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?