tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4272942558525262612024-02-07T10:59:49.360-08:00word scribblingsJeffrey McQuigganhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02124854798394293936noreply@blogger.comBlogger27125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-427294255852526261.post-20592711345672196832015-12-22T08:21:00.000-08:002015-12-24T19:17:31.214-08:00my top 10 music releases of 2014 presented with comment<div class="p1">
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1. Cardinal Cardinal - <i>Distant Lover</i></h3>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">There's a <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WjwjRbvV47s">Youtube video</a> of John Bradley playing a solo acoustic show when the other member of Dads is MIA and he introduces a song by saying "This song is about being in a long distance relationship and it sucks and it's great. Try it sometime" which is advice I think maybe I took to heart and anyways now I'm married.</span><br />
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2. Pianos Become the Teeth - <i>Keep You</i></h3>
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I often think there is an I<span style="font-family: inherit;">deal Jeff Album out there, a single music that would scratch all of my eardrumly itches. Further, maybe all </span>the music I love is the stuff I've found that's closest to this Ideal Jeff Album. Slowly I've built up a catalogue of what I think this album would have:</div>
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<li>twinkly guitars, riffs</li>
<li>singer who is not afraid to scream but does not scream all the time or even most of the time and sings pretty but maybe not all that well</li>
<li>sad lyrics that are ambiguous enough that I can fill them with my own feelings but also packed with enough detail for me to know that they are sincere concrete and meaningful</li>
<li>catchy but not too catchy but maybe almost a little bit too catchy so that the songs get stuck in my head in the morning and I just gotta listen to it that day</li>
<li>no keyboards (if it is a rock/metal/punk/hardcore/etc, which it probably is)</li>
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Anyway the first time I listened to <i>Keep You</i> it struck me as the closest thing I've found to Ideal Jeff Music and now it's a bit over a year later and that is still the case. Just listen to the way he screams "so let's say nothing some more!" Feelings feelings feelings. Also not talking is great. Saying nothing forever saying nothing for life.<br />
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<span class="s1">3. The Hotelier - <i>Home, Like Noplace is There</i></span></h3>
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<span class="s1">When my mom first heard The National she said that their songs sound like she's heard them a thousand times before. Like the melodies are new but also they resonate in a deep deep way with the </span>subterranean prehistoric melody detectors in our earbrains. That is also imo an apt description of <i>Home, Like Noplace is There.</i> Like a daydream of ghosts of favourite albums past but then on top of that it's way better.</div>
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Plus frontrow screaming along to their set at Bar Le Ritz P.D.B. on a chilly fall night was probably the most satisfying night of my life? I bought a t-shirt and it makes me feel a little bit happy every time I wear it.<br />
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4. La Dispute - <i>Rooms of the House</i></h3>
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There's a scene in Virginia Woolf where Mr. Richard Dalloway is invited to a lunch party and Mrs. Clarissa Dalloway is not. Clarissa hears of this, and then she thinks about death. I like this clever move from a specific event (not being invited to the lunch party) to an only kind of related general anxiety (death). Anxieties weigh heavy on us u kno, so they have a strong gravitational pull, sucking pulling bringing all our thoughts into their mass.</div>
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This clever move is all over Jordan Dreyer's lyrics. For example "First Reactions After Falling Through the Ice": he goes from falling through ice to wondering what would 'you' do if he died (fly out to his funeral? get too drunk at his wake? climb into his coffin and try to resuscitate him?) Specific event (ice fall) is sucked into general anxiety (hoping some faraway spirit that is obviously important to Jordan still finds his spirit important to him/her).</div>
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My thoughts do this! Crossing the street glides pretty quickly to thinking about death, a lone cheerio in a full bowl of milk makes me feel like a lone cheerio in a bowl full of milk, et cetera. I think this way especially when I'm sad but also kind of all the time. Anyway, I cherish V. Woolf and L. Dispute because you gotta hold your kindred spirits close. Also notable is how the lyrics of "First Reactions" segue from ice fall event to faraway spirit anxiety just as the music segues from rockin' first part to quieter middle part. There is a music-lyrics synergy in all of La Dispute's album that is UNMATCHED, or maybe ONLY MATCHED BY OTHER MUSICIANS WHO PUT SIMILAR AMOUNTS OF THOUGHT AND EFFORT INTO CREATING A SYNERGY BETWEEN THEIR WORDS AND THEIR SOUNDS.<br />
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<span class="s1">5. Taylor Swift - <i>1989</i></span></h3>
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<span class="s1">Since I listen to music all the time, I don't often end up with mental associations for specific albums. Pretty much all music is happy music sad music dog walking music kitchen cleaning music. But I listened to <i>1989</i> a lot while playing <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lxJDNwMjEfQ">Faster Than Light</a> and I did not listen to it a lot while doing anything else, so it's one of the exceptions. Now my musical mental associations are: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q2jnF1pOHyw">Aloe Blacc's </a><i><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q2jnF1pOHyw">Good Thing</a>s</i> with being sad and heartbroken, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tCEr4XbyLR8">The National's <i>Trouble Will Find Me</i></a> with being sad and heartbroken, and Taylor Swift's <i>1989</i> with spaceships.</span><br />
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<span class="s1">6. PVRIS - <i>White Noise</i></span><span class="s1"><br /></span></h3>
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<span class="s1">Paramore and Chvrches were two of my favourite 2013 albums so it makes sense that I am really into PVRIS because they sound like a Paramore-Chvrches hybrid even down to the name starting with a P and the misplaced V in place of a vowel. (V is for vowel? Maybe their name started out as CVCVC?)</span><br />
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<span class="s1">7. Antemasque - <i>Antemasque</i></span></h3>
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<span class="s1">i hoep tanya is the cedric to my omar and/or vice versa</span><br />
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<span class="s1">8. Salomé Leclerc - <i>27 fois l'aurore</i></span></h3>
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<span class="s1">In the Montreal metro there was annoying Sugar Sammy ads that said "en francais svp" and I did try to en francais some of my music listening while I was there. I never did go beyond musicians I discovered via metro ads though. One of those ads had Salomé Leclerc's face on it and this here albums'g to some of the best sounding guitars I've ever heard. Not bad STM, not bad.</span><br />
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9. Modern Baseball - <i>You're Gonna Miss It All</i></h3>
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I'm noticing a lot of post-hardcore albums with distance/keeping/home/house in their titles on this list, albums I've held close to my heart over the last two years. It's almost as if I moved across the country once or twice or something.<br />
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<span class="s1">10. Kittyhawk - <i>Hello, Again</i></span></h3>
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<span class="s1">But there's also a "hello" on this list =) </span>in my changes and in my travels I made some friends met some people.</div>
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:)</div>
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friends</div>
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:D</div>
Jeffrey McQuigganhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02124854798394293936noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-427294255852526261.post-20315371180522818852015-12-03T13:42:00.000-08:002015-12-07T09:26:34.148-08:00Maybe I'm a Samuel Beckett Character<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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When I am writing, my pen does backflips. I fidget. I suppose it's a busy brains:busy hands kind of thing, and it means I spend a lot of time tossing items. Pens are not great tossing items. If the nib hits your hand or clothes, then ink. Ballpoint pens are too light; sharpies are just the right weight but they have a tendency of leaking over time, which results in lots of ink. Pencils don't break or leak, but still they leave marks on flesh and fabric. I've done this for as long as I remember.</div>
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The first item was a basketball. My parents got me a hoop for Christmas (big wrapped present by the tree, too big to fit under the tree, v exciting) and installed it in our driveway. "Playing basketball" is a strong term for what I did, since I was mostly imagining Star Wars and college basketball fanfic. (I loved the Duke Blue Devils. iirc they won all the time?) But I shot the ball at the hoop, fetched it, bounced it, shot the ball at the net, etc. I was always disappointed when neighbour kids would see me and come outside to actually basketball. Rain would also spoil my fun.<br />
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A couple years into being a teenager I got self-conscious about never getting any better at basketball despite spending multiple hours on most dry days on the drive way. A man who lived two doors down would consistently ask me when I was going to hit the big leagues and then chuckle. So I started wandering the streets, bouncing a tennis ball off of the sidewalk. (I was not self-aware enough to realize this must look pretty odd too, or maybe I was OK with it because there was less chance of somebody I knew being around.) Tennis balls had the advantage of being plentiful, since my dogs chased them and tennis was my dad's sport of choice, but the disadvantage of bouncing wildly when they land on a non-flat surface, i.e. into the street when they hit a curb. My fantasies matured from droids, Dragonlance and sports to imagining life as a pro-gamer. I was deep into Warcraft 3 at that point.<br />
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In high school I thought people who played hacky sack were cool, so I spent a summer in the basement watching DVDs of <i>Six Feet Under</i> (R.I.P. lol) and trying to learn. I never learned. (It's maybe easier in sneakers than barefoot since feet are gnarled, unpredictable surfaces?) But I discovered that juggling two hacky sacks with one hand is perhaps the ideal fidgeting method. The 'tsh tsh tsh' of the sack smacking my palm was a source of conflict between me and my sister. Sorry Jen!! I've spent hundreds of happy hours walking, listening to music and tossing two hacky sacks.<br />
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Hacky sacks, however, are not the ideal tossing item. They cost money. I'm prone to losing things. Once I lose one, I have to buy another two since they have to be the same weight. Over time, they get dropped in puddles and become gross. Over time, their beads drop out so they lose the ideal shape and heft. Tiny stones scattered through the house and in my bed: also not ideal.<br />
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At times I've taken to flipping coins with my thumb, but since pennies, nickels, dimes and quarters are too small and light for a satisfying fidget and a dropped coin is hard to find, I quickly discovered that coins are the priciest tossing item. A friend told me that before he writes essays, he spends hours sitting in a chair, tossing a stress ball and planning what he's going to say. This reassures me that my busy brain busy:hands method is not a symptom of madness. I've never tried tossing stress balls.<br />
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Lately, having lost one of my hacky sacks and neglected to replace it, I've taken to tossing stones. Before, I'd considered rocks a no-go because their density meant they came down heavy on a small surface area and hurt my hand with each toss, but I've adapted or at least learned to cope. Stones are free! Stones are everywhere! I can leave the house with nothing to toss and just scoop up a stone off the side of the road! They tend to collect in gutters. Gravel is usually rough, jagged and not ideal, but river rocks are often heavier and too smooth. They hit harder and hurt more.<br />
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Samuel Beckett's <i>Watt</i> devotes a handful of pages to a character's habit of transferring rocks between the four pockets of his overcoat. He has an intricate system for ensuring that no rock gets transferred any more than the others. No rock is neglected. No rock is overused and overworn by his hands' oils and acids. There's also a procedure for introducing a new rock into the system when one gets lost. Reading <i>Watt</i>, I thought the appeal of this passage was absurd: pages that should give the reader pleasure and/or insight into the human condition are instead devoted to the minute and repetitive details of an obviously pointless task, haha such is life. But today I interrupted my home-to-café walk to crouch down, the hem of my jacket dipping into a nearby puddle, and I thought "that's a good tossing rock". I realized that maybe Beckett's character is a lot more real and more relatable than I'd thought.<br />
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haha<br />
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such is life<br />
<br />Jeffrey McQuigganhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02124854798394293936noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-427294255852526261.post-35903873589249555492015-11-16T13:58:00.002-08:002015-11-17T18:52:29.283-08:00I'm Beginning to Think I Might Finish a Novel Someday<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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I've always enjoyed the physical act of writing. At four years old, I filled a notebook with a facsimile of cursive writing, a copy of what my older sisters were learning in school. Pages and pages were devoted to the same letter, because I'd nailed an e's elegant swoop and was diligently trying to recreate it. I failed. A few years later, I'd taken to typing up movie plots (mostly<i> Star Wars</i>). The word processor I used had a gimmick where it replaced common nouns with little pictures, so there were a lot of hand emojis in front of the name 'Solo' since well that's what I thought his name was. At thirteen my parents bought a new computer and I would take off my headphones, turn off my music while I typed because I liked the clack clack of the keyboard. At fifteen an English teacher read my poem about Apollo to the class (D:), and my parents read my rewrite of a scene from The Outsiders I'd done for a class assignment. They (my parents) bought me a laptop so that I could write in my room, but it couldn't connect to the internet and I couldn't get the floppy drive to work so anything I wrote on it would've been trapped on it forever until it died, so I didn't use it to write much. I used it to play Solitaire and Hearts. My grade twelve English teacher singled me out as the one kid in class who could write a brilliant final exam essay without a brainstorm outline or structure. He claimed he was jealous because I had a chance to make a living as a writer. But my writing is always better if I plan it first. At twenty-two I relearned cursive and started writing my first drafts out by hand and I've never stopped, since it highlights the roughness of the rough draft, which lowers stress; it reduces facebook distraction; and it makes the typing part so quick and painlessish that I feel like a rockstar of the mind. At twenty-four I bought myself a Macbook Pro and boy do its keys sing.<br />
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Adolescent-Jeff took a few stabs at fantasy novels, mostly Blizzard fanfiction, and iirc the result was usually fifty or so small notebook pages full of character development world-making and set-up. Then I would block. The start of the novel is supposed to be setting something up and I wasn't doing that. Unsure of where to take things, I'd stop writing and, unwritten, the characters would wander off to wherever stagnant ideas go to die.<br />
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There's a Dragonlance novel by Richard A. Knaak called <i>The Citadel</i> and when the bad guy is being defeated/killed/??? his fingernails get blown right off (spoiler!!), but that image isn't why it had a lasting impact on my psyche. I read it in two days! For two days I didn't do much else! It had a <i>story</i>. A story that started from the root of a main character (main characters? memory is a fickle beast) and branched out into side characters villains side plots and backstory before bringing it all back together into a blossoming curtain call finale. It felt precise and perfect and planned! Things that happened at the end made sense given things things that happened at the start, and all the things were gripping, surprising, brilliant. Past and present wove together in a tapestry of dialogue and action that grew naturally from vibrant characters (I was fourteen?? I haven't read it since.) Anyway my takeaway was that Richard A. Knaak was really smart and that <i>The Citadel </i>had an awe-inspiring inner logic and complexity that made it a compelling piece of fiction, and no way am I smart enough to pull something like that off. Reading it probably killed off one of my sproutling twigs of Diablo II fanfiction; after those two days, Theresa the mysterious assassin who was overcoming her dark past and confronting an even darker present wandered off to wherever stagnant ideas go to die.<br />
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My ideas are not hard to kill. Or at least make not happen. My thoughts are easy to stagnate. They like to stay in the idea world, or at least I like to keep them there. I don't feel a strong desire to share them: other people are judgmental and I already know how amazing my ideas are. They bounce around in my brain for a few months and then they shuffle on to a brain more receptive to the labour of creation. I am not receptive to the labour of creation. I hate stress and I tend to prefer not doing things to doing things. If school is any indicator, I am bad at big projects. I hid a grade seven report report on Egypt on the shelves because I didn't want the teacher seeing it. In grade nine I decided losing 25% of my math grade was preferable to finishing a project on the Leaning Tower of Pisa. My Career and Personal Planning and French teachers outsmarted me by calling my parents, forcing me scout out an Engineering program and give a five minute presentation on l'élevage industriel (jokes on them I don't have a career plan and my French is not great lol sad joke). I'm currently working on my thesis and I spend most of my time feeling like garbage and not working on my thesis. Big things are big and scary. They don't agree with my constitution. They trigger melancholia.<br />
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Up until now in this post, I've given my case against me ever writing a novel, or at least given some reasons (excuses) for why it hasn't happened yet: I don't do stories, other authors are a lot smarter than me, I don't do big projects, my ideas don't hang around, and I never even have any ideas in the first place. But I'm starting to feel these obstacles weaken! Termites are eating away their load-bearing walls! So now I'd like to the make the argument that I could see myself finishing a novel one day because: I have an idea, this idea has lasted, I've learned to write long things, every author is bad at things, and stories are lame.<br />
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<b>I have an idea. </b>I want to write literary fantasy. The story: gold is discovered in a small mountain village and prospectors come looking for the gold. This does not go well for the locals because people are really into gold. A father and a daughter are two of said locals. She has magical powers and he loves his family. They escape the village, wander the continent, and try to find her mother and brother. Also, orcs that sing opera? Ideas everywhere!<br />
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<b>This idea has lasted</b>, especially the literary fantasy part. 2006-2007: Cormac McCarthy was trending hard (The Road, Oprah, No Country for Old Men, the Oscars, and so forth), I was working at a video store, my brain was deep into a reread of <i>Blood Merdidian</i> and I thought "What if like, this, but orcs?" And this early glimmer has stayed with me; it's only gotten stronger as I've discovered Thomas Pynchon (another "What if like, this, but orcs?" moment). I've harangued Chapters employees, thrift shops and book stores for literary fantasy (Rothfuss nah, R.R. Martin nah, Erikson mayyybe, Tolkien yeahh, an Octavia Butler novel is hard to find). I spent a summer in <a href="http://www.barkerville.ca/">Barkerville</a> and the gold rush aspect sprouted. I've never worked the idea out, so it hasn't gotten any bigger or more intricate over the years, but my brain hasn't forgotten it or stopped thinking it's pretty cool and novelable. That's something! The idea is maybe even uniqueish?<br />
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Plus if I don't think of the historical research and writerly mechanics behind the thrilling, startling way a Pynchon novel grabs my imagination and shoves me into his wild and wonderful, kind of familiar but also deeply strange world. And if I don't think of the way the way that McCarthy's tales of Appalachia force me to confront the truths of life violence love violence death and violence, then literary fantasy (in the sense that I mean) seems totally doable. (The research is a real doozy: what time period equivalent is my novel set in? what metal did they make their tea kettles out of? what did they eat while wandering the wilderness? what did they drink? what kinds of alcohol had been invented at that point? Also maybe profound dissatisfaction with fantasy novels is not the noblest motivation for writing a fantasy novel? but hey whatever floats my boat. If I can't read a thing that I want to read then I guess I'll have to write it myself.)<br />
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<b>I've learned to write long things</b>, because I've discovered that the more effort I put into a writing, the larger it gets. Grad school taught me that. Does it sound obvious? It's not! Or, it was not obvious to me! In my first year of university, when I typed the last sentence of an essay, it'd be done, i.e. if gun to the head I had to expand my six pages to ten, I'm not sure I'd've known how to do it. I'd get shot! Back then, proofreading was an emotional experience, one I avoided (reading my essays made me think, "how could I butcher such great thoughts with such dumb words?"), and I'd never tried revisiting assigned readings, or reading outside the syllabus. Grad school came with higher expectations from professors and a more professional mentality from me: I revised my essays because duh, I was expected to look beyond the course materials for my term papers, and I reread often because memory is a leaky cauldron. My first term paper hit the word count when I'd only made half of the points I wanted to make. The roughest draft of my thesis came with a half dozen further topics germinating in my mind and a half dozen unanswered objections.<br />
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Turns out, the more I plan, the more I read, the more I revise write and reread, the longer my writing gets. Details emerge. New tracks get laid for my train of thought. I develop new trains of thought. Ideas swell with content, and now that I've experienced pumping eight pages up into fifteen pages and fifteen up into forty-and-then-some, I feel confident a 50 000+ word novel would emerge if I put in the hard yards. Also, revising makes your writing sing, crap clauses turn into sleep sexy things. Structure emerges, creating the illusion that I knew what I was doing all along.<br />
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<b>Every author is bad at things</b>, even my top favourites! Tim Parks <a href="http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2015/nov/10/how-could-you-like-that-book/">recently blogged</a> about how he gets it when friends and folks don't like his favourite authors because they're not easy reads or they're extravagantly rhetorical, and he gets it when people are not into non-easy reads and extravagant rhetoric. I agree! I am excessively aware of the reasons other people might not feel as passionately about my top favourite authors as I do. But, further, I think there's big ole gaps in the writerly skillsets of even my favourites. I wouldn't call these gaps <i>flaws</i> because bibliographies are finite, so it's a little much to expect everything from a writer, but the gaps have a family resemblance to flaws.<br />
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Like, I don't think I've ever empathized with a Pynchon character, and being drunk on Pynchon starts to drag around page 200 in the same way that being drunk on drink starts to drag around hour four. <i>Infinite Jest</i> doesn't drag and oh god do I care about Hal Gately and Joelle, but it only tangentially addresses any kind of romantic love and it's short on sentences that I can underline and draw smiley faces next to. <i>IJ</i>'s sentences aren't the light of my life or the fire of my kidneys. Vladmir Nabokov brings the feelings and the fireworks, but he also brings an infinite disdain for his characters and tends to leave his novels short on the story front. <i>Lolita</i> is about the obvious thing and a road trip across America, but what else happens? I think a couple people die? (My gap-flaw as a reader is that I've only read white dudes. That's maybe more of an island of not-gap in an ocean of gap, but I'm working on it.) Virginia Woolf gets deep into her characters minds, makes them as separate as planets and as together as a solar system, but she has a way of ending the wayward story globs of <i>Mrs. Dalloway </i>and <i>Between the Acts</i> with a dramatic bang that rubs me the wrong way. Samuel Beckett is perfect. There is nothing missing from <i>Watt</i>. Nothing.<br />
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Here's a John Cage quote I like: "I certainly had no feeling for harmony and Schoenberg thought that that would make it impossible for me to write music. He said "You'll come to a wall you won't be able to get through." So I said, "I'll bang my head against that wall." Love ur flaws. Take them on hot dates. Rub their feet. Nibble their earlobes. Flaws're your best half.<br />
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I know I'm bad at stuff writer-wise, but that's okay, because the best of the best are bad at stuff too. They make up for it by being really really good at other stuff, and maybe I'm good at some stuff too. I'm not great at stories--I wrote a short story in college and the prof's comment was that I mention a dozen possible avenues for plot but then I stopped suddenly without following through on any of said possible stories. But being bad at stories is ok because...<br />
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<b>Stories are lame</b>. They're lies! Life is more wayward glob than <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sUtS52lqL5w">dope lego contraption</a>. There's no clear start, no exciting branching off, no clean causal chain, no satisfying resolution. Plot is cheap. The last Harry Potter kept me reading--I wanted to find out what happens next!--and yeah that's an impressive skill and yeah I read 700 pages in three or four days, but at the end I felt empty. I felt gross. It's not a skill I have: story is beyond me. I'm quick to forget the events the climaxes and the resolutions of books and movies. I'm slow to forget the tone, the words, the characters, and the humour. And story is not a skill I want! Most of my favourite authors are not great with story, I don't think (I'm not a connoisseur of these things.) I will emulate those I love! I will <a href="http://www.newyorker.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/gauld-four-undramatic-plot-structures-690.jpg">embrace undrama</a>.<br />
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tl;dr I am way behind on NaNoWriMo but I am stoked.Jeffrey McQuigganhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02124854798394293936noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-427294255852526261.post-5586895505678699022015-10-08T11:31:00.007-07:002015-10-08T11:39:11.909-07:00The End of the Tour<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<i>The End of the Tour</i> is about a not-successful writer interviewing a successful writer. The not-successful writer is David Lipsky. He published a novel, but his readings are sparse. He is a reporter for <i>Rolling Stone and h</i>e wants to write their first interview with an author in ten years (His great author timeline goes Hemmingway-Pynchon-Wallace, which seems open for <b>white</b><i style="font-weight: bold;"> </i>whale/<i>Moby </i><b style="font-style: italic;">Dick</b> jokes.) The successful writer is David Foster Wallace. He has just published <i>Infinite Jest</i>, his readings are packed, and he is being interviewed by <i>Rolling Stone</i>. The film's dialogue comes from Lipsky's transcription of the interview tapes, which he released as the book <i>Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself</i> a couple years after Wallace's 2008 suicide.<br />
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When I first heard of <i>The End of the Tour</i>, I wondered 'Is this a fundamentally awkward thing to make into a movie?' and I've wondered that ever since. I wondered when I saw the picture of <a href="http://pixel.nymag.com/imgs/daily/vulture/2014/03/19/19-jason-segel-jesse-eisenberg.nocrop.w529.h560.jpg">Jason Segel as DFW</a>, I wondered while I was watching the movie, I'm still wondering. It's a hard question to shake! Is there a story to milk out of the interview transcripts? Are there enough Wallace fans to subsidize the movie? Or, if not, does it appeal at all to non-fans? I'm not sure! And I enjoyed the movie! Jason Segel and Jesse Eisenberg are very good! Their characters are both generally likeable but also often uncomfortable and then sometimes Segel is scary and sometimes Eisenberg deserves to be scared. They are funny! The movie is dramatic! But it also doesn't overdo the drama. It has prayed faithfully at the altar of exquisite real awkwardness, joining the ranks of The Office or <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OIMGPlH4XPo">that Sigur Ros interview</a>. There's a beautiful feeling that I'm getting a three-day-slice-of-life glimpse at two people, and they're both carrying their pasts into the situation and they'll both keep on keeping on after the situation passes. There's sort of a conflict-buildup-climax-resolution but also kind of not really. I wanted it to keep going! I want a sequel! If you're not a Wallace fan, see it! and tell me if it does anything for you. If you are a Wallace fan (say, with reservations about a movie being made about Wallace), see it!<br />
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I came into the movie as a Wallace fan: after reading <i>Infinite Jest</i> I did the obvious thing and watched/read/listened to all available DFW interviews and nonfiction and assorted paraphernalia. I was worried that the movie would do something awful to the picture of Wallace I've formed in my head, but it didn't! (related: God I hate all those articles about the 'real' DFW that've cropped up in the last six months.) It wholeheartedly satisfied me on that front! I came out with the impression that director James Ponsoldt is at least as big of a Wallace nerd as I am and that he made the film with similar Wallace-nerd-concerns in mind, f.ex I get worried that with all this talk of David Foster Wallace, people are forgetting <i><a href="http://wordscribblings.blogspot.ca/2014/07/david-foster-wallaces-infinite-jest.html">Infinite Jest</a></i>, which is imo where all the beauty and complexity and action is, and yes Ponsoldt has made a movie about Wallace and not a movie about <i>Infinite Jest</i>, but I also got the impression that he's aware of my concern. He cares! There's something deliberate in the way that he's cropped the content of <i>IJ</i> out of the film, f.ex at Wallace's reading, we don't see him actually read from the book. And this deliberate cropping of <i>IJ</i> makes focusing on Wallace ~the man~ rather than Wallace ~the work~ more palatable, to me. Like, to understand <i>The End of the Tour </i>all we need to know about <i>Infinite Jest</i> is its author, its acclaim, and its size. The movie is very pointedly about the author and the interviewer, and not about the book! I can respect that. (Aside: Lipsky's <i>Rolling Stone</i> piece was never published. I'm inclined to think that's because Wallace ~the man~ was both not that interesting and not that forthcoming about the parts of him that would be interesting. Like sure he bought a gun to shoot his lover's husband, and he went to Alcoholics Anonymous and kept it a secret by calling it church/dancing, but the movie doesn't address those things. D.T. Max's biography does though! And in the film Wallace repeatedly cuts off Lipsky's permission to dig up any interesting stuff from his friends and his parents. Also if you want more about Wallace ~the work~ then I kindly direct you to <a href="http://thepointmag.com/2009/criticism/death-is-not-the-end">The Point</a> and <a href="http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/ijend">Raw Thought</a>.)<br />
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So anyway, is this a fundamentally awkward thing to make into a movie? I kept wondering! Even while I was enjoying the movie!<br />
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Structurally, the meat of the film can be divided into two piles. The first pile is what I will call the Wallace-insight. The man says smart things about television, loneliness, depression, happiness, philosophy and fiction. It's why people like him so much! So the film drops some of his better quotes, like the one about <a href="http://41.media.tumblr.com/a86d0c59b880d5d0111ef6f4a17592a9/tumblr_nt8oogWMhS1typl03o1_1280.jpg">depression and the burning building</a> and Wallace's complicated and interesting explication for why he gets a sweaty forehead at the thought of going to tea with Alanis Morisette. I got a <i>Clerks</i> vibe from the two guys talking about life and culture while being surrounded by 90s culture. Remember when people used to say they didn't own a TV as a meaningful statement about their relation to culture and how they use their time? Anyway I'd throw the Wallace-insight in the trash because depending on what you're interested in, your time is better spent reading "<a href="https://jsomers.net/DFW_TV.pdf">E Unibus Plurum</a>" (about television and loneliness), "<a href="http://harpers.org/wp-content/uploads/HarpersMagazine-1998-01-0059425.pdf">The Depressed Person</a>" (depression), "<a href="http://www.metastatic.org/text/This%20is%20Water.pdf">This is Water</a>" (happiness), Wallace's review of <i>Wittgenstein's Mistress </i>(philosophy, fiction), or <i>Infinite Jest</i> (the whole shebang). Maybe scrapping the Wallace and going for a writer-on-writer envy-fuelled highbrow <i>Clerks</i> would've been the correct route? but I'm not a moviemaker.<br />
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The second meat pile is the story. And it's a doozy! It's the tasty pile! It's packed with subtle conflict that never quite gets resolved but instead boils beneath the surface without bubbling up violently enough to explode and/or drive the two main characters apart. Ponsoldt milks the story for all its worth using three objects: a tape recorder, <i>Infinite Jest</i>, and Wallace's dogs. Lipsky is interviewing Wallace, so they have different roles and they have different goals. This creates a power dynamic with tension and conflict! Wallace is worried about saying interesting things and about how the interview will make him look. He asks for the right to retract anything he says if he realizes five minutes later that it was a stupid thing to say. Lipsky needs a story: the movie starts with a cliché "there better be a story here" from Lipsky's editor. When Lipsky first pulls the tape recorder, tension rises and moods shift. And this happens again and again every time he turns it on. The camera likes to zoom in on the tape recorder. It's a reminder of the constant low key battle of wills going on between the two men, a reminder that Lipsky's interests are not Wallace's interests. Lipsky's power is that Wallace agreed to the interview: he says "you agreed to the interview" when Wallace doth protest too much. He's a sly little rat and sometimes I wanted to punch him. His other power is flirting with Wallace's ex.<br />
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Wallace's power is that he's a successful novelist and Lipsky wants to be a successful novelist. When Lipsky sleeps at Wallace's house, he's on the floor in a guest room full of books Wallace has written He looks up at dozens of <i>Infinite Jest</i>s and <i>The Girl With the Curious Hair</i>s and <i>The Broom of the System</i>s. They tower above him! Wallace is living the Lipsky dream. Lipsky wants Wallace's fame and he wants Wallace's talent. After questioning whether <i>Infinite Jest</i> could be as good as people are saying, he gets partway through and says "Shit.". He's annoyed by how much his girlfriend enjoys the book. He probably even wants to be the first author <i>Rolling Stone</i> has interviewed in a decade! Copies of <i>Infinite Jest</i> are everywhere! Being read, being talked about, being written about, being bought. The only copy of Lipsky's novel (<i>The Art Fair</i>) is in his suitcase, waiting for him to build up the nerve to offer it to Wallace.<br />
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And my theory is that the sort of heartbreaking minor tragedy at the core of the film is that, if it weren't for envy and such, Lipsky and Wallace would be the best of friends, or at least pen pals! (They live in different cities.) They laugh together, they talk about deep shit (f. ex their lives, their thoughts about life). Lipsky slips up and talks about his parents and his childhood for a while before remembering that he's not the interviewee here. Reading the intro to <i>Although of Course...</i>, Lipsky calls the weekend the best conversation he's ever had (cute!). Romeo and Juliet are driven apart by warring familes; Lipsky and Wallace are driven apart by an interview and an acclaimed novel. imo this is the story that James Ponsoldt really wanted to tell! He tells it with dogs. They're big beautiful black labs. They like Lipsky (and they usually don't like anyone, says Wallace!). Lipsky doesn't mind when they drool on him. Whenever the dogs are around, Lipsky and Wallace are getting along. Those are the times when their could-be friendship shows. The dogs are bearers of good moods. I like dogs.<br />
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My other theory is that <i>The End of the Tour</i> was financed by the best McDonald's product placement I've seen. The movie's basically an hour and a half long ad for McDonald's. And it's a really good ad! One of those ads that you don't regret watching, that you're glad you saw. Like my thoughts were 20% "O product placement, the joy of the 21st century moviegoing experience !", but 40% "I want french fries" and 40% "lol". It's funny! Even remembering it makes me want french fries. They hit that one out of the park. (OK but yeah you do see the joke coming from a mile off.)<br />
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Wallace's suicide bookends the film. At the start, Lipsky hears of Wallace's death. (The story is a flashback while Lipsky listens to the tapes after he's dug them out of his closet.) At the end, Lipsky is reading to a full house from his Wallace-book, tears in his eyes. (But how does he feel that his fifteen minutes of fame are only because of his relation to Wallace? Can that be the sequel? It can't have been good for his jealous side!) The climax of the film is Wallace waking Lipsky up in the middle of the night to spit some hot truths about depression, which brings up a paradox I also felt big time while reading "This is Water". Here's someone who can say unexpected and insightful things about depression, happiness, the meaning of life and not succumbing to the bad feels when you have to wait in line at the supermarket after a hard day's work, but also that someone killed himself. He came up with deep thoughts about how to live but at the same time he himself was clearly not very good at living! How can we process that? Do we say that the supermarket line won? My thoughts have never gone beyond "that's weird". It's probably too interesting of a topic to say anything substantive about.Jeffrey McQuigganhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02124854798394293936noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-427294255852526261.post-51920733055701764562015-08-26T11:26:00.000-07:002015-10-05T10:51:41.724-07:00Young Blood: Practices, Partner Dancing, and the Virtue of Inclusiveness<div class="" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Small subcultures are particularly aware of the ebb and flow of their community. They are fragile, and they depend on both a steady stream of new members as well as the retention of old members to stay alive. In her excellent article <a href="http://latindancecommunity.com/calling-it-quits-why-some-social-dancers-are-hanging-up-their-dance-shoes/">"Calling It Quits: Why Some Social Dancers are Hanging Up Their Dance Shoes"</a>, Mellisa West-Koistila identifies three reasons why the atmosphere of a dance scene might drive its members away. First, "faux professional dancers": the ones who are uninterested in dancing with less skilled or beginner dancers in favour of improving their own dance skills. Second, rivalries between dance schools or dance teachers. Third, boredom; dancing becomes less exciting, so dancers drift away from the community.</div>
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I think these complaints, or at least similar ones, are common to a variety of subcultures and communities. Alasdair MacIntyre's concept of practice captures West-Koistila's last two complaints quite nicely. For MacIntyre, a <b>practice</b> is a complex human activity--such as chess, architecture or partner dancing--with standards of excellence. While trying to meet a practice's standards of excellence, you realize the<b> goods internal to the practice</b>. So, in the case of partner dancing, the internal goods might be things like connection, musicality, posture, athletic movement and the life of a dancer. MacIntyre contrasts internal goods with <b>external goods</b>, such as money, power and fame. Each practice has its own <b>unique</b> internal goods (so a tango dancer's excellent posture is similar to but ultimately different from a salsa dancer's excellent posture or a basketball player's excellent posture). In contrast external goods are not unique to a particular practice. You can get money or fame from a variety of different activities. Internal goods are <b>shared</b> within the community, while external goods are competed for. External goods are a zero-sum game: when Serena Williams wins the U.S. Open, all tennis players benefit from the excellence of her performance, but only she receives the trophy and the prize money.</div>
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MacIntyre also distinguishes practices from institutions. Practices are concerned with internal goods, while <b>institutions</b> are focused on external goods. There is the practice of partner dancing, but there are also the dance schools and organizations that pay the rent, hire teachers/bands/DJs, schedule lessons, organize events, etc. Practices <b>depend</b> on institutions: without the dance organizations, the dance community would not have a space to exist in. But practices are also <b>threatened</b> by their institutions. There is always the danger that the institution's goals (money, power, fame, etc) will become a higher priority than the practice's goals (better dancing), and this would cause the institution to gobble up the practice. According to MacIntyre, the virtues of courage, justice and honesty are <b>necessary to sustain practices </b>and protect them from being destroyed by their institutions. Courage, justice and honesty are also <b>necessary for achieving the goods internal to a practice</b>, because this achievement requires subordinating ourselves within a practice. To achieve internal goods, you must be unwilling to cheat, you must acknowledge that the experts are more advanced than you, and you must open yourself up to their criticism.</div>
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As I mentioned before, two of West-Koistila's observations fit nicely into MacIntyre's scheme. Dance school rivalries are a symptom of an institution becoming a higher priority than its practice, so it is no surprise that these rivalries weaken the practice and driver dancers away. Boredom is a symptom of not learning new things, i.e. of not meeting higher standards of excellence and achieving new internal goods.</div>
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However, faux professional dancers seem perfectly capable of realizing the goods internal to the practice of partner dancing. (I'll be discussing dancers who are more interested in improving as dancers, so they do not devote their time to teaching or social dancing with beginners, which is a somewhat charitable interpretation of 'faux professional dancer'.) This complaint does not seem to fit with MacIntyre's theory. It is a truism that the way to become a better musician is to play with people who are better than you. And while I've found dancing with beginners to be beneficial to my leading, I do not think it is <i>necessary</i> to becoming a better lead, and I imagine I would improve faster if I spent my time dancing with the highest level dancers I could find. While faux professional dancers might not reach outside their clique, they are exposing themselves to the criticism of their peers and betters, they are working to emulate the great dancers, and they are diligently putting in the hours needed to improve their craft. On one hand, going out of your way to be inviting to beginning dancers does not seem to be necessary for the attainment of partner dancing's internal goods. On the other hand, especially for smaller subcultures, young blood is required to sustain the practice.</div>
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MacIntyre places heavy emphasis on traditions. Entering a practice involves subordinating yourself to established practitioners, who are already familiar with the standards of excellence and internal goods. Participating in a practice involves forming a relationship with not only present-day practitioners but also with the great figures of the past who helped make the practice into what it is today. A practitioner learns from and confronts the authorities and the achievements of his/her practice. But, MacIntyre's emphasis looks backwards. It focuses on the practice's past.</div>
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I do not want to overstate this point. MacIntyre does talk about the continuation of practices. He defines the virtues, at least partially, in terms of sustaining practices. He argues that teachers should conceive of themselves as introducing students into a practice. He has an account of bringing a child into the practice of chess: first, by offering them prizes for victory, and then over time having the child come to appreciate the goods internal to chess themselves. He conceives of practices as things that exist and change through time, as shown by his discussion of their traditions, their evolution (as standards of excellence are met, new standards of excellence are revealed, thus transforming the practice) and the great figures of their past. But he assumes that there is a child there who can be introduced to the practice of chess. Other than the brief mention of prizes, he does not discuss luring newcomers into a practice and keeping them in the community once they are there.</div>
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My point is that in order to sustain a practice we have to look forward, to look to its future. Practices require young blood. Since the virtues are the character traits that are needed to sustain practices, and practices require new practitioners, inclusiveness (as well as the pedagogical virtues needed for good teaching) should be considered a virtue. This is what the faux professional dancers get wrong: they may be improving their own skills, achieving the goods internal to partner dancing, and even pushing partner dancing forward by meeting its current standards of excellence, but they are not sustaining the practice of partner dancing because they are not working to introduce new members into the practice and they are not working to retain current members of the practice.</div>
Jeffrey McQuigganhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02124854798394293936noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-427294255852526261.post-9445240986965792362015-06-17T09:50:00.001-07:002015-10-05T10:55:12.841-07:00A Reading of Pianos Become the Teeth's The Lack Long After<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<i>"Though with each crisis you come to, when the world has to be reinterpreted . . . for instance, the first real death you encounter . . . you go back with that same hunger looking for someone to interpret the event for you. I still feel that with poets older than I, that they're interpreting the next stage of life for me." -Helen Vendler</i><br />
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Lyrics, poetry and fiction help me deal with feelings. Trauma causes a scramble for meaning. If it's major trauma, the scramble is maybe more desperate. But I'm not unique and others have been through similar events. They've had the chance to reflect on their experience and funnel it into songs, poems, novels, and nonfiction. This is helpful in two ways: it is reassuring that others have felt the same things as me, and it provides a guide of sorts to the different perspectives I can take on these feelings. Art might even help nudge me towards the 'right' perspective. The numbers have to be fudged a little, since the details of what I go through and of what others go through are never exactly the same, but the balm still works.</div>
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With that in mind I'd like to look at Pianos Become the Teeth's <i>The Lack Long After. </i>The lyrics are about father dying from multiple sclerosis, and they show us something about grief.</div>
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<i>"I couldn't wrap my fingers around your spine and shake it loose from the bone" -'Spine'</i></div>
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Musically and lyrically, the album climaxes in the first two minutes of 'Spine'. The drums howl and then it's off. Kyle Durfey screams throughout the album, but here his yelling hits a particular intensity. The lyrics are consistently angry, uncomfortable and distraught, but they peak peak with the image of a son shaking his father's spine from his body. They touch on the event itself: his father's death. With the song's last howls of "goodbye", some sort of closure seems to be reached.</div>
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Heat recurs in the lyrics, and it boils over in the first two minutes of 'Spine'. The album is obsessed with fire and warmth or the lack thereof:</div>
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<li>"There's no proper way to feel, no mirth, no levity, no amazing grace, just a flame on a lake, floating away" -'I'll Get By'</li>
<li>"This damn body can't keep the warmth in" -'Good Times'</li>
<li>"You . . . set fire to my face" -'Shared Bodies'</li>
<li>"A face like water frozen over" -'Such Confidence'</li>
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Temperature ties the songs together. 'Such Confidence' has a face that's frozen over; in 'Shared Bodies' the face has been thawed, set aflame by passion. The song that veers away from grief to talk about love and sex is still woven through with grief. Death seeps in. "Spine" is, literally and metaphorically, the climax of the album: not only does it describe the day of the death, but also mentions of heat skyrocket: "I never set fire to your bed, I never burnt the bed sores, I never ate the flame, or drank the sweat."</div>
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The album is 38 minutes long and "Spine" starts at the 24-minute mark, about two thirds of the way through. Usually, a story's climax hits at the end, followed only by a brief denouement. <i>The Lack Long After</i>, on the other hand, is shaped like a triangle. Peak intensity hits at the halfway point, the build-up is not significantly larger than the drain-off. What's going on here?</div>
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<i>"Goodbye" -'Spine'</i></div>
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In my experience, one of grief's cruelties is the illusion of closure. I'll have a good day and assume the mood will last. I think I've figured it out, that the perspective I've taken is the right one and that my feelings have settled into their proper places. It feels like finding the key to the door I've been struggling to bash my head through for months. Good days feel revelatory. But then the sadness recurs. And this process happens over and over.</div>
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Each song here is fierce and frantic. Each song has a satisfying internal structure, a tension and a release, a build up and a climax. Each song is grief-stricken, and each song fights through the grief and ends with a bang. But then the next song starts, still fierce, still frantic, still stricken with the same grief. There is closure in each song's finale, but taken in the context of the album, where the next song is still struggling through the same struggle, the closure is illusory. Listening to <i>The Lack Long After</i> is an experience of grief, a second-hand trip through the mirage of figuring things out.</div>
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<i>"It's a hell of a thing" -'I'll Get By'</i></div>
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So if figuring things out is a lie, what do we get instead? Not much. Or, not much that's concrete. The last song is 'I'll Get By' and it's last words are 'It's a hell of a thing'. The album ends expressing intense feeling, but 'thing' is about as vague of a noun as you can get. 'Hell' is negative. To sum up grief, the lyrics offer us only that it's intense, negative, and difficult to put into words.</div>
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<i>"I worry I broke your kneecaps when I cut you down." -Karen Green</i></div>
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Karen Green is David Foster Wallace's widow. In 2008, he hung himself. She wrote a book of poems called <i>Bough Down.</i> Her words, like Kyle's, are simple, a paradoxical blend of abstract and matter-of-fact. They keep some things hidden while also revealing horrifying ferocity of feeling. Both write in second-person, addressing the lost. Karen highlights what might otherwise go unmentioned, like the disposal of the body. Both show a concern for the physical leftovers, the body that is now lacking spirit. Karen, irrationally(?), does not want to harm the body. Kyle repeatedly mentions the body's weight and anatomy. Their narratives of loss-as-a-partner and loss-as-a-son reflect similar themes, similar deliverances, similar perspectives.</div>
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<i>"You're laying here with a bed's eye view" -'Good Times'</i></div>
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<i> "but I don't remember such a bone cold chill on such <u>a</u> spring <u>day</u>" -'Sunsetting'</i></div>
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Kyle is clever with words. Describing someone in hospital bed as having "a bed's eye view" struck me as simple, apt inversion of a stock saying. "Bird" and "bed" sound similar, but a bed's eye view is, heartbreakingly, the opposite of a bird's eye view. And the quote from 'Sunsetting' shows that when I'm writing the lyrics out, detail is lost. Usually, when we talk we emphasize the verbs and the nouns because they're the containers of meaning. Articles are sidelined, they're less important. But in this line, Kyle screams the article "a" for a long time before rushing over "spring" and landing hard on "day". Reading, I expect the emphases to be similar to when they're spoken, but that's not always the case in the singing.</div>
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<i>"And I guess that's life" -'Good Times'</i></div>
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When "I guess that's life" is introduced to 'Good Times', it's half-sung, almost a backing vocal. At the end of the song, it's taken up by Kyle as a centre-stage full-force roar. "I guess that's life" is an ambiguous phrase but it's repeated. It's important. Lyrically, it's juxtaposed with vicious experiences: letting a father die, losing youth, losing spirit. The contrast takes the phrase from being ambivalent, borderline meaningless to being a bracing remind reminder: life is vicious, there isn't much to do but cope, and it's not clear how to go about coping.</div>
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<i>The Lack Long After</i> is an album of hearsay and ambiguity. The lyrics start with "maybe" and are full of "I guess", "Some say", and "it seems". They state that "most shouldn't strut around with such confidence". They are full of feeling, but much is vague, unclear, up in the air. Key questions--what is being felt, how to feel it, how long to feel it for, how to move on--get only hazy answers. But there is also a glut of details: "the old folks at Roland and 3939", "Room 211", "that 3 o'clock sun", "you can still smell the cedar", "on Memorial Day", "on Tuesday". Information is not being withheld; when it's available, detail is given. But the detail is sucked free of context. Unless you know the old folks at Roland and 3939 or which Tuesday is being referenced, you can't use the detail to build a picture of the narrative. The lyrics have a surfeit of information, but without any wider certainty or context to ground them in, they deteriorate into a wash of snapshots, infused with meaning but lacking a concrete sense of where they fit into the picture and why they are important.</div>
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<i>"I'm begging for what wasn't said" -'I'll Be Damned'</i></div>
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<i> "I just wish I could have had ears for more than what you said" -'I'll Get By'</i></div>
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The lyrics express a lack of words, a hunger for both more information and a greater ability to communicate. Words are first demanded--"Explain to me" ('Such Confidence')--and then rejected--"No, don't say it, don't say it" ('Spine'). There's a desire for more experience. 'Sunsetting' describes Kyle biding on old pictures and old footage of his father. "I'll Be Damned" shows us his dad's favourites: Norman Rockwell scenes and Gordon Lightfoot songs. But even with this information, the emphasis is on what's missing, the questions that won't be answered: "Is it better than Clapton? Did you see your father's eyes?"</div>
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<i>"Come on, bud, get out of that funk, it's time to move on"</i></div>
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The album is full of words--1,673 of them on the lyric sheet, 44 words per minute--but the words are always wanting. When things get real, when the message is most important, they deteriorate into vagueness: "I guess that's life", "It's a hell of a thing", "You 'loved life'". The words that sum up the situation best, that stick around in our heads, are vague and ambiguous. When there's something important to say, words can't say it. The detail, as mentioned before, is given to places, names, smells, times; feelings and solutions are left unclear, unstated. And the words that Kyle most wants, those of his father, are absent. He puts "come on, bud, get out of that funk, it's time to move on" into his father's mouth, but they are imagined words. The lyrics are full of grasping, full of search, but the goals--the experiences and expression being sought--are veiled. They are either, like the father's words, excised or, like the summaries of grief, kept vague. The lyrics don't reach or realize their goal, instead, through eight distressed songs and three-quarters of an hour, they tumble into an acceptance that it won't be reached. They calm down and stumble on.<br />
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<i>"The last look into your eyes, not having the words to say thank you, say goodbye."</i></div>
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Jeffrey McQuigganhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02124854798394293936noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-427294255852526261.post-31144786273972701332015-05-19T12:47:00.000-07:002015-05-19T12:47:16.582-07:00Frank<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhVS527pGTPprDBQo68qrGRgNZZa8mXqTBrEq3_IUaXLADcUSw5SyhCY0aQGmmra-TK7-zjldFHEc_bvs6E5H7VgLbxONw6ElaIkq3LvmJlRP-wowxm9aFXQmdn1qPNXbae_B9DaKOSeKhx/s1600/frank.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhVS527pGTPprDBQo68qrGRgNZZa8mXqTBrEq3_IUaXLADcUSw5SyhCY0aQGmmra-TK7-zjldFHEc_bvs6E5H7VgLbxONw6ElaIkq3LvmJlRP-wowxm9aFXQmdn1qPNXbae_B9DaKOSeKhx/s1600/frank.jpg" title="frank poster" width="214" /></a></div>
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According to a rather romantic account, artists and geniuses plumb the depths of human experience. They feel more than we do. They see more than we do. And what they find scars them. From Robin Williams to David Foster Wallace to Amy Winehouse, the great and the famous have a tendency for offing themselves. Does madness spawn genius, or does it hinder an artist's ability to put in the hard yards needed to craft a masterpiece? Do inner demons stoke or stifle the fire of creativity? <i>Frank</i> firmly takes the "stifle" opinion.</div>
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Frank is a genius. He rants sublime over dissonant space rock (ft. theremin). He wears a giant plastic head always. Whenever his band performs without him, something is missing. Those around him write songs that are not very good. His keyboardists often try to kill themselves. Most everyone in the film is a musician and mentally ill, and over the course of the film, they teach the naive protagonist Jon that the illness gets in the way of the music. (Although I noticed the 'sane' characters--Jon, the bassist, the drummer, Frank's parents--are also the ones who do not write great music.)<br />
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There's a lot to like about <i>Frank</i>. It's funny and full of feeling. It's unpredictable. The characters change naturally over time and, what's sweeter, my perspective on the characters changed over time. It covers mystical, interesting, artist-related themes such as the creative process, insanity v. inspiration, art v. fame, etc. And its ending is happy enough to be pleasant but sad enough to be satisfying.<br />
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But some cracks still show. Frank makes its points with a sledgehammer: a clearly sad, damp, and uninspired dude has, according to his Twitter, an idyllic life. People filter their lows off of social media! And sometimes its points are contradictory. The sledgehammer flails. Rather than portraying Frank consistently as a curious, creative spirit whose sonic experiments yield beautiful success and goofy failure, the film oscillates wildly between Frank being ridiculous and Frank being incredible. It is black or white: either Frank is a laughing stock or he's improvising beautifully. The protagonist is flippantly hired on because he knows three chords, but later Frank and his band show every sign of talent and seriousness. The movie is awfully good--it made me laugh and it made me cry. And maybe it is a little too much to ask for consistency and flawlessness from a movie about a guy in a giant plastic head, but how awesome would it be to have a beautiful, funny, realistic movie about a guy in a giant plastic head?Jeffrey McQuigganhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02124854798394293936noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-427294255852526261.post-43090061968649529202015-05-04T13:11:00.000-07:002015-05-04T13:14:19.880-07:00Michael<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span lang="EN-US">One evening after work, while watching TV,
Michael decided to relax. He breathed in, he breathed out. Breath in</span><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ascii-font-family: Cambria; mso-hansi-font-family: Cambria;">−</span><span lang="EN-US">his expanding chest stretched the muscles in his back. Breath out</span><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ascii-font-family: Cambria; mso-hansi-font-family: Cambria;">−t</span><span lang="EN-US">hose muscles needed stretching, apparently. Breath in. Breath out.
The Bruins were playing in Florida. He started by trying to relax his face. He
clicked on the sofaside lamp so that he was not squinting into the TV's glare.
He tried not to squint. He imagined flattening the crow's feet that framed his
brown eyes. His will was a steamroller, his flesh was soft asphalt. He found
that his face presented two difficulties. First, faces were complicated. Where
did sinuses end and muscles begin? Could sinuses relax? They certainly ached. </span><span lang="EN-US">He was congested and his sinuses swole and throbbed. A</span><span lang="EN-US">nd muscles, likewise, ache, especially when tense. He imagined
taking a needle to his face, popping the tissue that was bloated and taut,
relieving the tension, or sucking out the mucous(?) that was clogging his
sinuses' tubes(?). The second problem with relaxing his face was that he caught
his reflection in the TV's dead space, and the zombie slackjaw terrified him.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span lang="EN-US">So he tried fingers. Fingers were simple,
simpler. He imagined tension as barbed wire coiled around his bones. Breath in</span><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ascii-font-family: Cambria; mso-hansi-font-family: Cambria;">−</span><span lang="EN-US">tiny gnomes assembled, clippers in hand, ready for their task.
Breath out</span><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ascii-font-family: Cambria; mso-hansi-font-family: Cambria;">−</span><span lang="EN-US">the gnomes were
deployed, hacked at the wire, pulled it off his fingers, piled it by the
sidewalk for pickup on garbage day. That night he learned that these things
take time. Michael had embarked on a project. Having cleared the wire off his
left hand's index finger, he moved to his left hand's middle finger, but a half
dozen breaths later he noticed that the wire had snuck back onto his left index
finger. It was already the third period and the Bruins led 1-0. He focused on
small, stable victories: he got the area from the tip of his left index finger
to his first-left-index-joint completely calm, completely soft. Loose, relaxed,
pleasant. Holding onto past gains was a prerequisite for moving onward.
Progress needed stability. In the early weeks of his project, Michael's goals
became more and more miniscule. He wanted 'One step forward' instead of 'One
step forward, one step back' or, God forbid, 'One step forward, two steps
back.'<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Social relations with his coworkers started to
degrade.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It was apparent as early as the
next day. 'Mike did you see the game last night?' they would ask, and he would
say 'yes', because he had watched the game. 'Chara's play was sick. So sick.
I'm stoked to see him in the playoffs,' they would say. Michael would only nod,
because he had not noticed. The call-and-response of a mutually shared interest
was quickly becoming the flat talker-listener dynamic of dull small talk. Coworkers'
conversation moved on to Luongo, fan riots, Canadians. Michael was thinking
about fingers. Fingers were surprising. When relaxed they were neither folded nor
curled nor completely flat. Relaxed fingers were mildly bent in an elegant,
beautiful way that reminded Michael of the f(x)=ln(x) graph from long-ago calculus
courses, right after it breaks the x-axis. He thought about relaxing while at
work. He planned what he would do each evening, each night. He spent the first
month learning just how slow progress would be, and, since he would be working
on the same area for days in a row, Planning was replaced by what he thought of
as Preparing. 'Preparation' was inspired by his yoga teacher, who had said that
you could practice breathing while on the bus, at work, browsing the internet,
grocery shopping, etc. Preparing was different from really relaxing. It
happened in public, during spare time and stolen moments. Really relaxing took
hours, whole evenings. Preparing meant isolating the areas he would focus on
that night and bringing them to a state of mild calm, as much as was possible
in a couple minutes or a couple of breaths. Then the areas would be limbered
up, so to speak, for the real relaxation. He told his coworkers that lately he
had been trying to relax, and after a quick back-and-forth, they were talking about
the pros and cons of pre-sleep-shower temperatures. Hot showers relax your
muscles, but cold showers make your body burn calories(?) when it tries to warm
itself back up. So the dilemma was that both could, theoretically, help you
fall asleep. Showers did not seem relevant to Michael's project. Being wet and
hit with water and either muscle-softeningly hot or calorie-burningly cold did
not sound conducive the sort of relaxation he wanted.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span lang="EN-US">One and a half years ago, Michael had taken
a hatha yoga class with his then-girlfriend. He had enjoyed it</span><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ascii-font-family: Cambria; mso-hansi-font-family: Cambria;">−</span><span lang="EN-US">meant to go again, didn't</span><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ascii-font-family: Cambria; mso-hansi-font-family: Cambria;">−</span><span lang="EN-US">but the
instructor's metaphors had frustrated him. 'Imagine your arms as branches as
they reach, they uncurl slowly up towards the sun.' The class was indoors. 'Spread
your legs out into a squat, sink towards the ground and let the negative
energy, the stress flow out through your hips and into the dirt and the earth.'
The class was on the sixth floor. Michael had wanted mechanics: where was he
supposed to feel the stretch and the strain? Was his posture good? Was he
posing correctly? Now, however, metaphors were a prominent tool in his arsenal.
Tension was a lamplight throbbing through his fingernail and he focused on
making each throb less pronounced than the last. It felt like turning the
volume down on the TV. Tendons were vines and they were curled and tangled
around the bones, which were trunks, and Michael's project was to pull away the
vines so that they could not strangle the tree.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>His goal was to straighten things out, to let them live.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: inherit;">He kept a journal of the areas he had tried
to relax each night. 'Feb 18: left-hand: index finger & middle finger.' 'March
4th: left-index-finger: flesh under fingernail, down to the first joint.' 'March
21st: left-index-finger: down to the second joint & left-middle-finger:
down to the first joint.' Flipping through the pages, as he did every two or
three weeks, he felt his progress was slow. But, he reminded himself, he was being
thorough. His project could take a lifetime. During his yoga class, two people
had farted and the windows' sweat steam had blurred the outside sky blue. On
his couch each night, Michael heard his breath. His lungs were bellows stoking
a satisfaction or euphoria that never quite filled his chest.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span lang="EN-US">Michael was given inspiration by a picture
of Tyler Seguin, perched on an inflatable exercise ball, weights in hands,
biceps curled. He saw it in a newspaper while in line to buy bananas, tomatoes,
milk, chicken, and salsa at the grocery store. Michael thought: Seguin is a
professional hockey player</span><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ascii-font-family: Cambria; mso-hansi-font-family: Cambria;">−</span><span lang="EN-US">his goal is
hockey</span><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ascii-font-family: Cambria; mso-hansi-font-family: Cambria;">−</span><span lang="EN-US">but he improves his hockey by doing things
that are not hockey. Michael wanted to engage with his project like a
professional. He read about the training habits and daily schedules of the
obsessed and the dedicated: athletes, ballet dancers, orchestral performers,
doctors, academics. Michael imagined batters swinging three bats to warm up,
versus just the one they used when up at the plate, and adapted this image to
his project. Relaxation was a muscle he would work out by trying to remain calm
in tense situations. Compared to giving presentations to famously-irritable customers,
stumbling through early-stage tango lessons, breaking the ice with more than moderately
attractive strangers and offering coworkers constructive criticism, sitting on
the couch with the TV on felt like swinging one bat. It was a cakewalk,
stress-wise. Telling someone he had just met that 'relaxing' was his hobby
generally went OK. Conversation would turn to trying to let yourself do less,
bingewatching Netflix, the stress of technology and modern life, the glory of
going all night without a work e-mail. Michael thought progress improved. Tyler
Seguin had inspired him.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Despite continuous and systematic progress,
in month eight, Michael's project sprung a leak. His office was welcoming four
new co-op students with a Friday night post-work trip to the bar. Over the
third pitcher of peach-colored beer, one of them, Anna, her smile arcing
towards the puncture of a dimple, challenged Michael to a game of pool. That
month, new plots were taken up in his journal: 'Sept 18: left hand: upper-left
part of palm. Pool: don't be shy. Stout: the smell of coffee, bitter, dirt (in
a good way).'</span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
Jeffrey McQuigganhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02124854798394293936noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-427294255852526261.post-39062015001200623642014-07-23T13:19:00.004-07:002015-04-29T14:22:59.043-07:00David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<i>YEAR OF GLAD</i></div>
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<i>I am seated in an office, surrounded by heads and bodies. My posture is consciously congruent to the shape of my hard chair. This is a cold room in University Administration, wood-walled, Remington-hung, double-windowed against the November heat, insulated from Administrative sounds by the reception area outside</i>, <i>at which Uncle Charles, Mr. deLint and I were lately received.</i></div>
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Starting <i>Infinite Jest</i> for the second time, I had high expectations but I was also ready to be disappointed. I remember it being good enough and long enough to be a contender for Favourite Book status. The opening chapter--first-person, present-tense, dramatic, mysterious--kept me up at night. The question "Why can't Hal speak?" propelled me through the thousand-page tome. It made me laugh, it made me cry, it made me cringe, often all at once--a trifecta of simultaneous feelings unique to Wallace (see: Hal and Orin discussing their father's suicide over the phone, James Incandenza's father scraping his knees off on the tennis court, <i>Les assassins des fauteuils rollent</i>'s grisly execution of the Antitoi brothers). When it was over, I didn't want to let Hal, Mario, Gately, and Joelle go. Where would they be in five years? Ten? It was the longest book I'd read, but, the moment I finished it, I was planning to read it again.</div>
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I then did the obvious thing and immersed myself in Wallace. I read the lesser novels, short stories, nonfiction, interviews, D.T. Max's biography, Jonathan Franzen's weird camping story/threnody New Yorker thing. I learned that Wallace, like Hal, made a habit of blowing marijuana smoke into bathroom fans to hide his drug use, and that Wallace, like Orin, did cruel and unusual things to his younger sibling. <i>Infinite Jest</i> is tainted with autobiography. His review of <i>Wittgenstein's Mistress</i> became my role model for when I write about books, and I desperately wished he'd dissected other novels so thoroughly. I learned that "Steinbeck, when he's not beating his drum" was an author that rung Wallace's cherries, as well as what Wallace sounds like when he's beating his own personal drum. I learned the politics Wallace likes to bang on about: the nature of the entertainment we consume, its consequences and its effect on us, American values, grammar, civic duty, and what literature should do and be. At first I found his insights in <i>Infinite Jest</i> and articles like "E Unibus Plurum: Television and U.S. Fiction" revelatory--I longed to know what he would have said about the internet or video games. I backed away from my addictions and entertainments in favour of more productive activities--but by the time I got to the murkier thoughts in interviews and lesser articles, the drum was sounding flat. I worried that I'd spoiled <i>Infinite Jest</i> via overexposure to Wallace. It's plot points--a film so entertaining it eliminates the map of everyone who watches it, drug addicts at a halfway house, and stoners at a tennis academy--sound like Wallace setting up a pulpit from which to preach.</div>
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Luckily, <i>Infinite Jest</i> is brilliant. While Wallace cares deeply about morality, values and duty, he is not Upton Sinclair or George Orwell or even John Steinbeck.<i> </i>The book does not preach. Other than occasional comments on American culture by Marathe (Quebecois) and Shtitt (German?), the novel's politics are implicit and analysis is required to unearth them.</div>
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Again<i>, Infinite Jest</i> is brilliant. Not only clever and funny but also thoughtful and caring. The stories are sad. And absurd. But absurd in a way that is made believable by an abundance--truckloads--of detail. If you haven't read it, I highly recommend it. It's long, but it's divided into easily digestible chunks, each with its own hook, line, and sinker. It reads more like a series of interconnected short stories than a novel. And it is hard, but Wallace's challenges are considerate and aware of the reader. He's not Joyce, Woolf, Faulkner, Pynchon, or Gaddis. If you don't understand, don't worry and keep reading. If something is important, it is clear. If something is important, it is repeated. Obscure vocab ("pulchritudinous") is almost always next to an everyday synonym. The novel's main challenge is physical: lugging the big brick around, flipping to the endnotes, and finding a comfortable reading position. Other than parts that are deliberately obscure or omitted, the plot is easily graspable, despite its complexity. It responds well to being read without too much concern for precise chronology or too much worry about how all the events and themes hang together. And while I may be more interested in tennis, philosophy, depression and theoretical sci-fi politics than most, the novel cycles through its plot lines in a way that never lingers too long on one subject. There is a sensitive perfection in the structure that I would love to fully understand.</div>
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Wallace's ability as a storyteller is shown by how he sets up and executes dramatic situations. Ken Erdedy--eager, self-conscious, ashamed--awaits a marijuana delivery so that he can binge smoke for the week. Kate Gompert, hospitalized for suicidal depression, navigates her diagnostic interview with a young M.D. A series of exhibition tennis matches. Big Buddies give advice about life, school and training to their clusters of Little Buddies. A series of competitive tennis matches. Each scene is not only rife with internal tension but also shows the characters in a new light. You're introduced to the players at Enfield Tennis Academy, then you see how each plays tennis, how each answers their Little Buddies' inquiries about existence, competition and education, and how each responds to the duress of competitive tennis. Cocaine addict Joelle van Dyne is shown first out in the wild, then as a resident of Ennet House Drug and Alcohol Recovery House, where you see her complaints to the house manager, the dreams she tells Don Gately at night, how she copes with withdrawal, how she reacts to Narcotics Anonymous, and how she responds to violence. And you get to see how Kate, Erdedy, Lenz, and many others react in each of these same situations. In isolation, the set-up and execution of each section is exquisite, and over the course of the whole novel, a cast of beautifully crafted characters emerges.</div>
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Wallace's power as a writer is shown by his adoption of different narrative voices. Most obviously, Marathe, English being his second language, is prone to solecisms that echo the syntax of French, and Poor Tony Krause's sections are a semi-decipherable screed of misspellings and slang. Each character has their own database of sayings, figures of speech, and linguistic patterns, some more apparent than others. And the voices map onto the characters' relations. Phrases from the Incandenza family, e.g. "the howling fantods", show up in Joelle's narrative. The time she has spent with Orin and James Incandenza is reflected in her thoughts and in her speech, alongside her personal unique phrases ("her own personal Daddy"). The care taken is thrilling and staggering, part of the detail that creates a world of the novel's own. However, Wallace only ever half-wears each mask. The whole novel is filled with many of his own tics, his own vocabulary, his lengthy sentences, his "And but so", and the things he aches and cares about. He takes on different voices, but his intelligence throbs behind every word.</div>
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Further, while Wallace never explicitly breaks the fourth wall and addresses the reader, he leaves reminders that there is a mind behind the stories. He plays structural games with chapter headings and endnotes. The novel begins with the cryptic but positive "YEAR OF GLAD". Wallace then reveals that Glad refers to the sandwich bag brand, rather than the feeling. Each year has been subsidized by various corporations--the majority of the action takes place in the Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment. The early convention for chapter headings is that they date the content. Then some of the headers are descriptions of the chapter's content, which quickly swell into the half-page "HAL INCANDENZA'S FIRST EXTANT WRITTEN COMMENT ON ANYTHING EVEN REMOTELY FILMIC, SUBMITTED IN MR. OGILVIE'S SEVENTh-GRADE 'INTRODUCTION' TO ENTERTAINMENT STUDIES..." (and so on). Conventions are introduced, then modified, then bloated into absurdity. Wallace's games create an implicit dialogue with the reader. The endnotes follow this pattern as well. First, they give the chemical details of various narcotics. Then their scope expands to include small addiction tidbits, James Incandenza's filmography and, eventually, whole self-contained episodes with endnotes of their own. Finally, in a bizarre sort of climax two-thirds of the way through the novel, a whole chapter is relegated to an endnote. I spent a couple hundred pages wondering if or when this would happen, and I was gleeful when it did. Wallace never explicitly speaks or addresses the reader, but his presence is always felt in the consistent style behind the various voices, the emotional/political/spiritual/philosophical themes that he returns to again and again, and the ways he pushes and pokes at the novel's structure. Paradoxically, <i>Infinite Jest</i> feels both like a world unto itself--unforgettable characters in complex relationships inhabiting a detailed environment--and like a late night conversation with a very smart, very caring friend.</div>
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<b>Some Things the Novel Does Not Do</b> ("Criticisms" would be too strong a word because that would mean expecting the novel to do everything when it already does so much.)</div>
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-Quebec is a bastion of French on a continent of English (sorry, Mexico) and this creates an intriguing cultural tension that is ripe for the picking, as well as an opportunity for delicious multilingual puns. Despite making Quebecois separatists a major part of the novel, Wallace does not exploit these opportunities.</div>
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-There is very little lyrical writing and lots of (intentionally) awkward repetition, especially of place names. A lot of this has to do with taking on the characters' voices: people don't think pretty. Much of the narrative is meant, to some extent, to mirror the patterns of thought, and it does so beautifully, but the book doesn't churn out beautiful sentences the way a Pynchon or a Nabokov does and the repetition that infests so many of the narratives can spoil otherwise pretty writing.</div>
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-Romantic love is a Big Deal that Wallace does not engage. Gately/Joelle and Mario/Millicent Kent are brief glimpses of the subject. Both are touching in the extreme, but only glimpses. Orin/Joelle and Marathe/his wife (sorry, Wife) could have perhaps been expanded. In general, the characters kind of suck at caring about other people.</div>
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When I finished <i>Infinite Jest</i> for the first time, I planned to read it again. Now after finishing it a second time, I also plan to read it again. Its a book I can see myself returning to periodically every 3-5 years for the rest of my life. As far as fiction goes, it wins the competition of doing the most things and doing them well. (Thought given its length, this competition might not be very fair.) (Shakespeare's plays taken together are up there too. Nothing else is.)</div>
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Jeffrey McQuigganhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02124854798394293936noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-427294255852526261.post-29471585058553444622014-04-27T22:30:00.001-07:002015-04-21T15:42:32.756-07:00I don't write well under pressure.<span style="background-color: white; color: #37404e; font-family: inherit; line-height: 18px;">Check facebook. Sip tea. Write sentence. Pen stops working. Throw pen across room. Scour house for other pens. Sip tea. Check facebook. Choose new pen. Sip tea. Write sentence. Pen stops working. Swear at pen. Pick up pen from other side of room. Write sentence. Still not working. Throw pen across room. Choose new pen. Sip tea. Find quote. Put book down. Swear. Find quote. Insert bookmark. Put book down. Write quote. Check quote. Groan. Hit forehead with book. Re-check quote. Rest head on palm. Finish writing quote. Pen stops working. Stab page. Stab page. Stab page. Choose new pen. Sip tea. Sip tea. Check facebook. Write status.</span>Jeffrey McQuigganhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02124854798394293936noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-427294255852526261.post-39039866693381344302014-04-27T22:29:00.000-07:002014-04-27T22:29:04.360-07:00(a poem)<span style="background-color: white; color: #141823; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 19.31999969482422px;">happy night</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #141823; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 19.31999969482422px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #141823; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 19.31999969482422px;">happy day</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #141823; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 19.31999969482422px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #141823; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 19.31999969482422px;">good day</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #141823; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 19.31999969482422px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #141823; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 19.31999969482422px;">yay</span>Jeffrey McQuigganhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02124854798394293936noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-427294255852526261.post-20398887282309011282014-02-24T17:45:00.001-08:002015-04-29T11:53:26.846-07:00Thomas Pynchon's Against the Day<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<i>“Two facing rows of storefronts receded steeply down the packed-earth street. Where the buildings ended, nothing could be seen above the surface of the street, no horizon, no countryside, no winter sky, only an intense radiance filling the gap, a halo or glory out of which anything might emerge, into which anything might be taken, a portal of silver transfiguration, as if being displayed from the viewpoint (let us imagine) of a fallen gunfighter.” </i></div>
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Until I was eighteen, I dined on science fiction and fantasy. I played Dungeons and Dragons, Warhammer, and Magic the Gathering. The fiction I devoured was branded with Forgotten Realms, Dragonlance, and Battletech. I read Salman Rushdie’s The Moor’s Last Sigh and my tastes changed. I fell I love with density: sentences that made me struggle to understand it and writing that hurt a little going down. Ever since I’ve missed some of the feelings I got from simpler stores: being unable to put a book down because I need to find out how it will end, being immersed in a different and magical world, being sad when a favourite character is killed off. And my attraction to wizards, dragons, and robots never quite died. So I’ve been searching for a novel that combines Nabokov’s exuberant prose, Dostoyevsky’s puzzling morality, and Cormac McCarthy’s stark melodrama with wizards, dragons, and robots. (Tolkien fits the bill, but surely there must be others!)</div>
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<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Against the Day is the closest to this target I’ve come across. It has zeppelins, cowboys, dynamite, intercontinental conspiracies, and a sentient ball of lightning. At the same time, it has writing that is as breathtaking as it is elaborate. It could be described as a magical cyberpunk Western revenge epic. Or it could be called a Big Book about Everything. Capitalism, love, abstract mathematics, anarchy, time travel, philosophy of electricity, capitalism, sex (once it starts it just keeps coming), familial loyalty—it’s all here.</div>
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<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>I’ve read quite a few 800+-page novels and most of them, at times, make me wonder if they are worth the commitment of months of my reading life. I never questioned whether Against the Day was worth it. (On the other hand, Anna Karenina, Les Miserables, and Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon tried my patience at times.) Long books are capable of a unique joy. Too vast to be focused around a single plot, the experience is not as much about following a story from beginning to end as it is about immersing myself in the book’s world and the author’s mind. After a thousand pages with one voice, the recurring grammatical tics, rhetorical flourishes, dramatic buildups, and emotional concerns imprint themselves on my mind like the favourite (and least favourite) quirks of a close friend. At the end of a favorite long book, having to leave its world is a bittersweet feeling, many times more poignant than the death of a favourite character. But the downside of long books is that it is rare that an author’s interests will sync up with mine for such a gargantuan stretch of text. It is almost inevitable that I will find some pages, or some chapters, less than thrilling. The unique beauty of a long book has its price.</div>
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<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Against the Day consistently tickled my brain. Each night (and afternoon, morning, evening) after I put it down, I was thinking. About what, exactly, I’m not sure. Maybe absorbing the historical detail, maybe keeping track of the many plots, maybe situating all the characters in their relationships to one another. It lit me up. Like the other Pynchon I have read, it feels like there is a puzzle to solve, but what precisely that puzzle is, I could not say. Like any good narrative, it sucked me in. By page fifty, instead of thinking “What’s Pynchon doing with this?” I was thinking “What will happen next?”, “Gosh that’s beautiful”, and “I hope nothing bad happens to Dally. That’d break Merle’s heart.” I liked Dally a lot. Her story was touching.</div>
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<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Even though I cared for the characters, I also found them alien. They think and feel, but they do not think and feel in the way that I do, or in the way that as far as I can tell anyone I know does. I never felt sympathy for the characters. Their experiences were clearly intense and powerfully described, but there were no moments of “I’ve felt that way before,” no moments where I bask in the author’s ability to put the elusive tickles and tidal waves of qualia into words. Throughout the book, decisions are confounding and passions are unexpected. Somehow, it works. Against the Day has its own world, saturated in detail and functioning according to its own internal logic. The characters do not feel in the same way that I do, but they feel in the same way as each other, making the whole plausible. The alienation is consistent, strange but not unpleasant.</div>
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<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>There is also no palpable sentience behind the words. With most authors, their books seem to provide insight into their personalities. Nabokov’s willingness to imbue his prose with as many histrionic flourishes as possible reveals both his arrogance and his genius. David Foster Wallace’s sensitivity to the trials and tribulations of human existence manifests itself in his pushing of literary boundaries. Reading a book can feel like the writer is there, present, telling the story to me. Reading Pynchon is not like this. He is unfathomable and absent. Having read his books, I can infer certain things about him. He likes crude puns, silly names and superstition of all sorts from conspiracy theories to religious mythology. He searches his novels extensively. He seems to dislike capitalism. But the writing shows no sign of an author behind the words. It is impersonal. The dialogue sounds like the characters are talking. The narration imbues all events, whether life-changing or slapstick, with the same Wagnerian drama. Like the characters’ alienating feelings, Pynchon’s detachment is a feature rather than a bug. It is part of the experience. Being immersed in it for a thousand pages is strange but wonderful. Against the Day has a near-constant turbulence of intense feeling and dramatic prose, but it unclear what to make of it. Each chapter ends with a climactic finale, a gorgeous and confusing final paragraph.</div>
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<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Thomas Pynchon’s novels have a mystique to them. I remember reading the first few pages of Mason & Dixon while waiting for my mom at a bookstore, then going back the next day to buy it because I needed to figure out the nature of the strange beast I had just sampled. The novels are complicated. They are silly. They are frustrating. They are puzzles that may or may not be worth trying to solve, that may or may not have a solution. On Against the Day, he writes better than anyone, delivering page after page after page of exquisite rhythm and perfect word choice. Most of the sentences are beautiful and almost none are flat or uncomfortable. Starting the book felt like embarking on an adventure, a trip into the jungle, mysterious and exciting. Not many writers can give me that feeling. And it lived up to this initial excitement by never becoming a slog, by keeping me on my toes, by realizing my dream of a literary scifi-ish fantasy-ish novel, by making me think and feel in ways I have never thought or felt before.</div>
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Jeffrey McQuigganhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02124854798394293936noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-427294255852526261.post-25412683811604724562014-01-03T22:44:00.002-08:002015-01-03T22:04:29.530-08:002014 Reading List<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica, Arial, clean, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;"><strike>Pynchon - Against the Day</strike></span><br style="font-family: Helvetica, Arial, clean, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><span style="font-family: Helvetica, Arial, clean, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;"><strike>Nabokov - Bend Sinster</strike></span><br style="font-family: Helvetica, Arial, clean, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><span style="font-family: Helvetica, Arial, clean, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">Nabokov - Annotated Lolita</span><br style="font-family: Helvetica, Arial, clean, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><span style="font-family: Helvetica, Arial, clean, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;"><strike>Martin Amis - The Information</strike></span><br style="font-family: Helvetica, Arial, clean, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><span style="font-family: Helvetica, Arial, clean, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">Dumas - Le compte de Monte Cristo</span><br style="font-family: Helvetica, Arial, clean, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><span style="font-family: Helvetica, Arial, clean, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;"><strike>Laurence Sterne - A Sentimental Journey and Other Writings</strike></span><br style="font-family: Helvetica, Arial, clean, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><span style="font-family: Helvetica, Arial, clean, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;"><strike>Bulgakov - The Country Doctor's Notebook</strike></span><br style="font-family: Helvetica, Arial, clean, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><span style="font-family: Helvetica, Arial, clean, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">Cervantes - Don Quixote</span><br style="font-family: Helvetica, Arial, clean, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><span style="font-family: Helvetica, Arial, clean, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">Proust - A l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleur</span><br style="font-family: Helvetica, Arial, clean, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><span style="font-family: Helvetica, Arial, clean, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;"><strike>James - The Bostonians</strike></span><br style="font-family: Helvetica, Arial, clean, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><span style="font-family: Helvetica, Arial, clean, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">Gaddis - A Frolic of His Own</span><br style="font-family: Helvetica, Arial, clean, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><span style="font-family: Helvetica, Arial, clean, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;"><strike>DT Max - DFW Biography</strike></span><br style="font-family: Helvetica, Arial, clean, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><span style="font-family: Helvetica, Arial, clean, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">Barth - Lost in the Funhouse</span><br style="font-family: Helvetica, Arial, clean, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><span style="font-family: Helvetica, Arial, clean, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">DFW - Girl with Curious Hair</span><br style="font-family: Helvetica, Arial, clean, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><span style="font-family: Helvetica, Arial, clean, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;"><strike>another Beckett novel or two</strike></span><br style="font-family: Helvetica, Arial, clean, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><span style="font-family: Helvetica, Arial, clean, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">The Holy Bible</span><br style="font-family: Helvetica, Arial, clean, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><span style="font-family: Helvetica, Arial, clean, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">Book of Irish fairy tales and folklore (edited by Yeats)</span><br style="font-family: Helvetica, Arial, clean, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><span style="font-family: Helvetica, Arial, clean, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">Rabelais - Gargantua et Pantagruel</span><br style="font-family: Helvetica, Arial, clean, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><span style="font-family: Helvetica, Arial, clean, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">Connor - Two Girls, One on Each Knee (abt cryptic crosswords)</span><br style="font-family: Helvetica, Arial, clean, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><span style="font-family: Helvetica, Arial, clean, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">Gossett - Divas and Scholars (abt italian opera)</span><br style="font-family: Helvetica, Arial, clean, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><span style="font-family: Helvetica, Arial, clean, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">Mann - The Magic Mountain</span><br style="font-family: Helvetica, Arial, clean, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><span style="font-family: Helvetica, Arial, clean, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">Tolkien - The Silmarillion</span><br style="font-family: Helvetica, Arial, clean, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><span style="font-family: Helvetica, Arial, clean, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">Ovid - Metamorphoses</span><br style="font-family: Helvetica, Arial, clean, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><span style="font-family: Helvetica, Arial, clean, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">Turgenev - Fathers and Sons</span><br style="font-family: Helvetica, Arial, clean, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><span style="font-family: Helvetica, Arial, clean, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">Augustine - Confessions</span><br style="font-family: Helvetica, Arial, clean, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><span style="font-family: Helvetica, Arial, clean, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">Barthelme - Overnight to Many Distant Cities</span></span>Jeffrey McQuigganhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02124854798394293936noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-427294255852526261.post-55320783581307685342013-05-29T20:02:00.001-07:002014-08-30T19:43:58.274-07:00Interview: Brad Cheeseman of Brad Cheeseman Group<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhaEuBGvt7E3k4ngBkE76NsDIqKJfMLImB3vJ1BvmmpEqt7kn0NKL6Rk0jNRfsF8LP_0gZS91EmZyf14vDYjW7jOuBO72U9J8HvaHjXM12V5xQEJXWDVQeS19i0y847oH4RYAmv4WtUZ0F0/s1600/a2473523018_10.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhaEuBGvt7E3k4ngBkE76NsDIqKJfMLImB3vJ1BvmmpEqt7kn0NKL6Rk0jNRfsF8LP_0gZS91EmZyf14vDYjW7jOuBO72U9J8HvaHjXM12V5xQEJXWDVQeS19i0y847oH4RYAmv4WtUZ0F0/s200/a2473523018_10.jpg" height="200" width="200" /></a></div>
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and composer Brad Cheeseman has released an EP of tender and intricate
contemporary jazz tunes called "Mixed Messages", which you can listen
to and/or buy here: http://bradcheeseman.bandcamp.com/ <o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: #fcfcfc; color: #141414;"><b>How
long have you been playing bass for? Was fusion an early love, or something you
developed a liking for as your talents grew into it?</b></span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span></i></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background: #FCFCFC; color: #141414; font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">I started playing bass in 2004, so roughly nine years now.
Jazz (and eventually fusion) was kind of an acquired taste for me. When I first
listened to bands like Weather Report and Return to Forever, it was the
musicianship that I was listening for; the language was beyond me. On the more
"traditional" side of things, Dave Brubeck's <i>Time Out </i>was
the first jazz record I bought, and it was the mixed meter compositions which I
was attracted to most, as they appealed to the inner progressive rock fan in
me. Since I could get a few of the elements in the music though, I kept
listening and gradually began to understand the music better.</span><span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: #fcfcfc; color: #141414;"><b>Did
you start composing immediately, or did you feel like you should wait until
you'd developed a certain level of skill before writing your own music?</b></span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span></i></span></div>
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<span style="background: #FCFCFC; color: #141414; font-family: inherit; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Composition has always been there to a certain extent but
it hasn't really been a major focus until the last few years. Rather than
waiting to develop a certain level of skill, I think it was more of a need to
make sense of who I am, musically speaking. I listen to a lot of different
music and I get to play a lot of different styles, but I wasn't sure if there
was a way to do all of it at once without it sounding like a total mess. Could
I have my cake and eat it, too? This was the challenge that really got me
going, so I started listening to music and asking myself why I liked it, or
what I found interesting in it, and the initial result of this process was what
would eventually become "Mixed Messages".<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: #fcfcfc; color: #141414;"><b>The
name of the EP fits the music very well, since I get contrasting moods from
these songs. For example, “Seven Sages” starts off as a rocking number—I think
of King Crimson—but the once the solos starts it gets soft, sentimental, and
slightly psychedelic. Were you intentionally contrasting moods, or was it a
result of synthesizing different musical styles? How would you describe the
atmosphere of Mixed Messages?</b></span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span></i></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background: #FCFCFC; color: #141414; font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">I think that I was mainly focused on creating interesting
arcs and telling complete stories with these songs, especially the bigger ones
like "Seven Sages" and "Mixed Messages". I remember an
interview with Esbjorn Svensson (of E.S.T.) who was talking about writing
"not just music to improvise on, but music that is music in its own
right" and that idea stuck with me and really informed the writing of this
material. I'm not really sure how I would describe the atmosphere of the
overall EP, though. What do you think?</span><span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: #fcfcfc; color: #141414; font-family: inherit;"><b>It
depends on the song. "Mixed Messages" gives me the jazz feeling of
people who love music playing music they love, cerebral but groovy and
passionate. "Winter Solstice" feels nostalgic and sentimental.
"Seven Sages" and "Clouds" have the prog rock feeling of
going on a journey, a boat trip where the heroes are attacked by a cyclops,
showered with gifts, seduced by sirens, etc before making it home. (I just read
The Odyssey so that might've biased me.) For the EP as a whole the only thing
coming to mind is that it's thoughtful and brooding, as opposed to explosive
and extroverted.</b><i><o:p></o:p></i></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background: #FCFCFC; color: #141414; font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">I like that. The song-by-song approach definitely works a
bit better, as these were all written over a few years and were just some of
the songs I wanted to capture most with this group of musicians. That said, I
can't give enough credit to the other guys for helping me bring some life to
these songs. On paper, "Mixed Messages" probably borders on cold and
too intellectual but, well, your descriptors basically sum it up. I hadn't
really thought of "Winter Solstice" as intentionally nostalgic, but
that kind of makes sense as it's the oldest of the bunch. Rob's guitar solo
here really captures what I was going for, though, and Sam's interpretation is
wonderful. For the other songs, the Homer comparison is a good one, especially
for "Clouds".</span><span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="color: #141414; font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><br /><span style="background-color: #fcfcfc;"><b>Since
you mentioned the Esbjorn Svensson quote, I'll ask you about the role of solos
in your compositions. Do the songs ask for a certain instrument to be soloing
in a certain place, or do you include them because improvisation is a big
reason why people play and listen to jazz? Did you ask the other musicians to
play in a certain way for a solo because that's what the song needed?</b></span></span><span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background: #FCFCFC; color: #141414; font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Regarding solos, I think it depends on the song. All of the
tunes that this group plays have solos but I don't think it would be out of the
question to do a completely through-composed piece of music with this group...
it just hasn't happened yet. Still, the solos in most of the songs that this
band plays are a part of the song's development, and not necessarily the
primary focus. As far as who solos on what, sometimes it's clear from the
beginning as to who's going to be featured (i.e. "Clouds" has always
been a guitar/sax feature). "Seven Sages" on the other hand, was
never meant to necessarily be a bass feature, but it's just kind of stuck (and
I wanted to have a good bass tune on the EP). Instead of asking people to solo
in a certain way to fit the music, I think it's more important to make sure
that the right people are playing on each tune. What tunes are going to bring
out the best of someone's playing? Who's going to connect with a song the best,
based on what I know of their playing and/or listening habits? Sometimes I
miss, or sometimes people ask to play (or sit out) on certain songs, but these
are all talented musicians and always surprise me with what they have to say on
their instruments.</span><span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="background-color: #fcfcfc; color: #141414; font-family: inherit;"><b>How
would you define the Brad Cheeseman Group? How long have you been working with
the guys on Mixed Messages? (Is there a fixed "line-up"?)</b><i><o:p></o:p></i></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background: #FCFCFC; color: #141414; font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Stylistically, I keep referring to the group as
contemporary jazz, which is kind of a catch-all term these days used to
describe any number of groups, but I like it better than "fusion". To
me, fusion has some connotations that I want to shy away from, like
self-indulgence and spectacle, whereas this has a bit more heart than fusion
might lead people to believe. On the other hand, it's a lot easier to just call
it fusion than to explain all of the above. It's definitely jazz to me, but I
think it has a lot to offer for people who aren't really fans of jazz.</span><span style="color: #141414; font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><br />
<br />
<span style="background: #FCFCFC;">The line-up has changed a bit since the first
performances, and there's always a bit of a revolving door. Matt and Rob were
the first to try out the charts, and Sam was there for the first real gig. Jeff
first played with us shortly before tracking back in the fall, and Matt decided
to pass the torch not too long after tracking was finished. It would be nice to
always play with the same people, but the reality is that everyone's busy with
work or their own projects and won't always be able to make the gig or commit
to working on the material. As much as having subs can be difficult, though,
it's exciting for me to hear new people play the tunes and interpret them
differently.</span></span><span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: #fcfcfc; color: #141414;"><b>Do you
see the group only playing your compositions, or could you see playing
standards, covers, or stuff by other members?</b></span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span></i></span><br />
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<span style="background-color: #fcfcfc; color: #141414;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">We've done a few covers here and there... I did an
arrangement of Brandt Brauer Frick's "Mi Corazon" which made pretty
regular setlist appearances for a while, and we did one-off performances of the
Pinball Number Count from Sesame Street and an different arrangement of
"Single Ladies". Since most of the performances we do are only one or
two sets, there hasn't really been a need for covers. However, we're doing a
festival in a few weeks where we need the extra material so we'll do a set of
standards. Earlier on when I was still getting some rep together I asked a
couple of the musicians to bring in tunes if they wanted, but nothing ever came
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: #fcfcfc; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; color: #141414;"><b>What are the plans for the group's future? Live shows?
Touring? More recordings?</b></span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: #fcfcfc; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; color: #141414;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></span></div>
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playing live and expanding whatever fan base we currently have, work on getting
the existing material together and start introducing some new tunes to the
repertoire. There are no plans to tour at the moment, but that would be a lot
of fun. It would just be a matter of getting the schedules of five people to
lineup for a long enough period of time, as well as making it a worthwhile
endeavour for everyone. As for more recording, eventually... it's definitely
not something that I want to rush into right now.</span><span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: #fcfcfc; color: #141414;"><b>What’s
something you really love about Mixed Messages, and what’s something you'd like
to improve for next time?</b></span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span></i></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background: #FCFCFC; color: #141414; font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Overall, I'm really glad everything turned out the way it
did. The production sounds great and everything has a good balance between
sounding produced and like a live band. My favourite moments are a lot of
little ones, especially regarding some of the solos. During the recording
sessions, I was so focused on bigger things like how the grooves felt, or
listening for major mistakes, that I missed how good some little moments really
were until we started listening back. Sometimes, things that seemed like
mistakes during the sessions actually end up being really cool moments that we
kept... probably something to do with conviction and people just going for it.</span><span style="color: #141414; font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><br />
<br />
<span style="background: #FCFCFC;">Live, it's not uncommon for songs to be
stretched out for the solos, but in the studio we had to really try to keep
things under control, which generally meant giving solos a set length. For the
most part this worked but it would have been nice to let a few of the sections
breathe a little more. Next time I'd try a slightly looser approach and make
those calls on the fly.</span></span><span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: #fcfcfc; color: #141414;"><b>I know
it's hard to point to with words, but what's an example of a little favourite
moment?</b></span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span></i></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background: #FCFCFC; color: #141414; font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">One moment that sticks out is on the head out of
"Winter Solstice", Sam does this huge piano flourish. When he did it,
we all just kind of looked around the room at each other, as if to say
"you better believe that was the take". Also, the very end of Jeff's
solo on "Mixed Messages" was a bit of a surprise for everyone -- I could
see the producer and engineer cracking up in the control room. Everyone has
these moments scattered throughout, and I suppose it really comes down to how
much I enjoy listening to these guys play. We've played the songs a bunch in
rehearsal and on gigs, then after the tracking sessions I listened to the songs
over and over while choosing the best takes and listening to rough mixes, etc.
Which is to say that I know how the compositions sound and I have a general
idea about how the musicians play and improvise... yet I never get tired of
hearing them doing it and they always have new and interesting things to say on
their instruments.</span><span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: #fcfcfc; color: #141414;"><b>Haha I
think I know the feeling when something surprising and awesome happens, and
when you finish and think "yeah that was great." Were any of the
songs particularly hard to get a good take? Was it hard to decide between
takes?</b></span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span></i></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background: #FCFCFC; color: #141414; font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">"Seven Sages" was the first one we did, and it
took the longest. In the end, I think we did seven takes (how fitting haha). It
was coming along and everything was always close. After the 5th take, we
switched gears and did one of the other ones, but I knew that we were close to
getting it so we went back and did a couple more and, sure enough, the last
take was the one. Sometimes, though, there are trade-offs where you can live
with one part if another part is really good. It's also really difficult to get
a sense of the overall picture while you're recording, because you're so
focused on what you're doing... it was always great to take a break and listen
back to what we were doing, or to get the perspective of the producer and/or
engineer.</span><span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="background-color: #fcfcfc; color: #141414; font-family: inherit;"><b>That's
basically all the questions I had. I had fun. I hope you did too. Thanks a
bunch! Any last words? Favourite album of 2013?</b><i><o:p></o:p></i></span></div>
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<span style="background: #FCFCFC; color: #141414; font-family: inherit; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">I haven't gotten a chance to dig into too many 2013 albums
yet, but I've really been digging the new Justin Timberlake and James Blake
records. Lots of good music to check out, for sure! Thanks for doing this
interview. too. I hadn't really thought too intently about some of these
questions, so it was pretty informative for me. Lots of fun, thanks again!</span><span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
Jeffrey McQuigganhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02124854798394293936noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-427294255852526261.post-42928908029639991142013-05-20T17:16:00.002-07:002013-05-20T17:16:55.970-07:00Two small things<span style="background-color: white; color: #37404e; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">puppy stumbles to the sea</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #37404e; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #37404e; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">big, endless, uncomfortable</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #37404e; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #37404e; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">back to the shore!</span><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh6g8MlXto2eMgqCj4LqeicvUHK-jBlDqyhUL87n35RrwNP7EezmSaXjfNA2RqeBWu7cSCCacCz9l9TsCeznRx0yujPdiA6-roO4eHO3B-mocMXWVI0GqGvk27Ufix9SVZtVJqwy54fKLRO/s1600/mantra.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh6g8MlXto2eMgqCj4LqeicvUHK-jBlDqyhUL87n35RrwNP7EezmSaXjfNA2RqeBWu7cSCCacCz9l9TsCeznRx0yujPdiA6-roO4eHO3B-mocMXWVI0GqGvk27Ufix9SVZtVJqwy54fKLRO/s640/mantra.png" width="500" /></a></div>
<span style="background-color: white; color: #37404e; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;"><br /></span>Jeffrey McQuigganhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02124854798394293936noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-427294255852526261.post-15758815595029303812013-04-21T15:12:00.002-07:002013-04-21T15:12:13.645-07:00WinterpretationsStreets: moist grey concrete.<br />
Leaves: brown goo.<br />
Beaches: tracts of dreary beauty<br />
a no man's land of wet logs<br />
Buses roam from town to school,<br />
school to town<br />
and back again.<br />
The sun smiles occasionally through a veil.<br />
Wind tumbling from the sea batters the houses' shingles and the towers' concrete.<br />
Clouds rule the earth.Jeffrey McQuigganhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02124854798394293936noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-427294255852526261.post-34464893678411581092013-04-10T12:35:00.001-07:002015-04-29T11:53:39.667-07:00David Foster Wallace's The Pale King<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<i>Infinite Jest</i> changes lives. After reading it, I cut back my time spent on the internet and started pursuing guitar, singing, tennis, and swing dancing. My dad quit his nightly habit of drinking a beer or two. David Foster Wallace's epic of diligent practice and crippling addiction packs a punch. At about five times the length of a normal novel, it is vast. It sprawls. Yet the writing--paragraph after paragraph, page after page--is tight and polished. And behind the words I constantly sensed a personality that is profoundly clever and sincere. It is hilarious, disturbing, and deeply sad; at its best, it is all three at once. David Foster Wallace successfully wrote a big book about everything. What next?</div>
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First, Wallace released two collections of short stories: <i>Brief Interviews with Hideous Men</i>, "classic Wallace", and <i>Oblivion</i>, meticulous and unfathomable. He began work on a novel, but committed suicide before finishing. A stack of writing and manuscripts was left behind and pieced together by his editor, Michael Friesch. <i>The Pale King</i> is unfinished and it shows. The book is flawed yet, maddeningly, often brilliant. The masterpiece is still stumbling through its baby steps.</div>
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<i>The Pale King</i> is set in an IRS station in Peoria, Illinois. Wallace uses this setting to adress interesting and important issues. The tax examiners are used as an example of a job that is necessary for society, yet unbearably, heroically tedious. Questions: Why does everyone expect service from the government, yet hate paying the taxes that make these services possible? Is anything vital lost when humans are replaced by computers? Should the IRS's goal be to punish wrongdoers who are cheating on their taxes, or should it exist to raise money for the government? How does one maintain sanity when confronted with hard work and boredom for eight hours a day, five days a week, fifty weeks a year? These subjects combined with the politics and power struggles that exist in every organization, giving <i>The Pale King</i> the potential to be immensely poignant and relevant.</div>
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Unfortunately, the novel rarely says anything interesting. It skirts around the issues it raises, never making any astute or penetrating observations. Or, worse, it addresses the subject in an explicit, heavy-handed way that is closer to preaching than to storytelling. One chapter (19) abandons fiction in favour of being something like a modern day Platonic dialogue. And the points Wallace wants to make are not thrilling: I was unmoved by the portrayal of the hippie/counterculture movement as lazy college kids floating on their parents' wealth, and I was still unmoved when it was repeated a half dozen times. Wallace sets himself up with a situation where he can offer all sorts of profundity and insight--and profound insight is what he does best--but, this time, he cannot follow through on his promise.</div>
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<i>The Pale King's </i>other problem is that it lacks the polish of Wallace's other writing. Even when <i>Infinite Jest</i> tested my patience, the difficult passages felt necessary. The convoluted structures of <i>Oblivion</i>'s short stories made me ask "Why?" But even though I could not think of answer, the complexity felt logical. Lengthy, dull passages of <i>The Pale King</i> do not add anything to the book; they do not ring with necessity or seem otherwise justifiable. Wallace writes himself (as well as another "David Wallace") into the novel, and spends a long time assuring us that it is not a post-modern game, but rather a way of avoiding lawsuits; I did not particularly care either way. The "narrator here" chapters and the passages about the double David Wallaces are the novel's most tedious. (From the notes included at the end of the book, it seems like Wallace was still figuring out what to do with the David Foster Wallace character.) Fifty pages are spent on a dull description of the drive to the Peoria IRS station. The book's longest chapter, written from Chris "Irrelevant" Fogle's POV is satisfying, but flabby; it could have been four times as good if it were half as long. Claude Sylvanshine has the ability to divine random facts in some parts of the novel, but not in others. Wallace's writing is normally precise, anal retentive. <i>The Pale King</i> is fatty, sloppy. Its sprawl lacks intention and purpose.</div>
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Despite these two problems, I enjoyed the novel. There are moments of brilliance. The book juxtaposes childhood events with the current day lives of the various tax examiners, and the emergence of this structure made me tingle with glee. Claude Sylvanshine's chapter at the beginning is lovely; it captures the fragmented multitasking of consciousness--past experiences, present ailments, and future worries all rolled into one--while being easily readable and crystal clear. A young couple's unwanted pregnancy is rendered tenderly and thoughtfully, showing Wallace's newfound ability to harness the emotional power of simple struggles. A hilarious later chapter reverts to Wallace's earlier style of writing ("The station's flagpole's flag's rope's pulleys and joists"), showing he has evolved and simplified as an author. Bloody mucous is involved. Published posthumously, <i>The Pale King</i> comes heartbreakingly close to being a masterpiece.</div>
Jeffrey McQuigganhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02124854798394293936noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-427294255852526261.post-19708290932513276132013-03-20T10:19:00.000-07:002015-04-29T11:53:48.490-07:00Kingsley Amis' The Green Man<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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I discovered Kinglsey Amis via his son Martin. Interviewers salivate at the slightest hint of a juicy detail or tasty tidbit from Martin's family life; sharks, blood in the water come to mind. So, having enjoyed Amis' Jr.'s work, I decided to see what Sr. had gotten up to in his novels.</div>
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Both Amises are cynics and both love to write about sex. While Martin's cynicism pours a tidal wave of filth into his writing, Kingsley's manifests itself as a series of sly digs at the world. And while Martin revels in histrionic and/or disturbing eroticism, Kingsley restrains himself to having a womanizing protagonist whose goal in life is to have a threesome with his wife and his doctor's wife. The mood is droll rather than creepy. Both strike me as naughty fellows for their time, but Kingsley is from a much politer time.</div>
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Stylistically, the politeness of Kingsley's era also shows. Martin tinkers with structure and voice. He mirrors characters against each other, having one rise while the other falls; he writes a character named "Martin Amis" into one of his novels; Another, <i>Time's Arrow</i> moves backwards through time; and so on. The closest <i>The Green Man </i>comes to post-modernism is when the narrator rants against the novel as an art form and novelists as people.</div>
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<i>The Green Man</i> is told from the point of view of Maurice Allington, a hotelier/bartender who entertains his customers with ghost stories. Other than sex and alcohol, he is not the kind of person who is interested in things. Throughout the course of the novel, he expresses dislike for TV, food, guests, wine, novels, artichokes, and rock and roll. He fills his narrative with sly cynic quips such as "The last stages of the conversation were lengthened by my guest's habit of pausing frequently in search of some even more roundabout way of expressing himself than the one which first occurred to him." (Who hasn't known someone like that? Haha.) He hardly talks to his daughter, he hardly notices his wife, and when his father dies, he hardly cares. He has health problems; he cares about them. Others worry about his sanity and wish he would drink less. Ghosts haunt the hotel and teach Maurice to care about his family. The novel contrasts the hard facts of science with the tender magic of spirituality. (This reminded me of Iris Murdoch's <i>The Sea, The Sea</i>. Perhaps a common concern of post-WWII Brit novelists?)</div>
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Overall, I did not much care for <i>The Green Man</i>. Its story is quirky and cute. It would make a good oddball British movie for old people. Its narrator was grumpy. Its satire and wit were predictable, unspectacular. For example: "Soon afterwards I left, after having my offer to turn the TV set on rejected: she said she wanted to go on thinking." Sometimes I cracked a grin but sometimes it came across as an old person complaining about new things. I suppose I'll stick to Martin's weirdo post-modern raunchfests. But I did like the rant against artichokes.</div>
Jeffrey McQuigganhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02124854798394293936noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-427294255852526261.post-74574372945016291882013-02-01T09:56:00.001-08:002015-04-29T11:54:16.394-07:00C.S. Lewis' The Screwtape Letters<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhgFJ-nlD6ZaEONOhv6kYtPAVqGfYaR7hmnBR90pvLSvdgWbXoFXaAxypEYdoffeD8krLArg947ZAxhZMX0LUxKXejCsJXt5r4tn4HocdvE9RxuqvFa90rbS4FUTfTW754ZLWYWAjkj6zbc/s1600/letters.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhgFJ-nlD6ZaEONOhv6kYtPAVqGfYaR7hmnBR90pvLSvdgWbXoFXaAxypEYdoffeD8krLArg947ZAxhZMX0LUxKXejCsJXt5r4tn4HocdvE9RxuqvFa90rbS4FUTfTW754ZLWYWAjkj6zbc/s320/letters.jpg" height="320" width="219" /></a></div>
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Back in grade ten, I tried to write a story about a demon who was working to poison a person's mind. It was inspired by the music video for <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hglVqACd1C8">Tool's "Sober"</a>. He had a machine that pumped filth into his subject's mind, and he spent the story polishing and cleaning, tweaking and calibrating, trying to make the machine run as efficiently as possible. The story failed. I enjoyed describing the demon's gnarled face and mishappen limbs, and creating his murky, sewer-like lair. But I stumbled when the story collided with reality. I couldn't answer questions like "Who is the demon's subject?" and "Who does the subject become, post-corruption?" I was unsatisfied and eventually gave up.</div>
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When I heard that C.S. Lewis had written <i>The Screwtape Letters</i>--a story about a senior demon instructing a junior demon on the art of tempting humans--I got excited. He surely must've succeeded where I failed. I expected something succulently dark and deliciously creepy: malice in every word, malevolence in every sentence. I wanted prose so dark, vivid, and evil that it would make me concerned for the twisted mind that had channeled it onto the page.</div>
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In retrospect, I should not have expected this. My prior exposure to Lewis' writing was "The Humanitarian Theory of Punishment", an article of applied ethics that argues against 'prison as rehabilitation' and in favour of 'justice via punishment'. The article has a clear message and conveys it in a rational, concise, logical, and precise way. The words carry emotional heft when they need it, but for the most part they are calculated and efficient, rather than passionate, vivid, or histrionic. Lewis's writing is not dry, but it is not particularly moist, either.</div>
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<i>The Screwtape Letters</i> did not meet my expectations; I expected dark and terrible fiction, but it fell much more in line with my prior exposure to C.S. Lewis. It is a thoughtful critique of society and religion. Lewis is not concerned with ravenous lust or relentless greed, but rather snippets of gluttony and nascent buds of pride. He takes aim at the sins everyone struggles with every day. Or, if they do not struggle with these sins, they do not even notice them, which is why Lewis wrote the book. He wants to call attention to our minor failings. While he is not always right--there's a weird tirade against public schools--Lewis' critiques are always smart and thoughtful. I adored the book because it invited me to engage with his ideas, rather than trying to force me into agreeing with them. I considered each point carefully before accepting or rejecting it. Lewis made me think.</div>
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I am not a Christian (Screwtape got to me!), and this is primarily a theological work. However, with most theological texts, I mentally switch ideas like God and Heaven with "happiness" and ideas like sin and hell with "unhappiness" or "shame". This makes it easier to apply their teachings to my own life. A simple switch and the messages resonate with me. This paragraph in particular is a beauty:</div>
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"The Christians describe [God] as one 'without whom Nothing is strong'. And Nothing is very strong: strong enough to steal away man's best years not in sweet sins but in a dreary flickering of the mind over it knows not what and knows not why, in the gratification of curiosities so feeble that the man is only half aware of them, in drumming of fingers and kicking of heels, in whistling tunes that he does not like, or in the long, dim labyrinth of reveries that have not even lust or ambition to give them a relish, but which, once chance association has started them, the creature is too weak and fuddled to shake off."</div>
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<i>The Screwtape Letters</i> was not what I wanted it to be, but, once I got over that, I enjoyed it. It is a short monograph that gives solid advice on how to live. C.S. Lewis might not bring linguistic fireworks to the table, but his writing is always clear and never clunky; his paragraphs fall together like Tetris blocks. There is something beautiful about the way he writes one impeccably clear, perfectly punctuated sentence after another, for a whole book. His writing is transparent, letting us put the focus on his arguments.</div>
Jeffrey McQuigganhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02124854798394293936noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-427294255852526261.post-27789879018484959762012-12-27T22:49:00.000-08:002013-09-17T14:10:45.254-07:00My 2013 reading list, and 2012 listening list.<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
Music:</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgDvMQo6KVcK4NjcbDFz6OHLMBVfLrNWK4DWC_wfKHjdoPRQYk0KmBn-Het072MpZTzDNrowskHvOIzFf0QEjL5Rqq_Y_uCy7o7W6DdiTo6V5vBKIlNJTszszpr2dEV59tTIYmuRiL78lyF/s1600/lastfm.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgDvMQo6KVcK4NjcbDFz6OHLMBVfLrNWK4DWC_wfKHjdoPRQYk0KmBn-Het072MpZTzDNrowskHvOIzFf0QEjL5Rqq_Y_uCy7o7W6DdiTo6V5vBKIlNJTszszpr2dEV59tTIYmuRiL78lyF/s400/lastfm.jpg" width="345" /></a></div>
(Apparently I listen to nothing released between 1960 and 2010.)<br />
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Books:<br />
<strike>Nabokov - Ada, Or Ardor: A Family Chronicle</strike></div>
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Nabokov - The Originals of Laura</div>
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Pynchon - Against the Day</div>
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Tolstoy - War and Peace</div>
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Dostoeyevsky - Brothers Karamazov</div>
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Emile Zola - La debacle</div>
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<strike>Melville - Moby Dick</strike></div>
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Cormac McCarthy - The Crossing</div>
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<strike>(Kingsley) Amis - Green Man</strike></div>
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<strike>Samuel Beckett - Watt</strike></div>
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Proust - A l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleur</div>
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(Martin) Amis - The Information</div>
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<strike>(Martin) Amis - The Rachel Papers</strike></div>
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D.T. Max - Every Love Story is a Ghost Story (DFW bio)</div>
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<strike>David Foster Wallace - The Pale King</strike></div>
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David Foster Wallace - Girl With the Curious Hair</div>
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<strike>Homer - The Odyssey</strike></div>
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<strike>Wilde - Picture of Dorian Grey</strike></div>
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<strike>Carroll - Alice in Wonder + Adventures Through the Looking Glass</strike></div>
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<strike>Swift - Gulliver's Travels</strike></div>
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Mann - Magic Mountain</div>
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Barthelme - Overnight to Many Distant Cities</div>
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Dumas - Le compte de Monte-Cristo</div>
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Shakespeare - Two Gentlemen of Verona</div>
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Love's Labours Lost</div>
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Much Ado About Nothing</div>
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Henry the Sixth Part One</div>
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Part Two</div>
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Part Three</div>
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Julius Caesar</div>
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Timon of Athens</div>
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Macbeth</div>
Jeffrey McQuigganhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02124854798394293936noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-427294255852526261.post-7417096084435209362012-11-27T21:53:00.002-08:002015-04-21T15:42:32.775-07:00<span style="font-family: inherit;">On a cloudy day, Larry crosses the road. He looks both ways. He thinks of cars. He thinks about how easy it is to propel a thousand pounds of metal, rubber, and light across hundreds of miles. Or, if not easy, then thoughtless. Taken for granted. Magic that's lost its magic. He thinks about climate change, the coming apocalypse, about a million cars (trucks, vans, SUVs, etc) speeding along a million streets. Every second, a small cloud of exhaust is pumped through each of their mufflers and out each of their exhaust pipes. A million cars, a million small clouds, every second. Every day. "I wouldn't want to be the ozone layer these days," he thinks. He imagines all the smoke being pumped into a single room. Even a big room--a stadium or a hangar--and you'd still be in trouble, if you were in there, with all those cars. Not a likely situation. But he'd heard of people committing suicide that way, locked in their garage with their car running. Just one car, in a garage. Larry wants to save the world. He is walking. He wants an electric car, powered by clean energy, by dams that don't create unnatural lakes, by wind turbines that don't concuss passing birds with their gargantuan blades. (Or do they slice them apart? Unpleasant thoughts.) A car powered by the cleanest energy, by a miracle surge of electricity that is soon to be invented by a brilliant, slightly mad, socially abysmal, soon-to-be billionaire scientist, slaving away in a lab, the basement of a university in Europe, probably in Geneva, burning chemicals whose acrid, dull brown smoke will shorten his life, causing horrific lung problems that prevent said scientist from enjoying his overwhelming wealth. Or maybe the scientist will get cancer from handling too many mysterious radioactive stones. Either way, he'll have furthered science and done a great service to mankind. Larry apologizes for thinking of the scientist as socially abysmal. Too harsh! He wonders what the scientist, seeing him cross the street, would think. Too self-conscious! Do the brilliant ever consider other people? No. Their thoughts should be perpetually pinned to the solving of formulas, the workings of machines, the investigating and describing of the heavens and the earth. Larry thinks about technology--the developments the last hundred years, the developments of the last ten years, the developments of the next hundred years. Exciting thoughts, like "What's in store for humanity?" Larry is hit by a car.</span>Jeffrey McQuigganhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02124854798394293936noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-427294255852526261.post-63176719083598866532012-10-19T15:46:00.000-07:002012-10-19T15:46:26.747-07:00Weapons, Armour, JewelryTwist my fingers until they crack.<br />
My bones are out of place.<br />
Pull my fingers 'til they pop.<br />
My frame bent all wrong.<br />
Follow the paths of my joints-<br />
Roam ribs, caress tendons, scale vertebrae-<br />
It'll be a short trip but you'll never reach the end.Jeffrey McQuigganhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02124854798394293936noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-427294255852526261.post-72342789065463345922012-09-22T17:07:00.006-07:002015-04-29T11:54:27.443-07:00James Joyce's Ulysses - "Hard to Follow at the First Go-Off"<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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In my copy of Robertson Davies' Fifth Business, the introduction ruins the book's ending. It took me days to even realize that the book had a climactic revelation that redefined the narrator. Since then I have avoided reading secondary sources--prefaces, introductions, forewords, the plot synopsis blurb on the back of the book--until I've finished reading the novel. It started off as a desire to avoid spoilers, but it grew into a desire to have my own thoughts about a novel, thoughts untainted by the words and perspectives of others. Ulysses almost undid this tradition. Frustrated and challenged, I was tempted by plot synopses, expository essays, articles that would explain just <i>why</i> the book is considered by many smart people to be one of the best ever written. I knew scholars had been dissecting and explaining the thing for years, and I was needing an explanation of what I was reading.</div>
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But I made it to the end. I formulate my own reason why I think it is praised so highly: At times Joyce writes with the precise elegance of the Victorians - a Dickens or a Bronte. At other times, Joyce writes with the playful, absurd experimentation of the 20th century, a precursor of Pynchon, Burgess, or Burroughs. He even uses David Foster Wallace's favourite 'explained pronoun' trope: "All kinds of Utopian plans were flashing through his (B's) busy brain..." Ulysses is the work of a literary Picasso, a master of the old tradition who is inventing a new way of doing things. That said, I'm not sure I enjoyed reading it. If it weren't for the ringing endorsements of English teachers, friends, and a smart-looking guy on The Colbert Report, I doubt I would have finished.</div>
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I get the impression that Joyce did not have the reader in mind as he wrote Ulysses. In most novels, the author leads you by the hand through his story. There's a trail through the forest. In Ulysses, Joyce drops you into his tangled mess of ideas and lets you sort things out for yourself. You have to find your own way. Reader comprehension is not primary among Joyce's goals. He has other, loftier ambitions.</div>
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First, he wants to move beyond conventional narrative. The writing plugs into various characters' consciousness and records what it finds, without any added context or explanation. The novel covers a day in Dublin, and there's no cohesive plot that ties the events together. Ideas, themes, and subjects are not dissected all at once; instead, they flit through the characters' divided thoughts, coming and going. Names are mentioned without introduction, as if the reader already knows the person. A bar of soap bought early in the day is remembered periodically, intruding into other trains of thought as it needs to be switched from one pocket to another. Just as we can multitask and think of more than one thing at a time, the narrative juggles multiple themes simultaneously. A favourite passage of mine is when Leopold Bloom balances the annoyance of small talk, the sadness of contemplating death, and the thrill of glimpsing a woman's silk stockings. Our minds are full of subjects with seemingly contradictory moods and tones, all at once. At times, Joyce nails it.</div>
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I found Ulysses difficult because I do not posses the same web of knowledge and cultural associations as Joyce. He writes in Latin, Italian, French, Hebrew, and Spanish. (I got the French!) He references Italian opera, Catholic theology, English literature, Greek philosophy, Shakespeare's plays and biography, Dublin's geography, and Ireland's history. Most of the novel felt like a joke I wasn't getting. There are sources out there that will explain everything in the book, I'm sure, but those work about as well as explaining a joke, in my experience.</div>
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Here's one I did catch: "Item: was Hamlet mad?" A reference to Twelfth Night. Viola tries to flatter Olivia, but Olivia counters by parodying Viola's paen to her beauty, reducing the blazon to a merchant's inventory. "Item: two lips, indifferent red; item: two gray eyes, with lids to them..." I took this reference to mean that Stephen is wondering whether his studies of philosophy and literature just boil down to being another career, rather than being a grand search into the nature of truth and the meaning of life. Overall, the references I got were few and far between, and the references I <i>understood</i> even fewer. While the namedropping in Pynchon's novels seems random and meaningless, I think Joyce takes his references very seriously. There's depth and substance to each one, and I don't think I got much of it. I had a hard enough time trying to figure out what was going on.</div>
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Joyce's second goal in Ulysses is to play with language. According to his wife, he giggled while he wrote, and I don't doubt it. Every page of Ulysses echoes with onomatopoeia, rings with assonance, and chuckles with rhymes. Puns are a constant, present on every page, in every paragraph. "Closeclutched swift swifter with the glareblareflare scudding they scootlootshoot lumbering by. Baraabum!" and "(helterskelterpelterwelter) He's Bloom! Stop Bloom! Stopabloom! Stopperrobber! Hi! Hi! Stophim on the corner!" are two examples that it took me about a minute to find. Joyce is also partial to lists of names, e.g. "...Mrs Wyse Nolan, John Wyse Nolan, handsomemarriedwomanrubbedagainstwidebehindinClonskeatram, the bookseller of Sweets of Sin, Miss Dubedantandshedidbedad, Mesdames Gerald and Stanislaus Moran of Roebuck..." He throws letters on the page with a childlike glee. At best, it's hilarious, exciting; at worst, it's kind of cute and tedious. I chuckled and/or rolled my eyes again and again throughout the novel.</div>
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I have mixed feelings about Ulysses. I wouldn't enthusiastically recommend it to anyone, but I could see myself reading it a second time. It's long, difficult, and only sporadically rewarding. Of the books that've taken me over a month to read--such as Infinite Jest, Les Miserables, Lord of the Rings, Mason and Dixon--it is the only one I don't consider a favourite book. The others I found so consistently wonderful that I never considered putting them down. But I have a feeling that Ulysses, on second reading, would be substantially more enjoyable. Now that I have a map of Joyce's forest, maybe I'll be able to enjoy the scenery when I come back. But it's a hefty commitment of time and energy for something of uncertain rewards. Mixed, mixed feelings.</div>
Jeffrey McQuigganhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02124854798394293936noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-427294255852526261.post-47175815672950579262012-06-18T16:38:00.002-07:002014-08-30T19:45:47.272-07:00Montréal Week 2: Less novelty, more routine.<b>June 2</b><br />
<b> </b>Had a bad morning. I was really tired, homesick, and frustrated with Montréal. Nowhere to relax: stuffy uncomfortable bedroom, too many people outside. And I felt like I should be having a good time, since I far away from home doing lots of new things. It wasn't a fun couple of hours. Lynne helped me through it. She's great. Went to the Grand Bibliotheque and Eva Bie's, the fullest thrift store. Lynne found me a perfect raincoat in about 30 seconds. They served us free lemonade/chai mix. I liked Eva Bie's.<br />
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Home. Nap. Dinner (cheese-red pepper-celery-mustard sandwiches). A jazz restaurant with an amazing piano trio led by Taury Butler. Exhilerating and beautiful music, although I would have prefered a venue with more focus on the music. Having waiters squeak by you and constant background chatter is not ideal for listening. Home. Called the 'rents. Listened to God Bless Your Black Heart and then slept.<br />
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<strong>June 3</strong><br />
Awoke to Lynne beckoning me to Mont Royal and the Tam-tam. Luckily, our meeting time left me able to enjoy a leisurely breakfast and tea. Walking to Mont Royal and waiting was nice. It's a pretty place, a good place. I'll have to return. At 11:30 the Tam-tam hadn't really started, only 2-3 lonely drummers playing half-hearted rhythms. We headed up the mountain, but garbagey fire pits and broken beer bottles made our trail unappealing. Trombones and tubas lured us down off the slopes.<br />
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My cell phone died as I was trying to reply to Jocelyn's text. Chances of meeting up with family seemed slim. <br />
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The Tam-tam got going, a lovely circle of percussion and positive outdoor ambiance. Lynne and I swing danced to the drum circle; Lindy worked best with the tempo and feel. We traded massages, picknicked, generally rested and enjoyed the sun, etc. Walked home at 2ish through a pleasant residential, apartmenty district.<br />
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Evening: listening to Now You Are One of Us. Jon Congleton's music is oddly soothing, a favourite thing that reminds me of home. A walk around - to the bank, to the library. Bought two more volumes of La Recherche des Temps Perdus, decided to start collecting them, even if they're not in order. Read Les Miz for a long time at home. Ate celery and peanut butter.<br />
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<strong>June 4</strong><br />
My phone's battery died. Desperately begged, pleaded, prayed, but it refused to listen. I bring my charger everywhere, constantly searching for outlets to check my texts. In the corner of class, I crouch and fiddle with electronic gadgets like a hacker or a terrorist.<br />
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Class. Prepositions. Colours. Improv en Francais (vraiment drole!). Iffy photography presentation worse by the rude, disgruntled grumbles of the tired crowd. She was a good speaker, but I didn't care about her life story. Should've brought sandwiches today, 'twas long.<br />
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Sighed with relief when I saw Lynne waiting for me outside of my dorm. Dinner plans fell into place. A beautiful dinner with great family. Very nice seeing them.<br />
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Meant to walk a couple blocks with Lynne, but ended up at her place an hour later. Stayed until 11:40. Worried a bit about how little sleep I'll get tonight, but it was worth it for the quality time before saying goodbye. Lynne's sister brought home bees; they're starting a beehive; that's cool.<br />
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<strong>June 5</strong><br />
Morning class: more prepositions, an article about cell phones and facebook that spelled out pretty well why I like not having a phone. In the afternoon we went to the lovely Marché Jean-Talon. I came back with bread, apples, peppers, and the intention to go back for a more thorough shopping trip on the weekend. It was a nice place that I wouldn't mind returning to regularly. lots of fresh fruit, veggies, eggs, baking. Also, loose leaf tea (!).<br />
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Next, back at school for the photography competition. Fatgiue had me in a "let's get this done" mode rather than "let's have some fun" mode, unfortunately. Losing a member of the group was annoying. (Is it really that hard to notice everyone else stopped to watch the parkour?) But we took some cool pictures.<br />
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Cheesebread dinner. 6:45 nap that could've lasted all night, but I ambled to the grocery store at 10 to get some necessities: tea, granola. Also delicious apple/cranberry juice that took an act of will not to drink all at once.<br />
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<strong>June 6</strong><br />
More Facebook and social media discussion. Daphnée realized we were tired and played us lots of videos, so that we wouldn't have to carry the discussion. I felt pretty good, having slept 11 of the last 13 hours. We read an article about cyberbullying that made me glad to be out of high school (and glad that I wasn't a girl in high school.) Found out that I needed to get the competition photos in ASAP. Went into team leader mode, hunting Jill down, running to her computer, and choosing the photos for our team. I hope that I did a good job and that nobody would be disappointed by my choices. Back in glass I got to learn about subjonctif passé, which I vaguely recalled from high school.<br />
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Lunch. Home. Rice and cheese. Kind of disappointed that a roommate came home, no alone time. I think to function in a city for long periods of time, I'll need to lower my standards for what counts as alone time.<br />
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School: a talk about how to present photography. Titles, descriptions, sequencing the pictures. Then back to our teams to choose 3 of 8 pictures and then title, describe and sequence them. Parkour picture turned out disappointingly gray and blurry. Three stood out as looking good together. Finding a satisfying paralellism in our titles and descriptions was the hard part. I mostly translated, struggling to make phrases that sound good in English sound good in French while meaning roughly the same thing. But after a couple hours we had an end result that was super sentimental and super satisfying.<br />
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Home. left for a walk. Saw stylish hipster girls in denim blues and dusty browns. Saw a strip club called "Le Gentlemen's Choice", chuckled. The bouncer's head didn't interrupt the round curve of his body. Spent a couple hours on the campus computers. Home. Slept.<br />
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I've noticed myself getting excited about things that were commonplace at home: sitting with a cup of tea and listening to Noctourniquet, having the energy to read Les Miz for an hour, directionlessly browsing the internet for an hour. I should remmeber to do these things. They make me happy, keep me sane. I'd like to know more about old, traditional folk music. Like when Victor Hugo writes about Mme Thenardier singing a song based on an "air anglaise a la mode en 1830", I want to know what that sounds like. My ability to recognize jazz standards has steadily improved over the last couple years, which is cool :-)<br />
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<strong>June 7</strong><br />
Montréal seems to have a thing for lonely "up" escalators with no "down" counterpart. Verb learnings in the morning: more subjonctif passé (kinda hard), when to accord a participe passé. Listened to the song "Dégénerations" by Mes Aieux. Really cool arrangement: only drums and vocals. Nice beat that builds and grows with each refrain. Energetic singing, catchy melody, sexist lyrics that romanticize the past. Our assignment: rewrite the lyrics. My group probably went a little hard in the other direction; for us, the past was all plague, famine and inequality, while the present was a paradise of plenty and freedom. It was fun to sing for the class, though.<br />
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Next we played a game like charades, but with talking, in French. It was a lot of fun.<br />
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My team won the photography competition! Damn we're good. Heaping on the sentiment was the right course of action. I get to go to Mont-Tremblant!<br />
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Went to the computer lab. (Left my pen there, didn't realize it at the time.) Bought groceries. Ate dinner (pepper-avocado-cheese mustard sandwiches!) Checked out Francofolies. Dudes in black shirts/pants and red ties playing melodramatic modern rock. Realized my pen was missing. Back to school. Girl at the counter had picked it up and was excited to give it back to me. I was excited to get it back. Felt happy. Home. Read Les Miz, listened to Coltrane/Kelly/Chambers/Cobb. Slept.<br />
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<strong>June 8</strong><br />
First test was super easy. Calming. More grammar - participe présent. I liked it, makes sentences shorter, sharper, and more elegant. Teacher noticed towards lunch that we were getting tired, so we watched a Flight of the Conchords clip and some Québecois comedy that I had a hard time understanding. She's cool like that. Lunch. Picked up Cirque de Soleil ticket (!).<br />
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Movie in the afternoon: The Seduction of Dr Lewis. Tried to listen to dialogue rather than read subtitles, an exercise in focused attention, almost meditative. My eyes like words, so it was hard. The movie was good. Funny jokes, a touching plot. I had some problems with the doctor's character (not likeable) and motivations (why does he stay in town if everything he liked about it was a lie?), though. <br />
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Rested after school. One of my roommates said she's never drinking again. Wandered downtown. Listened to a South American-sounding band from Belgium for a couple songs. Girls talk about weddings and their weight a lot. Guys have a weird thing with cars. I spent fifteen minutes staring at racecars ("Lotus" was the brand) outside Place des Arts.<br />
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Swing! 20 Charleston lesson. Gotta get those foot swivels down. Had more energy than last week, had a lot of fun. Triple stepped as much as possible, for practice. Tried to watch other dancers for new things to do with swingouts. Kinda hard. One guy slipped around like he was dancing on ice, but his movements were always elegant, purposeful. One guy hardly moved - no footwork - but still led in time; didn't much care for that style. Except when a older dude did it. He seemed to be sending a variety of strong messages to his partners while moving as little as possible. Montreal teachers seem to emphasize dancing on your own more. Follows seem quick to do their own thing if my leads aren't strict and constricting. It's neat. Went home a little earlier than I'd've liked because I have to get up a lot earlier than I'd like to tomorrow.Jeffrey McQuigganhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02124854798394293936noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-427294255852526261.post-14294182479774636672012-06-06T16:46:00.002-07:002014-08-30T19:45:39.337-07:00Montréal Week 1: I forgot a camera so it's time for the thousands of words approach<strong>May 25</strong><br />
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Smooth flights, other than a descent to Montreal that was unpleasant for my ears and stomach. Clouds that looked like cardboard cutouts on picturesque backgrounds. Sunrise off the mountain snow. Very unhappy kid on the bus to Berri-UQAM. Somehow got luna bar all over my wrists and shirt on the plane. Attractive. Surprise thunderstorm as I left the grocery store; rain is not something I prepared for, clothing-wise, and there was a lot of it.<br />
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<strong>May 26</strong><br />
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Had an extended conversation with one of my roommates! She recommended going to Old Montrea, so I did. Found a very cool old, big, rusting building on the docks. Not sure what it was, but I feel in love with it. Also walked in a lovely park. (Trees!) I liked seeing green stuff a lot. Next, an art museum drew me in by being inside of a castle. It was mostly full of stores or galleries that cost money, but one store had a great dress out front, and one callery had nifty ceramic sculptures made to look like wood (I think) and then decorated with splatters of paint. And a sculpture that looked like a sea anemone. The cafe also had surprisingly cheap paintings; it's almost tempting to buy one when they aren't multiple hundreds of dollars.<br />
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Found a whole gallery (the "Michel Ange Gallery") full of the simple/splattery/modern stuff that I love. Another gallery had paintings that were detailed building/cityline sketches that then got a treatment of blurring and abstractness. Lots of vibrant oranges and reds. Love it.<br />
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Home. Nap. Left to find train station: success! Takes 25 minutes to walk there. Went into Zara, annoying music, non-good clothes, kinda neat sneakers and sandals. Not a fan of the number of people on that part of St Catherine's. Bought a maple syrup candy (tasty, made my teeth hurt), saw a ring that was nice, might go back and hunt for it. Ran into two buskers playing accordion and clarinet. (A duo after my own heart, surely.) Watched for a couple songs before they got interupted by a crappy electronic smooth jazz band playing out of a rooftop restaurant.<br />
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Felt happy that I'd only spent 2$ so far. Seeing that Gogol Bordello was playing at a theater made me think I should find a show-type thing to see. Wimped out of asking what was happening at the New Word Theater. (Everyone looked so busy!) Wandered into another mall-type art gallery. Saw that an opera's last date was May 26. Thirty seconds after asking whether the opera was in said building (it was), I had a ticket. Charles Gounod's Faust was lovely. Mephistopheles blew my mind. The director made the questionable decision of splitting Faust into two actors, one of whom got to stand around awkwardly while the other sang. (If there was symbolic meaning to things that only happened to one Faust but not the other, it eluded me.) The set was cool: about ten rectangular pillars/bookshelves that could be pushed around the stage and used to manipulate the lighting in lovely, geometric ways. The costumes also blended modern style - e.g. hoodies under coats - with more traditional peasant and military and aristocratic clothes without being at all campy, a cool accomplishment. Pretty sure I was the only person in a t-shirt and sandals. Woops.<br />
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Saw the first sign of student protests so far on the way home. They had a solid, marchy rhythm going.<br />
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<strong>May 27</strong><br />
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Free museum day! First, Pointe-à-Callière for some Montréal history. Cool (very old) buildings, hand-made, wobbly nails and shoes. A nice lesson.<br />
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Next, Redpath Museum at McGill. Pretty campus. (Trees!) A half-hour wait in the sun. A museum full of cool rocks; I love quartz and copper and a few other minerals, real purty. Fossils (highlight: Japanese spider crab!) and other old things. Chinese dentistry banners with hundreds of teeth hanging from them! Ancient African xylophones! A coin with a great, scared-looking owl on it. My feet started to hurt and my stomach was empty. Search for somewhere to eat: ended up eating penne romanoff on the second floor balcony of an Italian restaurant. I'd never eaten outside, up in the air before. I liked it. Satisfying. Tasty.<br />
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<span style="background: rgb(255, 255, 255); font-size: small;"><span style="left: -5px; position: relative;"><span style="background: rgb(255, 255, 255); font-size: small;"><span style="left: -5px; position: relative;">Last, the Musée d'art Contemporain de Montreal. Unfortunately my roommates weren't equally fond of abstract modern art. Lots of beautiful splatters! Optical illusionesque pieces that did mean things to my retinas. Fun with geometric shapes and paint textures! An exploding playdo zebra, complete w/ coconuts! Arachnid-looking crabs from my nightmares! Violent, mildly pornographic claymation! Dozens of strands of barbed wire hung on nearly invisible strings which played delightful tricks on the eye if you walked in circles around them and provoked "How are those hanging there?" reactions. Tetris-esque sculptures that took great efforts of the will to refrain from playing with them. I liked it quite a bit and wouldn't mind going back for seconds.</span></span></span></span><br />
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<span style="background: rgb(255, 255, 255); font-size: small;"><span style="left: -5px; position: relative;"><span style="background: rgb(255, 255, 255); font-size: small;"><span style="left: -5px; position: relative;">Home. Quality chatter with roomates, and an introduction to a new one. Nighttime perambulation around the neighbourhood. Eggs, mustard. Phone call home. Bedtime. More of Tommy Pynchon's V.</span></span></span></span><br />
A frustration: I can get through the "Allo! Comment ca va?" basics in a conversation, but as soon as they throw anything more novel at me, it takes me a second to digest and interpret what was said. In that second, they've usually switched to English.<br />
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<strong>May 28</strong><br />
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Introduction and evaluation day at Explore. Was fairly social with the other students. The evaluation test: it was cumulative and we were told not to guess. I had trouble distinguishing between uncertainty and guessing. Lots of "I remember learning about this, but not what the rule is. Well, this one <em>sounds</em> right!" moments. Oral exam was nice. It's interesting being in a conversation where my language, not the subject matter, is being evaluated. I took opportunities to go off on tangents that very few non-me people would find interesting. After ten or so minutes my mouth dried and my brain crashed. Luckily, it was only a couple more minutes before he (Gustaveau) let me go.<br />
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Home. Nap. Devouring of "Events in Montréal" brochurs. (Zaz on June 16!) and other Explore handouts.<br />
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School. Boring lecture about the rules of the program. ("Show up! Not drunk! Speak French!") and a rehash of stuff I'd already read in the calendar.<br />
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Bus station. Guy with rotting teeth and pregnancy-like tumour told me a heartbreaker about how he needed 30$ to stop his stomach from bleeding. Enough of me thought it was a ploy to steal celphones that I was unhelpful. (Am I a bad person?) He ditched at the first sign of me not having cash.<br />
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Lynne! Nice seeing her so far from home. Dinner with her lovely, interesting sister Joanne and Joanne's interesting husband Evan. More Québec history. Intelligent insights into the student proetsts, police brutality, and the NDPs surge. Pasta, ricotta cheese, asparagus. Tour of their vegetable garden: strawberries, kale and nettles, oh my!<br />
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Joining the student protests. (My view: I tentatively support being against raised tuition; I whole-heartedly support protesting the "let's make protests hard!" law. When the Explore instructors described Bill 78, it made me think I should get marchin'.) Caught up with a couple dozen strong group roaming the neighbourhood. Banged a spoon against a bowl 'til it splinted. (Oops.) Headed home thru Parc Jarry (the one that hosts Roger's cup) because none of us had bus fare. The protests are satisfyingly communal; I glowed a little as, from a roadside patio, an aged man in a pinstripe blazer looked on us approvingly and clapped. But they're also eerie. Eerie because I'm throwing my support behind a group whose views are probably many, and of those there's probably some I don't agree with. I'm a big fan of fine distinctions, and protests don't seem to be in that game.<br />
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Cheese bread. Bus stop swing dancing. home. V. (Tom P. published this thing when he was 24! I need to get going.) And I need a pair of sneakers for a trip to a forest, apparently.<br />
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<strong>May 29</strong><br />
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Got into Niveau 6 of Explore; I must be French smart! There's an intimidating girl who can talk without pausing for words or grammar. Lots of courseword. (3 presentations!) A challenging challenge, but it seems like the right level for me. Harder work means more learning? It'll build character?<br />
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(Forgot to mention: lightning storm at 3 am. Thunder woke me with dreams of crashing sheets of metal.)<br />
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Lunch. Couldn't find a computer. Frustration.<br />
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More classes. Stressed about coming up with two truths and a lie for a game. Less tiring than the first three hours overall, though. Learned the etiquette of "tu" vs "vous" and the history of Québecois French.<br />
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Finally found a computer. Meeting Jocelyn, Cathy and Ross at the Tam Tams on Sunday. Torrential rain started. I hoped that it would stop so that I could meet Lynne at Mont-Royal. Messaged her too late that I wasn't coming. Sat with Explore folks at a bar attached to the UQAM. The building flooded; power went out. I felt bad for the staff.<br />
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Home. Call from Lynne that she and Joanne missed me at the mountain. Guilt. I could've sent a "don't come unless rain stops" e-mail, but it didn't occur to me at the time. Too tired to formulate new plans clearly with Lynne. missed one of a half dozen days where I'll be able to see Lynne. Missed home, where spending time with her is so much easier.<br />
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Thrice was playing tonight but I didn't go. Not sure why. Maybe not used to bands that I want to see playing near me regularly. And tired.<br />
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Not feeling too great. Lil' bit of tears. Speaking of, residences has water in all sorts of places it shouldn't be: the lobby (rain), our living room (probably rain), and our bathroom (leaky sink). Sigh.<br />
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<strong>May 30</strong><br />
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Class was much less intimidating today - Emile Nelligan, analyse de phrase, marqueurs de relations, relations logiques. I feel relief that I'm not in totally over my head.<br />
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Lunch. Bought The Count of Monte-Cristo (en Francais). Noticed later it was only part 1. Finding part 2 might be hard. Finishing part 1 might also be hard. (Page count: 796).<br />
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Another trip to Vieux Montréal. Brick skyscrapers. Banks engaging in neck-and-neck battles of architectural opulence. An impressive array of underground tunnels linking much of downtown; they helped me discover a quality-seeming bakery near my home.<br />
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Home, briefly. A successful bus trip to Lynne's home base. (Triumph!) Apologies for yseterday. Indian food and apathetic waiters. Rd 2 of the Musée d'art Contemporain. Only made it through the "Zoo" exposition before closing time. Beautiful, gold-lacquered carvings of the Chinese Zodiac. Did I mention the exploding playdo-yarn-coconut zebras? Seeing Lynne is really nice and super great. Joined a student protest. Clumps and lines of riot cops are intimidating things. Thousands of people on the street is inspiring.<br />
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My feet are starting to seriously hurt. As soon as my sandals are off, I limp about my residence like a crippled thing.<br />
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<strong>May 31</strong><br />
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Realizing I need more downtime than I'm giving myself. Low energy levels have become a near-constant state of existence. It's hard with not TV or computer to unwind in front of. I should probably at least move a chair into my bedroom. I lay in bed for an hour tonight listening to music and it was blissful.<br />
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In class, while writing in French, I realized that writing in a second language can be artistically liberating. You have no stock vocabulary of phrases to draw upon: no "downtime" or "unwind in front of". You don't use clichés; not because they're bland, but because you don't know any of them. And if you don't care about using the right phrases, it creates room for cleve and fun constructions. Maybe that's what's behind Vlad Nabokov's exhilerating and creative English prose, although I suspect his knowledge of English vastly exceeds most natives.<br />
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<strong> </strong>Anyway, in class we wrote comedy sketches. I was intimidated by the idea at first, but Québecois sayings are fun and once we got working and performing, the whole thing was relaxed and fun.<br />
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In the afternoon, we hiked Mont-Royal. I was hoping it'd be around 1.5 hrs, but it was more like 3. Poor, poor feet. McGill's campus is super pretty, lovely buildings, lots of trees. Being on a path w/ trees on both sides was wonderful, reminded me of home. Found a beautiful building at the Mont-Royal lookout with squirrel statues on the support beams and a massive ballroom. Walked back through the cemetary and a fancy neighbourhood with lots of beautiful brick houses.<br />
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Home. Fatigue. Dinner. messed up making rice. Ate away from the table to hide my shameful rice goop from roomates. Slept.<br />
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<strong>June 1</strong><br />
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Explore today: a trip off the island to Mont Rigaud. Departure had a couple hitches: despite warnings that we'd leave at 8:30 sharp, the buses got stuck in rush hour traffic, so leaving was more like 9. Next, after some windey forest roads the buses could barely fit through, we came to the wrong place: the staff expected a bunch of fift graders but got a bunch of university students. After that, we found Mt. Rigaud.<br />
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First activity: strapping myself into a harness, then doing obstacle courses and riding ziplines up in the trees. I chose the beginner level to start off, and was glad I did. By the time I got on the first platform - ten to fifteen feet up - my hands were shaking something fierce. Trusting my caribiners, I persevered. Managed to finish courses 1 and 2 before getting tired/hungry enough that I wasn't having fun anymore. Missed out on the climax of the third stage; a triumphant zipline out of the forest, across a field, and onto the balcony of the main building. Unfortunate, but apparently the third stage was <em>long</em>.<br />
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Lunch. Activity no. 2: a combination of elastics and trampoline that kept you safe and let you jump super high. Fun, but fleeting fun, since consecutive backflips are the only real skill you can develop the contraption.<br />
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Activity no. 3: a climbing wall. I didn't know the "push with legs whenever possible" rule, so I barely made the top. My forearms were awful shakey at that point. But I might search out some walls in Victoria when I get back, because my hobbies lack upper body exercise.<br />
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Time for home, except there was an hour-plus long wait for all the obstacle coursers to get out of the forest. Wished I'd brought something other than food to the mountain (e.g. my iPod).<br />
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The bus rides there and back had beautiful eye candy. Trees. Brick lofts and appartments. Elegant tangles of highway overpass whose aged concrete, beautifully browned and cracked, does not inspire trust, support-wise.<br />
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Home (briefly). Bought a fancy pen - small, heavy, writes upside down. Went to meet Lynne. She wasn't there. Worried that the set-up of the Franco Folies festival had kicked her off of our meetning place. Worried that I'd missed her by being 5-10 minutes late. Worried that she'd gotten lost. Turns out it was the latter, but she turned up after fifteen minutes. We left to search for food. (I don't much like eating at restaurants; I'm awful at choosing restaurants.) We ended up at Bristro de Lyonnaise, jazz on the stereo and breakfast food at 8 pm. I had a crepe; she had a qiche. It was nice.<br />
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Home, before we mustered our energies to head to swing dancing. Cats Corner's floor has beautiful, worn-out wood, and despite fatigue, a crowded room (there's usually two, apparently), and the difficulty of asking for dances in a roomful of strangers, I managed to have a good time.<br />
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Lynne and I bussed to spend the night at her sister's. Sleeping in a less stuffy room and a more squishy bed was great. (The UQAM residence isn't bad, just more than a little unsatisfying, home-wise.)Jeffrey McQuigganhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02124854798394293936noreply@blogger.com0