The Life and Times of

I think I wrote this on a bus from Chicago to Des Moines after reading an article on Nietzsche.

Perspectivism

When I was my age I thought truth was and
I was and the chair was.
Love and hatred and fear and satisfaction were,
but strangely and as systems of things that more obviously were.
Beauty and banality and worthy and goodness were even less,
and to the extent that any of them
was at all, it was only on the solid foundations
of solid beings,
truths.

When I was only slightly older than I am now,
nothing was.
From that distance even I
was not, but that did not stop me.
My emptiness filled only me and those
who were filled with similar non-being truthy nontruths.
Nihilism can trouble even those aware of non-existence, but
we kept breathing because the hassle that comes when you stop is worse;
they always freak out.

Now though, at my age, I’m seeing the virtue of the cubist’s point of view:
Perspective is everything.

And but so now I’m listening to Our Prayer for the second time in an hour but this time it’s mono and the high voice in the beautiful choral arrangement is trying too hard and everyone sounds a bit muddled and distant, but then again I can hear Brian Wilson’s golden voice cutting through where 70 miles ago I could only hear impersonal virtuosity. That’s not fair. Darian Sahanaja and his touring band and the Wondermints are all quite talented musicians, not impersonal, just not identifiable. It’s just that when Wilson was 24 and tripping balls he was sort of vocally untouchable, and his voice is eerily clear despite the not-quite-pristine 40-year old tracks that, no matter the technical superiority of tape to digital, just don’t hold up to the phenomenal quality set by the recording on the 2004 remake of Smile.* And that’s the irreconcilable problem with choosing between the Smile Sessions and Brian Wilson Presents Smile. The later has a 60-year old Wilson who lost his castrati range and subtle phrasing sometime during his long let’s call it a hibernation, while the former lacks the polish (and often vocals) that comes with a completed recording ready for contemporary mastering. We’re left with a Phil Spector-aping wall-of-sound approach on the old tapes that gets the wall part right but it’s more of a mud and straw fortification to the newer versions’ Castillo de San Marcos coquina detail. What we really need is for someone to edit these two records together with the music of 2004 version and the Wilson vocals of the 1966-67 version.

And let’s not lose track of what’s lost in the Smile Sessions that Wilson and Van Dyke Parks resurrected in the 2004 album. Most painful is the absence of most of the vocals on what is called Love to Say Dada on the old version and In Blue Hawaii on the new one. The mostly instrumental version of Love to Say Dada is still pretty scary following Mrs. O’Leary’s Cow, with the breaths that go nowhere where they should lead to words. But we’re still left with that nagging question of what a younger Wilson would have done with the transition from needing a drink in Hell to being swept off to Hawaii. Nor do we get to hear the loungey delivery on I Wanna Be Around (and the bowed bass gets a little lost as well). And then there are smatterings here and there of missing vocals that make the tracks sound a bit empty, clearly not recorded to be heard as instrumentals (Song for Children is conspicuous).

What we do get on the Smile Sessions are gorgeous vocal performances from Wilson that are irreplaceable, even by Wilson himself. Wind Chimes and Surf’s Up avoid the stoned and pre-disco feels of the Smiley Smile and Sunflower/Surf’s Up versions that have been the standards for almost four decades. These two tracks and Cabin Essence can immediately be moved into whatever cannon there exists for “pop” music and should appear untouched on whatever mashup someone puts together of the 2004 recording and these sixties sessions.

As for Good Vibrations, the version here is definitive, but it’s nothing we didn’t already know. It’s a great song, arguably Wilson’s most essential (though not by me). But it shouldn’t be a part of Smile. There’s a reason that Wilson put it last on 2004 version and it remains last here. Parks didn’t write it and it has nothing to do with the rest of the record, which is a concept album about American history and geography, not a meditation on a woman sending out the good vibrations that contrast to the bad vibrations that Wilson’s mother told him are what make dogs bark at strangers. It’s just a great song and this version is a great version; the apex of the theremin.

So what to make of the Smile Sessions? It’s great. You should listen to it. A young Brian Wilson must be heard and that’s sort of all you need to know. It’s not “better” than the 2004 version, which for some reason folks take as not definitive despite being made by the two people who started Smile in 1966, but it has its moments and has historical import that I won’t address here. There are hints on the sessions (and proof on Pet Sounds) that Wilson could do wall-of-sound better than Spector, but these rough-cut sessions just don’t make it much of the time (I’m looking at you parts of Heroes and Villains). And I don’t care what Wilson said back in the day, mono isn’t better than stereo done right, which he proved himself forty years later.

*At least to my ears at 75 mph in the not-quite-Mercedes Benz-level noise-isolating cabin of this 2000 Mitsubishi Galant stuffed to gills with boxes and a box fan.

So I’m sitting in the Las Vegas airport watching planes rise and fall, earphones jammed into my ears to block out the sound of digital slots emulating mechanical slots and video games, with the pressure of what I think is a sleeping head on my right shoulder, and I’m startled by a sudden shuddering and a snort so loud that I can hear it over the two sports writers jammed in my ears talking about the historic Redsox collapse without actually giving the Rays any credit for an equally historic comeback. I turn to look past of dark curls just int time to see a barely controlled smile on her face fade with effort. I turn back to the runway. Another shudder. This time I’m pretty sure I hear the first pitch of a barely vocalized laugh. Then another, freer snort and a wide grin, though these are quickly subdued and she nuzzles back into my shoulder. I don’t think her eyes have opened. Later, in the Las Vegas Terminal B women’s room she’ll unnerve fellow passengers with a snort and squeal from a stall.

No doubt individuals taking an after-dinner stroll down a crowded lane have suppressed chortles during some Proustian moment or recollection of the joke they overheard at the butcher this morning. And I’m sure people were listening to comedy on Walkmen and Discmen. But my guess is that only with the recent ubiquity of portable digital audio and comedy podcasts and the minor resurgence of comedy albums has solitary laughing in public become a common occurrence outside of a small circle of bemused schizophrenics.

My first experience came on the Red Line toward Evanston a couple years ago. I was listening to back-episodes of the recently discovered Ricky Gervais Show and was hit by what in the privacy of my own room or in the company of friends would have been a guffaw followed by prolonged belly-laughs and tears. But on the train I made an effort to steal myself. I forced by mouth flat and let only my abdominal muscles shake. I probably put my hand to my mouth and looked down. I shook my head and put my contorted face in order, but I was new to it, so when Karl made a bold, unexpected pronouncement and Ricky exploded with squealing laughter and insistence on Karl’s idiocy, I lost it and snorted and spit a little down my chin. Mortified and red, I pulled the headphones from my ears and continued by commute in silence.

Why are we so embarrassed by public, solitary laughter? Does it come from the same place as public crying or fighting? Those things tend to come from something negative and so we try to avoid burdening strangers with our problems. Laughter doesn’t really burden our neighbors with anything unpleasant. It’s easy enough to point to shyness as the root of our embarrassment; we are uncomfortable with the gaze of strangers and so do everything we can to fade into the background. But of course we don’t always want to be unseen: we dress for strangers as much as those we know and being seen is a big part of our public persona. Could laughter be a sign of vulnerability? What message does it send? But that can’t be all there is to it because I at least feel like it’s rude to laugh alone in public. Maybe it’s because my neighbors aren’t in on the joke; it’s like I’m lording it over them that I’m having so much more fun than they are.

Whatever the reason for our shyness about giggling in public, I suspect that it’s a problem that’s only going to get worse.

With the end of my exile to Iowa nearly in sight and the irrational flood of premature nostalgia for my life to come still strong, I’m thinking about loneliness and absence. I’ve spent several years of my adult life mostly alone, often in unfamiliar locales. Even the six months before my (extremely lonely) life in China were oddly lonely. I was living in the neighborhood I went to college in, working at the same school, living with friends, and always just blocks from my best friend. But my partner who was not yet clearly my life partner at that point was gone, I was sort of adrift, my closest friend was distant despite her nearness, and I spent most of my free time walking around Bay Shore by myself. Then China was absolute loneliness, or as lonely as you can get in our age of technological miracles. And there were other bouts of being largely on my own, this last year the most recent, though my frequent lonely car rides back to Chicago mitigate it a bit. I’ve been thinking of loneliness as absence rather than isolation. Even when busy and around lots of folks that I find interesting, being away from her makes me lonely, which is sort of weird.

Writing poetry is hard and I’m even worse at that than I am at this and I should no better than to subject it to others. But what is a personal blog if not self-indulgent, so here is a poem I wrote mostly in a coffee shop on a hot day in Des Moines.

Lonely Pie

This place,
this booth,
is a good place,
a good booth
for this apple pie a la mode,
though I’ve lost my taste for it,
and replaced it with my taste for you,
which grows with our distance;
that old cliche.

Last week I watched you
sneak french fries from Suchie’s plate,
and I forgot my Amish-sized slice,
let the cream melt.
By the time you left for your lesson,
and my taste returned,
the crust was soggy.

I think I love you least in the space between
your presence and your absence,
when I take for granted
your effect on me.
But if you care for my well being at all,
be grateful for those moments of diminished love,
for they keep me from wasting away,
and save me from disappointment over cold apple pie drowned in melted ice cream.

I’m writing this on day three, so it is clogged with perspectives not so immediate as I’d like. A little context: I’m on a plane reading Zadie Smith book reviews in Harper’s on my way to DC for work and I can’t stop fiddling with this ring, which irritates my skin a little and makes me wonder how long until my body accepts it as a part of me. Will it be before or after I have a tan line on this tiny part of me? Can I even get a tan line anymore? I’ve gone so pale since moving to the Midwest. I guess I should say I was reading Zadie Smith, because this idea came to me suddenly when reading and now I’m listening to Kurt Vile and pecking away at a virtual keyboard. So here I am pecking away at a virtual keyboard 30,000 feet above the earth and I’m trying to see if I can create some kind of record of a life joined and I’m not entirely sure why. Nick and I talked in the corner of Simon’s about an excuse for writing; a project. So maybe this is just a project; maybe it’s just a reason to begin and continue. And maybe marriage is sort of the same thing.

I tell people I’ve been married for years. We made the first mumblings of that commitment on a couch in the high dessert, and even before that we stayed when going was an option and took path A over path B. And since that night in the dessert we’ve moved further and further on that continuum that includes strangers and friends and lovers and enemies and spouses. The wedding threw a surprising binary into our relationship: from unwed to wed. The change is pretty clear to the state, and given their gifts and travels and words and tears and smiles, I suspect that it was clear to our friends and families. But for me the change was fleeting, flitting in out of the frame of my experience. Suddenly we were changed by a a few words and small movements of precious metal and I was a husband where before I was a partner. And then it would pass and I had moved slightly further from stranger toward impossible unity.

But maybe the binary wasn’t so clear even for outsiders. The law would privilege our unwed relationship in small ways, and the gifts and travels and words and tears and smiles and hugs could just as easily be a moment of expression of the small step rather than an exclamation at a sea change.

The wedding is like a writing project. It gives structure and forces action: an excuse for community despite the distance of continents; formalizes celebration and expressions of love and appreciation; pushes us past the costs that keep us apart most of the time. And what of the marriage? What function as the rare important binary does it serve in our relationship with each other and with others on that relationship color wheel? I guess that’s the guiding question of the impulsive project.

I understand most of the reasons that I should turn my nose up at year end “top” lists. They are base in the way that rankings and scores are base. They obscure interesting things about the art they are meant to honor. They make ridiculous comparisons. When they are the product of an editorial staff they represent an incomprehensible set of compromises. (The staff at the gaming site, giantbomb.com, release a fantastic series of podcasts every year in which they record the actual process of creating their lists. It is impossibly frustrating but completely fascinating and insightful; some brave journalism/conceptual art). And perhaps worse, they verge on incoherence (see the podcast supra).

With all that said, I love top lists because they are my favorite source of new things to watch/play/read/listen to. This applies most to music because I have such ready access to music with my one-click purchase ability of iTunes, emusic, Amazon, rdio, etc. I tend to ignore where things land on a list. Scanning Pitchfork’s and cokemachineglow’s massive lists alone has given more great records than I have been able to make through in the past ten days. Blue Hawaii, a band I didn’t know existed before last Monday has become an instant classic for me, the kind of record I desperately wanted when I was twenty-one and didn’t know I needed as I approach twenty-eight.

I also get something out of the baser aspects of the year end list. I’m as susceptible as the next person to turning my nose up at the lists of others (especially major outlets like Pitchfork) and find myself returning to records, etc that I felt were snubbed. Maybe some of that is purchase validation (something I’m probably more susceptible to than pirates), but there are plenty of things I bought and don’t like. I think more that the shuns remind me that the pieces even exist. I had forgotten about the Matmos/So Percussion record until I noticed it being left off lists by folks that I respect.

I’ll continue to sift through year end lists. I just wish more outlets would steal from Pitchfork’s Guest List, which dumps records that folks found engaging in no particular order. Add in well written items about each a la cokemachineglow and year end lists and I’d no longer be ashamed of clicking refresh on sites to check out number 30-20.

Now that studying for the bar is about to consume all of my time not spent doing my paying job, work on larger creative endeavors will largely cease and I will turn to smaller forms – such as a blogging – as outlets.

I am sitting in O’Hare airport at gate B21 waiting for a flight to Des Moines, listening to an excellent Teebs record, watching the Bears try to close out the Jets, and browsing Mary’s gift of The Voice That Is Great Within Us. For some reason I turned straight to Sexton, despite my having a recently purchased copy of her complete poems waiting next to my bed just a few hours away. My recent obsession with her, which was catalyzed by her reading of “The Fury of Overshoes,” means that I take any opportunity to read her – always with her distinctive, gravely voice and cadence in my ears.

Curruth’s collection was published while she was still alive and contains only “Ringing the Bells” and “The Abortion.” In high school I was introduced to Brautigan’s The Abortion by my first role model peer. The directness of Brautigan’s novella, written some twenty years after Sexton’s short poem, was surprising to my seventeen year-old self. I remember it as short sentences and the sort of indoor overcast that you get from fading fluorescent lights. This was before Carver existed in my world and before literature could be about relatively contemporary, regular people going through trauma that was not sexy or important to anyone other than themselves. The novel, which I have never revisited for fear of what I will make of Brautigan as a more mature reader, gave me license, where appropriate, to abandon interesting language in service of the harder to grasp motivations of fiction, including ideas, experiences, or Truth (whatever that last one even begins to mean).

Sexton’s poem of the same name was one of the few that I was familiar with before my recent interest in her work. It always bothered me that the refrain is “Someone who should have been born/is gone.” I always felt that the better line is “Someone who should have been/is gone.” Something about not-being felt more poetic than limiting it to not being born. And it always sounded better to my ear. (You might not feel the same, but humor me.) I think that even with my line the poem could keep it’s powerful final stanza, which forbids the aborter from hiding behind the technicality of death being impossible without birth, so I’m not convinced that the logic of the poem demands Sexton’s line over mine. But returning to the poem now I’m struck by how much better it is at the sacrifice of my (alleged) better language. Sexton wants no debate over the events of the poem. The abortion in the title and in the refrain is not hidden in language through which high schoolers and scholars and book club members must wade in rubber boots searching for metaphors and meaning. The poem works best when its subject is in the open. Energy ought not be wasted on the subject when there is so much required for the rest.

The Bears win. My flight is delayed.

I’m experimenting with the updated wordpress app. It used to suck, so heres hoping the update is sweet.

So this is really for my father, with whom I recently had a conversation about whether or not a publication like the New York Times, with lots of money and a big reputation and readership, ought to hire critics who are not themselves fine writers. We didn’t get into whether you can be a fine writer only of criticism, but let’s just suppose that we’re talking about hiring professional writers of things other than criticism; your D.H. Lawrences of the world. Neither of us had much stake in either position. I thought others might find the topic of some interest, so here it is on the Internet. Hope you don’t mind, dad.

So my father asked whether it was valuable to have full time critics. It’s an old question, one with lots at stake financially for both sides. The financial stakes are of some import because the writers’ incomes are in great part determined by whether or not critics like them and critics make a living from either being a good predictor of what their readers will find valuable or else being controversial enough to gather a readership (my favorite critic in this role right now is B.R. Myers). For my father, there is value in having those who have a legit claim to the process of creation being the ones tearing down or building up another writer. Why is the opinion of Myer’s, who writes nothing but history and criticism, of any import to you and me? His ideas on sentence structure and plotting aren’t even good enough to put together a decent novel. I argue that his abilities as a writer have little to do with his abilities as a reader.

My perspective on a novel as a reader is not whether or not it was written well but whether it reads well. While it might be true that you need the former to get to the later (though the room full of monkeys drafting Shakespeare will disagree), I’m not sure I need to peak behind the curtain to read. The writer’s perspective has lots of things going on other than the end product, including the very act of writing – a lonely, lengthy process. The writer can’t think solely about his audience, but must engage himself, which might include playing in ways that will be of little interest to his readers. What good is a “writer’s writer” to a reader? From this perspective, being a writer has nothing to do with being a reader. If anything, Myers might be in a better position to offer advice from the reader’s perspective, because he’s a professional reader rather than writer. He is not burdened with all the other priorities of a writer; priorities that a reader can’t know and probably doesn’t care about.

I don’t need professional critics trying to tell me how a work can be improved. Nor do I need professional writers telling me why a reader ought to be moved or have his interest piqued by something. My sympathies lie with the readers and this reader prefers criticism that examines what a piece has to offer rather than how it offers it. There is lots to be discussed about the effects of a work and those conversations are worth having with readers and writers alike.

My mother is annoyed to no end by father’s careless channel selection. In their early fifties, they recently purchased their first television. For the first 27 years of my life my parents have had a series of used televisions, all donated by their parents. It was an exciting day when we replaced our 13 inch black and white – donated by my maternal grandmother – with a 13 inch color – donated by my paternal grandmother. Eight years later we landed a 32 inch hand-me-down from that same grandmother. In May, my mother took the plunge and traded the donations for an on-sale, brand new, 32 inch flat screen HD television. It was labeled a Father’s Day gift, but it was my mother who cooed over the crispness. She mastered the setup and printed a crisp white sheet of the listings for HD versions of the family’s most loved channels. For the first time in our family’s history we could actually read the score on Rays games. I had not previously been aware that my mother had a love of animation, but the crispness of a painted dwarf was suddenly a hot topic. To her continual frustration, however, my father is blissfully ambivalent about it all. He returns out of habit to the blurry, pan and scan SD channels because he knows the numbers. When he bragged about not using the channel cheat sheet I thought I thought I was the verge of coming from a broken home. “If I can follow the story, I’m just as happy to listen on the radio.”

While I lack my father’s ambivalence about image quality (I’ll see almost anything in XD at the Evanston theater), I’ve noticed something similar happening with my reading. I currently have Kindle accounts tied to four screens: Kindle, iPad, laptop, and iPhone. Nearly all of my reading, save a few magazines and the occasional library book, is done on a screen. My initial attraction to the Kindle was the e-ink, which I find nearly indistinguishable from real ink on paper, but now I find myself loving it for it’s long battery, light weight, and immunity from glare when reading outdoors. My iPad serves as my primary reading device for all things long-form articles and blogs. And for the first time I’m working through a full-length book my iPhone. It has taken me a year to jump into iphone reading, but I’m amazed at how quickly I forget that I’m reading on a tiny backlit screen. It is with the iPhone that I’ve started to understand my father’s indifference about picture quality. A couple hundred words into a reading session on my phone and I’m reading as quickly and effortlessly as I do on my Kindle. The screen-size disappears, and page turns happen without my noticing.

Where previously I was concerned that a change in medium would affect content or experience, I’ve come to believe that medium has next to nothing to do with experience. This is bad news for bookbinders and font creators. It’s not that the aesthetics of books are without merit, but I no longer find any connection between the aesthetics of books and the experience of reading. This frees me from having text be anything but ubiquitous. Suddenly text is a more able companion even than digital audio. With an Amazon or Instapaper account I can read anything anywhere. I can read a page at my Kindle walk out the door, and pick up where I left off on my phone while on the train. For what feels like the first time, the digital revolution has freed me rather than tethered me. Concerns about people reading less as a result of the Internet no longer make sense to me. Reading, previously cumbersome and something that, like television, you had schedule around and be somewhere to experience, is now just a part of routine. Content is everywhere and is as easily fallen into an out of as sleep on a Sunday afternoon.

Addendum
Thanks to Alex for pointing me to this article about e-readers.