Bel Canto Notes; Cacophony and Terrorism

Hello all (and mostly Dr. Reimer, since he will probably be the only person reading this)! 

Since I had to leave school early to fight fire, I wrote these notes on my reactions to Bel Canto. I am writing this on my iPhone since I am out working in the mountains with a couple bars of 3G, so forgive any grammatical mistakes. 

The term bel canto literally means "beautiful singing."  And upon further review of a Wikipedia article about this term, I came to find out that this term was originally applied in the 17th century to refer to sophisticated singing dwelling mostly in the realms of opera or sacred song. The term underwent a series of applications throughout the following centuries, and now, in the 21st century, is "used nostalgically to evoke a lost singing tradition." 

So how does this apply to Ann Patchett's novel? 

First, one must do some research on the Lima Crisis, on which the book is based. I read a series of Google Scholar findings on this event, and mostly what I came up with was that the Lima Crisis occurred in 1996 when MRTA (Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement--a Marxist revolutionary group in Peru) took hundreds of important figures hostage; this event--the Lima Crisis--is also called the Japanese embassy hostage crisis because it occurred at the residence of the Japanese ambassador (in Peru), Morihisa Aoki. The hostages were freed in 1997 by Peruvian armed forces, and the President of Peru (Alberto Fujimori) was given most of the credit for their release. 

Since then, a number of allegations and reports have emerged that the insurgents (MRTA) were executed after surrendering. It is important to note that the act of terrorism was mostly instigated so that MRTA could demand amnesty in order to participate in life among normal (non-commando) citizens. They also demanded better conditions in jails. 

This event has sparked many a discussion apropos amnesty, execution, terrorism, and the rights of jailed individuals. 

The plot of Bel Canto is essentially described above, except it is viewed in terms of the relationships between Roxane Coss and Katsumi Hokosawa and Gen Watanabe and Carmen, who is a terrorist. Politics and language barriers are the main obstacles in their relationships. 

The dynamic of the relationships in this novel can be described as nothing more or less than star-crossed; they reminded me of Jack and Rose in the Titanic and Romeo and Juliet in, well, Romeo and Juliet. Both relationships are highly political and, musically and linguistically, cacophonous. 

Hokosawa ends up dying in an attempt to save Carmen even though he loves Roxane (and her voice). Roxane's aptitude for all things musical ends up comforting the party during the standoff--a clear testament to the power of music. Watanabe is a translator. Carmen dies because she is a terrorist and most people do not have any tolerance for terrorism. Watanabe and Coss end up together because their partners died and that would be the most natural thing to do after your lovers die...sympathizing with someone whose lover also died. 

I could talk about the obvious theme of music bringing people together in times of crisis...the ability of opera to comfort people in dire circumstances. That is a superficial reading, in my opinion. It does no good to me as a human and to the readership of the novel in terms of a modern era that is very much subject to politics and globalization. 

But it is the idea of the broken hallelujah that was most resonant to me in this book: I want to focus on the modern meaning an context of bel canto--a word to describe nostalgia of lost traditions. To me, this nostalgia is particularly applicable now...in the midst of the tragedy that occurred recently in Boston. Lives were lost, and that is a shame. But the sound of bombs, screams, and sheer terror--CACOPHONY--makes us wonder about our capability as humans to understand violence. How do we take it in? Nostalgically, was there ever a time when we, as citizens of the United States, cared unanimously about the wellbeing of another country's citizens more so than our own? 

To me, it is ridiculous that this event in Boston caused so much alarm. Things like this happen every day in other places, and we, as an isolated and sheltered society, choose to ignore the screams of those who do not live on U.S. soil. This, to me, is the meaning of cacophony, and, the meaning of the broken hallelujah. 

We have discussed the idea of circles in depth and at length this semester. Take this quote from Bel Canto: 

"The day no longer progressed in its normal, linear fashion but instead every hour circled back to its beginning, every moment was lived over and over again. Time, in the manner in which they had all understood it, was over" (106).

The term bel canto represents nostalgia and returning to values that have always held true for societies. One of these values in love. Life itself is linear because time (in its Western interpretation) is linear. However, at the end of the novel, love is the only thing that appears to be circular and never-ending. 

And that holds true outside of literature as well. 

Thanks for a great semester, and have a great summer. 

Blessings! 

Jenna P. Lyons 

End Notes

Beginning with Beethoven (arguably) and extending through the Romantic period, the codas to symphonic compositions become longer and longer, and more elaborate, as if there's a kind of desperate desire to affirm something before the last note must fade into the air. This, maybe, is the 376 blog's equivalent, as I will probably now find myself writing a series of "final" postings. It seems fitting, though, that we also have a last posting about music. In noting the passing of the great album cover art designer, Strom Thorgersen (think Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon), a few weeks, NPR queried their readers with the question "What are your Top 5 album covers?" I was pleased to see that the article's author, Robin Hilton, included Shearwater's Rook among his choices. I know album art is less prominent now with the confining dimensions of cds (not to mention the immateriality of mp3s), but what might make your list?

I hope things are going well with the multigenre essays. There was a great article about writing, by the way, in a recent issue (April 29) of The New Yorker: John McPhee's "Draft No. 4." You might check it out if you get a chance, especially since he writes so well about the agonies all of us endure anytime we sit down to write something. Here's a brief teaser: "You are working on a first draft and small wonder you're unhappy. If you lack confidence in setting one word after another and sense that you are stuck in a place from which you will never be set free, if you feel sure that you will never make it and were not cut out to do this, if your prose seems stillborn and you completely lack confidence, you must be a writer. If you say you see things differently and describe your efforts positively, if you tell people that you 'just love to write,' you may be delusional.... First drafts are slow and develop clumsily, because every single sentence affects not only those before it but also those that follow.... There are psychological differences from phase to phase, and the first is the phase of the pit and the pendulum.... For me, the hardest part comes first, getting something -- anything -- out in front of me. Sometimes in a nervous frenzy I just fling words as if I were flinging mud at a wall. Blurt out, heave out, babble out something -- anything -- as a first draft. With that, you have achieved a sort of nucleus. Then, as you work it over and alter it, you begin to shape sentences that score higher with the ear and eye. Edit again -- top to bottom. The chances are that about now you'll be seeing something that you are sort of eager for others to see. And all that takes time.... Without the drafted version -- if it did not exist -- you obviously would not be thinking of things that would improve it. In short, you may be actually writing only two or three hours a day, but your mind, in one way or another, is working on it twenty-four hours a day -- yes, while you sleep -- but only if some sort of draft or earlier version already exists. Until it exists, writing has not really begun." Unfortunately, because of the pressures and compacted time of the semester, we don't often enough get to pursue this process of "drafts." It's like Kundera's "unbearable lightness of being" that comes from the awareness that there is no dress rehearsal for our lives: we just have to go on stage cold. Well, anyway, I will look forward to reading your essays when the time comes.

Well, there it is: "Now my charms are all o'erthrown," lamented Prospero (which is not to say I won't return to post again!). Thank you for all of your hard work, good cheer, and many contributions to the course. As I noted on Wednesday, I feel like I've lived the material in many ways during the semester (in good ways and, lately, in unwanted ways); as we head into the graduation, and into the summer and beyond, perhaps we can all remember Charlie Parker's advice that "if you don't live it, it won't come out your horn." After I've had the chance to recover, to "sleep like a rock or a man that's dead," I'm assuming the "thump, thump, thump" will start kicking in again, and I'll start looking towards the next iteration of the class. You and your contributions will be an important part of it when I do. And maybe someday we'll meet again under the tamarind tree! All the best ...

Of Slender Silver Slivers

Apropos of yesterday's discussion, here is a link to an NPR article regarding the poetics of hip-hop and rap; the article appeared over two years ago, but those of you interested in this area might want to seek out the anthology that is reviewed. As I said, it makes me wonder what other blind spots we might have in the course as it's currently designed -- or maybe not so much "blind spots" as just other possibilities (texts, genres, issues, etc.) that might enrich a course like this one. Thinking back to your musical DNA papers from the beginning of the semester, part of me wonders if music and children's literature might be an interesting little mini-unit (half a class?). Some children's books can be positively brilliant -- in terms of rhythm, alliteration, rhyme, assonance and consonance, et al. -- and can function like sheet music and yield new inflections every time they're read aloud/"performed." I think of something like Lloyd Moss's Zin! Zin! Zin! A Violin, for example, which deals with music directly: "With mournful moan and silken tone, / Itself alone comes one trombone. / Gliding, sliding, high notes go low; / One trombone is playing solo. / .... / Flute, that sends our soul a-shiver; / Flute, that slender, silver sliver. / A place among the set it picks / To make a young sextet--that's six." Or Karma Wilson' wonderful Bear Snores On, which is always a positive delight to read: "An itty-bitty mouse, / pitter-pat, tip-toe, / creep-crawls in the cave / from the fluff-cold snow. / Mouse squeaks, "Too damp, / too dank, too dark." / So he lights wee twigs / with a small, hot spark." / The coals pip-pop and the wind doesn't stop. / But the bear snores on. / Two glowing eyes / sneak-peek in the den. / Mouse cries, "Who's there?" / and a hare hops in. / "Ho, Mouse!" says Hare. / "Long time, no see!" / So they pop white corn. / And they brew black tea. / Mouse sips wee slurps. / Hare burps big burps! / But the bear snores on." Well, if you have any other ideas for texts and topics germane to a future iteration of this course, send them along!

e krii?

Another quick announcement (although, since this blog venue seems not to offer the equivalent to the charms of Solibo's tamarind tree and Sucette's ka-drum, it's hard to know how many of you will gather here to read it): in any event, I have put some brief comments on your multigenre preludes, and I will be able to put them in my mailbox (in LA 133) by Friday at 11:00 in the event you want to stop by and pick them up. Do consider, as well, posting a teaser of your multigenre project here on the blog: this would not only allow everyone to get a glimpse of each other's projects, but it could also produce some cross-fertilization and maybe become a way for getting some ideas from your colleagues as to how you might use the course texts in support of your inquiry. It all depends, though, on whether there are any potential "e kraas" out there at this point! Anyway, just a thought!

I'm repeating myself in this instance, of course, but I always get jazzed by the way disparate texts end up speaking to one another in a class like this: thus my repeated reference to the fact that one intertext (from early in the semester) that sheds some useful comparative light on the situation and dilemma of the character of Chamoiseau, the "word-scratcher," is Blake's "Introduction" to the Songs of Innocence. As you recall, the piper in that poem is commanded first to pipe, then to sing, and then to write, and with each step in the sequence there seems to be a kind of diminishment that occurs (until finally the child vanishes when he sits down to write, and then he subsequently "stain'd the water clear"). Solibo warns Chamoiseau of a similar peril in moving from an oral to a written mode of expression, and the latter finally laments the situation: "In rereading my first notes from the time I followed him around the market, I understood that to write down the word was nothing but betrayal, you lost the intonations, the parody, the storyteller's gestures, and all of this was made even more unthinkable for I knew Solibo was hostile to it. But I called myself a "word scratcher," a pathetic gatherer of elusive things, like the draft through the wind's cathedrals" (158). Of course, without the efforts of the word scratcher we wouldn't have the novel, and Chamoiseau must be commended for making such a sonorous, musical, and rhythmic text, and for honoring the oral tradition in the process.

If you read through the novel again in light of my attempt to link it with Bakhtin and the carnivalesque, you'll undoubtedly find a good many passages that become newly relevant to you. The events of the novel take place during Carnival, of course, and the nature of those events, and the manner of the transactions between the witnesses/mourners and the police emerge from Bakhtin's characterizations: e.g., "The whole place soon began to resemble a market during the sale of red pepper. Screaming. Astonishment. Sympathies offered to the line of witnesses. Curses of mysterious origin in the direction of the policemen" (68). There are also the various references to laughter, including the "thick and greasy laughs" when "all were displaying molars" (62), laughter which often serves to undermine institutional power. And there's still so much more we could say about wakes and quiverings in the context of this novel, too. Given that this is a novel about the processual, fluid, and multiple nature of identity, how appropriate that it's focused on the transition between life and death; we're reminded that death induces us to look at life as a process of change, and brings with it a kind of poetics of liminality in which there are no easy answers or categorizations (which creates rich overlap, potentially, with Kay's Trumpet). These poetics call upon the performance of storytellers, too, and somehow I find myself thinking of the various itinerant bards we've encountered in this course: Mr. Tambourine Man, perhaps; the squeezebox singer in the Martin Sexton song we listened to; Mikey Smith (whose "Me Cyann Believe It" we'll listen to on Monday); Robert Johnson and then the crossroads bluesman in the O Brother film clip; Solibo; Medouze in the Black Shack Alley film clip; et al.

Finally, there are a good many wonderfully evocative and poignant moments of writing in this novel, which are worth contemplating in isolation. An example: "That scene lasted forever -- and could have gone on and on: a tafia-soused audience, sitting in a circle at the crack of dawn, does not inscribe itself in the ephemeral. But then, after eons (exactly three hours, thirty-eight minutes, and twenty-two seconds, says the coroner), a basaltic old man left the assembly and made toward Solibo. His name was Congo and he seemed to owe Death four centuries" (16). Or this one, on memory and grieving, and on storytelling's solace: "Sidonise, who had seemed for a few moments to be drowning in another world, starts to murmur an inaudible story. A strange smile transfigures her pain, her eyes follow the flight of internal visions. There is a prowling memory there, of those that death, in its tide, drains from our heads, our hearts, our dreams. Oh life plays hide-and-seek, never giving all of herself at once, but leaving to death's seasons the essence of her stems, her flowers' subtle perfume. There, through the small sherbet vendor, Solibo confronts our distress, dissipates it, as certain churches do the sadness of the devoted. Charlo' forgets his cheek and raises his inundated eyes" (78-9). Perhaps you have other examples that you would add to the list ...

Hope you enjoy Bel Canto this week & weekend ...

A Musical Inventory

Hi everyone. I have another assortment of disparate items to send your way. The first is an article I just chanced upon entitled "Writers in Love with Other Arts," which surveys a range of writers who have found inspiration (as well as formal and aesthetic influences) from painting, the performance arts (ballet, etc.), music, etc. It seems germane, in quite obvious ways, to our interdisciplinary inquiry this semester. You might note the discussion of E.M. Forster, in particular, and the quote from A Room with a View (1908): “The kingdom of music is not the kingdom of this world. It will accept those whom breeding and intellect and culture have alike rejected. The commonplace person begins to play, and shoots into the empyrean without effort, whilst we look up, marvelling how he has escaped us, and thinking how we could worship him and love him, would he but translate his visions into human words.”

When we were talking about the healing power of art last week (during our discussion of elegiac writing vis-a-vis Sheffield, Lethem, et al.), and after the reference to Mrs. Ramsay's metaphorical green shawl in To the Lighthouse, which covers over the pig skull and, symbolically, death, I promised to get a quote to you by Jane Hirshfield (from her essay "Poetry and the Constellation of Surprise") about poetry's efficacy. Here it is: “It is, of course, we who house poems as much as their words, and we ourselves must be the locus of poetry's depth of newness. Still, the permeability seems to travel both ways: a changed self will find new meanings in a good poem, but a good poem also changes the shape of the self. Having read it, we are not who we were the moment before.... Art lives in what it awakens in us... Through a good poem's eyes we see the world liberated from what we would have it do. Existence does not guarantee us destination, nor trust, nor equity, nor one moment beyond this instant's almost weightless duration. It is a triteness to say that the only thing to be counted upon is that what you count on will not be what comes. Utilitarian truths evaporate: we die. Poems allow us not only to bear the tally and toll of our transience, but to perceive, within their continually surprising abundance, a path through the grief of that insult into joy.” Lovely stuff, really. It applies to music, as well (and will no doubt register with those of you writing about grief, consolation, healing in your multi genre essays) -- that ability to help us "bear the tally and toll of our transience," but, more than that, to help us come out from the other side of that grief ("that insult") into a kind of joy.

Finally, as I start to get a bit recapitulatory and retrospective in my thinking relative to our course, I was reminded of the DNA assignment you all completed and thought I should post some DNA material of my own. It's more list-like in nature, but you'll notice that in the "elsewheres" section to the right I've posted a link to "Eric's Top 145" -- the 145 songs that I feel I can least do without in life! As I indicate on the page, it's a rather absurd endeavor to identify these songs, but I suspect at least 2/3 of them could withstand the fluctuations of my daily whims! It's not always a list based on perceived quality, of course -- oftentimes the songs are simply ones that were hard-coded into my being by the events and contexts of my life, and thus they will always have special significance to me (even if you find yourself thinking, Blue Oyster Cult? Really?!).

One other way of measuring the passage of time this semester (on a personal level) is to list all of the music I have purchased or downloaded during the semester. It would include the following: Tegan and Sara -- Heartthrob; Local Natives -- Hummingbird; Bowerbirds -- The Clearing; Goodnight Texas -- A Long Life of Living; Hey Marseilles -- Lines We Trace; Andrew Bird -- Hands of Glory; Martin Sexton -- Live at the Fillmore and Live in Portland; The Tallest Man on Earth -- There's No Leaving Now; Samantha Crain -- Kid Face; Pearl Jam -- assorted songs; Fossil Collective -- assorted songs; Iron & Wine -- Ghost on Ghost; Laura Stevenson -- Wheel; The National -- Trouble Will Find Me; Patty Griffin -- American Kid. (Those last two records won't be released until this Tuesday, but they'll be in my possession shortly thereafter!).

Last Writes

I hope the malleable, nonlinear, collage-like aesthetic of the multigenre essay will suit you over the next two weeks; it is an essay that should build its structure and its associative links incrementally and sometimes stealthily. If it works for you it's probably because you will manage to channel Montaigne, who once described the essaying impulse by noting that "my style and my mind alike go rambling." Some of you will sense the literary possibilities of the genre, and others the musical possibilities. By the way, I recently chanced upon this very appropriate paragraph in Robert Root's The Nonfictionist's Guide: On Reading and Writing Creative Nonfiction:

"The segmented essay is like an oratorio or a concerto. The spaces are like intervals of silence between the separate elements. Sometimes the segments of prose in an essay can be recitative, aria, duet or trio, chorus; they can be allegro non troppo, allegro appasionato, andante, allegretto grazioso. This is what the spaces say: In this interval of silence hold onto what you have just heard; prepare yourself to hear something different; ponder the ways these separatenesses are part of a whole. Like musical compositions, nonfiction need not be one uninterrupted melody, one movement, but can also be the arrangement of distinct and discrete miniatures, changes of tempo, sonority, melody, separated by silences. This is what the spaces say" (86).

I also like Susan Griffin's description, in her meta-essay, "The Red Shoes," of the wandering nature of language and storytelling, and think it gives us another way to think about the essays you just worked on:

"The extent of the unknown borders all language. One's relationship with it is erotic. One has a passion to know. But one can never entirely know what is other. Telling a story, no matter how much you know, you are very soon pulled into unexplored territory. Even the familiar is filled with unexpected blank spaces. The usual Sunday drive is all of a sudden a wild ride into terra incognita. You are glad to be going, but there is a vague feeling of discomfort. Where are you?"

So you're all embarking on your essayistic wandering without a map, honoring Robert Davis's and Mark Shadle's belief that "motion is the essay's ubiquitous trope." These writers elsewhere refer, quite appealingly, to the essay's potential as a "cabinet of wonders." I continue to be drawn to the idea of creating a collaborative "cabinet of wonders" for a course like this, an essay for which each of us contributes one section of a group oratorio that we then try to get published somewhere. Another time, I guess! In the meantime, do feel free, in this space, to provide a window onto your writing process, to share a segment of your essay, to ask for advice from the group, etc.

Stray Notes

Hey, all. Well, we have to keep in touch with current goings on in the music world, too, right? In case you missed it, Rush was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame just over a week ago on April 18th, a recognition that legions (including me and, undoubtedly, you, too, Tyler!) felt was unconscionably overdue. This might be an occasion to include a link to one of their classic progressive rock tunes ("Tom Sawyer," "Spirit of Radio," "Limelight," et al.), but as I think about my reference in class to my "best songs of 2012" cds maybe it would be more appropriate to include a link to Rush's "The Garden," which was one of my favorites of 2012 (though for whatever reason I didn't include it on one of those cds). It's strange to pick a ballad when it comes to a representative Rush song, but it's a particularly majestic and poignant one, and may quite possibly be the best song they've written in the last thirty years. See what you think!

Elsewhere, The National performed the new songs "Sea of Love" and "I Need My Girl" (from their upcoming release Trouble Will Find Me) on Jimmy Fallon the other night, which you can watch here, and Iron & Wine performed "Grace for Saints and Ramblers" (from the new release Ghost on Ghost), also on Fallon. Finally, Patty Griffin has released the song "Ohio" from her much anticipated new release (at least in these quarters, and, I suspect in Kelsey's!), American Kid.

And for you country fans out there, we of course should note the passing on Friday of George Jones, who was famously/humorously recognized at one time by Frank Sinatra as being "the second best singer in this country." Some have called "He Stopped Loving Her Today" the best country song ever written.

Memorial Art

I guess we can say that everything we read/listened to this past Wednesday -- from Lethem and Sheffield to U2 -- was elegiac in some way: for lost mothers, spouses, friends, innocent victims, innocence itself, one's younger self, etc. I suspect that if you reread the Jonathan Lethem essay with some care you'll increasingly perceive the subtly interlocking sense of argument to his meandering progression, and you'll also likely get some additional worthwhile ideas for your own multigenre essays. You might, by the way, also be interested in Lethem's short tribute to his father (which includes a rather striking picture of his father with, coincidentally (or not), a beard) that appeared in Granta.

It's not as hip to be a U2 fan these days as it used to be (though to see them live, even now, is to believe all over again), but I wonder what you might have thought of that particular performance (including the "turn this song into a prayer" interlude and the Omagh victims tribute at the end); in some respects, you could nearly say that song was always meant for that one moment and and that one performance above all others. You may have noticed, hearing those twenty-nine names, that, as one report summarized, "the Omagh fatality list reads like a microcosm of troubles deaths, and left no section of Irish life untouched. The town they attacked is roughly 60-40 Catholic-Protestant, and the dead consisted of Protestants, Catholics, a Mormon and two Spanish visitors. They killed young, old and middle-aged, fathers, mothers, sons, daughters and grannies. They killed republicans and unionists, including a prominent local member of the Ulster Unionist Party. They killed people from the backbone of the Gaelic Athletic Association. They killed unborn twins, bright students, cheery shop assistants and many young people. They killed three children from the Irish Republic who were up north on a day trip. Everyone they killed was a civilian. The toll of death was thus both extraordinarily high and extraordinarily comprehensive." These are the ironies of such terrorist attacks (which in this case, given the perpetrators, would presumably have been intended to kill Protestants).

I wanted us to read and discuss Seamus Heaney's "Casualty" to have a context for Bono's "eulogizing" act at the end of "Sunday Bloody Sunday"; the rich, moving portrait of and tribute to the man featured in the poem, who was a friend of the poet/speaker until he was killed in a pub bombing, causes us to reflect on the irony of the poem's title, which is meant to remind us that such victims too often become mere anonymous "casualties" and statistics, without names and (epic) personal stories. It's writing, storytelling, music-making, and art, generally, that we call upon to correct that situation. Recall Lethem from the "The Beards": "Syd Barrett wasn't dead, but "Shine On You Crazy Diamond" was memorial art. It suggested that I didn't have to fall into ruin to exemplify the cost of losing someone as enormous as Judith Lethem. My surviving Judith's death would in no way be to her dishonor. I'd only owe her a great song" (65).

Back to U2 and the political dimension to the performance, we might think of the stage as a kind of space for dissident perspectives (we can forget or not realize that a song like "Sunday Bloody Sunday" may have augured the first real sign of generational change in terms of the Troubles in Northern Ireland), which may also make us think of other "spaces" in our course readings: the jazz clubs in Trumpet, the floors upon which Joe and Violet dance in Jazz, the alleyways and rented rehearsal spaces of the northside of Dublin in The Commitments, under the tamarind tree in Solibo Magnificent, etc.. Because sound can evoke spatial impressions, we might also think about music as creating imaginary landscapes. Springsteen once lauded the guitar work of U2's Edge, saying that it "creates enormous space and vast landscapes." In this way, U2 can perhaps elude their own ethnic and national status (which is largely assigned to them from outside) by extending the boundaries of Irishness. We've talked a good bit about home and exile in this course (beginning with sonata form), and Bono adds his own take on this: "How does the music of U2 relate to our being Irish? I come to this question as someone who does not know who he is.... I didn't know I was Irish until I went to America.... Maybe we Irish are misfits, travelers, never really at home, but always talking about it. I met a fisherman who told me we were like salmon: it's upriver all the time, against the odds, the river doesn't want us ... yet we want a way home ... but there is no home. Religious minds tell us exile is what having eaten the apple means, that 'home' is a spiritual condition. We in Ireland already know this, not because we've been exiles, but because hardships, be they economic or political, have forced us to be less material."

The Goal is Soul

Everyone by now, as the semester endgame asserts itself, feels like they're singing their own personal "Weary Blues," right? Anyway, I just wanted to create this thread in order to invite more comments on The Commitments. It seems like I appreciate and enjoy the film more and more every time I see it. There's clearly a generational theme in the film: Roddy Doyle was about 30 when he wrote the novel, and although he's in his mid to late 50s now we can still think of him as someone associated with the "new" Ireland (away from the constricting ideologies and narratives of the past) and as one of the most important Irish writers of his generation. We see this generational slant, of course, in the movement towards music and away from the commitments to state and church (Elvis above the Pope, right). We might say it rejects traditional Irishness (and thus the pieties of state affiliation), as well, in the music the characters adopt (and this strikes me as different from "The Dead," when the appearance of "The Lass of Aughrim," a traditional ballad with connections to the west of Ireland, seems to be valorized at the end, at least relative to the earlier conversation about opera and the classical tradition): the audition scene at Jimmy's apartment was telling in this regard, as what we saw there was a bunch of aspiring Irish musicians who were all over the musical map in terms of the traditions and identities they were peddling. In this sense, the novel/film seem to be making an argument against single, univocal, essential identities, which of course were the cause of so much trouble and pain in twentieth century Ireland.

Hybrid identities find an apt metaphor in soul, too, which we know to be a kind of fusion of gospel, blues, rhythm and blues, and rock and roll. My sense is that the Gilroy essay has some useful passages for this kind of blending, especially when he talks about the discourse of authenticity and the need for an "anti-anti-essentialism" that might allow us to move beyond old and narrow ways of thinking about identity into "wider, as yet uncharted, worlds" (110). Soul is an interesting metaphor, too, in terms of Irish identity. There seems to be no soul in Joyce's Dublin at times, and Gabriel Conroy learns that the fire has gone out of his soul. Contemporary Irish literature often defies our tendency to think of the Irish as being all about soulful rebellion by time and again (at least through the 1980s and early 1990s) depicting a void at the heart of Irish society. That's why these musicians and young people in the film are so symbolically important, representing as they do a new direction into the future. I'm reminded, too, of U2's Bono, who has often ended live performances of their song, "Beautiful Day" with the impassioned refrain, "the goal is soul!" There's also a short essay by Bono, which appeared in Richard Kearney's book Across the Frontiers, in which Bono invokes some of the race/class/identity issues we discussed last week ("I'm black 'an I'm proud!"). Discussing U2's influences (in the 1980s, in particular), Bono notes that "We started looking into American music, Gospel, Blues, the likes of Robert Johnson ... John Lee Hooker. Old songs of fear and faith. As I said when we first started the band, we felt like outsiders in Rock Music but these themes were very much inside U2, they were also very Irish.... The Irish, like the blacks, feel like outsiders. There's a feeling of being homeless, migrant, but I suppose that's what art is -- a search for identity. The images of our songs are confused, classical, biblical, American, Irish, English, but not in a negative sense. The fight, the struggle for a synthesis is what's interesting about them. The idea of an incomplete, questioning, even abandoned identity is very attractive to me."

So, we appreciate the uplifting and efficacious effect of music-making in The Commitments, and we take comfort in the fact that even though the band self-destructs at the end, each member seems to emerge as a stronger person. It's a novel, a film about finding fulfillment, raising one's self-esteem (making a commitment to oneself), changing and taking control of one's life, finding and having a voice. "Better to pass boldly into the next world ..."

More Perfect Unions

I still find myself thinking back over the past two novels, especially as I realize we've now essentially concluded the jazz portion of the course. I had promised, I think, to provide links to two rather incredible speeches that were on my mind as we read and discussed Jazz: President Obama's speech on race that he gave (when he was still a candidate) to defuse the Reverend Wright controversy and Toni Morrison's Nobel Lecture in 1993. Obama's speech stands in stark contrast to the coarsened political discourse that surrounds us at this moment: I personally think it's one of the most significant speeches in modern American political history, certainly during my lifetime -- it's startling to hear a politician speak so candidly and truthfully about race, seemingly without fear of political consequences. Morrison's speech is mesmerizing, poetic, and wise, and would undoubtedly seem all the more so if we could hear the music of her voice reading it; the blind woman at the heart of the story speaks to the saving power of narrative, and her function is that of a bard conducting a call-and-response exchange with her listeners.

Together, these two speeches consolidate the operative historical, cultural, and racial contexts at the heart of Jazz, and also seem to echo the ethical charge set before us by both Morrison in her novel and Jackie Kay in hers. "We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives," instructs Morrison's old griot; we think here, perhaps, even of someone like Bernard in The Waves, as he seeks words and phrases and narratives to shore against his ruins. "I don't know whether the bird you are holding is dead or alive," Morrison's blind woman continues, "but what I do know is that it is in your hands. It is in your hands." Recall here the last two sentences of Jazz, when the narrator calls attention to the book that is in our hands, and implicitly to the necessity that we remember our responsibility to help make the world more humane and more tolerant. "What's the world for if you can't make it up the way you want it" (208) ponders Violet Trace, and don't we feel the ache of this? Like jazz musicians who wander within and beyond their core material to seek freedom and new possibilities, we, too, must move outside of ourselves, accept difference and uncertainty, promote empathy and tolerance. Like Joss Moody and as promoted in Kay's Trumpet, we must be willing to reject absolute categories and definitions, whether they be racial, sexual, national, etc.

All of this returns me to Obama's speech and that very familiar but yet, in his usage, somehow defamiliarized and exciting appeal to a "more perfect union." Jazz -- and music generally -- no doubt help us find and follow the path to that union, and it makes what we're exploring in this course all the more important. It's interesting to move that phrase "more perfect union" outside of its political and social connotations and think about its connotative value more broadly in terms of our course. If we do, we might begin to realize how often music has been used in our texts to seek more meaningful connections and unions (although we know from the lyrics to Springsteen's "The River" and Cohen's "Hallelujah" that it doesn't always work out): there's the narrator of Woolf's "The String Quartet" realizing a sort of communion forged by the chamber music; there's Keats's speaker seeking that union with the nightingale; there's Gretta Conroy being carried across space and time to meet again with Michael Furey; there's Gretta and Gabriel being moved closer together (we hope) by virtue of the music; there are the six friends of The Waves joining together like six interdependent notes; there are those down-on-their-luck Irish youths finding meaning and self-respect in their commitments to each other in Alan Parker's film; there's the wounded ballet of Joe and Violet Trace as they slowly, through the healing power of music, find their way back to each other; there's Joss and Millie Moody and their faces "with the lines of dreams on them." As we look ahead to our next readings, I guess we'll have yet another example in this regard with Sheffield's tender and sad Love is a Mixtape. Wounded seekers. Music. More perfect unions.

Well, I know I still feel full of ideas, passages, emotions after Jazz and Trumpet, and perhaps a couple of you will feel inclined to deposit a stray thought or two here in this location (I wonder, for example, what your responses are to the lovely, affecting scenes involving Colman and Edith Moore). Do try to check out those speeches, too, when you get a chance, as they will no doubt be richly rewarding.

Music and Film

As we approach our film viewing occasion for the semester, it's worth noting, sadly, the loss of Roger Ebert, who passed away last week. He certainly changed my relationship to movies, and I think he became even more treasured in his later years, during his battle with cancer, when, by necessity, he had to turn to writing (his reviews, his blog, etc.) to compensate for the physical difficulties of speaking; the blog (click on "Roger's Journal" when you get there) is especially worth visiting, as it's interesting to have seen Ebert move away from writing purely about movies to writing about all sorts of topics (in the way of someone who is simply in love with life). These lines, from Ebert's 2011 personal essay on dying, are touching and inspiring, and a challenge to us all: "'Kindness' covers all of my political beliefs. No need to spell them out. I believe that if, at the end, according to our abilities, we have done something to make others a little happier, and something to make ourselves a little happier, that is about the best we can do. To make others less happy is a crime. To make ourselves unhappy is where all crime starts. We must try to contribute joy to the world. That is true no matter what our problems, our health, our circumstances. We must try. I didn’t always know this and am happy I lived long enough to find it out." Finally, apropos of what awaits us, here is Ebert's review of Alan Parker's The Commitments.

After watching that scene from O, Brother Where Art Thou? before the break, I'm increasingly reminded why that film would have nicely picked up some of the strands of our various discussions (e.g., regarding Dylan and the folk tradition, as well as the ideas of wandering and homelessness that have inhered in much of what we've read and listened to this semester). It would also have effectively galvanized our focus on the blues and on the jazz aesthetic during this current three-to-four week run of the semester, and it would have anticipated the ideas of music as resistance and music as signifier of cultural authenticity. And then there's the wonderful way that music works as a form of storytelling in that film (what other films can you think of that use music in this way? I guess Les Miserables would be an obvious one, although I didn't end up seeing it).

Well, The Commitments is going to serve us well next week as our featured film of the semester (and should provide some much-needed laughter), but I could now nearly wish we had time for two films! I remain curious about what springs to your mind when you consider the convergence of music and film. What films are memorable to you in terms of music (and why)? You might respond with films that to varying degrees include music as their subject matter, or films that are almost unimaginable without their soundtracks or scores (did anyone do more to create the menace of the shark in Jaws than John Williams? It was Williams who put the bite in that shark with that primal, insistent, and Stravinsky-esque theme), or films that use music to advance or augment narrative, or films that use musical technique as a structuring device, etc. What film might have fit particularly well in the schedule for this course (and why)? I was recently reminded of the conversations about jazz that occur in Michael Mann's film Collateral from some years ago (with Tom Cruise (when he was still a little bit likable!) and Jamie Foxx) -- which now causes me to remember Mann's use of rousing Irish music during that pulsating flight to the waterfall sequence in The Last of the Mohicans (clearly here's a director who consistently and memorably uses music in his films). Having shown a clip from Apocalypse Now in my survey class a couple weeks ago, I have Coppola's film on my mind in this regard (and, now that I've mentioned that name, Sophia Coppola always seems to use music in essential ways in her films, too).

"Desert sky, dream beneath a desert sky ..."

Greetings, LitMusicians. I hope it was a good Spring Break for all of you, perhaps even a slightly restful one in advance of the semester endgame. I actually just returned from a week in the Nevada and California deserts -- thus the brief hiatus from the blog -- where I took my mid-semester, weary, and, to be honest, my sorrowful self (I received some rather devastating family news just before the break, which has me thinking all over again of the latter stages of Kundera's novel) for some restorative high desert air, hiking in Joshua Tree National Park, fish tacos at the Blue Coyote in Palm Springs, and the aroma therapy of all the blooming citrus trees. Then again, how much restoration one can expect when your luggage includes three kids, including a four year-old, is another matter!.

Such an excursion suggests its own soundtrack, right? Certainly (and obviously) there would be U2's "The Joshua Tree." I think I read somewhere that the tree featured in that album's insert burned some years ago in a wildfire (lightning strike?), so I was spared the quixotic journey of trying to seek it out. Incidentally, since we were recently discussing lyrics as poetry, that album makes me think of the poetic, intensely moving elegy, "One Tree Hill." Written as a tribute to the band's friend, Greg Carroll, the song is memorable for its lyrics (another one of those songs using the "river to the sea" metaphor), for its slow burning emotional intensity, and for the way the Edge's guitar revs up to mimic a motorcycle late in the song (Carroll died in a motorcycle accident), which then yields to a plaintive prayer from Bono as the song concludes. Always a favorite of mine, lyrically and musically ...

Back to the High Desert soundtrack. We didn't have a convertible in which to listen to it properly, but you can be sure I brought along my copy of "Sinatra at the Sands," which was recorded in 1966 with Count Basie's band and certainly evokes a bygone world (fortunately, a world that can still (even if just barely) be summoned via current-day Palm Springs, which seems to be getting some of its hipness back). And, wow, talk about some tight, sincere musicianship, and such old chestnuts as "Come Fly With Me," "I've Got You Under My Skin," "Fly Me to the Moon," "Angel Eyes," etc. I've always loved Dean Martin's line: "It's Frank's world; we just live in it." The world feels like a lonelier place without him.

I didn't bring it with me this time, but every time I drive to Joshua Tree I think of Robert Plant's "29 Palms," a song I've always found to be irresistible. In terms of memory and music, too, driving on Interstate 10 reminds me of the first time I ever heard David Gray's "White Ladder" record, which probably has to rank up there as one of the best driving cds. Music and the open road, music and the inside of a car. Now there's a topic for a lexia in your multi-genre essay! In his book, Traveling Music (which I highly recommend, even for non-Rush fans!), Neil Peart writes that "in the unique zen-state of driving for hour after after, music didn't just pass the time, it filled the time, with pleasure, stimulation, discovery, and memories."

So I guess your prompt in this case -- and here we may be back to one of Hornby's "Top Five" lists -- is to ask what ranks high on your list of best driving cds, or best "traveling music" memories?? Or Top 5 songs for a desert highway?

Found this on Reddit

I was browsing /r/literature on Reddit today and I found a thread on Bob Dylan as a poet. Thought you guys might like to see some outsiders opinions. People contribute some interesting insights.

http://www.reddit.com/r/literature/comments/1aoz25/what_does_rliterature_think_of_bob_dylan/

All that Jazz

I guess the Larkin poems got pinched, ultimately. Maybe that just won't do -- that is, maybe I'll have to put a couple more of them on the wall for us to contemplate for some moments before Monday's and/or Wednesday's main discussions. Thus, might I ask that you keep "For Sidney Bechet," "Reference Back," and "Aubade" somewhat freshly aligned in your mind's queue? Better yet, might some of you be inclined to make a few observations about one or more of them in this space in advance of next week's meetings? Do you see, for example, any similarities between "Reasons for Attendance" and "For Sidney Bechet"? At least one critic has noted that the latter can almost be read as a reworking of those two lines from the former that read: "It speaks; I hear; others may hear as well, / But not for me, nor I for them." And then the subtly powerful "Reference Back": with all of our focus on time and the (painful) operations of memory in this course, maybe this poem connects into some recognizable circuitry (strangely, I find myself thinking of Springsteen's "The River" as I consider this one). Anyway, I know you'll be plenty busy working with the Morrison novel, but it'd be great to gather some of your reactions to the poems here.

And what did you think of A Love Supreme?? Were you able to follow its development pretty well with the aid of the handout? Did you enjoy it? Can you assimilate it into any of our course contexts and discussions at this point? As I noted in class, jazz privileges rhythm rather than melody (unlike classical music, which puts melody at the top of the hierarchy), which was probably apparent from your experience of this piece. Melodies are present in A Love Supreme, but only briefly, at which point Coltrane (or the other soloists) take them out for a ride and stretch them harmonically. Coltrane, by the way, died at the youthful age of 40, in July of 1967. His health had been steadily deteriorating until he finally succumbed to liver cancer. The music of A Love Supreme seemed to help some make sense of his death: Wayne Shorter, for example, noted a fatalism in "the tone of the tenor [sax] on A Love Supreme. I think he knew he was sick -- it's as if he were seeing the light -- that grand light." So, two of the most influential figures in the history of jazz in the second half of the twentieth century -- Coltrane and Charlie Parker -- were both dead before their 41st birthdays.

You will find Morrison's Jazz to be a rather unconventional historical novel, one that seeks to capture the mood of Harlem in the 1920s but that ranges across time (mostly within the 1906-26 period, though) and suggests a kind of improvised narration (improvisation, at this point, becomes a key word & notion for us). The genius of A Love Supreme lies mostly in the imagination of Coltrane and in the improvised dynamics between the bandmates -- not in any written score. The same might be said of Jazz, which is going to demand your participation to bring it to life. It's a strange novel, in a sense, in that the very first paragraph will tell you the entire story of the novel -- and yet when you get to the very end of the novel it will all seem rather unfinished to you. So, be thinking of women's blues, of the oral tradition, of the spirit of improvisation, etc.

"Timely" Articles

Just dropping by to share a few articles with you that I chanced upon in recent days, and that weigh in nicely on our ongoing meditations/discussions this semester (and perhaps they'll even give you some ideas for your multigenre essays). The first, "The Quest for Permanent Novelty," deals with the way writers (from Keats to Orwell) struggle with time, those hallelujah moments, and the "fading of aesthetic freshness." Then there's "The Piccolo and the Pocket Grouse," which seeks a definition of music and wonders to what extent birdsong can be understood as music (and in which Emily Doolittle refers to zoomusicology as a term that accounts for the ways that animal sounds are and are not like music). Finally, more germane to our current inquiry, there's this informative review -- "Soundtrack to the Century" -- of David Schiff's book, The Ellington Century, in which Schiff uses Ellington's example to ponder if jazz is "as subtle, complex, and emotionally expressive as classical music."

Odds & Ends

Hi, everyone. I hope you had a nice weekend, and perhaps a fiddle-laced St. Patrick's Day. Just a quick note to let you know that I've just posted some new links in the "Elsewheres" section (to your right), including a running record of our semester's music ("LIT 376 Soundtrack") and the beginnings of a bibliography ("LIT 376 Bibliography") of critical (and creative) sources related to our inquiry this semester. The latter may be useful to you as we move into the second half of the semester and towards your multigenre essays, which may be enhanced to the extent they reflect your immersion in the scholarship and theory of our course material.

If you haven't seen them yet, there are recent blog posts from Jenna, Reed, and Kelsey just below. Check them out & leave a comment to keep the conversation going, if you are so inclined!

Finally, mindful of some of your music DNA references, maybe some of you will be interested in the following news from the music world: May will be a big month in that both The National and Patty Griffin will be dropping new records; the new record from Iron & Wine releases on April 16, and you can stream the song "Grace for Saints and Ramblers" at RollingStone.com. Are there any Alela Diane fans out there? If not, there should be! Her new record will be out this year, too, and she has released the song "The Way We Fall" to whet your appetite. Finally, some of you asked about Martin Sexton after we heard his track "Way I Am" in class some weeks ago: if you're curious, check out his "YouTube Wednesdays" site, where a new video is posted each week of one of his live performances. You'll get a sense for what a one-person dynamo he is on stage ... and, oh, that voice! "Glory Bound" is still one of his signature songs, so that might be one to sample, and I'd recommend "Black Sheep," too, but you can't go wrong with any of them.

Cheers!

Green Notes

LitMusicians: we need to assemble a class playlist for tomorrow, when we all become Irish, right?! So, I'll get things started: "Falling Slowly" by The Frames; "Devil's Dance Floor," by Flogging Molly; "Isn't it Amazing" by Hothouse Flowers; "World of Good" by The Saw Doctors; and "In a Little While" by U2. (It's a shame Hothouse Flowers never got the attention they deserved in the U.S.: great band, with at least two great albums; I guess the same applies to The Frames, although at least they got a bit of a boost from Glen Hansard's success with The Swell Season). Happy St. Patrick's Day! (and I think I've just decided that our featured movie this semester, which we'll watch after the break, will have to be The Commitments!)

Scoring The Waste Land

Greetings, all! I promised, I think, to create a thread to open up discussion of The Waste Land, since we were barely able to get started on it this past Wednesday; I'm hoping a good many of you might be inclined to drop by this space before Monday's class and make an observation, raise a question, etc., about this poem's relationship to music and our class inquiry. Eliot himself called it "just a piece of rhythmical grumbling," and I.A. Richards referred to it as a "music of ideas." Regarding the latter characterization, what is the music and what are the ideas? What observations might we be inclined to make about the intersection of poetry and musical form here (especially on the heels of our encounter with both The Waves and The Book of Laughter and Forgetting)? I'll offer this one thought: we might not be inclined to think sonata form is relevant to this fractured and fragmented modernist work, but nevertheless there does seem to be the presence of an exposition in Part 1 ("The Burial of the Dead") in which the basic themes -- sterility, dryness, death, uncertain rebirth -- get introduced. That might beg the question of whether we can then speak of there being development and recapitulation sections. Anyway, if we get started here we can be that much more efficient when we meet on Monday. We'll start with Eliot, then move to the scheduled jazz poems; because we have some extra time available to us on Wednesday, too, either before or after we listen to A Love Supreme, the jazz poems might be able to be spread across two class sessions. Have a nice weekend!

Music. Ballet. Book of Laughter and Forgetting.

With the notion of ballet that we were talking about today, I thought I would share one of my favorite multi-genre videos...sculpture, ballet, music. Enjoy, and thanks for class today. 

Riffing on Guitars

OK, well, the battle lines are drawn. Kundera: "Stereotyped harmonies, banal melodies, and rhythms all the more insistent the more monotonous they are -- that is what remains of music, that is music's eternity....That primeval state of music (music without thought) mirrors the human being's inherent stupidity....The history of music is perishable, but the idiocy of guitars is eternal. Music nowadays has returned to its primeval state." Hornby (from Songbook): "I discovered sometime during the last few years, that my musical diet was light on carbohydrates, and the rock riff is nutritionally essential -- especially in cars and on book tours, when you need something quick and cheap to get you through a long day....If I ever had to hum a blues-metal riff to a puzzled alien, I'd choose Zeppelin's "Heartbreaker," from Led Zeppelin II. I'm not sure that me going "DANG DANG DANG DANG DA-DA-DANG, DA-DA-DA-DA-DA DANG DANG DA-DA-DANG" would enlighten him especially, but I'd feel that I'd done as good a job as the circumstances allowed. Even written down like that (albeit with uppercase assistance), it seems to me that the glorious, imbecilic loudness of the track is conveyed effectively and unambiguously. Read it again. See? It rocks....So much of what you consume when you get older is about accommodation: I have kids, and neighbors, and a partner who could quite happily never hear another blues-metal riff or block-rockin' beat in her life; I have less time, less tolerance for bullshit, more interest in good taste, more confidence in my own judgment....In learning to do that, however, things get lost, too, and one of the things that got lost ... was Jimmy Page. The noise he makes is not who I am anymore, but it's still a noise worth listening to; it's also a reminder that the attempt to grow up smart comes at a cost." This he said/he said reminds us, perhaps, of a conversation about the intellectualization of music begun with our recent encounter with Adorno. Where do you fall?!

By the way, in case you end up wanting to refer to it, here's that passage I read from Kundera's The Art of the Novel in which he discusses the word-based, variation-based approach he seeks in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (and which validates our discussion of Schoenberg as a musical model for this novel): "A theme is an essential inquiry. And increasingly I realize that such an inquiry is, finally, the examination of certain words, theme-words. Which leads me to emphasize: a novel is based primarily on certain fundamental words. It is like Schoenberg's "tone-row." In The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, the "row" goes: forgetting, laughter, angels, litost, border. Over the course of the novel, those five principal words are analyzed, studied, defined, redefined, and thus transformed into categories of existence. The novel is built on those few categories the way a house is built on its pillars."

Circles

I wanted to post something about circles that  I found in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting. We were talking about Mikhail Bakhtin in class--and his emphasis on the dialogic and circles. I think this quote applies to music and literature...the cycles it goes through as it leads us through emotional processes: 

"That is when I understood the magical meaning of the circle. If you go away from a row, you can still come back into it. A row is an open formation. But a circle closes up, and if you go away from it, there is no way back. It is not by chance that the planets move in circles and that a rock coming loose from one of them goes inexorably away, carried off by centrifugal force. Like a meteorite broken off from a planet, I left the circle and have not yet stopped falling. Some people are granted their death as they are whirling around, and others are smashed at the end of their fall. And these others (I am one of them) always retain a kind of faint yearning for that lost ring dance, because we are all inhabitants of a universe where everything turns in circles." 

(page 92, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting) 

Poetry or music?

Class, whats your opinion on the following lines? Is this poetry or music lyrics? Were these to be lyrics, would you say that they stand on their own or require music? Would you rip them apart in a workshop?


Shake dreams from your hair
My pretty child, my sweet one.
Choose the day and choose the sign of your day
The day's divinity
First thing you see.
A vast radiant beach in a cool jeweled moon
Couples naked race down by it's quiet side
And we laugh like soft, mad children
Smug in the wooly cotton brains of infancy
The music and voices are all around us.
Choose they croon the Ancient Ones
The time has come again
Choose now, they croon
Beneath the moon
Beside an ancient lake
Enter again the sweet forest
Enter the hot dream
Come with us
Everything is broken up and dances.

Prose in Music

Ever since beginning the discussion of whether Bob Dylan's music can be classified as "poetry," I have been wrestling with another idea in my mind. It has become more common in pop music videos for artists to have some sort of spoken yet artistic "prologue" before their songs begin in their videos. My favorite example that I can think of at the moment is Lana Del Rey's introduction to her music video, "Ride," and another example that I give hesitantly is Rhianna's introduction to her single "We Found Love." These are not part of their recorded songs, however, I have been wondering if these beautifully crafted introductions could be classified as music, or literature? Maybe the beauty in this lies in my confusion of what to call them, and their capabilities to serve as both?

Waving Goodbye

It is always tough to leave Woolf behind, and especially in this case given that her novel and her concerns are a landmark in so many ways for the pursuits of this course. They are like that fin rising out of “the waste of waters” for Bernard, the vision that momentarily and partially lends flashes of ecstatic meaning and coherence. I’ve always admired Kundera's work, but somehow I can’t help but feel we don’t do him any favors by reading him next to Woolf: there’s a thinness and near inconsequentiality to The Book of Laughter and Forgetting coming as it does on the heels of The Waves. But maybe that’s just me. It’s just that when you give yourself over to Woolf’s fiction, you can experience such an extension and amplification of your being in the world; aesthetically, too, a novel like The Waves is experienced as if it were a painting or a piece of music: you tend to feel it with your whole body.

In any event, I hope the novel offered various degrees of rewards to you. I hope, too, that the Beethoven string quartet seemed, even if in somewhat opaque ways, an enriching and intriguing complement to your reading. The most accessible intersection may be in the emotions of the music: that is, the mixture of sorrow and lament with defiance and heroism in the music seems particularly germane to the tenor of The Waves, and especially to Bernard's summing up in the final section.

Maybe some of you -- especially those who didn't get to weigh in as much during our class conversations -- would still care to reflect and comment in this space. And how about, simply, some examples of memorable lines, similes, or generally stunning writing? For example, in one of my favorites, consider that figurative "sauntering down the avenue" of Neville and Bernard, the extended analogy describing their conversations and confluent minds: “There we talked; sat talking; sauntered down that avenue, the avenue which runs under the trees, the trees that hung with fruit, which we have trodden so often together, so that now the turf is bare round some of those trees, round certain plays and poems, certain favorites of ours — the turf is trodden bare by our incessant unmethodical pacing” (272). Or the type of line that induces self-reflection, such as when Bernard recalls “being in love for the first time” and notes “I made a phrase — a poem about a wood-pigeon — a single phrase, for a hole had been knocked in my mind, one of those sudden transparencies through which one sees everything” (241). What have served as "sudden transparencies" in your lives? Along the same lines, and with only slightly different vocabulary, Bernard realizes that he and his five friends “all had their rapture; their common feeling with death; something that stood them in stead.” After noting that “some people go to priests; others to poetry,” Bernard reaffirms “I to my friends, I to my own heart, I to seek among phrases and fragments something unbroken” (266).

And this, finally, is what this novel ultimately seems to be about: finding something to shore against our ruins (as we look ahead to Eliot), something to at least create the illusion that things might be unbroken. Thus the consolation Bernard finds in realizing “what a sense of the tolerableness of life the lights in the bedrooms of small shopkeepers give us!” (233). They’ll get up the next morning and open the shop, Tuesday will follow Monday, etc. For a while, Bernard’s wife, family, and domestic routines do the trick, causing him to think that “what was fiery and furtive like a fling of grain cast into the air and blown hither and thither by wild gusts of life from every quarter is now methodical and orderly and flung with a purpose.” But then that oh-so-fateful appendage: “or so it seems” (262).

And then (here I realize I'm nearly repeating a comment I made in class) there's that line that could nearly apply to anything we’ve read (and will read) this semester: “It is strange how the dead leap out on us at street corners, or in dreams” (274). This is developing as a course about hauntings. From the younger selves of the narrator of “Tintern Abbey,” to Keats’s dead brother who permeates the two odes we read, to Michael Furey and the vast hosts of the dead, to the Abyssinian maid in "Kubla Khan," to Mary and the speaker's memories in Springsteen's "The River," to Dylan's speaker yearning after Mr. Tambourine Man, to the spectral spirits waiting for us in The Waste Land, to the incomprehensible loss of Percival – the living dead return to nourish, to challenge, to force self-reckonings, to console.

Regarding musical language and identity: what friends, what family members – what notes – do you need in your life for balance, for completion, for proper orchestration? Consider Bernard in this two-page sequence, when we understand that he’s both a musical note in a fugue AND a composer and arranger: “To be myself (I note) I need the illumination of other people’s eyes, and therefore cannot be entirely sure what is my self … With them I am many-sided. They retrieve me from darkness … Yet they drum me alive. They brush off these vapours. I begin to be impatient of solitude — to feel its draperies hang sweltering, unwholesome about me” (116-7). And then, sentences later, it’s Bernard as composer: “I could describe every chair, table, luncher here copiously, freely. My mind hums hither and thither with its veil of words for everything. To speak, about wine even to the waiter, is to bring about an explosion. Up goes the rocket. Its golden grain falls, fertilizing, upon the rich soil of my imagination” (117).

Art like this is a great challenge, but we're rewarded amply if we give ourselves over to it. Reading this novel reminds me of Neville's description of reading a challenging poem: "To read this poem one must have myriad eyes.... One must have patience and infinite care and let the light sound, whether of spiders' delicate feet on a leaf or the chuckle of water in some irrelevant drainpipe, unfold too. Nothing is to be rejected in fear or horror.... One must be skeptical, but throw caution to the winds and when the door opens accept absolutely. Also sometimes weep; also cut away ruthlessly with a slice of the blade soot, bark, hard accretions of all sorts. And so ... let down one's net deeper and deeper and gently draw in and bring to the surface what he said and she said and make poetry" (198-9). In any event, I hope your nets revealed generous hauls.

What Makes Music?

Greetings!
I was reading this poem for my Modern Poetry class by Wallace Stevens and it really resonated with what we started to touch on in class on Wednesday. This question of what music actually is. Do simple sounds create a sort of music? I think that this poem argues that these sounds indeed are music. When the speaker mentions "Just as my fingers on these keys/ Make music, so the self-same sounds/ On my spirit make a music, too. / Music is feeling, then, not sound;", it is very clear that the speaker believes music is simply a sound that moves you. The poem is kind of long but check it out! What do you think?

Peter Quince at the Clavier

Just as my fingers on these keys
Make music, so the self-same sounds
On my spirit make a music, too.
Music is feeling, then, not sound;
And thus it is that what I feel,
Here in this room, desiring you,
Thinking of your blue-shadowed silk,
Is music. It is like the strain
Waked in the elders by Susanna;
Of a green evening, clear and warm,
She bathed in her still garden, while
The red-eyed elders, watching, felt
The basses of their beings throb
In witching chords, and their thin blood
Pulse pizzicati of Hosanna.

II
In the green water, clear and warm,
Susanna lay.
She searched
The touch of springs,
And found
Concealed imaginings.
She sighed,
For so much melody.
Upon the bank, she stood
In the cool
Of spent emotions.
She felt, among the leaves,
The dew
Of old devotions.
She walked upon the grass,
Still quavering.
The winds were like her maids,
On timid feet,
Fetching her woven scarves,
Yet wavering.
A breath upon her hand
Muted the night.
She turned —
A cymbal crashed,
Amid roaring horns.

III
Soon, with a noise like tambourines,
Came her attendant Byzantines.
They wondered why Susanna cried
Against the elders by her side;
And as they whispered, the refrain
Was like a willow swept by rain.
Anon, their lamps' uplifted flame
Revealed Susanna and her shame.
And then, the simpering Byzantines
Fled, with a noise like tambourines.

IV
Beauty is momentary in the mind —
The fitful tracing of a portal;
But in the flesh it is immortal.
The body dies; the body's beauty lives.
So evenings die, in their green going,
A wave, interminably flowing.
So gardens die, their meek breath scenting
The cowl of winter, done repenting.
So maidens die, to the auroral
Celebration of a maiden's choral.
Susanna's music touched the bawdy strings
Of those white elders; but, escaping,
Left only Death's ironic scraping.
Now, in its immortality, it plays
On the clear viol of her memory,
And makes a constant sacrament of praise.

Remembering Rhoda

We start to worry for Rhoda fairly early in The Waves, it seems, as it becomes evident that her hold on ordinary reality is rather tenuous, and as we get intimations that she desires to escape from that reality. There's complexity and poignance to her plight, though, most especially, I find, in that moment when she observes that "there are moments when the walls of the mind grow thin; when nothing is unabsorbed, and I could fancy that we might blow so vast a bubble that the sun might set and rise in it and we might take the blue of midday and the black of midnight and be cast off and escape from here and now" (224). There's something beautiful about that passage, something that suggests that maybe death can be envisioned as something to be embraced, as something that will offer a compensatory reality.

Anyway, this posting comes less from a need to fill in Rhoda's story than to share a wonderful poem. Do you all know Stevie Smith's 1957 poem "Not Waving but Drowning"? We could note the parallel to Woolf's novel in Smith's title, of course, but more importantly we get a kind of vivid mini-drama that suggests a person (consider Rhoda) whose gestures have been tragically misinterpreted throughout his (her) life:

Not Waving but Drowning

Nobody heard him, the dead man,
But still he lay moaning:
I was much further out than you thought
And not waving but drowning.

Poor chap, he always loved larking
And now he's dead
It must have been too cold for him his heart gave way,
They said.

Oh, no no no, it was too cold always
(Still the dead one lay moaning)
I was much too far out all my life
And not waving but drowning.

It's a shattering poem when you think about the contrast between the dead man's inner torment and the image of good nature his friends saw in his comings and goings (his "larkings"). Like The Waves, it's a work that suggests many of us don't always feel at home in the world, and that we have to try to convince ourselves and others that we do. And sometimes, alas, we can't call upon that resolve Bernard summons at the end of the novel.

Get Your Motor Runnin'

I'm invoking Steppenwolf's 1969 chestnut, of course, with that title line, but it's neither "Born to Be Wild" nor Easy Rider that's on my mind, but, rather, the music that rallies our burning muscles during workouts. I was reflecting that I probably pull off my best times on the elliptical machine when I listen to a playlist that looks something like the following: "Tower" (by Angel, an undervalued progressive rock band from the 70s!), "Unchained" (Van Halen), "Hallowed Be Thy Name" (Iron Maiden), "The Hellion & Electric Eye" (Judas Priest), "Don't Fear the Reaper" (Blue Oyster Cult), "Magic Power" (Triumph), and maybe "Trains" (Porcupine Tree). Now, I know that's not the music of the spheres (and you may be thinking less of me already), but one can't argue with results! Anyway, all of this makes me wonder what music you call upon when you need a little extra adrenaline in your pedals, your running shoes, or when you're in the car on the way to your soccer game? Because, after all, in these instances Joni Mitchell just won't do! Macklemore's "Can't Hold Us" is seeming like a candidate lately, too -- what a great song!

OK, back to more serious matters: I hope you didn't leave class last time in a greater state of loss than when you entered. I'm reminded of the pedagogical challenges of The Waves -- part of me thinks the best approach would be a linear one, moving in some kind of modestly representative way through each "time pool," but, then again, I'm also inclined to go at it in a more random way, as we did last Wednesday, letting the particles fall where they may. Either, I suppose, is true to the formal spirit of the novel, which is linear in one sense (the interludes) and recursive in another (the soliloquies). Anyway, do use the posting below (i.e., "Waveriders") -- or start a new one -- to comment, share a passage, an observation, etc.; the more of these that we can get circulating the better off we'll be this week. Keep in mind, too, that as the posts pile up the older material will get pushed out of view -- but don't let that stop you from reviving an older thread. Don't be put off by some of those loooonngggg posts, either -- I guess this is material for my own multigenre essay, and my hope is (to quote Bernard) that you'll at least find a "fin in a waste of waters" in some of the lengthier posts, and be inclined to share even a modest observation or two of your own! Polyphonically yours, Eric.

Music of Fruit

I found this pretty interesting video and thought I would share it with the class. It certainly presents the music of nature that we discussed from our poets in a unique and entirely modern way. Perhaps this speaks to the fresh fruit and vegetables that we get in the grocery store, no longer are they local or seasonal. Technological music from technologically produced vegetables in a modern world. Entertaining nonetheless. Enjoy.


http://www.npr.org/blogs/thesalt/2013/02/19/172431202/this-music-is-bananas-really

Waveriders

We move on, of course, to the enormous challenges (and hopefully the enormous delights) of Woolf's 1931 novel (her seventh), The Waves. Previewing some of your reactions and comments in this space might be a good way to get things going as we look ahead to Wednesday's class (when we'll start by returning to Joyce & "The Dead" but then make our way in short order to Woolf). First of all, some relevant excerpts from her diaries, where she emphasizes issues of both sound and rhythm: "Could one not get the waves to be heard all through? Or the farmyard noises? Some odd irrelevant noises" (6/23/1929); "The Waves is I think resolving itself into a series of dramatic soliloquies. The thing is to keep them running homogeneously in and out, in the rhythm of the waves. Can they be read consecutively? ... I think this is the greatest opportunity I have yet been able to give myself: therefore I suppose the most complete failure. Yet I respect myself for writing this book" (8/20/1930).

Woolf certainly felt the pressure of form when she wrote the novel (like Beethoven, she struggled fiercely throughout her career to free herself and her art from conventional form, from the "two and thirty chapters" of her literary predecessors, as she pursued what she memorably called the "luminous halo" of life). And now we feel the pressure of reading and responding to that form. Most skeletally, we will encounter nine episodes that each follow an italicized interlude (or maybe prelude is a better word for these): the latter trace the arc of the sun, from dawn to dusk, and aspects of the natural world, in a day-spanning progression that may nearly make us recall the similar sort of (metaphorical) arc in Keats's "To Autumn." The episodes follow six individuals from childhood (episode 1) through their school years (episode 2), their university years (episode 3), and all the way up through middle age (episode 7) and, in some cases, death; through it all, the six (Bernard, Jinny, Neville, Rhoda, Louis, and Susan) remain life-long friends.

Our job, I guess, is to understand how Woolf is using form in this novel -- especially musical form -- but also to look for the presence of music as a thematic context, and, hopefully, to enjoy the aesthetics, the story, and the wisdom that the novel has to offer. As you would expect from Woolf, this novel will not be about a sequence of events, but about what Wordsworth calls "spots in time": we don't, after all, typically think of our lives in strictly chronological terms. The emphasis will be on lucid moments, on bright, vivid scenes and impressions. Many of them will recur. If the characters share anything, it's probably the desire to achieve reintegration and deeper meanings, to find in all those disparate moments and images a kind of pattern and unity. So, try to perceive some manner of relationship between the preludes and the melodies and concerns of the voices that follow in the attached section, try to identify the ways the six voices/individuals resemble each other and differ from one another, try to track the role of memory in the novel, and, especially as we work towards the conclusion and our 2/27 meeting, try to figure out where this all leads.

(Do feel free, as well, to offer some comments on the presence/role/influence of music in Joyce's story -- especially if you missed our previous class session or haven't yet had a chance to share some of your observations)

Of Abbeys, Nightingales, Urns, and Swallows

Adieu! Adieu! to the Romantics, and on to the Modernists. I guess we're leaving the exposition stage of the course, and, with the weighty literature that looms (Woolf, Kundera, Morrison, etc.), we enter the development stage; we also move from poetry to the novel. I hope some of the important questions (theoretical, structural, thematic, musicological, etc.) are circulating productively for you. We will create more, I'm sure.

I hope, too, that the musical contexts informed and even enhanced your experience of Wordsworth and the Keats odes. We're realizing that we can study the presence of music in literature, or literature in music, or, perhaps most interestingly, the seemingly shared structures of literature and music. The ode and the sonata forms both provided public models/genres for artists, and to that end tended to produce similar expectations and "landmarks." I tried to emphasize the treatment of time in each genre and artistic form. Sculpture and painting (and of the latter you should visit Jenna's posting on O'Keeffe below), we might say, unfold meaning in the context of space, while music and literature reveal themselves as arts of time (and here I'm remembering Nancy Cluck's book, Literature and Music: Essays on Form). Reading "Tintern Abbey" and listening to Beethoven's 5th, we learn important lessons about human life and about dealing with the passage of time. It would be useful for us to map the movements in time (i.e. present time, past time, and future time) in Wordsworth's poem, and what these movements mean in the context of the overall meaning of the poem. It is no doubt a work of crisis (and here you might think of our experience listening to the Mozart and Beethoven movements, where the first theme must undergo crisis and fragmentation before "coming home again" in the recapitulation): the speaker must struggle between confidence in the truth and in the moral power of the imagination (especially in the context of the human heart's ballet with nature) on the one hand, and the ravaging effects of time on the other, the irrepressible sense of mortality. The speaker achieves an affirmation at the end, but it's not without a sense of loss and anxiety.

We didn't talk about the Preface to Wordsworth's and Coleridge's Lyrical Ballads, and we probably should have. We might have thought about (in the context of literary and musical composition) Wordsworth's famous lines that poetry constitutes "emotions recollected in tranquility." Romanticism in some respects becomes obsessed with recovering a sense of lost wholeness.

This is a recapitulation itself, of course, but the Keats odes trace a similar effect. They reflect a kind of lost tonal stability (ah, there's that phrase again!") in the midst of the anguished strivings and questions of "Nightingale" and "Grecian Urn," but arguably turn a corner in that stanza in "Grecian Urn" when the urn (now a funeral urn) begins to suggest not an art of escape from the conditions of mortality, but an art that can soothe and console human suffering. This leads to the deeply consoling treatment of time in "To Autumn," which, in a season-spanning day, and a life-spanning metaphorical trajectory (sunrise to sunset), finds the speaker ultimately perceiving that life means life in time, and that, contemplated properly, we can find beauty and consoling meaning even in the moment that we know must now pass. The swallows are gathering to leave, but in order that they might come back. The sounds of nature and animal life in that gloriously elegant third stanza become a kind of a music in the poet's soul (John Minahan writes convincingly about this in his study, Word Like a Bell) -- music becomes a path to insight, teaching the speaker (and us) that even in passing, time leaves something of value behind. This reminds me of when we listen to a favorite captivating, well-constructed, emotional song (pop, rock, or otherwise): we must somehow both relish where it takes us and be prepared for that moment when it ends, when the notes vanish into the air.

A (Long) Keatsian Postscript

For what it's worth (and it may be worth very little), I thought maybe I'd post some outtakes from that essay I was telling you I wrote on Michael Stipe's "Find the River" and Keats's "To Autumn" (the full text of which is available on Moodle, should you be interested). Maybe it will be useful as an example of how one might go about writing up something formal in this interdisciplinary field, but mostly I thought you might just find it to be interesting (and maybe you'll tell me I have gone off the deep end with the analysis!). So, I pick up the action about 2/3 of the way into the essay:

***************************

Helen Vendler observes that "the constitutive trope of the ode "To Autumn" is enumeration, the trope of plenitude" and, indeed, the poem is "o'er-brimm'd" (l.11) with a catalog of fruits, nuts, flowers, grains, and animals. This abundance appears formally, as well, in the dense textures of Keats's poetic line, in the subtleties of sound and rhythm, and, as H.T. Kirby-Smith adds, "in a wealth of vocalic resonances, echoes, and reflections" (225) that finally turn the poem over to music and the ambivalent songs of autumn in the final stanza.... Stipe, too, loads his poetic line with an abundance of carefully considered sound elements, and creates a speaker whose cornucopia of spices and scents -- referencing, as he does, bergamot, vetiver, ginger, lemon, indigo, coriander stem, rose of hay -- articulates his own pursuit of sensuous immediacy and expression of "the richness of this transient existence" (Kirby-Smith 249).... What neither writer or speaker possesses in abundance, though, is time, and thus each lyric proceeds with the painful awareness that what now is "loaded," "swelled," and "o'er-brimm'd" must finally fall, turn to "last oozings," or reach the ocean. Amidst all the temporal and spatial movement, the poetics of each lyric also ironically strive to produce stoppages and stasis, seeking to arrest the flow of time with challenging syntax, rhythmic variation, and metaphor.

Stipe, of course, manages the progression of time most obviously with his masterful rhythmic variations and metrical anomalies. In addition, the obliqueness of some of his phrasings (e.g., “bergamot and vetiver / run through my head and fall away” (l. 17-18)), the tactical breaks with syntactic convention (e.g., “river poet search naïveté”), and the Hopkins-like coined phrases (e.g., “bayberry moon” (l. 8)) all serve to slow down the reader’s experience of time, and thus work brilliantly with the thematic content of “Find the River” even as they work against those rhythmic elements that sweep one along in its current. As a lyric, then, “Find the River” stops, rearranges, and even at one level transcends the problems of time in the way that poems can; as a musical composition and auditory experience, however, the song accedes to a sense of linear inevitability, proceeding from the soft opening strums of the acoustic guitar to its preordained conclusion after three minutes and fifty-two seconds. Because music happens to us in “real time,” argues Matthews, “to change the time of a piece of music is to alter, as it were, its cellular makeup, and for the worse” (38); to violate the flow seems to do a kind of violence to it. Although it’s repeatable and we can find the river over and over again, we always necessarily swim in different waters —- it is always, at some level, an experience of one-timeness. While its meditative content and formal qualities do, as we’ve seen, extend the reader in time, the semantic coda of “Find the River” does not exhibit the expressive qualities of what Barbara Smith calls “weak closure” (250): the last line, in which the speaker, seemingly again addressing the young auditor, promises that “all of this is coming your way” (l. 39), feels so declarative, so wise, and so full of final significance as to secure strong closure.

If, though, we consider, as we should, the musical elements that surround and complement Stipe’s words, then, when the rushing stateliness of the final verse seems at last to capitulate to the unforgiving linear nature of time, we realize Stipe receives help from his band-mates. We’re delivered definitively and emotionally to that final end-stop, but yet the song, in its very last moments and just after Stipe’s voice has exited, yields to the soft repetitive strums of the acoustic guitar, which fade gently as if loath to leave, and as if the notes -— and we the listeners —- are being stretched like gossamer in an unending present: like “permanence wrung out of wane,” as Rilke writes in his poem “Gong.” We think, perhaps, of Plumly’s assessment of Keats, that “at his best, in the odes, time is not only suspended but extended to an edge, to where the running-over almost spills” (344). This is poetry’s “timeless, time-bound business,” writes Linda Gregerson, “to trace both portal and mortality, to write against death, yes, but also into it” (263).... Just as Keats’s poem provides that exhilarating spatial sensation of veering upwards into the expanse of sky, “Find the River” widens out to the ocean and the horizon as the river dramatically approaches the estuary. In each case, we ultimately experience a poetic work “whose visionary size transcends its local space” (Plumly 172).

[....]

As convinced as Keats was in his last year that he’d leave little of value behind in his poetic work, no one any longer, of course, needs to argue for his legacy or for that of his odes. Using “To Autumn” as an ongoing reference point in a discussion of Stipe’s “Find the River” in no way implies an equivalency of stature or accomplishment -— the latter will never, after all, appear in a single poetry anthology. All the same, “To Autumn” uniquely helps to reveal the thematic and emotional amplitude of “Find the River,” as well as to draw out the intricacies of Stipe’s nuanced poetics. Considered together, however improbably, we value these two lyrics because they convince us that the imaginative can be situated “in a harmonious relation to the natural” (Vendler 126) and in so doing they provide recompense and instructions for our experience of time. By being so resolutely embedded in the fleeting, both “To Autumn” and “Find the River” teach us how to assimilate the implications of the reaped furrow and the river’s arrival at the ocean, and thus to extend ourselves temporally -— with grace and with the expectation that sweetness will follow. We are, in turn, perhaps newly appreciative of the “stubble-plain,” accepting of the power of the undertow, and welcoming of the expanse (and possibly the void) of the boundless sky and sea. With sense that “seems to be brought along by chimes of sound” (Hallberg 164), these two lyrics allow us to reach beyond the linguistic, to sense “a cohesion and ongoingness to which we adhere even when we cannot know its ground” (Stewart 331). And if and when there is, indeed, “nothing left to throw,” and no more songs of Spring in the sonorous air, these lyrics tell us we can make peace with the accompanying doubts and uncertainties, trusting that our figurative last line will be some manner of enjambment and not an end-stop.