so the copy read "The Day the Music Died" or something stupid like that (as if I'm not sure I quite remember what it said; in fact, that is exactly what it said). As I'm writing this, I am just now realizing that I must have been attracted to the issue, not just because I had been a fan of Nirvana, but because in a sense for me music had sort of died around then, or had started to. At any rate, I had long been at an impasse. This is fitting given what I'm about to relate, because the purchase of this magazine turned out to be a watershed moment for me and my music fandom and consumption. Naturally, the cover article itself was instantly forgettable, but as with all issues of CMJ Monthly, a cd came with the magazine featuring songs by artists reviewed inside. And, again, as with all such cds, most of the music was either terrible or forgettable or both. But the first song on this particular cd was "The Plan" by a band I'd barely heard of called Built to Spill.
Let me set the stage. By this time I already owned what any sane person would call a lot of music. I had passed 1000 cds the previous Fall (oh, how we remember the great moments in our lives!). I had worked at a record shop and had a fairly diverse taste in music, though by no means as diverse as I might have thought.
And Nirvana had, indeed, at one point changed my musical life. I was a classic rock guy through high school and most of college, spiced with a little REM, some Replacements, even Sonic Youth (though Goo), when I heard Nirvana for the first time: "Smells Like Teen Spirit" remains the only song by a theretofore unknown-by-me artist that I have stayed in the car to listen to the end the first time I ever heard it. It was, in a word, awesome. Then it turned out there was an underground bubbling up (I remember clearly hearing PJ Harvey's "Sheela-na-gig" for the first time the following year; but then it was the year-in-review show on WHFS: I was always late). But for me, it was the bubbling up that mattered. I didn't follow the threads down. Essentially, I learned about music through Spin magazine, and if it was really new, probably not till their own year-in-review issues. If it didn't get mentioned there, I likely didn't know about it. I was curious and open but not actively adventurous or confident. But still, I heard a lot of great independent music that way: Fugazi, Sleater-Kinney, Yo la Tengo. By the end of the decade, I was at a loss when it came to rock music and also felt I was losing the thread. I bought a lot of older jazz, folk, and classic country, and kept up with the indie rock bands I knew. I went to Bob Mould and Sonic Youth shows. I was obsessed with Kristin Hersh and Throwing Muses. I bought Yo La Tengo and REM albums the day they came out. I was into Bjork and Radiohead, and I liked Massive Attack and Tricky and Portishead and Cornershop. I cherry-picked the occasional rap album: Outkast's Aquemini, Missy Elliott's first album, cds by Bone Thugs-n-Harmony and Gang Starr.
There was obviously plenty of music for me to get into and plenty of stuff I enjoyed, but I was dissatisfied, without my own compass, and wanting something interesting, as well as something that rocked. (This is how I found myself buying, ::shudder::, a Korn album; in retrospect, that earlier me would have been much better off with the Deftones, if only because they're not Korn.) So, in the wake of this issue of CMJ, I bought Built to Spill's album Keep It Like a Secret. And, friends, it hit me like a ton of bricks. I listened to that cd over and over again, pressing it on roommates and friends, rocking out, singing along, singing along to guitar solos like it was Zeppelin or something, which it sort of was. I quickly bought everything in their back catalog. I was hooked. I read about them online extensively, spending a lot of time at CD Now (anyone remember that site?) following that site's flawed but addictive links to bands who influenced them or they influenced or whatever. And this dropped me square in the middle of the rock underground that I'd barely known existed. I was like a little kid again, obsessively tracking down leads, uncovering new-to-me bands, reading reviews and histories. My obsession with all things Kristin Hersh meant that I'd been spending a ton of time on the Throwing Music message boards, where in late 1999 someone posted a link to Pitchfork's list of the decade's best music, much of which I'd had no inkling (this list has disappeared from their site, by the way, replaced by a more recent stab at the same decade; the first list was aggressively indie rock). Built to Spill led me pretty easily to Modest Mouse and other current bands, but eventually and more importantly somehow also to Slint and forward and back from there. Then the rock or post-rock I got into dovetailed with the folk and jazz I was into, and I was doomed. (Example: I'd started buying John Fahey reissues as a consequence of my preexisting interest in folk music; around the same time, following my new threads, I bought Gastr del Sol's Upgrade & Afterlife because I erroneously thought band-member David Grubbs had been in Slint. I saw with excitement that the last track on that album was a cover of Fahey's "Dry Bones in the Valley" and my worlds collided.) I went sort of apeshit-crazy. It's hard to describe the ways in which my favorite musics crossed and spoke to each other and opened up giant avenues of exploration and thrilled me. Over the next few years, I estimate I bought between 250 and 300 albums a year. Obviously, huge amounts were backfills from the music I'd missed from the 90s, when I should have been more awake, as well as various and sundry post-punk, jazz, and reissues of what the hell ever—but even so, enough were from the 2000s so that the decade is the only decade for which I will ever have listened to enough new music to form an actual opinion about it while it was happening.
But then things got even more complicated. Some of the above-linked posts go into this in more detail, but I realized that I'd been missing stuff that I would have liked, music that my prejudices (in particular my pronounced anti-pop prejudice) prevented me from even hearing. Following the poptimists' challenge, I gave chart pop and dance music a chance; I listened to more new rap, started to buy new metal for the first time since Metallica was worth listening to. I had only just begun sampling non-Western music. And it all quickly became untenable. Around the same time I found myself happily in a new relationship, and I started to realize that I couldn't get to know what I already had let alone keep up with new music to anything like the same degree. Which, combined with my shifting political outlook, led me to re-assess my perspective on hyper-consumption. Which, combined with having a new baby and no time, led me to virtually stop buying music altogether.
But I still have what I have and I still listen to it and I have this list, see, the list of my top 101 albums of the years 2000-2009, and I'm going to share it with you. Why 101? Because I'd done all the trimming I'd wanted to do to get to 100 and then noticed I'd inexplicably overlooked Pan*American's gorgeous 360 Business/360 Bypass and didn't feel like finding room for it, so I just added it. Since the list is long, and it seems to me that further notes would be lost and unread if placed after such a list, some brief notes precede it. The albums are listed alphabetically by artist. I was going to limit the number of albums per artist but decided fuck it, I don't want to have to decide which Animal Collective album to remove, since they're so different from each other. In general, an album had to be more than just one or two great songs to be included (hence, no LCD Soundsystem, despite "All My Friends" being one of my favorite songs of the decade and possibly ever) and I generally had to have had some period of obsession with it (though even some of those didn't make the cut; hello Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, though it probably would have made it if the list bulged out to 110). Given the arc of the above-sketched narrative, you'll see that the list is very heavily, well, white. There are a few rap albums, a couple metal albums, a lot of post-rock or sort of psych-rock or stuff that once would have been called prog (possibly because I'm old, but also because I work in an office in front of a computer all day and that kind of thing sounds great in that context, not to mention sounding great when drifting off on a commuter train when too tired to read, which I really should be doing but motherfucker I'm exhausted a lot and why the fuck won't she sleep more?), not a ton of "indie rock du jour"-type records (for which I generally feel too old, as previously mentioned on the blog, but the definition of which may be meaningless to most, so whatever), almost no quote-unquote pop, a paucity of black artists (for which I routinely have felt guilty, but music is a social thing and few of the people I've run with after college have listened to much of anything other than indie rock or classic rock, or maybe jazz, so there's some older black music, but you know what I'm saying, so it was all on me, and it took too long before I became confident exploring pop and rap and whatnot, and it's way too late to effectively redress this or balance the scales or anything like that, etc); and I really wish more of my favorite jazz artists had released great and not just good albums this decade, or that I had them, but there it is (I'm especially sorry to not be able to include a Joe McPhee album, because dude is fucking awesome and also really nice). Artists of the decade for this listener? Animal Collective; Smog/Bill Callahan; Jackie-O Motherfucker; the Mountain Goats; Deerhoof. Enough. I could go on and fill in and expand and so on because inevitably I feel I'm leaving something personally crucial out of that narrative, but enough blather, enough. The list (sorry for the tiny type, but Blogger is annoying):
Acid Mothers Temple & the Melting Paraiso U.F.O., Univers zen ou de zero a zero, 2002
The Angels of Light, Everything Is Good Here/Please Come Home, 2003
Animal Collective, Spirit They're Gone Spirit They've Vanished, 2000
Animal Collective, Here Comes the Indian, 2003
Animal Collective, Sung Tongs, 2004
Animal Collective, Feels, 2005
Asa-Chang & Junray, Jun Ray Song Chang, 2002
Sir Richard Bishop, Improvika, 2004
Paul Bley/Evan Parker/Barre Phillips, Sankt Gerold Variations, 2000
Boards of Canada, Geogaddi, 2002
Bonnie 'Prince' Billy, Sings Greatest Palace Music, 2004
Boredoms, Seadrum/House of Sun, 2004
Boris, Akuma no Uta, 2005
Bowerbirds, Hymns for a Dark Horse, 2007
Broadcast, The Future Crayon, 2006
Broken Social Scene, You Forgot It In People, 2002
Burial, Burial, 2006
Califone, Quicksand/Cradlesnakes, 2003
Neko Case, Fox Confessor Brings the Flood, 2006
Neko Case, Middle Cyclone, 2009
Chumbawumba, English Rebel Songs 1381-1984, 2003
Deerhoof, Reveille, 2002
Deerhoof, Apple O', 2003
Deerhoof, Friend Opportunity, 2007
Dizzee Rascal, Boy in Da Corner, 2003
Double Leopards, Halve Maen, 2003
Do Make Say Think, & Yet & Yet, 2002
Bob Dylan, "Love and Theft", 2001
Missy Elliott, Miss E…So Addictive, 2001
The Ex, Dizzy Spells, 2001
Explosions in the Sky, The Earth Is Not A Cold Dead Place, 2003
Christine Fellows, Paper Anniversary, 2005
The For Carnation, The For Carnation, 2000
Fugazi, The Argument, 2001
Gang Gang Dance, God's Money, 2005
Geto Boys, The Foundation, 2004
Ghost, Hypnotic Underworld, 2004
Ghostface Killah, Fishscale, 2006
Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Yanqui U.X.O., 2002
David Grubbs, The Spectrum Between, 2000
Merle Haggard, If I Could Only Fly, 2000
Herbert, Bodily Functions, 2001
High on Fire, Blessed Black Wings, 2004
Jackie-O Motherfucker, The Magick Fire Music, 2000
Jackie-O Motherfucker, Fig. 5, 2000
Jackie-O Motherfucker, Liberation, 2001
Philip Jeck, Stoke, 2002
Jesu, Conqueror, 2007
Junior Boys, So This Is Goodbye, 2006
Labradford, fixed::context, 2000
Miranda Lambert, Kerosene, 2005
Love is All, Nine Times That Same Song, 2006
Low, Things We Lost In The Fire, 2001
Matmos, The Rose Has Teeth in the Mouth of the Beast, 2006
The Microphones, It Was Hot, We Stayed in the Water, 2000
Mission of Burma, Obliterati, 2006
Modest Mouse, The Moon & Antarctica, 2000
Juana Molina, Son, 2006
The Mountain Goats, The Coroner's Gambit, 2001
The Mountain Goats, All Hail West Texas, 2002
The Mountain Goats, Tallahassee, 2002
The National, Boxer, 2007
The Necks, Drive By, 2003
The Necks, Chemist, 2006
Alva Noto +Ryuichi Sakamoto, Vrioon, 2002
Om, Conference of the Birds, 2006
Jim O'Rourke, Insignificance, 2001
Pan*American, 360 Business/360 Bypass, 2000
Panda Bear, Person Pitch, 2007
William Parker Quartet, O'Neal's Porch, 2001
William Parker Clarinet Trio, Bob's Pink Cadillac, 2002
Pelt, Pearls from the River, 2003
Pinetop Seven, Bringing Home the Last Great Strike, 2000
Robert Plant, Dreamland, 2002
Robert Plant & Alison Krauss, Raising Sand, 2007
Polmo Polpo, Like Hearts Swelling, 2004
Radiohead, Kid A, 2000
Radiohead, Amnesiac, 2001
Scarface, The Fix, 2002
Shalabi Effect, The Trial of St. Orange, 2002
Shalabi Effect, Pink Abyss, 2004
Shellac, 1000 Hurts, 2000
Six Organs of Admittance, School of the Flower, 2005
Smog, Dongs of Sevotion, 2000
Smog, Supper, 2003
Smog, A River Ain't Too Much to Love, 2005
Songs: Ohia, Ghost Tropic, 2000
Songs: Ohia, Didn't It Rain, 2002
Songs: Ohia, The Magnolia Electric Co., 2003
Sonic Youth, Murray Street, 2002
Sonic Youth, Sonic Nurse, 2004
Sunburned Hand of the Man, Fire Escape, 2007
Supersilent, 6, 2003
Mia Doi Todd, Manzanita, 2005
Scott Tuma, The River 1234, 2003
US Maple, Acre Thrills, 2001
Vibracathedral Orchestra, Tuning to the Rooster, 2005
Volcano the Bear, The Idea of Wood, 2003
Gillian Welch, Soul Journey, 2003
Robert Wyatt, Cuckooland, 2003
Yo La Tengo, And then nothing turned itself inside-out, 2000
Monday, July 26, 2010
Intermittent Activity
Currently on vacation, reading Laird Hunt's novel The Exquisite. I note this line, from midway through the book:
I've been getting a lot more sleep lately, and I hope to be able to post somewhat more regularly in the next couple of weeks or so. Thanks for reading, and for those that care, thanks for caring.
"When one is in the early, enthusiastic throes of a friendship, one lets a great deal slide."Which under certain circumstances seems to imply this line from the Mountain Goats song "Game Shows Touch Our Lives":
"People say friends don't destroy one another/What do they know about friends?"Which is apropos of nothing, really, except to give me an excuse to post this brief entry so people know I've not disappeared. Sometimes you forget that online friends know you only through the Internet, and if you disappear without notice, they worry. I know I have at times wondered to the point of worry about a blogger's extended absence. It's nice that people worry, but it's also nice to let them know you're ok. The above quotes may seem to be in a different spirit than my own lines, but, while I recognize some truth in them, I post them now only because I like them.
I've been getting a lot more sleep lately, and I hope to be able to post somewhat more regularly in the next couple of weeks or so. Thanks for reading, and for those that care, thanks for caring.
Friday, May 21, 2010
Clip Show
In March this blog completed its fourth year, and just a few weeks ago was my 600th post. While things have been very slow lately, for various reasons I won't bore you with again, I do have several things in the works. But meanwhile, like a sitcom with half the cast away filming bad movies, or no money in the budget for the desperate episode with the gang in London or Hawaii, it seems like time for the Clip Show, if you'll forgive me the indulgence. (Also, I seem to have the knack for going into extreme slowdown at the very moment some bigger blogger kindly sends people my way. And not everyone digs deep into blog archives like I do, or used to—who has the time? So this is for you. Though I do notice when you do, and I thank you.)
Some favorite bloggers have been writing about Christopher Hitchens' latest blather, so I'll start off with my review of his utterly shitty God is not Great. Hot damn that's a bad book. Which leads easily into other posts on faith and atheism and reason: one about a "debate" between overrated atheist writer Sam Harris and overrated blogger/commentator Andrew Sullivan, and an early Dawkins-related post, pursuing the point that these atheist writers efface politics in their rush to blame everything on religion. Of course in Hitchens' case, he sees politics to some extent, he just gets the politics wrong.
In a post from 2007 that I'm especially proud of, "Becoming Human", I wrote about Chris Knight's brilliant Blood Relations: Menstruation and the Origins of Culture; I still maintain it's an important book and that more people should read it. A bit earlier in the same year, there was my review of Rebecca Goldstein's excellent Betraying Spinoza. Much more recently, in a post I hope to expand on, I asked "Who do you trust?"
Two years ago, I wrote a lengthy entry on Nicholson Baker's much-misread book Human Smoke. Nearly a year later, I posted a follow-up, as the book continued to be misread upon its appearance in the UK (well, at least by one idiot in particular; I can't say I kept close tabs on the wider UK reviewing). In "Myth Rushes in to Fill the Gap", I used some remarks made by Marilynne Robinson and a very fine book about the American Revolution, Taming Democracy by Aimée's former professor Terry Bouton, to consider the declining conception of democracy. Here's a more recent one on Nader and progressivism.
I've written quite a bit about capitalism, as I've been working to understand its history and processes. In the context of the crisis of the last few years, I wrote several borderline-apocalyptic posts, culminating in "Terminal Crisis?", which served in part as a mini-review of sorts of David Harvey's The Limits to Capital. A little earlier, responding in part to some remarks from Noam Chomsky, I posted the popular Google-hit, "Basic Capitalist Principles". I always wonder if people are getting what they think they're looking for when they end up there. And there was my review of Alexander Berkman's Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist.
"Love is an object kept in an empty box" is a line from a Smog song, but also the name of a meditative post on art and aesthetics and literary tradition. "The haiku is not for me" was a surprisingly popular post (relatively speaking, of course). Another meditation of sorts, this time on the term "novel"; it didn't quite get at what I meant it to, but it was a decent start.
Which brings us to literature. IOZ has graciously linked to two of my better recent-ish literary posts. First, to this one on J.M. Coetzee's Diary of a Bad Year; then this one on Roberto Bolaño and his much-hyped novel 2666. (An example of what I mentioned above, IOZ's link to the first resulted in a massive spike in traffic here, which increase I, naturally, immediately squandered. Readers seemed to have wised up with the second and failed to take the bait.)
More literature:
My notes on Jacques Roubaud's marvelous novel The Great Fire of London. "First Furrows of Care" was a meditation on Kafka's short story, "First Sorrow". Going back further, two posts (one, two) on the work of Israeli novelist Aharon Appelfeld, with some attention paid to political matters. Still further, two posts on Proust and his great work, In Search of Lost Time. The first is on "Proust and the Problems of Writing"; the second considers the fifth volume, The Captive, as it relates to love and trust and suspicion. (Inspired by Proust was this more personal post on an awakened memory, arguably marred by the unnecessary appending of an excerpt from Proust himself.)
More novels: A long somewhat rambling take on Richard Ford's Frank Bascombe trilogy (that is, the novels The Sportswriter, Independence Day, and The Lay of the Land). A reconsideration of Philip Roth's once-notorious Portnoy's Complaint. An early post looking at Richard Powers' novel Prisoner's Dilemma: "What if the world were already lost". Powers used to my favorite writer. No offense to him, but I can't imagine thinking anything like that anymore. A very early, very meandering post on my re-reading of Nabokov's Despair.
Wait, how is that I haven't yet mentioned Thomas Bernhard? Doesn't this blog's pretentious name come from one of his books? (Yes, yes it does; The Loser.) A Bernhard post that seems to attract a lot of Google visits is "Cerebral Pulse", on the novel Frost. There's also my review, of the much greater novel, Old Masters. And there have been several posts about Peter Handke: This one on his novel Across was perhaps the first entry where I felt I had an idea what I was doing here.
A defense of the then-still-living David Foster Wallace, who another blogger had called "washed up". And one about my disenchantment with the increasingly odious Martin Amis, another one of my formerly favorite writers.
Another popular one, this time a personal reading history of sorts. "We lack jouissance" was one of many posts touching on reading anxiety, this time from the perspective of translation and the kinds of writing we, as Anglo-Americans, might have trouble with. And, yes, alas, it's true: Literature is not innocent.
Finally, I would be remiss if I put up a post like this without strong representation from Gabriel Josipovici. He's been such an important part of my reading life in the last few years that it's impossible to explain. Here, then, are five posts about his work:
My review of In a Hotel Garden, the first Josipovici book I read; I had no idea the role he would later play. "Smoothness of Surface" and "A world about to be lost" deal at length with Josipovici's beautiful book, On Trust. I'm pretty happy with those posts, I have to admit. Then last year, I wrote about his marvelous essay "The Bible Open and Closed". At last, most recently, I, along with several others, reviewed his great short novel, Everything Passes.
Well, I think that's plenty. Thanks to everyone for reading. If you're new, stick around; I'll be back soon. I promise.
Some favorite bloggers have been writing about Christopher Hitchens' latest blather, so I'll start off with my review of his utterly shitty God is not Great. Hot damn that's a bad book. Which leads easily into other posts on faith and atheism and reason: one about a "debate" between overrated atheist writer Sam Harris and overrated blogger/commentator Andrew Sullivan, and an early Dawkins-related post, pursuing the point that these atheist writers efface politics in their rush to blame everything on religion. Of course in Hitchens' case, he sees politics to some extent, he just gets the politics wrong.
In a post from 2007 that I'm especially proud of, "Becoming Human", I wrote about Chris Knight's brilliant Blood Relations: Menstruation and the Origins of Culture; I still maintain it's an important book and that more people should read it. A bit earlier in the same year, there was my review of Rebecca Goldstein's excellent Betraying Spinoza. Much more recently, in a post I hope to expand on, I asked "Who do you trust?"
Two years ago, I wrote a lengthy entry on Nicholson Baker's much-misread book Human Smoke. Nearly a year later, I posted a follow-up, as the book continued to be misread upon its appearance in the UK (well, at least by one idiot in particular; I can't say I kept close tabs on the wider UK reviewing). In "Myth Rushes in to Fill the Gap", I used some remarks made by Marilynne Robinson and a very fine book about the American Revolution, Taming Democracy by Aimée's former professor Terry Bouton, to consider the declining conception of democracy. Here's a more recent one on Nader and progressivism.
I've written quite a bit about capitalism, as I've been working to understand its history and processes. In the context of the crisis of the last few years, I wrote several borderline-apocalyptic posts, culminating in "Terminal Crisis?", which served in part as a mini-review of sorts of David Harvey's The Limits to Capital. A little earlier, responding in part to some remarks from Noam Chomsky, I posted the popular Google-hit, "Basic Capitalist Principles". I always wonder if people are getting what they think they're looking for when they end up there. And there was my review of Alexander Berkman's Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist.
"Love is an object kept in an empty box" is a line from a Smog song, but also the name of a meditative post on art and aesthetics and literary tradition. "The haiku is not for me" was a surprisingly popular post (relatively speaking, of course). Another meditation of sorts, this time on the term "novel"; it didn't quite get at what I meant it to, but it was a decent start.
Which brings us to literature. IOZ has graciously linked to two of my better recent-ish literary posts. First, to this one on J.M. Coetzee's Diary of a Bad Year; then this one on Roberto Bolaño and his much-hyped novel 2666. (An example of what I mentioned above, IOZ's link to the first resulted in a massive spike in traffic here, which increase I, naturally, immediately squandered. Readers seemed to have wised up with the second and failed to take the bait.)
More literature:
My notes on Jacques Roubaud's marvelous novel The Great Fire of London. "First Furrows of Care" was a meditation on Kafka's short story, "First Sorrow". Going back further, two posts (one, two) on the work of Israeli novelist Aharon Appelfeld, with some attention paid to political matters. Still further, two posts on Proust and his great work, In Search of Lost Time. The first is on "Proust and the Problems of Writing"; the second considers the fifth volume, The Captive, as it relates to love and trust and suspicion. (Inspired by Proust was this more personal post on an awakened memory, arguably marred by the unnecessary appending of an excerpt from Proust himself.)
More novels: A long somewhat rambling take on Richard Ford's Frank Bascombe trilogy (that is, the novels The Sportswriter, Independence Day, and The Lay of the Land). A reconsideration of Philip Roth's once-notorious Portnoy's Complaint. An early post looking at Richard Powers' novel Prisoner's Dilemma: "What if the world were already lost". Powers used to my favorite writer. No offense to him, but I can't imagine thinking anything like that anymore. A very early, very meandering post on my re-reading of Nabokov's Despair.
Wait, how is that I haven't yet mentioned Thomas Bernhard? Doesn't this blog's pretentious name come from one of his books? (Yes, yes it does; The Loser.) A Bernhard post that seems to attract a lot of Google visits is "Cerebral Pulse", on the novel Frost. There's also my review, of the much greater novel, Old Masters. And there have been several posts about Peter Handke: This one on his novel Across was perhaps the first entry where I felt I had an idea what I was doing here.
A defense of the then-still-living David Foster Wallace, who another blogger had called "washed up". And one about my disenchantment with the increasingly odious Martin Amis, another one of my formerly favorite writers.
Another popular one, this time a personal reading history of sorts. "We lack jouissance" was one of many posts touching on reading anxiety, this time from the perspective of translation and the kinds of writing we, as Anglo-Americans, might have trouble with. And, yes, alas, it's true: Literature is not innocent.
Finally, I would be remiss if I put up a post like this without strong representation from Gabriel Josipovici. He's been such an important part of my reading life in the last few years that it's impossible to explain. Here, then, are five posts about his work:
My review of In a Hotel Garden, the first Josipovici book I read; I had no idea the role he would later play. "Smoothness of Surface" and "A world about to be lost" deal at length with Josipovici's beautiful book, On Trust. I'm pretty happy with those posts, I have to admit. Then last year, I wrote about his marvelous essay "The Bible Open and Closed". At last, most recently, I, along with several others, reviewed his great short novel, Everything Passes.
Well, I think that's plenty. Thanks to everyone for reading. If you're new, stick around; I'll be back soon. I promise.
Sunday, March 28, 2010
So it Begins
It figures that the last post, primarily about needing to be a more patient reader, would begin and end with notes about blogging frequency. Inevitable around here, I suppose. Anyway, there were other factors leading into the decision to finally just read those things I've wanted to, or felt the need to, read and to be patient about it. Regarding poetry, Jonathan Mayhew recently posted a brief entry about his ongoing engagement with canonical high modernist poetry:
So, ok, on with it then. Instead of trying to squeeze in a page or three of some novel before drifting off to sleep at night, I have been reading poetry at bedside—I tried some Rimbaud, with some success, more Stevens, Dickinson, Kay Ryan. (I've found I really like Kay Ryan's poetry. Another contemporary poet I have in mind to try is Geoffrey Hill, who I expect to be a thornier read. I may have more to say about how these two poets have come to my attention and why I am drawn to them as possibilities.) (By the way, this does not mean that I'm abandoning novels. Far from it. But I've read a lot of them, after all, and so don't feel the need to read as many just now, or to keep up with it for the moment. Even so, as of this writing, I am about 200 pages into Christina Stead's The Man Who Loved Children. Parts of it I love; others are actually rather annoying—frankly, just about any scene involving the titular father with his children is a serious chore to read.) As far as philosophy is concerned, I've written about my goals to read Plato and Aristotle, and I've written about Nietzsche, but possibly the philosopher I've mentioned most often here, again usually in a spirit of deferral, has been Heidegger. Perhaps one day I'll write something about why I'm drawn to Heidegger, but in any event, the actual reading has been rough-going, even as his philosophy remains somehow attractive. So I ordered History of the Concept of Time, recommended by Graham Harman as a good place to start with Heidegger, if Being and Time itself seems too opaque, as it has for me (and, indeed, leafing through it briefly upon delivery, the former does strike me as a more readable volume; for the record, I also ordered Harman's own Heidegger Explained). But I haven't dived into that just yet, because the real day-to-day project I've begun is Capital.
Capital, because of its hugeness and its incompleteness and the sheer massiveness of the commentary and other writing that draws from it and has been influenced by it, has, of course, loomed as a central text, but yet again always deferred. I've read several books that take Marxian approaches to capitalism, by David Harvey and by Ellen Meiksins Wood and by the Midnight Notes Collective, among others, some of which I have written about here; these books have been enormously helpful to me. But I have always known that in order to come to terms with Marx's own analysis, I needed to really be deliberate with the text itself, which, of course, requires time and patience. But it was a book I read earlier this year that really brought home to me my need to read Capital sooner rather than later and which reinforced the patience theme I've been talking about. I'm referring to Maria Mies' Patriarchy & Accumulation on a World Scale: Women in the International Division of Labour, which I have excerpted from and referred to a couple of times previously on the blog (it's also true that there are many discussions that seem to me to be lacking precisely because they don't sufficiently focus on the economic, but no doubt I can make that argument more directly if I myself am more familiar with the Marx in Capital, versus his other writing, or the legacy of cultural Marxism, which seems to have displaced his economic analysis in perceived importance to way too many). I think that Mies' book is an important book, so important that I decided I wanted to devote several blog posts to it. But when I sat down one evening to begin taking chapter-by-chapter notes I was confronted with my dual-problem. First, I had read the book too quickly. I had been so excited by it that I fairly tore through the text. I marked my copy in numerous places, of course, but I didn't take notes as I was reading. This has been a basic problem for me for years. I've never been a good note-taker, but it's even worse now, as my reading is largely done on my commuter train, where writing notes is physically difficult. And, on the patience theme, I've so protected this reading time and have had so many different books on my list, that I've simply read, over-relying on my memory and copious underlining to get me by and to retain what ought to be retained. My memory may be good, but it's not that good. And as I've explored with respect to writing, if you don't write an idea down, take note of it, odds are it will disappear. I discovered when I attempted to summarize the chapters in Mies' book that I would effectively have to read the book again in order to do so. (The same thing happened with a great David Graeber essay I have had in mind to use for another post I'm working on; I'll have to read it again too.) Since Patriarchy & Accumulation on a World Scale is a feminist text, and as such is in part a feminist critique of Marx and Marxist analyses, I realized that the time had come to stop deferring and to just read Capital.
Here, then, is my plan: as I've been meaning to since first learning about it, I'm going to follow along with David Harvey's lecture series on Capital. So, I downloaded the first several lectures, and I began to read. I plan to read the chapter(s) under discussion, freely writing notes in the text itself, following up each chapter with some additional notes, then viewing the relevant lecture (these last two steps may be reversed as needed), not at all worrying if I have to re-read sections or re-view portions of lectures. I think it's gone fairly well so far. I'm through chapter 6, which means I've made it through the difficult first three chapters, the third being the one, Harvey says, where people often given up when they're going it alone. I was gratified to find I was able to read it without too much pain. (It may help, in this regard, that I read Harvey's Limits to Capital last year.) I'm not expecting to completely get Capital in this reading, or come through feeling like I've satisfied my need to understand capitalism or anything like that. I expect it to be a text I return to in the future as certain problems present themselves. In any event, Marx's own analysis aside, I'm interested in the ways in which we as readers are encouraged to treat everything as in flux, including understanding. In that way, also remembering Marshall Berman's argument that Capital is very much a modernist text, it is not unlike poetry and philosophy.
I quote the first paragraph because I want to note the assumption some people have that the lives of certain others apparently have little to no "aesthetic component". But it is the second paragraph that is relevant here, for various reasons, both negative and positive. I believe Mayhew's observation to be essentially true. This belief has unfortunately had the effect of leading me to the further self-defeating belief that it has always already been too late for me to read difficult poetry with any degree of competence. I have blogged numerous times about this kind of thing, and probably will again; it remains something that bothers me, not just on a personal level. On the other hand, why not simply read poetry? Why worry so much? The same goes, more or less, with philosophy—endless deferrals, endless fretting, and so on. But still, why not just get on with it?Now the problem is that in the contemporary university, cultural studies has largely displaced that canon, especially in Latin American studies--but also to some degree in the peninsular (Iberian peninsular, that is) realm. The typical argument in Latin American studies would have a very clear political "take away." I heard a colleague of mine at a candidate's job talk the other day suggest that any emphasis on literature as an aesthetic phenomenon would automatically alienate students, have them view literature as something alien to their own lives--as though their own lives had no aesthetic component at all.
So yes, I work on the boring old canonical stuff, leaving me holding the conservative end of the stick. I believe, though, that reading this stuff--really difficult modernist poetry--makes you frightfully intelligent. It really just uses all of your brain at the highest level of literacy imaginable. To really get this kind of poetry, you have to have a highly developed cultural, musical, visual, verbal, problem-solving, connection-making intelligence. But the only way to get that is to read it. In other words, nobody has it before approaching this kind of poetry.
So, ok, on with it then. Instead of trying to squeeze in a page or three of some novel before drifting off to sleep at night, I have been reading poetry at bedside—I tried some Rimbaud, with some success, more Stevens, Dickinson, Kay Ryan. (I've found I really like Kay Ryan's poetry. Another contemporary poet I have in mind to try is Geoffrey Hill, who I expect to be a thornier read. I may have more to say about how these two poets have come to my attention and why I am drawn to them as possibilities.) (By the way, this does not mean that I'm abandoning novels. Far from it. But I've read a lot of them, after all, and so don't feel the need to read as many just now, or to keep up with it for the moment. Even so, as of this writing, I am about 200 pages into Christina Stead's The Man Who Loved Children. Parts of it I love; others are actually rather annoying—frankly, just about any scene involving the titular father with his children is a serious chore to read.) As far as philosophy is concerned, I've written about my goals to read Plato and Aristotle, and I've written about Nietzsche, but possibly the philosopher I've mentioned most often here, again usually in a spirit of deferral, has been Heidegger. Perhaps one day I'll write something about why I'm drawn to Heidegger, but in any event, the actual reading has been rough-going, even as his philosophy remains somehow attractive. So I ordered History of the Concept of Time, recommended by Graham Harman as a good place to start with Heidegger, if Being and Time itself seems too opaque, as it has for me (and, indeed, leafing through it briefly upon delivery, the former does strike me as a more readable volume; for the record, I also ordered Harman's own Heidegger Explained). But I haven't dived into that just yet, because the real day-to-day project I've begun is Capital.
Capital, because of its hugeness and its incompleteness and the sheer massiveness of the commentary and other writing that draws from it and has been influenced by it, has, of course, loomed as a central text, but yet again always deferred. I've read several books that take Marxian approaches to capitalism, by David Harvey and by Ellen Meiksins Wood and by the Midnight Notes Collective, among others, some of which I have written about here; these books have been enormously helpful to me. But I have always known that in order to come to terms with Marx's own analysis, I needed to really be deliberate with the text itself, which, of course, requires time and patience. But it was a book I read earlier this year that really brought home to me my need to read Capital sooner rather than later and which reinforced the patience theme I've been talking about. I'm referring to Maria Mies' Patriarchy & Accumulation on a World Scale: Women in the International Division of Labour, which I have excerpted from and referred to a couple of times previously on the blog (it's also true that there are many discussions that seem to me to be lacking precisely because they don't sufficiently focus on the economic, but no doubt I can make that argument more directly if I myself am more familiar with the Marx in Capital, versus his other writing, or the legacy of cultural Marxism, which seems to have displaced his economic analysis in perceived importance to way too many). I think that Mies' book is an important book, so important that I decided I wanted to devote several blog posts to it. But when I sat down one evening to begin taking chapter-by-chapter notes I was confronted with my dual-problem. First, I had read the book too quickly. I had been so excited by it that I fairly tore through the text. I marked my copy in numerous places, of course, but I didn't take notes as I was reading. This has been a basic problem for me for years. I've never been a good note-taker, but it's even worse now, as my reading is largely done on my commuter train, where writing notes is physically difficult. And, on the patience theme, I've so protected this reading time and have had so many different books on my list, that I've simply read, over-relying on my memory and copious underlining to get me by and to retain what ought to be retained. My memory may be good, but it's not that good. And as I've explored with respect to writing, if you don't write an idea down, take note of it, odds are it will disappear. I discovered when I attempted to summarize the chapters in Mies' book that I would effectively have to read the book again in order to do so. (The same thing happened with a great David Graeber essay I have had in mind to use for another post I'm working on; I'll have to read it again too.) Since Patriarchy & Accumulation on a World Scale is a feminist text, and as such is in part a feminist critique of Marx and Marxist analyses, I realized that the time had come to stop deferring and to just read Capital.
Here, then, is my plan: as I've been meaning to since first learning about it, I'm going to follow along with David Harvey's lecture series on Capital. So, I downloaded the first several lectures, and I began to read. I plan to read the chapter(s) under discussion, freely writing notes in the text itself, following up each chapter with some additional notes, then viewing the relevant lecture (these last two steps may be reversed as needed), not at all worrying if I have to re-read sections or re-view portions of lectures. I think it's gone fairly well so far. I'm through chapter 6, which means I've made it through the difficult first three chapters, the third being the one, Harvey says, where people often given up when they're going it alone. I was gratified to find I was able to read it without too much pain. (It may help, in this regard, that I read Harvey's Limits to Capital last year.) I'm not expecting to completely get Capital in this reading, or come through feeling like I've satisfied my need to understand capitalism or anything like that. I expect it to be a text I return to in the future as certain problems present themselves. In any event, Marx's own analysis aside, I'm interested in the ways in which we as readers are encouraged to treat everything as in flux, including understanding. In that way, also remembering Marshall Berman's argument that Capital is very much a modernist text, it is not unlike poetry and philosophy.
Friday, March 26, 2010
Have a little Patience
In a comment to my last post, new reader Andy W. offers some welcome kindness, while noting that he seems to have discovered the blog at a particularly slow moment in its existence. True enough. I have not been able to devote time to blogging lately, though there is indeed much on my mind, many pieces gestating.
And as far as being awake goes, that old struggle, being awake enough to read, to think, to write, this past month has been terrible for me. But the first week of this month was the worst. I looked out at the world through a sheet of gauze, with a dull, perpetual, sleeplessness-induced ache in the back of my head. I was just able to make my way, semi-coherently, through daily meetings at work as we continue to dig our way into an awful requirements document (are they not all awful? why do I have to read such non-writing?). But real reading was out of the question. Real writing (ha!) was equally out of the question, but in truth, my available time is such that I rarely devote much of it to writing anyway. (As far as the blog is concerned, half-begun sketches of posts abound in draft status, but this is nothing new.) No, the real problem that week was reading. I have been deeply frustrated in recent years whenever I have been too tired to read on my commute. Time lost forever, and there's only so much of it left.
But it occurred to me then how futile this frustration is. And it occurred to me that I have been, still, a deeply impatient reader. In the past I have described my period of despair, when I was an unfocused reader, seemingly interested in everything, casting a very wide net, getting nowhere. My reading, now, is much more directed, but direction doesn't imply discipline. Oh, sure, I have been disciplined in that I have taken on a book, and read it. I have given myself specific goals (Proust, for example), and met them. Taking on a particular book and reading it is fine, but by itself that doesn't mean I'm going to be able to think or to attend to that need to write.
It happens that the day before this awful week, as I was doing some housecleaning, I decided to listen not to music, as I normally would, but to an episode of "Entitled Opinions" having to do with Nietzsche that I'd downloaded many months before. "Entitled Opinions" is a show out of Stanford University hosted by Robert Harrison, generally concerned with philosophy, poetry, ideas. I'd heard about it through Stephen Mitchelmore and had previously listened to the two fascinating conversations with Andrew Mitchell about Heidegger, which had been particularly recommended by Stephen. The Nietzsche show is also a conversation with Andrew Mitchell and deals primarily with Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Admittedly, amid the clamor of cleaning I wasn't able to listen as closely as I'd hoped, but I caught enough to be interested and to decide to try again to read Zarathustra, which I'd tried and failed to read before. The experience of listening to this show fresh in my mind, I decided to use my sleepy commute time in the following week to listen to other "Entitled Opinions" shows I'd downloaded. In particular, I listened to two enjoyable shows with Marjorie Perloff, the first a conversation about Ezra Pound, the second about Yeats, each leaving me much more likely to read the poet in question.
What emerged from the experience of listening to these three conversations, from hearing the poetry, from considering Perloff's recommendations and Mitchell's take on Nietzsche, was a deepening of my longstanding desire to really engage with both poetry and philosophy. What emerged from this week of utter exhaustion, in which I was unable to actually read much of anything, was a kind of epiphany in place of the usual frustration and impatience. I realized that if I'm ever to read the difficult, complicated works I've long been deferring, whether it be poetry, or philosophy, or specific works such as Marx's Capital, I need to go ahead and read them. I may as well read them now. I'm not, as the saying goes, getting any younger (I was 40 yesterday). But what really hit me was the crushingly obvious fact that I need to be more patient. There are still so many books that I want to read that I think I retained the tendency to plow through books, as though ticking them off of a giant list inside my head (and then, of course, dutifully adding them to the list on my sidebar here, as if that meant something). But it does me no good to read Capital or Thus Spoke Zarathustra or Being and Time or The Space of Literature if I don't get out of these books what I want to get out of them, if I retain little from them, if my engagement with the text is superficial. What would be the point? To say I've read them? No: I want to read such books for real reasons, reasons of my own, but real enough. My desire to read Capital is to help me understand capitalism, which itself is not just to add to my store of knowledge, but which matters to me in the project of living my own life. I will need to read it slowly, taking notes, writing. The same is true of philosophy. And with poetry, I feel the need to engage with the poetic form in some fashion, come to terms with it, as writing that is more focused, more attentive, more in play than so much prose. As a species of thought, a working through of language.
All of this requires patience, patience I have generally been sorely lacking. So, ironically, in response to a week in which I was largely unable to read, I am planning on, and have been, reading less, but, I hope, better. For one thing, this means no more forcing myself through a page or a chapter when my eyes want to close. I hope, too, that this patience will be reflected in my writing. In light of that, blogging will likely remain on the weekly or bi-weekly semi-schedule it's been on of late. Which isn't to say I won't immediately post something tomorrow. [I confess that the title to this post is a reference to the Guns N'Roses song. I can't decide whether I'm embarrassed to admit that. You're just lucky I didn't start whistling.]
And as far as being awake goes, that old struggle, being awake enough to read, to think, to write, this past month has been terrible for me. But the first week of this month was the worst. I looked out at the world through a sheet of gauze, with a dull, perpetual, sleeplessness-induced ache in the back of my head. I was just able to make my way, semi-coherently, through daily meetings at work as we continue to dig our way into an awful requirements document (are they not all awful? why do I have to read such non-writing?). But real reading was out of the question. Real writing (ha!) was equally out of the question, but in truth, my available time is such that I rarely devote much of it to writing anyway. (As far as the blog is concerned, half-begun sketches of posts abound in draft status, but this is nothing new.) No, the real problem that week was reading. I have been deeply frustrated in recent years whenever I have been too tired to read on my commute. Time lost forever, and there's only so much of it left.
But it occurred to me then how futile this frustration is. And it occurred to me that I have been, still, a deeply impatient reader. In the past I have described my period of despair, when I was an unfocused reader, seemingly interested in everything, casting a very wide net, getting nowhere. My reading, now, is much more directed, but direction doesn't imply discipline. Oh, sure, I have been disciplined in that I have taken on a book, and read it. I have given myself specific goals (Proust, for example), and met them. Taking on a particular book and reading it is fine, but by itself that doesn't mean I'm going to be able to think or to attend to that need to write.
It happens that the day before this awful week, as I was doing some housecleaning, I decided to listen not to music, as I normally would, but to an episode of "Entitled Opinions" having to do with Nietzsche that I'd downloaded many months before. "Entitled Opinions" is a show out of Stanford University hosted by Robert Harrison, generally concerned with philosophy, poetry, ideas. I'd heard about it through Stephen Mitchelmore and had previously listened to the two fascinating conversations with Andrew Mitchell about Heidegger, which had been particularly recommended by Stephen. The Nietzsche show is also a conversation with Andrew Mitchell and deals primarily with Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Admittedly, amid the clamor of cleaning I wasn't able to listen as closely as I'd hoped, but I caught enough to be interested and to decide to try again to read Zarathustra, which I'd tried and failed to read before. The experience of listening to this show fresh in my mind, I decided to use my sleepy commute time in the following week to listen to other "Entitled Opinions" shows I'd downloaded. In particular, I listened to two enjoyable shows with Marjorie Perloff, the first a conversation about Ezra Pound, the second about Yeats, each leaving me much more likely to read the poet in question.
What emerged from the experience of listening to these three conversations, from hearing the poetry, from considering Perloff's recommendations and Mitchell's take on Nietzsche, was a deepening of my longstanding desire to really engage with both poetry and philosophy. What emerged from this week of utter exhaustion, in which I was unable to actually read much of anything, was a kind of epiphany in place of the usual frustration and impatience. I realized that if I'm ever to read the difficult, complicated works I've long been deferring, whether it be poetry, or philosophy, or specific works such as Marx's Capital, I need to go ahead and read them. I may as well read them now. I'm not, as the saying goes, getting any younger (I was 40 yesterday). But what really hit me was the crushingly obvious fact that I need to be more patient. There are still so many books that I want to read that I think I retained the tendency to plow through books, as though ticking them off of a giant list inside my head (and then, of course, dutifully adding them to the list on my sidebar here, as if that meant something). But it does me no good to read Capital or Thus Spoke Zarathustra or Being and Time or The Space of Literature if I don't get out of these books what I want to get out of them, if I retain little from them, if my engagement with the text is superficial. What would be the point? To say I've read them? No: I want to read such books for real reasons, reasons of my own, but real enough. My desire to read Capital is to help me understand capitalism, which itself is not just to add to my store of knowledge, but which matters to me in the project of living my own life. I will need to read it slowly, taking notes, writing. The same is true of philosophy. And with poetry, I feel the need to engage with the poetic form in some fashion, come to terms with it, as writing that is more focused, more attentive, more in play than so much prose. As a species of thought, a working through of language.
All of this requires patience, patience I have generally been sorely lacking. So, ironically, in response to a week in which I was largely unable to read, I am planning on, and have been, reading less, but, I hope, better. For one thing, this means no more forcing myself through a page or a chapter when my eyes want to close. I hope, too, that this patience will be reflected in my writing. In light of that, blogging will likely remain on the weekly or bi-weekly semi-schedule it's been on of late. Which isn't to say I won't immediately post something tomorrow. [I confess that the title to this post is a reference to the Guns N'Roses song. I can't decide whether I'm embarrassed to admit that. You're just lucky I didn't start whistling.]
Thursday, January 07, 2010
Looking Forward, Back
As this opening week of 2010 perhaps suggests, things may be quiet here over the next few months. Not by design or desire but only because of other things. Like, life. I'm a little busier at work than I've been for years; I still have the lengthy commute, which, though it allows me to read a fair amount, does not allow for much time in the evenings. I'd rather take my time on writing than whip something off. But I make no predictions on how much blogging I'll actually end up doing. I do have a few things on my mind that will need some time to tease out into something coherent. I suspect I'll have even less to say about buzz or news than usual.
Looking back over the last few months, it's a bit hard to believe I blogged as much as I did. We had a lot going on. We moved, fixed up the house we had been living in, fucking sold it. (There were a variety of factors leading into this transition. One was the desire to escape the bind of home-ownership.) But anyway: we were extremely busy. I had no business blogging in the evenings, and I pretty much didn't (when do people blog? follow-up question: how many of you bloggers are academics or students in some capacity? am I the only one who wants to do it more but can't?), unless I was by myself for whatever reason, or there was downtime during naps on the weekend. This explains the silences followed by flurries of activity. (I'm sure that same general pattern will obtain now.)
But, hey: reading! I received a nice stack of books for Christmas this year, so I should be set for a while (not likely). Plus, with the sale of the house, and the ensuing debt-cancellation (yay!), I won't be as constrained from acquiring a book I really want (but still, let's not go crazy).
The gift books, then:
First, the three highest on my short list:
The Letters of Samuel Beckett, 1929-1940
The Journal, Henry David Thoreau (the nice new NYRB edition)
After & Making Mistakes, Gabriel Josipovici
Then the pleasant surprises from my longer list:
The Infinite Conversation, Maurice Blanchot
The Moral Economy of the Peasant, James C. Scott
Weapons of the Weak, James C. Scott
Our Horses in Egypt, Rosalind Belben
The total wild card:
The New Literary History of America, Greil Marcus & Werner Sollors, eds.
This last item was brought to my attention a couple of months back. I wouldn't have bought it for myself (not least because of Greil Marcus, who I have very mixed feelings about), but I have to admit it looks very interesting, and I look forward to reading much of it (it is like 1100 pages or something obscene like that; it's fucking massive). At first glance, I already know I have some criticisms of it, but I'll hold off on saying anything till I've had a chance to read more into it.
I was also given two gift cards to book stores. To date, I've picked up four books with one of them:
Short Letter, Long Farewell, Peter Handke
Wittgenstein's Nephew, Thomas Bernhard
Doctor Faustus, Thomas Mann
Summertime, J.M. Coetzee
With a such a bounty, there is always the problem of what to read next. I feel the compulsion to read several of them all at once. One can only pick one and begin. I expect to be, and in fact have already begun, dipping into Beckett's Letters and Thoreau's Journal over the course of several weeks, if not months. The others as the occasion strikes. I've already read the Handke, and though it's nothing like as great as Slow Homecoming, it was nonetheless a fascinating read, as ever. I feel an intensive period of Handke reading coming on--perhaps Repetition soon? And a pile of others. . .
I'm currently in the middle of Our Horses In Egypt; a peculiar book. It's very English and compressed. The combination of dated English slang and horse and military jargon makes for some unexpectedly thorny paragraphs. And yet there's something charming about the tale, a bit old fashioned, if also not quite like anything else I've read.
I don't really have specific reading goals for the year. Looking back over my list from last year, I see that only one or two of the novels I read even approached 400 pages (I believe Augie March was the longest); most were well under 300, if not under 200. But I have sitting on my shelves many long books I'd like to get to before too long: 2666, The Kindly Ones, um: Don Quixote, er: Ulysses (really!), The Aesthetics of Resistance, several Henry James novels (I forgot to mention that I'd started reading The Wings of the Dove last year; wasn't up for it), even Marguerite Young's enormous Miss Macintosh, My Darling. It remains to be seen which if any of them I find time for.
My non-fiction reading will probably continue to be a rough course through philosophy, political economy, Marx, anthropology (cf. James C. Scott, etc), evolutionary bases for cooperation, arguments against the teleology of progress, and so on. And every year, and at various points within every year, I say to myself, ah, yes, now I will begin to systematically read the classics, Plato, Aristotle; you know, that crowd. I still have this strong desire to become more acquainted with that tradition. We will see how it goes.
Looking back over the last few months, it's a bit hard to believe I blogged as much as I did. We had a lot going on. We moved, fixed up the house we had been living in, fucking sold it. (There were a variety of factors leading into this transition. One was the desire to escape the bind of home-ownership.) But anyway: we were extremely busy. I had no business blogging in the evenings, and I pretty much didn't (when do people blog? follow-up question: how many of you bloggers are academics or students in some capacity? am I the only one who wants to do it more but can't?), unless I was by myself for whatever reason, or there was downtime during naps on the weekend. This explains the silences followed by flurries of activity. (I'm sure that same general pattern will obtain now.)
But, hey: reading! I received a nice stack of books for Christmas this year, so I should be set for a while (not likely). Plus, with the sale of the house, and the ensuing debt-cancellation (yay!), I won't be as constrained from acquiring a book I really want (but still, let's not go crazy).
The gift books, then:
First, the three highest on my short list:
The Letters of Samuel Beckett, 1929-1940
The Journal, Henry David Thoreau (the nice new NYRB edition)
After & Making Mistakes, Gabriel Josipovici
Then the pleasant surprises from my longer list:
The Infinite Conversation, Maurice Blanchot
The Moral Economy of the Peasant, James C. Scott
Weapons of the Weak, James C. Scott
Our Horses in Egypt, Rosalind Belben
The total wild card:
The New Literary History of America, Greil Marcus & Werner Sollors, eds.
This last item was brought to my attention a couple of months back. I wouldn't have bought it for myself (not least because of Greil Marcus, who I have very mixed feelings about), but I have to admit it looks very interesting, and I look forward to reading much of it (it is like 1100 pages or something obscene like that; it's fucking massive). At first glance, I already know I have some criticisms of it, but I'll hold off on saying anything till I've had a chance to read more into it.
I was also given two gift cards to book stores. To date, I've picked up four books with one of them:
Short Letter, Long Farewell, Peter Handke
Wittgenstein's Nephew, Thomas Bernhard
Doctor Faustus, Thomas Mann
Summertime, J.M. Coetzee
With a such a bounty, there is always the problem of what to read next. I feel the compulsion to read several of them all at once. One can only pick one and begin. I expect to be, and in fact have already begun, dipping into Beckett's Letters and Thoreau's Journal over the course of several weeks, if not months. The others as the occasion strikes. I've already read the Handke, and though it's nothing like as great as Slow Homecoming, it was nonetheless a fascinating read, as ever. I feel an intensive period of Handke reading coming on--perhaps Repetition soon? And a pile of others. . .
I'm currently in the middle of Our Horses In Egypt; a peculiar book. It's very English and compressed. The combination of dated English slang and horse and military jargon makes for some unexpectedly thorny paragraphs. And yet there's something charming about the tale, a bit old fashioned, if also not quite like anything else I've read.
I don't really have specific reading goals for the year. Looking back over my list from last year, I see that only one or two of the novels I read even approached 400 pages (I believe Augie March was the longest); most were well under 300, if not under 200. But I have sitting on my shelves many long books I'd like to get to before too long: 2666, The Kindly Ones, um: Don Quixote, er: Ulysses (really!), The Aesthetics of Resistance, several Henry James novels (I forgot to mention that I'd started reading The Wings of the Dove last year; wasn't up for it), even Marguerite Young's enormous Miss Macintosh, My Darling. It remains to be seen which if any of them I find time for.
My non-fiction reading will probably continue to be a rough course through philosophy, political economy, Marx, anthropology (cf. James C. Scott, etc), evolutionary bases for cooperation, arguments against the teleology of progress, and so on. And every year, and at various points within every year, I say to myself, ah, yes, now I will begin to systematically read the classics, Plato, Aristotle; you know, that crowd. I still have this strong desire to become more acquainted with that tradition. We will see how it goes.
Thursday, November 05, 2009
Peeking Through
Er, right. I didn't expect to drop off like that. The last couple of weeks have slipped past me in a fog of sleepiness (so sleepy) and distraction (the World Series, where my Phillies lost, no shame, but to the Yankees, those bastards). Nonetheless, I do have a few things in the works. In the meantime, check out Yareah, a bilingual literary monthly, the November issue of which is largely devoted to Kafka, including my short piece, "Kafka and Brod" (which originally appeared here).
Monday, August 31, 2009
On a treadmill
This blog is mired in a serious malaise, one that at times feels terminal. Though I don't have any desire to quit, lately I have been finding it extremely difficult to finish writing posts that I begin. Part of the problem, as ever, is my tendency to link too many ideas together, resulting in so much rambling, bad writing. Just when I think I've gotten the hang of it all, I invariably hit a snag, writing slows down, ideas dry up. Or they come to me, but on the train, in whole paragraphs, good ones I'd like to think, but who can write on the train? (The Marc commuter train is not the smoothest ride in the world, and my handwriting is poor enough as it is.) And if I wrote on the train, anyway, when would I read? (Never, by the way, is the answer to that one. I don't think my reading at home this calendar year has added up to more than a few hundred pages.)
One problem, I realize, is my reluctance to just put it out there. I persist in thinking that I should have read this or that before expressing an idea. When it comes to the actual writing itself, the germ of the idea gets buried, in fact unwritten, as I bog myself down in shaping the introductory remarks or the background. A bog that weighs me down, when what I desire, what I value, is lightness. (God, I looked at my numerous posts in draft status, and there's an earlier unfinished whinge about how I can't write... I'd naturally forgotten all about it.)
All this is to say that I have a lot that I've been wanting, and failing, to say here. Here are just a few topics I hope to get around to finishing posts on in the nearish future, though I make no promises:
J.M. Coetzee (on Diary of a Bad Year, naturally, while everyone else's moving onto Summertime...)
Flannery O'Connor and politics and literature
Evelyn Scott (again)
Art and Ontology
Chomsky, an appreciation, and more
Conservatism and relational political spectrums
Modernism and post-Modernism
a line or two about Gayl Jones' Corredigora (in connection with Modernism)
ideas about primitive accumulation and lost social orders
more on Blanchot, possibly finally getting into his ideas on communism
communism as the original human, cultural state (circling back on Art and Ontology, touching on Chris Knight and Heidegger and more)
the role of play in the former, as well as in art, and what that means for us, moving forward (combining, if possible, Knight and Josipovici, among others; in truth, this feels like my main unwritten book)
One problem, I realize, is my reluctance to just put it out there. I persist in thinking that I should have read this or that before expressing an idea. When it comes to the actual writing itself, the germ of the idea gets buried, in fact unwritten, as I bog myself down in shaping the introductory remarks or the background. A bog that weighs me down, when what I desire, what I value, is lightness. (God, I looked at my numerous posts in draft status, and there's an earlier unfinished whinge about how I can't write... I'd naturally forgotten all about it.)
All this is to say that I have a lot that I've been wanting, and failing, to say here. Here are just a few topics I hope to get around to finishing posts on in the nearish future, though I make no promises:
Tuesday, July 21, 2009
Interview notice
I have a few long-ish posts awaiting my divided attention. In the meantime, over at Conversations in the Book Trade, Finn Harvor has posted an interview with me as part of his ongoing series. It will be seen that I remain, as ever, the eternal optimist. Ha!
Friday, June 12, 2009
Revisiting the Big Dalkey Get
As is traditional around here, I move from the deadly serious to the irretrievably trivial. . .
When this blog was but a month old, I posted a list of the 55 Dalkey Archive books I'd acquired a couple years previously when a friend and I took advantage of their big sale (100 books for $500). I thought it would be amusing to take another look at this list in the context of my change in focus, shifts in my reading life, and so on. At the time of the original post, I'd read 23 of the 55 books; as of today, I've read 31. But I've also discarded some of them, others are on the edge of removal, and even of those that are relatively safe, a few remain that I wish I hadn't picked.
Here is the list, with those I've read in bold and the discards crossed out:
1. Chapel Road, Louis Paul Boon
2.Rigadoon, Céline
3. Some Instructions to my Wife, Stanley Crawford
4. Storytown, Susan Daitch
5. Island People, Coleman Dowell
6. Too Much Flesh and Jabez, Coleman Dowell
7. Phosphor in Dreamland, Rikki Ducornet
8. Criers and Kibitzers, Kibitzers and Criers, Stanley Elkin
9. George Mills, Stanley Elkin
10. The Rabbi of Lud, Stanley Elkin
11. Van Gogh's Room at Arles, Stanley Elkin
12. Mrs. Ted Bliss, Stanley Elkin
13. Foreign Parts, Janice Galloway
14. Willie Masters' Lonesome Wife, William H. Gass
15. Quarantine, Juan Goytisolo
16. Blindness, Henry Green
17. Concluding, Henry Green
18. Nothing, Henry Green
19. Doting, Henry Green
20. Fire the Bastards!, Jack Green
21. The Questionnaire, Jirí Grusa
22. Flotsam & Jetsasm, Aidan Higgins
23.Crome Yellow, Aldous Huxley
24.Time Must Have a Stop, Aldous Huxley
25. A Minor Apocalypse, Tadeusz Konwicki
26.The Age of Wire and String, Ben Marcus
27. Reader's Block, David Markson
28. AVA, Carole Maso
29. The American Woman in the Chinese Hat, Carole Maso
30. Cigarettes, Harry Mathews
31. Singular Pleasures, Harry Mathews
32. 20 Lines a Day, Harry Mathews
33. The Human Country, Harry Mathews
34. The Case of the Perservering Maltese, Harry Mathews
35. Women and Men, Joseph McElroy
36. Impossible Object, Nicholas Mosley
37. The Hesperides Tree, Nicholas Mosley
38. Odile, Raymond Queneau
39. Collected Novellas, vol. 1, Arno Schmidt
40. Nobodaddy's Children, Arno Schmidt
41. Two Novels, Arno Schmidt
42. Is this what other women feel, too?, Jill Akers Seese
43. The Sky Changes, Gilbert Sorrentino
44. Imaginary Qualities of Actual Things, Gilbert Sorrentino
45. Mulligan Stew, Gilbert Sorrentino
46. Pack of Lies, Gilbert Sorrentino
47. Blue Pastoral, Gilbert Sorrentino
48. Under the Shadow, Gilbert Sorrentino
49. Something Said, Gilbert Sorrentino
50. The Making of Americans, Gertrude Stein
51. Annihilation, Piotr Szewc
52. Monstrous Possibility, Curtis White
53. Miss MacIntosh, My Darling, vol. one, Marguerite Young
54. Miss MacIntosh, My Darling, vol. two, Marguerite Young
55. Marguerite Young, Our Darling, Miriam Fuchs, ed.
With 31 books read and four discarded, that leaves 20 books. Why did I get rid of the four? Well, the real question is, why did I pick two Aldous Huxley books?!? I've never read anything by Huxley, including Brave New World. At the time of the purchase, I was smack in the middle of what I have been calling my "days of despair", but the period wasn't always despairing. I believed in the virtue of diverse reading, an expansive view of what constituted literature, of what I thought I wanted to read. (I'm not saying I don't now believe in diversity, but my approach is markedly different.) I also had--still have--a tendency to read the less famous book(s) by an author first. This has paid off handsomely in many cases, but it has its pitfalls. One of which is making you not want to read the more famous book at all. Anyway, this is partly what happened with Huxley. I figured I'd read Brave New World at some point, and, hey, Point Counter Point was also on that Modern Library list, so... It is in this spirit that I'd acquired a used (Dalkey) copy of the latter, and included the other two Huxleys as part of my selection in the big purchase. I suppose I should have paid more attention to my previous passes at the first page of Brave New World. In retrospect, I realize that I found the prose unreadable at worst, uninteresting at best. It turns out the same is true of these other Huxleys. Nothing interesting about the prose at all. Off they go. (I'm sure I could elaborate some more, but these are books I've not read and will not read, right?)
I'm not surprised I included the Ben Marcus volume in my pick, but after several attempts at reading this book, I decided that I simply couldn't. I couldn't make sense of it at all, nor did I relish the work needed to unpack its mysteries. Away!
As for Céline, here is another case where I should have read the more famous book(s) first before acquiring any others. I've kept my copy of Journey to the End of Night (a New Directions book, of course), so I may yet read it, even though my early passes at it have not kept my interest. And Rigadoon, and all the other Céline books I've looked at, is much the same. The style looks irritating. I know writers I admire have sworn by Céline, but I just don't care. (I still think that Death on the Installment Plan is a first-rate title, however.) Sold!
Ok, that accounts for the four discards; what about the remaining 20? One book in particular is on the chopping block: Joseph McElroy's Women and Men. Read my earlier Dalkey post for remarks about McElroy and this book. Here, I'll just say that this mammoth novel survives only because I hope to read some of the sections explicitly mentioned by Garth Risk Halberg in his year-end post (and comment) at The Millions. If those sections don't work for me, it's gone.
Others: Unexpectedly, I've been unable to make it through William H. Gass' (incredibly short) Willie Masters' Lonesome Wife. Gass is one of my favorite writers, but this book is rather too cute (Gass plays here with fonts and type sizes and the shapes of words and I don't think it's nearly as interesting as he does). I've tried several times to read Goytisolo's Quarantine. This novel is also short, but the writing strikes me as vague and unfruitfully obscure. I'll give it another pass, but if I can't make it through, it'll have to go. I wish I hadn't selected Jack Green's Fire the Bastards!, if only because I don't think I care enough about the shittiness of newspaper reviews, or even the review reception of Gaddis' The Recognitions, more than 50 years on. I still expect to read one of the Dowell books and the Aidan Higgins (a collection I began but never finished for no good reason). Carole Maso's AVA is in the current TBR pile. She's always a keeper, but she requires slowness and attention I don't always have to give (plus, I wanted to have read some Beckett before reading it, which I now have). I'm sort of out of my Nicholas Mosley phase, so The Hesperides Tree has languished and isn't likely to be read anytime soon. The lone remaining unread Stanley Elkin book on my shelves, the three novellas making up Van Gogh's Room at Arles, will get read. Elkin's another favorite, but I just haven't been in an Elkin place in the last couple of years. Same with Sorrentino. I was mildly disappointed in his Mulligan Stew (still a very funny book), and that may have put me off reading Pack of Lies and Blue Pastoral. But also I simply wasn't there. I sort of wish I hadn't included the Curtis White (non-fiction) book, but it's slim enough and probably not without interest, so I imagine I will read it. Arno Schmidt...it was the over-the-moon enthusiasm of The Complete Review that moved Schmidt onto my radar. I'd had some good success with Complete Review recommendations up till then, but since then I've become aware that my tastes are very different, so I wonder if the Schmidt selections (three of them! how insane am I?) were a mistake. I've thought about trying one or more of them a few times, but the layout of the words on the page is odd enough to have distracted me. I wasn't up for it. Two of these books are hardcovers and thus very expensive, so if I decide to sell, who knows, I may do OK on them. But I still hope to give them a decent chance. (Meanwhile, I've seen very few references to Schmidt anywhere outside The Complete Review. I'm not sure if that tells me much of anything.)
That leaves Gertrude Stein's The Making of Americans and Marguerite Young's two-volume Miss MacIntosh, My Darling (plus the small critical volume about Young and her book; I probably didn't need this book either). I leave these for the end because of their length, their perceived difficulty, and the fact that both writers were women. We think of men as being the writers of difficult literature, do we not? I certainly do, I have to admit. One clear exception is Gertrude Stein, who is famously difficult, in particular The Making of Americans. Marguerite Young's enormous novel doesn't appear to be difficult to read, at the level of the sentence or paragraph, but it does appear to be hugely ambitious. With either book, I will need to psyche myself up for a serious attempt at a reading that does justice to the material.
Interestingly, when I took part in this big purchase, I was madly in love with the Dalkey Archive. To me, it was the ideal press: attractive books, excellent mission, and a massive stable of interesting books by underappreciated authors. My opinion has shifted. It still is all those things, and I still think it's an exemplary publisher. But its considerable focus on the self-consciously experimental or post-modern, however one chooses to define those terms, is, let's say, not quite in line with what I want from literature anymore, what I think is valuable or interesting about it. But of course that's what this blog is about, when it's about literature, so I won't expand on the point here.
When this blog was but a month old, I posted a list of the 55 Dalkey Archive books I'd acquired a couple years previously when a friend and I took advantage of their big sale (100 books for $500). I thought it would be amusing to take another look at this list in the context of my change in focus, shifts in my reading life, and so on. At the time of the original post, I'd read 23 of the 55 books; as of today, I've read 31. But I've also discarded some of them, others are on the edge of removal, and even of those that are relatively safe, a few remain that I wish I hadn't picked.
Here is the list, with those I've read in bold and the discards crossed out:
1. Chapel Road, Louis Paul Boon
2.
3. Some Instructions to my Wife, Stanley Crawford
4. Storytown, Susan Daitch
5. Island People, Coleman Dowell
6. Too Much Flesh and Jabez, Coleman Dowell
7. Phosphor in Dreamland, Rikki Ducornet
8. Criers and Kibitzers, Kibitzers and Criers, Stanley Elkin
9. George Mills, Stanley Elkin
10. The Rabbi of Lud, Stanley Elkin
11. Van Gogh's Room at Arles, Stanley Elkin
12. Mrs. Ted Bliss, Stanley Elkin
13. Foreign Parts, Janice Galloway
14. Willie Masters' Lonesome Wife, William H. Gass
15. Quarantine, Juan Goytisolo
16. Blindness, Henry Green
17. Concluding, Henry Green
18. Nothing, Henry Green
19. Doting, Henry Green
20. Fire the Bastards!, Jack Green
21. The Questionnaire, Jirí Grusa
22. Flotsam & Jetsasm, Aidan Higgins
23.
24.
25. A Minor Apocalypse, Tadeusz Konwicki
26.
27. Reader's Block, David Markson
28. AVA, Carole Maso
29. The American Woman in the Chinese Hat, Carole Maso
30. Cigarettes, Harry Mathews
31. Singular Pleasures, Harry Mathews
32. 20 Lines a Day, Harry Mathews
33. The Human Country, Harry Mathews
34. The Case of the Perservering Maltese, Harry Mathews
35. Women and Men, Joseph McElroy
36. Impossible Object, Nicholas Mosley
37. The Hesperides Tree, Nicholas Mosley
38. Odile, Raymond Queneau
39. Collected Novellas, vol. 1, Arno Schmidt
40. Nobodaddy's Children, Arno Schmidt
41. Two Novels, Arno Schmidt
42. Is this what other women feel, too?, Jill Akers Seese
43. The Sky Changes, Gilbert Sorrentino
44. Imaginary Qualities of Actual Things, Gilbert Sorrentino
45. Mulligan Stew, Gilbert Sorrentino
46. Pack of Lies, Gilbert Sorrentino
47. Blue Pastoral, Gilbert Sorrentino
48. Under the Shadow, Gilbert Sorrentino
49. Something Said, Gilbert Sorrentino
50. The Making of Americans, Gertrude Stein
51. Annihilation, Piotr Szewc
52. Monstrous Possibility, Curtis White
53. Miss MacIntosh, My Darling, vol. one, Marguerite Young
54. Miss MacIntosh, My Darling, vol. two, Marguerite Young
55. Marguerite Young, Our Darling, Miriam Fuchs, ed.
With 31 books read and four discarded, that leaves 20 books. Why did I get rid of the four? Well, the real question is, why did I pick two Aldous Huxley books?!? I've never read anything by Huxley, including Brave New World. At the time of the purchase, I was smack in the middle of what I have been calling my "days of despair", but the period wasn't always despairing. I believed in the virtue of diverse reading, an expansive view of what constituted literature, of what I thought I wanted to read. (I'm not saying I don't now believe in diversity, but my approach is markedly different.) I also had--still have--a tendency to read the less famous book(s) by an author first. This has paid off handsomely in many cases, but it has its pitfalls. One of which is making you not want to read the more famous book at all. Anyway, this is partly what happened with Huxley. I figured I'd read Brave New World at some point, and, hey, Point Counter Point was also on that Modern Library list, so... It is in this spirit that I'd acquired a used (Dalkey) copy of the latter, and included the other two Huxleys as part of my selection in the big purchase. I suppose I should have paid more attention to my previous passes at the first page of Brave New World. In retrospect, I realize that I found the prose unreadable at worst, uninteresting at best. It turns out the same is true of these other Huxleys. Nothing interesting about the prose at all. Off they go. (I'm sure I could elaborate some more, but these are books I've not read and will not read, right?)
I'm not surprised I included the Ben Marcus volume in my pick, but after several attempts at reading this book, I decided that I simply couldn't. I couldn't make sense of it at all, nor did I relish the work needed to unpack its mysteries. Away!
As for Céline, here is another case where I should have read the more famous book(s) first before acquiring any others. I've kept my copy of Journey to the End of Night (a New Directions book, of course), so I may yet read it, even though my early passes at it have not kept my interest. And Rigadoon, and all the other Céline books I've looked at, is much the same. The style looks irritating. I know writers I admire have sworn by Céline, but I just don't care. (I still think that Death on the Installment Plan is a first-rate title, however.) Sold!
Ok, that accounts for the four discards; what about the remaining 20? One book in particular is on the chopping block: Joseph McElroy's Women and Men. Read my earlier Dalkey post for remarks about McElroy and this book. Here, I'll just say that this mammoth novel survives only because I hope to read some of the sections explicitly mentioned by Garth Risk Halberg in his year-end post (and comment) at The Millions. If those sections don't work for me, it's gone.
Others: Unexpectedly, I've been unable to make it through William H. Gass' (incredibly short) Willie Masters' Lonesome Wife. Gass is one of my favorite writers, but this book is rather too cute (Gass plays here with fonts and type sizes and the shapes of words and I don't think it's nearly as interesting as he does). I've tried several times to read Goytisolo's Quarantine. This novel is also short, but the writing strikes me as vague and unfruitfully obscure. I'll give it another pass, but if I can't make it through, it'll have to go. I wish I hadn't selected Jack Green's Fire the Bastards!, if only because I don't think I care enough about the shittiness of newspaper reviews, or even the review reception of Gaddis' The Recognitions, more than 50 years on. I still expect to read one of the Dowell books and the Aidan Higgins (a collection I began but never finished for no good reason). Carole Maso's AVA is in the current TBR pile. She's always a keeper, but she requires slowness and attention I don't always have to give (plus, I wanted to have read some Beckett before reading it, which I now have). I'm sort of out of my Nicholas Mosley phase, so The Hesperides Tree has languished and isn't likely to be read anytime soon. The lone remaining unread Stanley Elkin book on my shelves, the three novellas making up Van Gogh's Room at Arles, will get read. Elkin's another favorite, but I just haven't been in an Elkin place in the last couple of years. Same with Sorrentino. I was mildly disappointed in his Mulligan Stew (still a very funny book), and that may have put me off reading Pack of Lies and Blue Pastoral. But also I simply wasn't there. I sort of wish I hadn't included the Curtis White (non-fiction) book, but it's slim enough and probably not without interest, so I imagine I will read it. Arno Schmidt...it was the over-the-moon enthusiasm of The Complete Review that moved Schmidt onto my radar. I'd had some good success with Complete Review recommendations up till then, but since then I've become aware that my tastes are very different, so I wonder if the Schmidt selections (three of them! how insane am I?) were a mistake. I've thought about trying one or more of them a few times, but the layout of the words on the page is odd enough to have distracted me. I wasn't up for it. Two of these books are hardcovers and thus very expensive, so if I decide to sell, who knows, I may do OK on them. But I still hope to give them a decent chance. (Meanwhile, I've seen very few references to Schmidt anywhere outside The Complete Review. I'm not sure if that tells me much of anything.)
That leaves Gertrude Stein's The Making of Americans and Marguerite Young's two-volume Miss MacIntosh, My Darling (plus the small critical volume about Young and her book; I probably didn't need this book either). I leave these for the end because of their length, their perceived difficulty, and the fact that both writers were women. We think of men as being the writers of difficult literature, do we not? I certainly do, I have to admit. One clear exception is Gertrude Stein, who is famously difficult, in particular The Making of Americans. Marguerite Young's enormous novel doesn't appear to be difficult to read, at the level of the sentence or paragraph, but it does appear to be hugely ambitious. With either book, I will need to psyche myself up for a serious attempt at a reading that does justice to the material.
Interestingly, when I took part in this big purchase, I was madly in love with the Dalkey Archive. To me, it was the ideal press: attractive books, excellent mission, and a massive stable of interesting books by underappreciated authors. My opinion has shifted. It still is all those things, and I still think it's an exemplary publisher. But its considerable focus on the self-consciously experimental or post-modern, however one chooses to define those terms, is, let's say, not quite in line with what I want from literature anymore, what I think is valuable or interesting about it. But of course that's what this blog is about, when it's about literature, so I won't expand on the point here.
Wednesday, April 15, 2009
"And it's hard to explain what I was doin' or thinkin' before you"
I've written some here about how my interests have evolved over the years and have occasionally wondered at the time lost when I was younger. How they've evolved beyond "interests" in my mind to now being crucial areas of study and writing and politics. Naturally, what I read has influenced this development, as have blogs, including some that are over my head, introducing me to writers and thinkers and concepts, as well as threads leading from one book to the next.
But the truth of the matter is that the major influence in my evolving approach to things has been Aimée, my beautiful and brilliant wife and my best friend. In our life together, I have learned more about what it is that I want and believe than I ever knew or understood before, and Aimée is a big and necessary part of that. Partly this is simply through engagement with her on an intellectual and emotional level. Aimée is very intelligent and passionate and can argue with the best of them. Unlike me, she has some grounding in philosophy and political theory. She also comes out of an activist background. (So she was in this sense both more theoretical and more practical than me. Ha!) I'm still the same person, but I'm more fully who I am than I ever was before. Her encouragement has been crucial (she encouraged me to start this blog, for one). I'd had encouragement before, of course, from friends and family, and I don't wish to deny it. But it turns out that the kind of love and trust we share was something that was necessary for me to be able to recognize my own self, and to be able to embrace and think about and write about the uncertainties.
I can wallow in my frustration at all the lost or seemingly wasted time, when I could have been doing this or that. I can and do complain about not having sufficient time now to read what I want to read and to write and think about it. And it's true that much of what takes away from my current time reading and writing is my responsibilities to her and to our daughter Mirah. It might be easy, when frustrated, to imagine having that time and not having those responsibilities. But of course these are not mere responsibilities, but the joys of my life. And, in fact, not only would I not be the same person pursuing these interests were it not for Aimée, not only would those interests not be the same, since they have developed and evolved in large part within the crucible of our relationship, but those interests take on added importance and urgency because of her presence in my life and because of Mirah.
Today is our third wedding anniversary. It's hard for us to believe that three years have already gone by--or indeed nearly five years since we met--but at the same time, it seems as if we've been together forever (in the good sense). We've been struggling with balancing our time together since Mirah was born eight months ago (also: !). And lately the major part of that struggle has been with sleep, lack of which has affected us both negatively. It can be easy to lose sight of each other through this kind of thing, and we've been sort of on hiatus in recent weeks especially as Mirah's sleep has been particularly bad. (Happily, it appears that things are finally getting better on that front.) I can't imagine my life without Aimée, and I can't imagine me without Aimée.
Happy Anniversary Aimée!
But the truth of the matter is that the major influence in my evolving approach to things has been Aimée, my beautiful and brilliant wife and my best friend. In our life together, I have learned more about what it is that I want and believe than I ever knew or understood before, and Aimée is a big and necessary part of that. Partly this is simply through engagement with her on an intellectual and emotional level. Aimée is very intelligent and passionate and can argue with the best of them. Unlike me, she has some grounding in philosophy and political theory. She also comes out of an activist background. (So she was in this sense both more theoretical and more practical than me. Ha!) I'm still the same person, but I'm more fully who I am than I ever was before. Her encouragement has been crucial (she encouraged me to start this blog, for one). I'd had encouragement before, of course, from friends and family, and I don't wish to deny it. But it turns out that the kind of love and trust we share was something that was necessary for me to be able to recognize my own self, and to be able to embrace and think about and write about the uncertainties.
I can wallow in my frustration at all the lost or seemingly wasted time, when I could have been doing this or that. I can and do complain about not having sufficient time now to read what I want to read and to write and think about it. And it's true that much of what takes away from my current time reading and writing is my responsibilities to her and to our daughter Mirah. It might be easy, when frustrated, to imagine having that time and not having those responsibilities. But of course these are not mere responsibilities, but the joys of my life. And, in fact, not only would I not be the same person pursuing these interests were it not for Aimée, not only would those interests not be the same, since they have developed and evolved in large part within the crucible of our relationship, but those interests take on added importance and urgency because of her presence in my life and because of Mirah.
Today is our third wedding anniversary. It's hard for us to believe that three years have already gone by--or indeed nearly five years since we met--but at the same time, it seems as if we've been together forever (in the good sense). We've been struggling with balancing our time together since Mirah was born eight months ago (also: !). And lately the major part of that struggle has been with sleep, lack of which has affected us both negatively. It can be easy to lose sight of each other through this kind of thing, and we've been sort of on hiatus in recent weeks especially as Mirah's sleep has been particularly bad. (Happily, it appears that things are finally getting better on that front.) I can't imagine my life without Aimée, and I can't imagine me without Aimée.
Happy Anniversary Aimée!
Thursday, February 12, 2009
Top Albums of 2008 - A Comprehensive Survey
. . . and my favorite albums released in 2008 are:
1. Gang Gang Dance, Saint Dymphna
2. Juana Molina, Un Dia
3. Matmos, Supreme Balloon
4. The Mountain Goats, Heretic Pride
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
Hm. Right. Turns out these are the only four I have! The first three would have been contenders for a real top ten or twenty list, if only I'd listened to any new music last year, whereas Heretic Pride is the least essential Mountain Goats record ever. Which is not to say it's the worst, or even bad, but it feels decidedly unnecessary.
I post this half-list to highlight the change in my attitude towards music, including its relative absence on the blog over the last year-plus, as noted. This change might be worth investigating. I have a huge amount of music at my disposal. More than 2400 cds (down from a high of over 2700), more than 12,000 songs on the iPod. A few years ago I was averaging 250 cd purchases per year. Of course this is insane. There is no way to absorb such a quantity of music. I was vaguely conscious of this at the time of my greatest indulgence, but something was driving me, an urge, an obsession, a fear that I would miss out on something, not necessarily on something cool or hip or whatever, but something that I felt I needed, something that would be just around the corner, in the next batch, the next new cd or three, some sound that would hit me just right, something.
I'd hit a fruitful vein. Starting with a purchase of Built to Spill's then-new Keep it Like A Secret in 1999, when I truly encountered indie and the underground, I went nuts. I'd missed a lot, for one thing, and I wanted to catch up and, worse, keep up. And I could afford to. I was, at the time, flush. Lucky me. So I consumed. I bought in huge quantities. I wasn't exactly indiscriminate--I didn't buy everything--though in a sense I was, within a highly discriminating range. If something seemed like my kind of thing, I didn't hesitate. If there was buzz around an interesting sounding cd, I was on it. Pretty soon, though I had a lot of fun, I felt obligated to keep it going, this amassing of a library, this consumption, this keeping up. Eventually, much of the fun was sucked out of it. I'd already slowed down massively before I met Aimée, after which I was confronted with the basic truth that I had too much music to listen to. And that I no longer had the time to simply sit around listening to music. I fretted about this a bit, after all I had all of these cds, surely I should be using them. Plus, I still felt the need to keep abreast of new music, to keep up with the conversation, reading the music blogs. As noted by Scott at Pretty Goes With Pretty recently, most of the prominent music blogs are written by professional music critics. So attempting to keep up with a conversation with people who get most if not all of their music for free is a fool's game, a prescription for massive debt. And yet I felt compelled to do so.
Then, almost suddenly, there was a release, a great release of pressure. With a baby on the way--before this really, but it's a convenient enough time marker--I had to face up to the fact that I could no longer afford to buy new cds. And I had to acknowledge that I couldn't keep my beloved wall of cds continually on display in our tiny house. So I began systematically, as well as arbitrarily, selling some off; I decided I could only acquire new music if I got it on store credit. Finally, I put 85% of the rest of the collection in storage. As the year wore on, I still checked in with some of the music blogs, had a general idea what the big records were, even downloaded some tracks here and there, but by the end of the year, when the big best-of lists were announced, I noticed both how drab the music seemed and how little I cared. More to the point, I found that I liked that I didn't care.
I have more to say on this, touching on consumption, over-availability of cultural products, and so on, and how all of this actually contributed to the diminishment of music as a topic of interest, for writing or otherwise, but I'll leave that for another post.
(Oh, yeah, I do have Animal Collective's new album, Meriweather Post Pavilion. It's taken me a few listens to adjust to it, but I think it's phenomenal--I'm particularly partial to "Summertime Clothes" and "Brother Sport". Part of me still mourns the path not taken, from the Here Comes the Indian days, but no one does what they do, and what they do is beautiful and amazing.)
1. Gang Gang Dance, Saint Dymphna
2. Juana Molina, Un Dia
3. Matmos, Supreme Balloon
4. The Mountain Goats, Heretic Pride
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
Hm. Right. Turns out these are the only four I have! The first three would have been contenders for a real top ten or twenty list, if only I'd listened to any new music last year, whereas Heretic Pride is the least essential Mountain Goats record ever. Which is not to say it's the worst, or even bad, but it feels decidedly unnecessary.
I post this half-list to highlight the change in my attitude towards music, including its relative absence on the blog over the last year-plus, as noted. This change might be worth investigating. I have a huge amount of music at my disposal. More than 2400 cds (down from a high of over 2700), more than 12,000 songs on the iPod. A few years ago I was averaging 250 cd purchases per year. Of course this is insane. There is no way to absorb such a quantity of music. I was vaguely conscious of this at the time of my greatest indulgence, but something was driving me, an urge, an obsession, a fear that I would miss out on something, not necessarily on something cool or hip or whatever, but something that I felt I needed, something that would be just around the corner, in the next batch, the next new cd or three, some sound that would hit me just right, something.
I'd hit a fruitful vein. Starting with a purchase of Built to Spill's then-new Keep it Like A Secret in 1999, when I truly encountered indie and the underground, I went nuts. I'd missed a lot, for one thing, and I wanted to catch up and, worse, keep up. And I could afford to. I was, at the time, flush. Lucky me. So I consumed. I bought in huge quantities. I wasn't exactly indiscriminate--I didn't buy everything--though in a sense I was, within a highly discriminating range. If something seemed like my kind of thing, I didn't hesitate. If there was buzz around an interesting sounding cd, I was on it. Pretty soon, though I had a lot of fun, I felt obligated to keep it going, this amassing of a library, this consumption, this keeping up. Eventually, much of the fun was sucked out of it. I'd already slowed down massively before I met Aimée, after which I was confronted with the basic truth that I had too much music to listen to. And that I no longer had the time to simply sit around listening to music. I fretted about this a bit, after all I had all of these cds, surely I should be using them. Plus, I still felt the need to keep abreast of new music, to keep up with the conversation, reading the music blogs. As noted by Scott at Pretty Goes With Pretty recently, most of the prominent music blogs are written by professional music critics. So attempting to keep up with a conversation with people who get most if not all of their music for free is a fool's game, a prescription for massive debt. And yet I felt compelled to do so.
Then, almost suddenly, there was a release, a great release of pressure. With a baby on the way--before this really, but it's a convenient enough time marker--I had to face up to the fact that I could no longer afford to buy new cds. And I had to acknowledge that I couldn't keep my beloved wall of cds continually on display in our tiny house. So I began systematically, as well as arbitrarily, selling some off; I decided I could only acquire new music if I got it on store credit. Finally, I put 85% of the rest of the collection in storage. As the year wore on, I still checked in with some of the music blogs, had a general idea what the big records were, even downloaded some tracks here and there, but by the end of the year, when the big best-of lists were announced, I noticed both how drab the music seemed and how little I cared. More to the point, I found that I liked that I didn't care.
I have more to say on this, touching on consumption, over-availability of cultural products, and so on, and how all of this actually contributed to the diminishment of music as a topic of interest, for writing or otherwise, but I'll leave that for another post.
(Oh, yeah, I do have Animal Collective's new album, Meriweather Post Pavilion. It's taken me a few listens to adjust to it, but I think it's phenomenal--I'm particularly partial to "Summertime Clothes" and "Brother Sport". Part of me still mourns the path not taken, from the Here Comes the Indian days, but no one does what they do, and what they do is beautiful and amazing.)
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