Petty vandal as wandering monk.

I'm blogging on The Mountain Goats' new album All Eternals Deck until I feel like stopping.

I love the arrangement on "High Hawk Season."

The Mountain Goats have large bagful of songs about kids who are coming to feel fully alive through misdemeanors and, sometimes, felonies. This appears to be one such song: the kid in question appears to be a graffiti artist in the Bronx. But I hear -- and this may not be accurate -- an almost medieval intonation in the three-part vocal accompaniment, and I really like the idea of petty-vandal-as-wandering-monk. It's a man, a guitar, and his small trio of singers. I like it, especially when the trio emphasizes the words of the refrain, by repetition, by singing along, or by falling silent.

Which brings me to a point I want to make about the arrangements in general.

The first time I saw the Mountain Goats -- it was not long enough ago for me to be snobbish about anything -- the band was just guitar and bass; the second time was a solo show. A week and a half ago, I saw the full band for the first time: guitar, bass, keys, and drums. Some people seem to hate the full band, but my position's not so extreme. I would punch a dog* for the chance to play with the guys in that band, so I can't fault the band for expanding. And the lineup works really well in the studio, when the vocals can be placed at the right level in the mix. But at the live show, both the keys and the drums competed with the vocals, and made it that much harder to appreciate unfamiliar song. On the other hand, I really enjoyed the full-band versions of songs I knew by heart, like "Jeff Davis County Blues. Oh, and they did a great job on "Broom People," too.

As much as I love Jon Wurster's drumming, I've got a mild preference for the old guitar-and-bass shows. Peter Hughes's bass lines add a lot from a musical perspective, but without ever fighting the vocals. They're like great counterpoints that just happen to hit the root note on the important beats.

*Not really.

Why we tweet like we do.

Alan Jacobs, after considering the way in which knowledge of the Bible permeated every part of Victorian culture:

Today, it seems to me, there is no such truly common cultural currency. Instead, there is currency shared among small groups of initiates into certain mysteries, often meant to exclude others as much as to include the like-minded. This is what song lyrics and South Park quotes are for, after all.

When it comes to dropping unexplained references in hopes of picking out fellow insiders, I'm a great sinner, if not the chief. (My only Google Chat status that doesn't fall under this indictment is "lunchtime.") But I suppose another somewhat less plausible -- but surely not impossible -- motivation would be to try to provide your friends little moments of wonder at the unfamiliar.

Sleepless.

I'm blogging on The Mountain Goats' new album All Eternals Deck until I feel like stopping.

Here's a verse from "Beautiful Gas Mask" about castles and kings:

we hold hands and we jump
and as we fall we sing
paupers hammering the walls of the castle
going to meet the king

And here's one from "Age of Kings," about which I wrote two days ago.

halls of the stone tower in the foothills
why should we hide from anyone
held you in my arms for the first time that day
felt like god's anointed when you didn't push me away
gold light shining on so many things
in the age of kings

And here's an instruction not to sleep in the refrain of "Beautiful Gas Mask":

never sleep, remember to breathe deep
never sleep, remember to breathe, breathe deep

The refrain of "High Hawk Season," which I'll write about tomorrow:

rise if you're sleeping, stay awake
we are young supernovas and the heat's about to break

All Eternals Deck is not a concept album in the sense that all the songs are all about a particular place or group of people, but it's stuff like this -- the image of kings, injunctions not to sleep -- that seems to give the lyrics some thematic cohesion. On the other hand, could John Darnielle's way of writing give you similar connections across any random collection of his songs? Anyways, catching these cross-references is changing my initial impression of the album as a tad disjointed.

Euclid versus origami.

In 1936 Margherita Piazzolla Beloch, an Italian mathematician at the University of Ferrera, published a paper that proved that starting with a length L on a piece of paper, she could fold a length that was the cube root of L. She may not have realized it at the time, but this meant that origami could solve the problem given to the Greeks at Delos, where the Oracle demanded that the Athenians double the volume of a cube. [...] It also followed from Beloch's proof that any angle can be trisected--and this cracked the second great unsolvable problem of antiquity. Beloch's paper, however, remained in obscurity for decades, until in the 1970s the math world began to take origami seriously.

[...]

As it turns out, origami is more versatile than a ruler and compass, for example, in constructing the regular polygons. Euclid was able to draw an equilateral triangle, square, pentagon, and hexagon, but recall that the heptagon (which has seven sides) and the nonagon (nine) eluded him. Origami can fold heptagons and nonagons relatively easily, although it meets its mach with the 11-agon.

-Alex Bellos, Here's Looking at Euclid: A Surprising Excursion Through the Astonishing World of Math. New York: Free Press, 2010. (67)

This is a fine example of how deeply metaphors can be buried in human inquiry. The methods of geometry we learned in high school were mostly derived from Euclid, and the basic tools of Euclidean geometry assumed you could (1) draw connections between fixed points and (2) draw circles from two fixed points, using one as the center and letting the distance to the other provide the radius. Though by Euclid's time, this approach had been extended into three-dimensional space, it assumed a similar mathematical tool set and kept the idea of constructions against a fixed background.

Origami math adds folding, and thereby gains a really powerful tool. The mathematicians who followed the Greeks were stumped by three problems, two of which Bellos references above. But as a refresher, the problems were:

1. circle squaring: given a circle, use a compass and straightedge to construct a square with the same area
2. cube duplication: given a cube, use compass-straightedge methods to construct a cube with exactly twice the volume (note that since V = length * width * height, doubling the edges of the cube give you a second cube that is eight times as large)
3. angle trisection: given an angle, use a compass and straightedge to divide the angle into three equal parts (note that bisecting an angle is easy)

Had the earliest Greek mathematicians been interested in folding things rather than drawing on the ground or on walls, who knows what techniques they might have come up with? I'm not necessarily wishing that things had been otherwise; the efforts to solve these three problems -- and eventually to prove that no compass-straightedge solutions were possible -- led us to techniques far more powerful than folding. Perhaps having three problems that seem simple but are in fact unsolvable stokes curiosity in a particular way.

But on the other hand, it turns out that trisecting an angle is really, really simple when you're folding. It's like our civilization spent two thousand years looking for our keys or something.

“The Autopsy Garland”

I'm blogging on The Mountain Goats' new album All Eternals Deck until I feel like stopping.

First: “Ah, that's a decent sound. Acoustic and ominous. That second verse is quite eerie. I like that little high trill that you hear sometimes.”

Then: “Hard to tell what this is about. London and Hollywood? What's an autopsy garland? No flowers in mortuary, right? But… ‘look west from London toward the Emerald City’?”

And: “Umm… Judy Garland??”

~~~~~

That's the process, more or less. It hits your brain like a joke, and now I can add Judy Garland to Prince Far I, Dinu Lipatti, Pinklon Thomas, and many others on the list of people I'll always take special interest in because of a Mountain Goats song.

Subterranean apical buds.

“The great tactic of the grasses is to keep their growing tip, the apical bud, below the surface of the ground so that it is not destroyed by grazing animals—and, in fact, grasses, in contrast to all other plants, positively gain from being grazed and grow rank if they are left alone. To find a way of benefiting from the attentions of the predators that come to eat you is a trick indeed; and it explains why the world's grasslands, basically created by members of the single family Poaceae, are almost as extensive worldwide as the world's forests, which contain many thousands of species in scores of families.”

-Colin Tudge, The Tree: A Natural History of What Trees Are, How They Live, and Why They Matter. New York: Crown Publishers, 2006. (135)

Gold light shining on so many things.

I'm blogging on The Mountain Goats' new album All Eternals Deck until I feel like stopping.

I wish I had more to write about "Age of Kings." It reminds me of the album Get Lonely, which I love. And the string lines in the bridge are good. But I'm not in a nostalgic mode so much these days. But somewhere out there, this song must be ripping someone's guts out.

Out in the yard.

I'm blogging on The Mountain Goats' new album All Eternals Deck until I feel like stopping.

I. From Raymond Carver's "Why Don't You Dance?":

Weeks later, she said: "The guy was about middle-aged. All his things right there in his yard. No lie. We got real pissed and danced. In the driveway. Oh, my God. Don't laugh. He played us these records. Look at this record-player. The old guy gave it to us. All these crappy records. Will you look at this shit?"

II. From The Mountain Goats' "Estate Sale Sign":

crude little wooden idols and aviator shades
the trinkets and the treasures we brought back from the crusades
some guy in an impala shakes his head when he rides by
but i remember when we shared a vision, you and i

III. The trailer for "Everything Must Go," which is ostensibly an adaptation of (I):



IV. Another Mountain Goats reference to the Chevy Impala, which suggests that, of American-made cars, the Impala is the most evocative:

once a week i make the drive
two hours east to check the
austin post office box
and i take the detour
through our old neighborhood
see all the
chevy impalas
in their front yard up on blocks

-from "Source Decay"

V. A Chevrolet Impala:

An uninvited guest.

I'm blogging on The Mountain Goats' new album All Eternals Deck until I feel like stopping.

I will say right away that I can't quite figure out "Birth of Serpents." I'm not enough of a superfan to scour the internet for interpretations, and since no inspiration has struck, I've got no narrative to put together the bits about photography with the apparent reference to the story of Jacob and Esau ("clutch your birthright in your fist"), nor am I sure how the snakes fit in.

But: ". . . see that young man who dwells inside his body like an uninvited guest."

In Walker Percy's Love in the Ruins, which is ultimately a little too weird and didactic for me to recommend, there is a part where a young man comes to the protagonist, who is a psychologist, for an evaluation. The young man's problem is that he can't, you know, perform his marital duties. The main character advises him to make his way home by going straight through the Louisiana swamp that lies between the office and the house. Later, we find that after the man has nearly died and has thereby put himself in a situation where he was acting more than thinking, he has no trouble doing, you know, what he needs to do. Percy maintains that the young man was too abstracted: he was living out some kind of unhealthy dualism.

I've started running again recently. And I've been pushing myself enough that I have gotten those wonderful endorphin rushes from time to time. In those moments, it's a wonder to be alive and in motion. Perhaps it's all of this happy jogging that has made me so receptive to the symposium on sports in the latest issue of The Point. (Part of one of the best essays is online.)

Several of the writers in this symposium hint at the old but good argument that the pursuit of excellence in sports makes us more at home as ourselves. It needs to be emphasized that athletics are good for us in this way when treated as active play rather than as an obligation of hygeine. In playful physicality, we're overjoyed to be bodies, not just pleased to have -- or dwell inside -- them.

Gifts of the internet.

Two things I enjoyed:

1. Alexander Pruss uses Gettier cases to suggest that "memetic" accounts of belief make moral realism impossible. This is along the lines of what I've thought about the subject, but it's quite an ingenius way of putting the matter.
2. Dr. Boli advises a reader on how to deal with the poor punning skills of modern clergypersons. Part of the answer: "It is probably pointless to protest to the minister or priest who authorized the sign; you would only be told 'I thought it was rather funny,' and against such profound ignorance of literary art there is no argument."

Some regrets, no apologies.

I'm blogging on The Mountain Goats' new album All Eternals Deck until I feel like stopping.

So there's that verse in Tom Petty's "Free Fallin'," where he sings about the valley vampires moving West on Ventura boulevard, which strikes me as the touch that made the song better than a proto-"Meet Virginia" listing of quirks and failures between some guy and girl. A few layovers in LAX aside, I've never spent any time in Los Angeles, but "Free Fallin'" more or less defines it in my imagination: a harsh reception for hopeful innocents, some regrets, no apologies, and no particular depth.



And so I'm not sure if John Darnielle had any particular geographic setting in mind for "Damn These Vampires," the opening track on All Eternals Deck, but its muscle-car-in-a-Western imagery reminds me of the vampiric Los Angeles I pieced together from Tom Petty and, later, Joss Whedon. The press materials for All Eternals Deck describe it as a sort of cartography of hope and despair, and the opening song on the album hits a really unusual admixture of the two: the narrator's fighting his way forward, for no great reason, in a terrible and destructive life someone else has put him in:

feast like pagans, never get enough
sleep like dead men, wake up like dead men
and when the sun comes try not to hate the light
someday we'll try to walk upright

crawl till dawn on my hands and knees
god damn these bite marks
deep in my arteries

crawl till dawn on my hands and knees
god damn these vampires
for what they've done to me

It's a great opening track for this album.

Starting on Jenson.

“The gospel tells about Jesus as the future, and in doing so impresses him on the hearers as a future for which they may live, calls up and evokes the coming Lord as the Lord of their present. Therefore, the gospel can never be only statements about Jesus; the gospel depends on the creative, future-evoking power of language. Of course, our ordinary language — whether of words, gestures, purely didactic pictures, or whatever — is itself more than descriptive, and will, therefore, often suffice for the telling of the gospel. But the church seeks to intensify the future-pointing power of its talk about Jesus; as a result, the church finds itself singing, rhyming, depicting, dancing, and playing his story.”

-Robert Jenson, “Language and Time.” Essays in Theology of Culture. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1995. (4)

Essays in Theology of Culture is my first attempt to get into Robert Jenson's work. So far I'm finding a lot to like.

Tarantino, honor, morality.

FLG's trying to get ahold of Tarantino's major theme as a filmmaker, and settles on "savoring the moment you have with the people around you because, well, they might kill you the next second." I don't think this is quite right. There are all sorts of reasons that Tarantino likes these strange conversations that lead up to moments of intense violence, but they're not ends in themselves. FLG's right that the juxtaposition of trivial topics and looming violence serves to raise tension to unbearable levels, but the tension is the goal, not the moments leading up to it.

And FLG's missed the other thing in Pulp Fiction, which is that the arguments -- about foot massages, or what it feels like to kill a man, or the ethics of tipping waitresses -- these conversations reveal things about the characters that explain their actions in later scenes. Tarantino's scripts are really dense in this way. (Pulp Fiction is a good read in script form.)

Tarantino's writing has always made sense to me as a study of codes of behavior. Reservior Dogs is perhaps most clear on this point: every character has a different approach to the idea of honor among thieves, and, as I said before, you can get figure out the characters' positions on honor from the conversation about tipping in the first scene, though on a first viewing it might not be clear that this is what going on. Likewise, Kill Bill focuses on codes of honor, revenge, and obligation from Asian cinema.

I'd argue (and I'm not the first to do this) that the main thing standing between Tarantino and greatness is that he's interested in film-based codes of behavior rather than morality.

Bad Lieutenant.

The A.V. Club: What did you tell [Nicolas Cage] about how to play the character?

Werner Herzog: You see, with actors, normally I don’t like to have any conversation about background and about motivations and all this. I think on the first or second day of shooting, Nicolas, who is a very shy man, came to me and said “Werner, I know you hate these kind of Lee Strasberg Actors Studio questions about motivation, but what makes him so bad? Is it the drugs? Is it Katrina? Is it his injuries?” And I said, “Yeah, well, let’s not discuss that. But there’s such a thing as the bliss of evil. Let’s go straight for that. Enjoy yourself as much as you can, doing the worst thing, the most debased and vile things, but enjoy yourself, because the audience will somehow, I hope, be in a secret conspiracy with you that sometimes we love to be vile and debased.” It’s a secret joy, and that makes it so hilarious, I think.

Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans is not a great movie, but it is amazing in its own way.

Curse of Ham.

So this is worth knowing. One of the purported Biblical justifications for slavery was the "Curse of Ham;" the idea was that all black Africans were living under an ancient curse which made it all right for white people to own them. According to a short review Mark Noll posted today at Books & Culture, the "Curse of Ham" was first specifically linked to Africa in a book published in 1498; before that, biblical commentators had only treated the passage as an explanation of serfdom as a general condition, not specifically tied to race.

Here's the upshot:

You do not have to look far today to find continuing efforts to apply the "curse of Ham" to Africans and use it as vindication for slavery. None of it is true. It has been made up out of whole cloth. It is a depressing tale from first to last.

"Cultivating our historical imagination."

Peter Wicks on liberal education:

The question of what the humanities are for has no simple answer, but if I had to sum it up in 60 seconds here is what I would say:

The best time to have a midlife crisis is in college. I don’t mean that anyone should expect to graduate feeling as if they have life all worked out, but by the time they graduate they should be in the habit of thinking seriously about what gives life meaning and value.

The humanities equip us for such reflection by cultivating our historical imagination. By studying the literature and ideas of those who came before us we learn that, like them, we are living in a particular historical period, and we come to recognize its prejudices and blind spots. We also discover that our sense of what is obvious has a history, and that what now seems obvious once seemed revolutionary. We don’t just learn to quote the great thinkers of the past; we learn that we have been quoting them without realizing it for a long time.

My favorite entry in the "Table of Dates" included in the Penguin Classics edition of Ben Jonson's Complete Poems.

"1618-19: Walks to Scotland and back; meets Drummond in Scotland."

Solitude, stillness, creativity.

A friend shared a speech that William Deresiewicz gave at Westpoint called “Solitude and Leadership.” One way to sum it up is to say that it's a defense of the value of a cultivated inner life in our times.

Strangely enough, I kept thinking of a passage from Elizabeth Gilbert's The Last American Man while I read the speech. Upon finding what I was remembering, I realized it's about something different. Here, Gilbert describes the sort of people with enough emotional fortitude to work on the mountain farm of a modern survivalist:

“But the people who thrive here—and there aren't many of them—are an interesting species. They are among the most quietly self-aware people I've ever met. They have in common a profound psychic stillness. They don't talk a lot, and they don't seek praise, but they seem confident of themselves. They are able to make themselves vessels of learning without drowning in it. It's as if they decide, when they come here, to take their fragile and sensitive self-identity, fold it up tight, tuck it away someplace safe, and promise to retrieve it two years later, when the apprenticeship will be over.” (215)

New ignorance.

In The Narnian, Alan Jacobs repeatedly recommends English Literature in the Sixteenth Century (Excluding Drama) as the best-written book by C.S. Lewis. Every other work, Jacobs says, could have used at least one more revision; English Literature in the Sixteenth Century was a scholarly work with an unusually long gestation. The introductory essay, “New Learning and New Ignorance,” is strong stuff; I recommend it to anyone who wants to see Lewis in full force. From page 26 of the 1954 edition:

“In the fourth chapter of Eothen Kinglake draws a contrast between a child reading Homer (in Pope's version) and a ‘learned commentator’. The child, he says, is ‘nearer by twenty centuries to the old Greeks’ because he is ‘not grubbing for beauties but pressing the siege’. In some ways this is a parallel to the difference between the medieval and the humanistic reader. The latter never really cares about the siege: he is too interested in literature, literature conceived almost exclusively as style, and style valued chiefly as a model for imitation.”

And, a little further, on page 27:

“Chapman's Homer might almost have been written to show that the real Homer was in that age impossible for us to assimilate. The great age of Greek influence is not the sixteenth century but the nineteenth. Shelley, Landor, Browning, Tennyson, Arnold, Ruskin, and even Morris, were all, in their different ways, more receptive of the Greek spirit than any Elizabethan.”

The whole thing is like that: a whirl of names whose work you feel you should have read, a familiar perspective on imagination and beauty freshly applied, and an utterly lucid line of argument.

(By the way, Lewis's line on the humanists is pretty similar to James Franklin's in the “Renaissance Myth” essay I mentioned last month.)

C.S. Lewis's poetry.

For Keats' Sake! has posted a few of C.S. Lewis's poems, with some commentary. If you're interested in Lewis's early dislike of T.S. Eliot, or if you want to know what Lewis thought of gnomes, it's worth reading.

Speaking of Lewis and verse, a family member gave me a copy of Alan Jacobs's biography of Lewis, The Narnian, for Christmas. Jacobs discusses poetry's power over the intellectuals of Lewis's generation; the best illustration of this comes in the context of Lewis's lifelong love for A. E. Housman's The Shropshire Lad:

When [Lewis] was about sixty he and his wife were found—by her son—weeping in the common room of their house. "Nothing's wrong, Doug," Lewis said. "We're reading the poems of A. E. Housman and they always do this to us."

Generally, the best responses my generation can summon for verse are genial admiration and contemplative silence; I only know one or two people who admit to ever having wept over poetry.