I want my reading regimen for 2010 to be at least more robust than last year’s, which isn’t saying much—I’d have to read more than five books to beat last year’s total (hey—these YouTube videos aren’t going to watch themselves).

The first one is Mary Karr’s Lit, which I was looking forward to for a while, and which I received for Christmas. Her first two memoirs are among my favorite models of the form, and I was eager to see Karr’s singular voice brought to bear on her adult struggles with alcoholism and spirituality.

So maybe my high expectations were part of the reason I was a little disappointed that Karr’s account of her salvation seems almost too tidy, when in fact motherhood, divorce, addiction, and the writer’s life are extremely messy things. It’s a truism in literature that happy lives don’t make for narratives nearly as compelling as tragic ones, so maybe after watching Karr navigate such a spectacularly fucked-up life across three books, we don’t quite buy it when she actually finds peace.
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Posted: February 3rd, 2010 under Reading & Writing.
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Notes on David Foster Wallace’s “All That” (The New Yorker, December 14, 2009):

From what little I know about The Pale King, I am already wondering if and how this story fits into it.

The early mention of the narrator’s “biological parents” recalls similar qualifications made by the narrator of the 2004 story “Good Old Neon” from Oblivion.

On the surface this story is about faith v. skepticism. I wonder whether it is meant to function as DFW’s rejoinder to the New Atheists, knowing as we do from his writing that he attended church and made substantial room in his work for faith, magic, the supernatural, and the afterlife. He was always good at putting the lie to the idea that smart people cannot be believers, or that believers must be simple-minded and irrational.

“The fact that the most powerful and significant connections in our lives are (at the time) invisible to us seems to me a compelling argument for religious reverence rather than skeptical empiricism as a response to life’s meaning.”

Has it taken me this long to get around to reading this story because I was reading other things, because I had much catching up to do in my NYer reading, or because I was avoiding this story with a kind of vague dread I’m worried will accompany all my consumption of whatever future writing by DFW ever emerges?

“I’m not putting any of this well. I am not and never have been an intellectual. I am not articulate, and the subjects that I am trying to describe and discuss are beyond my abilities.”

Posted: January 4th, 2010 under Reading & Writing.
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I would not be a very good Infinite Jest/David Foster Wallace enthusiast if I didn’t observe the fact that SPOILER ALERT the primary action of his most famous novel takes place in what is established to be November of the year 2009.

Upon noting that a bulk of the novel’s action has transpired by November 23 of the Year of the Depends Adult Undergarment, I began wondering how our version of 2009 stacked up against DFW’s. Not as entertaining, or as dystopian, but equally unsettling, I bet. After all—to paraphrase Hal on page 12—Johnny Gentle is just Sarah Palin in a dark mirror.

With much thanks to Peter Levinson and Stephen Burn.

Posted: November 24th, 2009 under General, IJOASa-oBC, Reading & Writing.
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As my music journalism class heads into its final weeks, I want my students to read some unconventional, unprofessional, and esoteric examples of music writing. Last week they graciously indulged my sadistic decision to assign Hipster Runoff’s infamous Animal Collective post. This week I asked them to read a piece from the War Against Silence by Glenn MacDonald, a software engineer by trade and a music geek by default.

I forget how much I miss The War Against Silence until I revisit it. From 1999—when I discovered it while searching for fellow Loud Family fans—until 2004, when MacDonald discontinued it, TWAS was the source of some of the best music writing on the web, and was the first instance of cogent, articulate online writing I ever encountered. That MacDonald wrote TWAS as a labor of love, with purportedly zero interest in becoming a professional music writer, only makes his project seem more rarefied and noble.

Eight years after he posted it, his ostensible critique of Amnesiac, Vespertine, and Life on a String also frames MacDonald’s immediate response to the events of 9/11/01. Eight years later, the piece holds up not only as a review of three new releases but also as a bracingly prescient time capsule containing one very smart person’s comprehension of the incomprehensible.

One of MacDonald’s best lines in the piece comes near the front. “Here is a very simple rule,” he states. “Music is what humans are best at, so anything that seems to supersede it, we should not do. Or phrased as semi-solipsism, in a sort of inversion of Wittgenstein’s point about what language can’t express, anything I cannot comprehend, should not exist. We, as a species, must be past this, or we will not survive.”

I have read this piece repeatedly over the intervening decade, and that bit still makes me catch my breath. MacDonald doesn’t dither about the role music plays in our lives or how best we humans might employ our ability to listen to and perform music. I have had the privelege of making music with and reading the words of people who agree with this statement and think very hard about it, and MacDonald’s words—this whole treatise, because it really is a kind of manifesto, still makes my spine straighten a bit, serving as a mild admonishment to care more—about music, about other people, about life.

“This isn’t a record, it’s the inherent sound of streets and data and buildings, of all the wreckage we surround ourselves with even if it hasn’t fallen yet.”

Is that even music journalism? Who cares? I certainly don’t.

Posted: November 23rd, 2009 under Music, Reading & Writing.
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So I just finished Bill Bruford’s autobiography (unofficial subtitle: Tea & Drumpets) and I can report that I loved it for all the reasons you might expect, along with some wholly unanticipated ones.

I suspected the book would be full of juicy anecdotes about Bruford’s forty years in the business, but it also contains some very sophisticated assessments of the current state of the music industry, the various schools of music pedagogy, the effects of a musician’s professional life on his personal one, the promises and perils of recording technology, the differences between rock, jazz, and classical, and a hundred other facets of music-making. What’s more, unless he’s hired the best ghostwriter in the business, Bruford is as good a writer as he is a drummer.

Sure, he sounds a little out of touch at times—he uses Whitney Houston as an example of a glossy pop star, and the Arctic Monkeys as the hot sensation all the kids are listening to these days, but then, he is sixty. (Oh Dad.) But he also describes the current state of the music industry more accurately than any other assessment I’ve read, so he has been paying attention. Read more »

Posted: November 20th, 2009 under Music, Reading & Writing.
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I woke up to Kerri Miller interviewing Mary Karr about her new memoir, which I didn’t even know existed. It’s called Lit and it’s sort of the third installment in a trilogy of memoirs (The Liar’s Club and Cherry being the first two). I am going to run, not walk, to my nearest local bookseller to get this book if there’s even a slim chance that Karr’s ex-boyfriend, David Foster Wallace, shows up in it. Plus, some of it takes place in the Twin Cities and it’s about Karr’s struggle with addiction and spirituality. Sold!

Posted: November 11th, 2009 under Reading & Writing.
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The Simpsons: An Uncensored, Unauthorized History, by John Ortved.

All it took was a few tantalizing excerpts from The Awl to seal the deal, namely this one:

Also not amused by the knockoffs was one James L. Brooks. One story, which circulated throughout the Gracie Films building, involved Jim in New York City soon after the show had hit it big. Brooks spotted an African-American street vendor hocking counterfeit Bart Simpson T-shirts. Jim accosted him: “You’re taking food out of the mouths of my children!”

The Best American Essays of 2009, edited by Mary Oliver.

This one’s a perennial purchase. I realize I probably could have found it at any nearby bookstore, but it’s raining out and I’m still in my pajamas. Sorry, struggling local bookstores.

Bill Bruford, the Autobiography, by Bill Bruford.

This arrogant British jackass is my second-favorite drummer of all time. He’s also a prime example of the axiom that the more talented a musician you are, the worse the horrible, pun-laden titles you’re going to give your compositions. (This is the same law that compelled Tony Levin to name a song “Not Just Another Pretty Bass.”) Bill Bruford named his first solo album Feels Good To Me and its cover was a shot of him caressing a gong; his method and technique book is called When In Doubt, Roll! So you can imagine my disappointment when he went with such a boring title. Come on, Bill, you can do better than that. How about Tea & Drumpets. That’s just off the top of my head!

Posted: October 21st, 2009 under Reading & Writing.
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A couple weeks ago I recommended Ian Frazier’s epic New Yorker story about Siberia, and now I am here to recommend another epic New Yorker story. I once had grand ambitions about posting weekly reviews of each of the magazine’s issues, with my thoughts about the stories I’d read and recommending certain stories to certain people, depending on their interests. I don’t have the time or the hubris for that sort of thing, but I do want to try and get a few more people out there to read stories that I feel are among the best that today’s efforts in nonfiction and literary journalism have to offer.

It’s in that spirit that I recommend David Grann’s twenty-page story, “Trial By Fire” (Sept. 7), but with a strong caveat: this story will probably make you cry. It will probably also make you angry. In its first pages you will become convinced, almost without a doubt, that its subject, Cameron Todd Willingham, is an arsonist who murdered his three children. Then you will learn quite a bit of fascinating and troubling things about fire, the legal system, and arson investigation. Then you will gradually but steadily become convinced, almost without a doubt, that Cameron Todd Willingham was an innocent man executed by the state of Texas as the result not of any crime he committed, but of a sloppy judicial process, biased investigators, sophistry masquerading as science, a Board of Pardons and Paroles too lazy to investigate exculpatory evidence, and the notoriously archaic and draconian hand of Texas’ capital-punishment system.

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Posted: September 8th, 2009 under Reading & Writing.
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Several months, sometimes a year, will go by when I forget that I was ever in a band called Our Friends Electric. I played drums for them for about a year in 2004-2005. They were nice guys, fun to drink beer with, and they wrote some great songs. Yesterday I was listening to A Ghost Is Born—an album that gets better with each passing year—and it always reminds me of OFE, because those guys loved the shit out of Wilco and because I listened to that disc a lot in the winter of 2004 when I’d drive about six miles to the far west side of Chicago to rehearse in a large, dark, frightening building. The walls there were whatever the opposite of soundproof is, but there was a vending machine that dispensed Special Export. So it all evened out.

We recorded some songs that I’m still quite proud of. I miss those guys.

Our Friends Electric – “Back In Reno” (mp3)

Our Friends Electric – “Drugs or Jesus” (live) (mp3)

Photo by Joe, March 2005

Posted: August 27th, 2009 under General, Reading & Writing.
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I highly recommend, to anybody and everybody, Ian Frazier’s recent two-part Siberian travelogue in the New Yorker. (Unfortunately it is only available online to subscribers, or for a fee, but if you want to read it let me know and you can borrow my copies.)

To think I almost didn’t read this piece, because I looked at it and said, “Ugh. Two parts? Travelogue? Siberia?”

But the ways that Frazier overcomes the average reader’s natural aversion to a bajillion-word description of a trip across a landmass whose name has become synonymous with boredom and exile are a testament to the power of first-person journalism, and cement his status as one of our greatest living nonfiction writers, the obvious heir to John McPhee’s topical and stylistic universe, and the best bridge imaginable between that generation of memorist/journalists and mine.

He tackles the geography. The history. The literature. The vodka. The mosquitoes. And best of all, the people, especially his two guides, who both live up to and thwart a slew of hilarious post-Soviet stereotypes.

It’s a beautiful, epic, and ultimately very personal piece. It feels immediate, even though the events it describes happened in 2001. It did what the best New Yorker pieces do, which is to cause you to be fascinated by topics in which you’d never thought you’d ever be even remotely interested. I wanted that little black diamond to never appear. It made me want to do what I always want to do with good writing, especially good writing about Russia: recommend it to my dad.

Posted: August 18th, 2009 under Reading & Writing.
Comments: 1