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!).