CHURCH GOING

Fiona Apple and a pathology called "love"

2012-02-14T11:02:00.000-08:00

Last week, a friend's passing reference to Fiona Apple as one of Lana Del Rey's predecessors got me up in arms. I've been listening to Apple's 2005 album, Extraordinary Machine, a lot lately, and rumors about her long-awaited follow-up, which could be released a few months from now, have also just begun to circulate.Valentine's Day seems like the right occasion to rehash some of the reasons why I find her music so interesting, and why I go on the defensive when I hear her get linked to other popular female singer-songwriters.

"Not About Love" - Jon Brion's unreleased version:

The controversy surrounding Extraordinary Machine's release is a bit muddy, but it'll help to explain why I felt it necessary to post two very different versions of the same song above. Originally thought to be delayed because Apple's label, Sony, doubted its commercial viability, the long awaited album had fans writing letters and mailing apples to label execs as part of the "Free Fiona" campaign (my roommate at the time was peripherally involved through his Fiona Apple message board--we even had a "Free Fiona" poster on the door of our dorm room). As it turns out, there was an original version, produced by Jon Brion, that was shelved because Apple wasn't happy with it; she then reworked most of the songs with a different producer (Mike Elizondo) and released the album.

Elizondo's finished product was still a good collection of songs, but the unreleased version with arrangements by Jon Brion (the demos of which had leaked several months before the official version came out) was, at least in my eyes, clearly superior. Apple felt that Brion's instrumentation had nearly taken over her songs: as such, they represented his musical taste more than they did her artistic identity (The two versions of "Not About Love," posted above, are a great example of this). But, for me, Brion's production accented the strangeness of Apple's romantic vision. What ended up sounding like sugary pop on the Sony's official release had a much darker, perverse quality to it when accompanied with Brion's string arrangements. The songs on his version of Extraordinary Machine nearly collapse under their own weight. If it's really "not about love" for Apple, it's because it's impossible for her to align herself with the security of conventional romance: instead, the kind of consuming love she articulates is pathological ("Get Him Back"), at times violent ("Window"), and often turns out to be solipsistic ("Better Version of Me"). Here's what's probably the best example of what I'm trying to get at.

And, naturally, with all this talk of psychosis, and narcissism, I think of Zizek, whose Lacanian remarks on love are, I think, realized in some of Fiona Apple's more compelling songs:

More generally, when one is passionately in love and, after not seeing the beloved for a long time, asks her for a photo to keep in mind her features, the true aim of this request is not to check if the properties of the beloved still fits the criteria of my live, but, on the contrary, to learn (again) what these criteria are. I am in love absolutely, and the photo a priori CANNOT be a disappointment - I need it just so that it will tell me WHAT I love... What this means is that true love is performative in the sense that it CHANGES its object - not in the sense of idealization, but in the sense of opening up a gap in it, a gap between the object's positive properties and the agalma, the mysterious core of the beloved (which is why I do not love you because of your properties which are worthy of love: on the contrary, it is only because of my love for you that your features appear to me as worthy of love). It is for this reason that finding oneself in the position of the beloved is so violent, traumatic even: being loved makes me feel directly the gap between what I am as a determinate being and the unfathomable X in me which causes love. Everyone knows Lacan's definition of love ("Love is giving something one doesn't have..."); what one often forgets is to add the other half which completes the sentence: "... to someone who doesn't want it." And is this not confirmed by our most elementary experience when somebody unexpectedly declared passionate love to us - is not the first reaction, preceding the possible positive reply, that something obscene, intrusive, is being forced upon us?

In a kind of Hegelian twist, love does not simply open itself up for the unfathomable abyss in the beloved object; what is in the beloved "more than him/herself," the presupposed excess of/in the beloved, is reflexively posited by love itself. Which is why true love is far from the openness to the "transcendent mystery of the beloved Other": true love is well aware that, as Hegel would have put it, the excess of the beloved, what, in the beloved, eludes my grasp, is the very place of the inscription of my own desire into the beloved object - transcendence is the form of appearance of immanence. As the melodramatic wisdom puts it, it is love itself, the fact of being loved, that ultimately makes the beloved beautiful.

From With or Without Passion: What's Wrong with Fundamentalism. Part 1.

Rowan Williams on Charles Dickens

2012-02-07T17:41:00.000-08:00

The Archbishop of Canterbury's commemorative address, given at Westminster Abbey on the bicentenary of Charles Dickens.

It’s difficult to tell the truth about human beings. Every novelist knows this in a special way, and when Dickens sets out to tell the truth about human beings he does it outrageously, by exaggeration, by caricature. The figures we remember most readily from his works are the great grotesques. We have, we think, never met anyone like them, and then we think again.

The truth is extreme, the truth is excessive. The truth about human beings is more grotesque and bizarre than we can imagine. And Dickens’ generous embrace of human beings does not arise out of a chilly sense of what is due to them, but out of a celebratory feeling that there is always more to be discovered. Even his villains are exuberant. It was George Orwell who pointed out that when Mr Murdstone sets David Copperfield one of those appalling sums in his unhappy childhood, it is couched in terms of calculating numbers of Double Gloucester cheeses. Orwell points out that a real Murdstone would never have thought of the cheeses - it’s part of that overflow, that unnecessary excessive sense of what is human that takes us from page to page in Dickens, eyebrows raised and breath bated.

Dickens is the enemy not so much of an unjust view of human beings, as of a boring view of human beings. He loves the poor and the destitute, not from a sense of duty but from a sense of outrage that their lives are being made flat and dead. He wants them to live. He wants them to expand into the space that should be available for human beings to be what God meant them to be. In Hard Times, he left us, of course, one of the most unforgettable pictures of what education looks like if it forgets that exuberance and excess, and treats human beings as small containers for information and skill.

And that sense of the grotesque is, strange as it may sound to say it, one of the things that makes Dickens a great religious writer. As we’ve heard [in the earlier reading from The Life of Our Lord] he could write simply and movingly about Christ. He could, in A Christmas Carol, leave us one of the greatest modern myths arising out of the Christian story. But he had relatively little time for conventional religion, and no time at all for those who substituted conventional religion for that exuberant celebration of the human, which he was interested in.

[Extract from Bleak House] - “Mr Chadsbans he wos a prayin wunst at Mr Sangby’s and I heerd him, but he sounded as if he wos a speakin’ to hisself, and not to me. He prayed a lot, but I couldn’t make out nothink on it.”

The Chadsbans and the Jellabys and all those other (again, I’m afraid) unforgettably exuberant hypocrites in his books – these are the people for whom at the end of the day, he wishes judgement to be passed.

But that sense of excess in the human spirit and the human heart also leads on to another side of Dickens – equally serious, equally religious, much more disturbing – that side of Dickens which makes him indeed a novelist to stand alongside the very greatest imaginative spirits in Europe. And this is Dickens’ sense of the tragic. Dickens writes about people ‘in hell’, and he knows what hell is like. He describes people in the hell of deceit and self-deceit - William Dorrit, Mr. Merdle, Lady Dedlock - people who cannot live, literally, when their myths about themselves are destroyed. Because part of this sense of exuberance in Dickens is the recognition that all of us live by projecting myths and dramas about ourselves. We tell stories about ourselves, we write scripts for ourselves, and we love to act them out.

But what happens when those stories and those scripts are so far from reality that we cannot actually survive the touch of truth? Tragedy in Dickens is so often about that appalling moment when a myth is shattered, and a person with it. And along with the hell of deceit and of self-deceit, there are the hells of obsession – of Mr. Monks and Miss Havisham, Mrs. Clennam and Bradley Headstone. The people who have lost all their freedom, and for once are losing their exuberance because they have been taken prisoner by something in themselves, locking them in, weighing them down. They are part of Dickens’ unparalleled portraiture of self-destruction. And perhaps these depictions of hell – the hells of self-deceit and obsession and self-destruction – perhaps the depictions of these hells owed something to Dickens’ own painful self-awareness. A man who recognised the gap in his own life, so often, between aspiration and reality; a man who in his own exuberance drove himself towards self-destruction – and yet in that very process, again as we have heard, drew out extraordinary levels of sheer joy, festive celebratory hearing, of what he had to say.

A man, then, who portrays human beings excessively and extravagantly. A man who portrays human beings in hell. And yet when we read him, it does not read like bad news. Because what does he have to say at the end of the day about redemption? In some ways not a great deal. Or rather there is a tension again and again in his books between a carefully, neatly resolved happy ending, and an immense burden of recognised, almost unbearable, unresolved suffering. He achieves the balance of those two most perfectly, for one reader, in Bleak House, where the past tense of Esther’s narrative is balanced by the present tense of unhealed suffering, the rain still falling on the Lincolnshire wolds. But in that book, which one reader at least thinks is perhaps his most profoundly theological – though he wouldn’t thank me for that – in that book, we have one of the strangest, most shocking images that he ever gives us of compassion and mercy, and that is the figure of Sir Leicester Dedlock. At the very end of Bleak House, left alone in his decaying mansion, holding open the possibility of forgiveness and restoration, “I revoke no dispositions I have made in her favour” says Sir Leicester, with his typical dryness about his wife who has fled from him in guilt and terror. And in that appallingly stiff phrase we hear something of the hope of mercy. Almost silent, powerless, Sir Leicester after his stroke, dying slowly in loneliness, and stubbornly holding open the possibility that there might be, once again, love and harmony.

“We may confidently hope that God will forgive us our sins and mistakes, and enable us to live and die in Peace”, says Dickens for his children. And perhaps for us as grownups, or people who might quite like to be grownups one day, that image of the hope of God’s forgiveness is shockingly, startlingly, expressed in that lonely figure stubbornly holding the door open, revoking no dispositions made in our favour. Powerless to enforce love or justice, and yet indestructibly, even extravagantly, offering the only kind of love that is appropriate – the extravagant and excessive nature of human beings. An utterly unreasonable compassion, which because of its utter unreasonableness can change everything.

G.K. Chesterton on Charles Dickens

2012-02-06T22:50:00.000-08:00

Charles Dickens, David Foldvari (2011)

No man was more filled with the sense of this bellicose basis of all cheerfulness than Dickens. He knew very well the essential truth, that the true optimist can only continue an optimist so long as he is discontented. For the full value of this life can only be got by fighting; the violent take it by storm. And if we have accepted everything, we have missed something -- war. This life of ours is a very enjoyable fight, but a very miserable truce. And it appears strange to me that so few critics of Dickens or of other romantic writers have noticed this philosophical meaning in the undiluted villain. The villain is not in the story to be a character; he is there to be a danger -- a ceaseless, ruthless, and uncompromising menace, like that of wild beasts or the sea. For the full satisfaction of the sense of combat, which everywhere and always involves a sense of equality, it is necessary to make the evil thing a man; but it is not always necessary, it is not even always artistic, to make him a mixed and probable man. In any tale, the tone of which is at all symbolic, he may quite legitimately be made an aboriginal and infernal energy. He must be a man only in the sense that he must have a wit and will to be matched with the wit and will of the man chiefly fighting. The evil may be inhuman, but it must not be impersonal, which is almost exactly the position occupied by Satan in the theological scheme.

But when all is said, as I have remarked before, the chief fountain in Dickens of what I have called cheerfulness, and some prefer to call optimism, is something deeper than a verbal philosophy. It is, after all, an incomparable hunger and pleasure for the vitality and the variety, for the infinite eccentricity of existence. And this word "eccentricity" brings us, perhaps, nearer to the matter than any other. It is, perhaps, the strongest mark of the divinity of man that he talks of this world as "a strange world," though he has seen no other. We feel that all there is is eccentric, though we do not know what is the centre. This sentiment of the grotesqueness of the universe ran through Dickens's brain and body like the mad blood of the elves. He saw all his streets in fantastic perspectives, he saw all his cockney villas as top heavy and wild, he saw every man's nose twice as big as it was, and very man's eyes like saucers. And this was the basis of his gaiety -- the only real basis of any philosophical gaiety. This world is not to be justified as it is justified by the mechanical optimists; it is not to be justified as the best of all possible worlds. Its merit is not that it is orderly and explicable; its merit is that it is wild and utterly unexplained. Its merit is precisely that none of us could have conceived such a thing, that we should have rejected the bare idea of it as miracle and unreason. It is the best of all impossible worlds.

--from G.K. Chesterton's Charles Dickens (1906)

"Dinner Time on the Prairies"

2012-02-03T10:30:00.000-08:00

William Kurelek, Dinner Time on the Prairies (1963)

The Dodos - Don't try and hide it

2012-01-31T21:37:00.000-08:00

More vaguely theological indie folk music. I highly recommend anything by the Dodos, especially if you suffer from existential crises that don't seem to end.

"Industry"

2012-01-24T09:16:00.000-08:00

William Kurulek, Industry (1962)

Dead ends: William Cavanaugh and the limits of consumer-centred critique

2012-01-23T18:31:00.000-08:00

The American Catholic theologian William Cavanaugh was in Edmonton last week for a small conference on faith, economics and social justice at King’s University College. Given how influential Cavanaugh’s work was for my friends and I during our undergrad degrees, I felt obligated to go and hear him speak. I should mention that it was a conference aimed undergraduate students; his delivery was light and his argument familiar. It arises out of an Augustinian understanding of right living, the validation of all material (read: created) things with an emphasis on the proper ends of human desire. While I've appreciated Cavanaugh’s various attempts to align theology and politics, over the course of his lectures last week, I grew increasingly skeptical of his critical project.

In his first lecture, Cavanaugh narrated our culture as one of progressive detachment. Against commonplace accusations of “materialism” (which somehow explains our consumerism) he described the West as a place of increasing dissatisfaction with material goods, and thus increasing detachment from producers, the ground of production, and from the products themselves. Throughout the lecture images of scandalous magazine ads were projected onto a large screen. Some induced gasps from the audience, others pointed out how advertising has infiltrated every corner of human life. In Cavanaugh’s hands, this weak cultural analysis paved the way for an Augustinian prescription: for classical theology, the argument goes, all material things bear a spiritual restlessness because all of creation is predisposed to its eternal source—the only place where this constitutive trauma ends. Like other theologians in the "post-secular" school, Cavanaugh rebounds from this negative critique of a secular economy to another standard trope: the Eucharist. Participating in Christian model of consumption known as the Lord's Supper, we are not consumers, but are instead the objects that are consumed by God through the church. Thus, rather than an atomistic community based on the clash/coexistence of individual wills, our very subjectivity is transformed into sheer relation: the distinction between what is yours and what is mine is thrown into question [I was slightly confused by this aspect of his model, as Cavanaugh had made a passing remark, earlier on, that “we need private property so people will take care of their possessions”]. From this perspective secular versions of charity don’t go far enough because they rely on a model of violent consumption, rather than this apparently radical inversion.

The focus of Cavanaugh’s second lecture was the “free market,” a term which he questioned by holding up the liberal theory of American economist Milton Friedman alongside that of Augustine. Again, the content of this lecture was quite familiar. The free market system of contemporary liberalism is based, at least theoretically, on the assumption that all market transactions are acceptable so long as they are voluntary. Here, the argument goes, there are no common ends and thus there is only brute force: it’s essentially the same argument we get from RO theologians against what is disparagingly called “a metaphysics of violence” (as though the secular theorists who are lumped together in these critiques actually endorse violence as such). Where there is no objective standard, continued Cavanaugh, the one with the most power wins. While this understanding of freedom is “negative,” Christian theology offers a “positive” view of freedom: not freedom from interference, but freedom for the collective pursuit of human flourishing. Here, the ability to sin is not understood as an index of individual power, but as a weakness. We have true and false desires, the objects of which are either good or bad. For Cavanaugh, secular models of economic exchange fail because their appeal to voluntarism allows for exploitation; Christian models, on the other hand, can set a price on goods that contributes to flourishing on both sides of the exchange.

Of course, this sort of diagnosis begs some pretty obvious questions: Who decides which ends qualify as “good” or “bad,” and what constitutes an “objective standard”? Doesn’t Christianity already espouse some form of voluntarism, and how does one decide where human freedom ends and violent coercion begins? Second, how do objective ends emerge if not through power—how else do we account for the rise of the capitalist market as our only real objective touchstone? Surely, Christianity (and not simply secularism) has also helped to spread the global reach of capital. And it’s just lazy to say that there’s any clearly defined separation between the two, given our history of colonial expansion.

What really discouraged me was the answer Cavanaugh gave to a student who asked what he should do. “You have two choices,” replied Cavanaugh. “You could run off and become a Marxist revolutionary, which would be to participate in and condone violence; or you could make more of an effort make good purchases (buy fair trade, organic, local when you can) and get more involved with your church. You see,” continued Cavanaugh, “Marxists believe that everything has to change all at once and, therefore, they think that what is necessary for transformation is a violent disruption of everything.” According to Cavanaugh, this logic stems from a narrow view of history that runs counter to the Christian tradition. Christians believe that God works slowly, on the margins, through His elect. What frustrated me most about this throwaway answer wasn’t how reductive it was – of course Marxists are going to be caricatured by politically moderate theologians, but I’m tired of hearing that going to church and buying better products is the only option available to Christians who are dissatisfied with global injustice; I’m not sure I can accept the argument that church ritual is the proper end of all social and economic life, and that we can only ever change the objects/ends of our consumption. While I do think questions of ends and objectivity are on the right track (a track that hopefully leads to a critique of production, labor conditions and exploitation), I'm more interested in examples of how this shift in what Cavanaugh calls "spiritual discipline" leads to the empowerment of the dispossessed.

Is it really so hard to accept that the church doesn’t have a monopoly on the proper “ends” of human flourishing? Surely the church is not immune from this critique as it more often than not represents the interests of an increasingly paranoid middle class. What bothers me most about Cavanaugh's line of critique is that its focus on consumerism (which disingenuously steals most of its valuable insights from Marx) never seems to move beyond a simple reorientation, a change of buying practices, which are currently no more than a diversion that is just as often reinscribed by the market. This is bound to happen when our focus is on the symptom (and questions of individual morality) rather than the system, and when the work of historicization (a glaring weakness in much contemporary theology, which regularly tries to protect the church and what it considers to be “true” theology from any kind of historical necessity) is dismissed as a form of totalitarianism.

Gerard Manley Hopkins on Milton's rhythm

2012-01-20T16:15:00.000-08:00

From his letter to Richard Watson Dixon; Oct. 5, 1878:

I quite agree with what you write about Milton. His verse as one reads it seems something necessary and eternal (so to me does Purcell’s music). As for ‘proper hue’, now it wd. be priggish, but I suppose Milton means own hue and they talk of proper colours in heraldry; not but what there is a Puritan touch about the line even so. However the word must once have had a different feeling. The Welsh have borrowed it for pretty; they talk of birds singing ‘properly’ and a little Welsh boy to whom I shewed the flowers in a green house exclaimed ‘They are proper!’—Milton seems now coming to be studied better, and Masson is writing or has written his life at prodigious length. There was an interesting review by Matthew Arnold in one of the Quarterlies of ‘a French critic on Milton’—Scherer I think. The same M. Arnold says Milton and Campbell are our two greatest masters of style. Milton’s art is incomparable, not only in English literature but, I shd. think, almost in any; equal, if not more than equal, to the finest of Greek or Roman. And considering that this is shewn especially in his verse, his rhythm and metrical system, it is amazing that so great a writer as Newman should have fallen into the blunder of comparing the first chorus of the Agonistes with the opening of Thalaba as instancing the gain in smoothness and correctness of versification made since Milton’s time—Milton having been not only ahead of his own time as well as all aftertimes in verse-structure but these particular choruses being his own highwater mark. It is as if you were to compare the Panathenaic frieze and a teaboard and decide in the teaboard’s favour.

I have paid a good deal of attention to Milton’s versification and collected his latest rhythms: I did it when I had to lecture on rhetoric some years since. I found his most advanced effects in the Paradise Regained and, lyrically, in the Agonistes. I have often thought of writing on them, indeed on rhythm in general; I think the subject is little understood.

[. . .]

I should add that Milton is the great standard in the use of counterpoint. In Paradise Lost and Regained, in the last more freely, it being an advance in his art, he employs counterpoint more or less everywhere, markedly now and then; but the choruses of Samson Agonistes are in my judgment counterpointed throughout; that is, each line (or nearly so) has two different coexisting scansions. But when you reach that point the secondary or ‘mounted rhythm’, which is necessarily a sprung rhythm, overpowers the original or conventional one and then this becomes superfluous and may be got rid of; by taking that last step you reach simple sprung rhythm. Milton must have known this but had reasons for not taking it.

RIP Etta James

2012-01-20T10:28:00.000-08:00

revisiting Marx's critique of religion

2012-01-17T23:22:00.000-08:00

While I continue to appreciate the theological reflections that have grown out of the Marxist tradition, much of what I appreciate about Marx's writings on religion has to do with his dismissal of it as a subject thought to be worthy of critique. More compelling are the connections he draws between the abstract value of capital and the way its accumulation assumes a theology of its own. As is well-known, Marx's critique of religion in The German Ideology made a radical break with the sort of idealism that dominated critiques of religion in his own time. Derrida's Specters of Marx does a particularly good job of complicating this supposed break with the ghosts of religion, before proceeding to name Derrida's own debt to an unconditional and impossible justice, a hope which he models after Benjamin's weak messianism. The late French philosopher is one of many radical theorists (see Giorgio Agamben, Alain Badiou, etc.) to return to theological sources and ideas in order to better understand and criticize the various "secular" guises of neo-liberalism.

I spent the holidays reading through most of Alberto Toscano's Fanaticism, a recent attempt to reconfigure the debate surrounding the so-called “return of religion” and the various arguments put forward by “post-secular” critics like those mentioned above. In it, he traces the critical history of the concept of fanaticism. His expressed purpose is that of reconstituting a political vocabulary which is capable of accommodating both “enthusiasm” and “abstraction” (an overabundance of each is a consistent mark of the "fanatic," according to the Western liberal tradition). But for Toscano, the fanatic isn't simply the dark side of some secular ideal. As he writes, “Contemporary approaches to questions of politics and religion continue to rely, perhaps inevitably, on philosophies of history articulated in some sense around notions of secularization – whether they’re analyzing a supposed ‘return’ of a religiosity that history had doomed to obsolescence, or viewing unconditional political commitments or ‘fanaticisms’ as atavistic resurgences, in secular garb, of affective structures of a fundamentally religious kind.” For this reason Marxism is written off as a utopian program analogous to religion (so Alastair MacIntyre argues in Marxism and Christianity). Rather than invoking structures of experience or conceptual analogies between Marxism and Christianity, Toscano follows Fredric Jameson in arguing that the goal of political criticism should be to historicize the very comparison between these two systems of thought.

Toscano centres his study of fanaticism on a rereading of Marx’s critique of religion in The German Ideology, emphasizing that we cannot begin to conceive of a space outside of religion—that is, a secular space—without first participating in real emancipation from capitalist modes of production and a radical restructuring of social relations. Amid the flurry of arguments for and against religion by popular scientists, journalists and Christian apologists, Marx’s simple but profound point—that the proliferation of ideology is intimately related to material practices and social conditions—is routinely forgotten. As Toscano puts it, “Atheistic criticism overestimates the centrality of Christianity to the state and treat’s the state’s secularization as an end in itself.” Rather, we should understand that Marx meant his criticism of religion to be a starting point, a critique “in embryo” for a restructuring of the economic base. To effectively dissuade people of their religious illusions about their condition “is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions.” Whether this is in fact possible, or desirable is another question.

your little ampersand

2012-01-17T12:04:00.000-08:00

Credit for the title of this post goes to John K. Samson, whose wonderful new solo album, "Provincial," is streaming at Exclaim.ca. Click through to listen.

It's dreadfully cold in Edmonton. I want to say "finally," in part because I've been anticipating this plummet in temperatures for several months and at least I can stop worrying about it. While this "return to normal" (-38* C) provides some rational closure and helps to temper some of the environmental paranoia that conditioned my Christmas holidays (Winnipeg, like Edmonton, enjoyed a very brown Christmas), I can't find anything else good to say about it. In the words of a fellow Edmontonian, "This shit is real." And suddenly we all feel like we've fallen behind, now struggling to catch up with the season.

Speaking of falling behind, I've returned to the quagmire of thesis research/writing. After submitting a sprawling, disjunctive first chapter (and from what I hear, the first chapter is always a disaster), I'm beginning to envision my second and third chapters, which I hope will be more focused and straightforward. Expect to see many related blog posts over the coming weeks. For now, I'll leave you with a song about distractions, which are of course a mainstay of grad school.

"Black Cat," a poem by Rainer Maria Rilke—

2012-01-14T16:08:00.000-08:00

A ghost, though invisible, still is like a place
your sight can knock on, echoing; but here
within this thick black pelt, your strongest gaze
will be absorbed and utterly disappear:

just as a raving madman, when nothing else
can ease him, charges into his dark night
howling, pounds on the padded wall, and feels
the rage being taken in and pacified.

She seems to hide all looks that have ever fallen
into her, so that, like an audience,
she can look them over, menacing and sullen,
and curl to sleep with them. But all at once

as if awakened, she turns her face to yours;
and with a shock, you see yourself, tiny,
inside the golden amber of her eyeballs
suspended, like a prehistoric fly.

“To a Cat,” a poem by Jorge Luis Borges—

2012-01-06T23:15:00.000-08:00

Mirrors are not more silent 
nor the creeping dawn more secretive;
in the moonlight, you are that panther 
we catch sight of from afar. 
By the inexplicable workings of a divine law, 
we look for you in vain; 
More remote, even, than the Ganges or the setting sun, 
yours is the solitude, yours the secret. 
Your haunch allows the lingering 
caress of my hand. You have accepted,
since that long forgotten past, 
the love of the distrustful hand. 
You belong to another time. You are lord 
of a place bounded like a dream.

books, capitalism, and christmas

2012-01-06T00:50:00.000-08:00

I realize most of us don't really want to think about Christmas for another 12 months, but I can't resist posting this brief digression from the introduction to Ted Striphas' The Late Age of Print. I wish I'd read it prior to the holiday season, but I don't imagine that it would have changed my gift-giving habits. As per usual, my gift of choice comes in the form of a book, whether it's for the coffeetable or the nightstand. Whenever I return home to stay with my family, I feel as though I'm re-inhabiting the ever-expanding library that conditioned my childhood; and the feeling is only intensified at Christmas, when the strength of our bookshelves is tested yet again by an influx of new reading materials waiting to be consumed. As Striphas observes, such gifts have already fulfilled an overlooked historical function:

Consider the fact that books were among the very first commercial Christmas presents. Not only that, but they were integral to the development of a modern Christmas holiday primarily organized around familial gift exchange. In the second quarter of the nineteenth century there emerged in the United States a new genre of books: gift books. These special anthologies, which publishers released on the cusp of the Christmas season, consisted of poetry, prose, illustrations, and, typically, a customizable bookplate. The popularity of gift books as Christmas presents is attributable to many factors, chief among them their status as mass-produced merchandise. Indeed, industrial production not only facilitated their availability en masse at the appropriate moment but, even more important, provided for their reception as tokens of intimacy and affection in at least two ways. First, a gift giver had to select from among many editions the one that best suited the recipient. Making the correct choice wasn’t easy since publishers produced a range of volumes, each targeted to individuals belonging to a particular social set. Selecting a mass-produced consumer good, in other words, became a meaningful expression of one’s consideration and goodwill in no small part through the popularity of gift books. Second, the bookplates allowed the gift giver the opportunity to further personalize his or her selection, for they generally included a small amount of blank space upon which to pen an inscription. These pages, however, were preprinted at the factory, again suggesting a blurring of boundaries between mass industrial production and personal sentiment. In any case, these examples illustrate the crucial role that books played in turning Christmas into a consumerist holiday. “Publishers and booksellers were the shock troops in exploiting—and developing—a Christmas trade,” writes Stephen Nissenbaum, “and books were on the cutting edge of a commercial Christmas.”

Books not only helped give rise to what’s become the capitalist holiday par excellence but they also “were on the cutting edge” of a broader and more fundamental economic transformation that occurred as the nineteenth century flowed into the twentieth. By this I mean the gradual transformation of capitalism from a form in which agriculture and intracapitalist exchange were primary engines of economic accumulation to one in which economic vitality increasingly hinged on working people’s consumption of abundant, mass-produced goods. Books—along with sewing machines, pianos, and furniture—were among the very first items that people purchased with the aid of a resource newly extended to them toward the end of the nineteenth century, namely, consumer credit. Although the practice of buying consumer goods on credit harbored negative connotations at the time of and even well after its introduction, an attractive set of books was considered by many to be a more or less acceptable credit purchase. Much like a sewing machine, it was assumed to be a productive investment rather than a frivolous purchase. Clearly, the moral value many people attribute to books provided an alibi for their existence as mass-produced merchandise. Books consequently became a test case for debt-driven purchasing, an activity that’s proven to be a lasting and even prosaic aspect of contemporary consumer culture.

I also can't resist posting another related quote that was circulating closer to Christmas. It comes from late queer theorist Eve Sedgwick. Consider it a companion to the previous passage.

The depressing thing about the Christmas season—isn’t it?—is that it’s the time when all the institutions are speaking with one voice. The Church says what the Church says. But the State says the same thing: maybe not (in some ways it hardly matters) in the language of theology, but in the language the State talks: legal holidays, long school hiatus, special postage stamps, and all. And the language of commerce more than chimes in, as consumer purchasing is organized ever more narrowly around the final weeks of the calendar year, the Dow Jones aquiver over Americans’ “holiday mood.” The media, in turn, fall in triumphally behind the Christmas phalanx: ad-swollen magazines have oozing turkeys on the cover, while for the news industry every question turns into the Christmas question—Will hostages be free for Christmas? What did that flash flood or mass murder (umpty-ump people killed and maimed) do to those families’ Christmas? And meanwhile, the pairing “families/Christmas” becomes increasingly tautological, as families more and more constitute themselves according to the schedule, and in the endlessly iterated image, of the holiday itself constituted in the image of ‘the’ family.

The thing hasn’t, finally, so much to do with propaganda for Christianity as with propaganda for Christmas itself.

Retro-spective: My favorite albums of 2011 (5-1)

2012-01-03T11:30:00.000-08:00

(Click here for the preamble and for albums 10-6, illustrated and illuminated.)

5. Colin Stetson - New History Warfare, Vol. 2: Judges (Constellation)

Most of the music I enjoyed this past year fit within familiar pop conventions and made use of familiar sounds. Musically, I'm a creature of habit: just as inclined toward repetition as I am toward novelty. Colin Stetson's solo record stands out not only because his vertigo-inducing songs avoid easy categorization, but because he uses unfamiliar sounds to channel the chaos of a forgotten (I want to say "Old Testament") world. To do this, Stetson bypasses most of the studio wizardry that other solo artists normally rely on. No loops here - just a muscular man and his massive machine. Along with his much talked about circular breathing technique, Stetson uses several different mics (variously located on his instrument and his body) to produce a wide range of primordial sounds that actually seem to capture the kind of archaic violence suggested by his (very pretentious) album title. The result is so utterly brutal, at once so mesmerizing and jarring, that Stetson's collection quickly became one of the most divisive and disturbing albums of the year.

4. Wye Oak - Civilian (Merge)

Here's what I wrote about this album back in May. For the most part, I think it still holds true:

It's a soothing, satisfying record: cohesive and gentle, but incredibly cathartic and uncompromising at the same time. It's the kind of record, in other words, that you'll want to listen to all the way through. This is going to sound like the worst kind of cliche, but for me, Wye Oak have found a paradoxical balance, the fullest expression of which can be found in the alt-rock of the early 90s. So it's a little creepy how much this album seems suited to my tastes. Wye Oak's second proper LP highlights a stunning vocalist (Jenn Wasner), ample feedback, grungy breakdowns and lyrics with vaguely religious themes. For instance, there seems to be an ongoing dialectic between Creation and Evolution in Wasner's lyrics that's oddly compelling. Musically, things appear relatively stripped down (the band performs as a two-piece), but every so often Wye Oak's sound becomes incredibly expansive.

3. Sandro Perri - Impossible Spaces (Constellation)

I was introduced to the wispy voice of Toronto's Sandro Perri back in 2006 with his second proper album, Tiny Mirrors. I still like much of what I heard, but at the time I thought it sounded a little too stripped-down, a little too straightforward for a folksy singer-songwriter with clear Afro-beat influences (and a major debt to Arthur Russell). What I saw as shortcomings five years ago were perhaps over-corrected on Impossible Spaces, a cohesive collection of songs I honestly didn't think Perri was capable of. In interviews he's made it clear that he took every one of those five years (since Tiny Mirrors) to work on the new record. And it shows. The grand scope these songs--their dynamic structures and lush instrumentation--is carefully balanced by the intimacy of Perri's softly sung narratives. I tried to flesh out one of them (the ten minute epic "Wolfman") in the image above.

2. The Antlers - Burst Apart (Frenchkiss)

A haunting, absorbing chamber-pop album from Brooklyn's finest students of atmosphere and emotion, Burst Apart demonstrates that there is life after the kind of trauma explored on the Antlers' 2009 debut, Hospice. But if the conceptual overload of Hospice has indeed been left behind, it's only just barely. These songs speak of emotional collapse and relationships that are doomed to fail. Each track sounds as though its teetering on the edge of something terrible--be it chaos, the abyss, or isolation. Combine the apocalyptic tone of Menomena with the sublime reach of a group like Sigur Ros and you might have something close to the Antlers' sound. Despite the deep darkness of Peter Silberman's vision, Burst Apart is oddly comforting. For all the acknowledgments of subjective depravity, ineptitude, and confessions of deceitfulness, Silberman hits on something similar to St. Vincent's Strange Mercy and ultimately refuses to give himself the last word.

1. PJ Harvey - Let England Shake (Vagrant)

As expected, PJ Harvey was rolling in accolades by the time 2011 came to a close. Clearly, I'm in agreement with most critics when they praise Harvey's latest album as her best in a decade, but I'll confess that it's not a record I put on unless I'm in a particular mood. To tell you the truth, I've spent less time listening to and more time thinking about Let England Shake. It's impossible not to. And that's part of the reason I think this album is so strong--it effectively gets under your skin and stays with you. The music is catchy, at times eerily familiar thanks to some well-chosen samples from other artists; but once Let England Shake wins you over, your left to deal with a batch of heavy (and, at times, heavy-handed) questions, the kind we normally try to evade. Back in November, I wrote a lengthy Remembrance Day meditation on Let England Shake that should help to explain why I think this album was so important and so necessary for 2011. I guess I'll leave it at that.

Retro-spective: My favorite albums of 2011 (10-6)

2012-01-02T16:44:00.000-08:00

This year I've gone a little overboard in my exhibitionism. Alongside the usual long-winded review you'll find original illustrations for each of my ten favorite albums. Some draw on a particular song, others are straightforward portraits; still others aim for something more personal and evocative.

In a year crammed full of nostalgia--from Destroyer's 80s homage to The Horrors' big-haired shoegazing, not to mention the forceful return of early 90s guitar rock via The Pains of Being Pure at Heart, Yuck, etc.--one album stood out for in its effort to draw this kind of memory work--and its politics--into question. But alongside PJ Harvey's meditations on nation and violence, other artists pushed through familiar territory to produce new sounds. Earlier this year, James Blake had the press swooning with his dubstep-infused R&B and Colin Stetson channelled something chaotic and primordial with his multiphonic saxophone, while both Annie Clark (St Vincent) and Chad Vangaalen entered the ambivalent spaces of domestic life with tragicomic results. With every year it becomes more difficult to narrow down and organize a list of my favorite albums--I've pared it down from thirty or so. Strong releases from stalwarts like the Dodos, Wild Beasts, Bill Calahan, The Roots, and Stephen Malkmus require some mention, as do new discoveries like Iceage, Dog Day, Main Attrakionz, Braids, the Weeknd, Shabazz Palaces, Peaking Lights and Jessica Jalbert. For many it was the year of Bon Iver, a charming enough folk-singer who turned out to be incredibly polarizing (producing among some of my friends the longest Facebook debate I've ever taken part in). Meanwhile, Radiohead fans had to grapple with a surprisingly weak showing from a band whose fans have come to expect nothing less than game-changers--besides a viral video, it seemed less an RH album--less a cultural event--than a blip.

I've split the list in half, with the first five following below. I'll try and post my top five in the next several days.

10. Chad Vangaalen - Diaper Island (Flemish Eye)

It's not his best record, but it's probably his most consistent. If you like restrained guitar noise and conventional folk-rock this is the Chad Vangaalen album for you. It's full of moments that can only be described as "heartwarming" (but in Vangaalen's imagination, I'm sure this kind of description gets at something more perverse or grotesque than sentimental). Although it pays lip-service to domestic topics like child-rearing, relationships, etc., Diaper Island is still full of the wonderful weirdness, humor and creativity we've come to expect from Vangaalen. This illustration is based on one the album's more frenetic tracks, "Freedom for a Policeman." The song would be a straightforward punk jam about a violent encounter with the law were it not for a hilarious bridge/breakdown, where the policeman's blows slow down and we become privy to the psyche of an agent whose enforcement of the law is momentarily suspended--suddenly, at the level of fantasy, something sappy and pathetic comes into view. That's my take, anyway. Vangaalen's at his best when transforms the familiar into something strange and surprising.

9. James Blake - James Blake (Universal)

I'm not usually one for singer-songwriters, but James Blake is in a separate class. A poppier dubstepper, Blake introduced me to the wonderful world of sub-bass--his album also convinced me that I need a new stereo/soundsystem to appreciate the depth of his sound. It all sounds effortless. Sure, it's pretty music with a wide appeal, but each of the songs on Blake's debut retains a degree of darkness that keeps his music compelling, mysterious even.

8. Destroyer - Kaputt (Merge)

Dan Bejar has been kicking it for nearly two decades. In my mind, this is his best album since 2001's Streethawk: A Seduction. Those of us who've been craving layers of ambient brass and woodwinds over top mid-tempo electro beats can pass out with smiles on our faces. The much-hyped 80s motif has found an appropriate home in Bejar's well-oiled hands, and the result isn't so much sentimentalized nostalgia for a wasted decade as it is reminiscence of parties we were too young to appreciate.

7. St. Vincent - Strange Mercy (4AD)

"Forgive the kids for they don't know how to live." It could be a simple accusation, but St. Vincent's Annie Clark spends the greater part of her third album accepting responsibility and dealing with the crushing guilt of her own failings. Part of what makes her so compelling is the feeling that she really shouldn't have to do so--that she's constantly reacting preemptively against what people think of her. Songs like "Cheerleader" "Neutered Fruit" take a confessional, prayerful tone that's anything but comforting: she's constantly putting herself into question, at one point memorably imploring a surgeon to come cut her open. The whole thing seems like a perverse, sacrificial offering--not so much an apology as a window into her own twisted psyche. Strange Mercy is "strange" for a variety of reasons: musically, it's adventurous and unconventional; lyrically, it's honest and evocative. But despite her best efforts to lay bare her own depravity, Clark seems unable to produce anything that's not beautiful, or at the very least, compelling. Indeed, it's strange that this confusing existential mess could be delivered with such force and candor and still require mercy. For Clark, the error of self-interest--manifested in her own guilt-ridden account of despair--is always there, lurking in the shadows. As with Terrance Malick's recent film Tree of Life, Strange Mercy succeeds in showing us how productive the traditional dialectic between nature and grace can actually be. "It's not a perfect plan," she sings on "Champagne Year," "but it's the one we've got."

6. Cymbals Eat Guitars - Lenses Alien (Memphis)

Along with a handful of well-recieved albums from the past year (such as those from The Pains of Being Pure at Heart, Yuck, etc.), this album sounds like it could have been released fifteen years ago and would have had no trouble finding an audience. (Here is where I would normally list a bunch of bands that New York's CEG sounds like, but it's obvious enough.) But as nostalgic retreads of the 90s go, this is by far the most dynamic and well-crafted. It's also the most melodic guitar based rock record I heard this year. The songs on Lenses Alien are the kind that harness and transform the abrasive energy of teen angst into sheer catharsis. That description's a bit overstated, but so is my subject matter. For all the missteps (such as "The Current") and cringe-enducing lyrics (that more often than not resemble bad high school poetry), I'm won over by the unapologetic delivery of Jeremy D'Agostino's vocals. Sometimes he sounds like Conor Oberst in the worst way; other times his belting sounds like a real exodus.

Christmas by George Herbert

2011-12-25T00:42:00.000-08:00

                            (I)

After all pleasures as I rid one day,
My horse and I, both tired, body and mind,
With full cry of affections, quite astray;
I took up the next inn I could find.

There when I came, whom found I but my dear,
My dearest Lord, expecting till the grief
Of pleasures brought me to Him, ready there
To be all passengers' most sweet relief?

Oh Thou, whose glorious, yet contracted light,
Wrapt in night's mantle, stole into a manger;
Since my dark soul and brutish is Thy right,
To man of all beasts be not Thou a stranger:

Furnish and deck my soul, that Thou mayst have
A better lodging, than a rack, or grave.

                            (II)

The shepherds sing; and shall I silent be?
      My God, no hymn for Thee?
My soul's a shepherd too; a flock it feeds
      Of thoughts, and words, and deeds.
The pasture is Thy word: the streams, Thy grace
      Enriching all the place.
Shepherd and flock shall sing, and all my powers
      Outsing the daylight hours.
Then will we chide the sun for letting night
      Take up his place and right:
We sing one common Lord; wherefore he should
      Himself the candle hold.
I will go searching, till I find a sun
      Shall stay, till we have done;
A willing shiner, that shall shine as gladly,
      As frost-nipped suns look sadly.
Then will we sing, and shine all our own day,
      And one another pay:
His beams shall cheer my breast, and both so twine,
Till ev'n His beams sing, and my music shine.

Caught Live: Prince - Dec. 8, 2011

2011-12-16T10:02:00.000-08:00

A guest post by Sue Sorensen

At which point during the December 8 Prince concert in Winnipeg did I decide that Prince was really Sinatra? Perhaps it was early, when the lights snapped up after his opening number, a shuffling of melodies and rhythms on his singular electronic piano. (He was, I think, opening for himself.) Under the brighter lights, Prince was revealed in a dapper dark suit. Sharp white shirt, ascot. The surprise was the asymmetry of his jacket. At the back: one side long, a tail coat. The other side: short, so you could see his trim 53-year-old behind.

Sinatra dressed impeccably for his shows. He took his vocation as a professional entertainer seriously. Likewise, Prince told us that this was his job; he was willing to sing and play the guitar as long as we were willing to get up, do the windshield wiper, and waggle our hips. When he talked about his job, he sounded joyful.

I hadn’t expected to encounter joy at a Prince concert in a hockey rink. I respect Prince for his prodigal musical imagination, for his sometimes bizarre independent stance in the music industry. I appreciate the way he has crashed together his dirty mind, now somewhat curtailed—this was surprisingly wholesome show—with his love of God. I’ve been bemused by how prolific he is. Prince by normal standards writes far too much music. He has driven his distributors crazy. The listener cannot keep up, and in recent years Prince could delete and edit more. But he doesn’t. It’s his life, his music.

This profligacy, this delirious too-muchness that goes along with Prince, is ineluctably part of the experience of real joy. We don’t encounter enough joy. My other insight that night, as a bunch of purple confetti erupted, was that this was what good Vaudeville once felt like. Maybe Prince is a funk or R&B singer. Or he’s the last Vaudeville performer. Or the best entertainer with a vocation since Sinatra.

"Romans go home!"

2011-12-09T17:11:00.000-08:00

I just finished writing my Latin final. This clip from Monty Python's Life of Brian sums up my semester pretty well.

Fredric Jameson on the role of literary criticism

2011-12-07T10:27:00.000-08:00

After spending a good deal of my own time with the likes of Benjamin, Bloch, and Lukacs, Fredric Jameson's thundering, dense treatment of those well-known twentieth-century critical theorists in Marxism and Form (1971) was a bit of a let-down for me. Since the 70s, Jameson's style has greatly improved; here, however, it is plodding, abstract, and disappointingly vague. The book ends with a five part, 120 page essay ("Towards Dialectical Criticism") that provides some moments of real analysis and clarification, but again I must confess that much of Jameson's critical positioning is lost on me. That being said, the essay ends with real gusto, offering something of a justification for literary criticism. Even forty years after it was written, his conclusion is almost rousing enough to make me believe in what I'm doing.

Even if ours is a critical age, it does not seem to me very becoming in critics to exalt their activity to the level of literary creation, as is loosely done in France today. It is more honest and more dialectical to point out that the scope and relevance of criticism varies with the historical and ideological moment itself. Thus, it has been said that literary criticism was a privileged instrument in the struggle against nineteenth-century despotism (particularly in Czarist Russia), because it was the only way one could smuggle ideas and covert political commentary past the censor. This is now to be understood, not in an external but in an inner and allegorical sense. The works of culture come to us in an all-but-forgotten code, as symptoms of diseases no longer even recognized as such, as fragments of a totality we have long since lost the organs to see. In older culture, the kinds of works which a Lukacs called realistic were essentially those which carried their own interpretation built into them, which were at one and the same time fact and commentary on the fact. Now the two are once again sundered from each other, and the literary fact, like other objects that make up our social reality, cries out for commentary, for interpretation, for decipherment, for diagnosis. It appeals to other disciplines in vain: Anglo-American philosophy has long since been shorn of its dangerous speculative capacities, and as for political science, it suffices only to think of its distance from the great political and Utopian theories of the past to realize to what degree thought asphyxiates in our culture, with its absolute inability to imagine anything other than what it is. It therefore falls to literary criticism to continue to compare the inside and the outside, existence and history, to continue to pass judgment on the abstract quality of life in the present, and to keep alive the idea of a concrete future. May it prove equal to the task!

Stanley Fish and institutional evasion

2011-12-05T10:17:00.000-08:00

Departing from Wolfgang Iser, whose theory of reading remains tied to the notion of an objective (albeit "inaccessible") text that exists outside of interpretation, Stanley Fish is able to regulate the sort of free play which Roland Barthes celebrates by invoking the “interpretative strategies of interpretative communities.” Much like Barthes, Fish’s critical readings reveal how the objects of interpretation are always constructed (or “written”) by their readers. As he explains in Is There a Text in This Class?, such strategies are not so much “for reading (in the conventional sense) but for writing texts, for constituting their properties and assigning their intentions.” Fish’s aim is to demonstrate how textual ambiguity is resolved by the modifications we make to our own interpretive strategies, like, say, establishing a context or ground that exists at a deeper level than interpretation. In this way, his theory always returns the text to a constitutive indeterminacy, a function of the “reader” rather than the “text.” At times, however, it is difficult to see Fish’s overt lack of a critical position as little more than evasive. It becomes obvious enough when Fish attempts to break free from accusations of relativism: “No one can be a relativist, because no one can achieve the distance from his or her own beliefs and assumptions which would result in their being no more authoritative for him than for the beliefs and assumptions held by others."

A brief example of how this lack of position supports Fish’s critical program can be found in an essay on Milton’s Areopagitica. Here, Fish argues that the importance of the tract lies in its process of “rhetoric” or “persuasion”: the making of virtue by what is contrary. He then proceeds to distance his reading from Christopher Kendrick’s Marxist interpretation, finally endorsing both critical positions as equally tenable sites of literary criticism: an institution that both determines and enables each critic’s respective work. “No criticism is more political than any other,” writes Fish, “at least not in the sense one normally means by ‘political,’ an intervention in the affairs of the greater—non-academic—world.” Again, the strategy echoes Milton, for Fish’s point in saying this is to demonstrate how Kendrick’s “political reading” is a product of the institution for consumption by the institution; that is, that “there is nothing larger, that institutional life (of some kind or other) defines and exhausts those possibilities, but (and this is the crucial point) that those possibilities are rich and varied, and they are, in the only meaningful sense of the word, political.” There is, in short, no deeper (i.e., political) reading of a text than the one that is produced within an institutional politics; there are only differences in institutional life, which as Fish bluntly puts it, cannot even amount to a conscious choice but are rather given as the “groundless ground” of our very freedom as academics. "Groundless ground"? How convenient. This academic paradigm is beginning to resemble the very author that Barthes and Foucault had sought to demystify.

For Fish, like Barthes, the agency of the reader comes to resemble that unity which had traditionally belonged to the author; both are, of course, the products of certain institutional or ideological histories that we cannot break free of. As Barthes writes in “The Death of the Author,” “a text’s unity lies not in its origin but in its destination. Yet this destination cannot any longer be personal: the reader is without history, biology, psychology; is simply that someone who holds together in a single field all the traces by which a written text is constituted.” Fish makes a similar claim when describes his critical method as a kind of production that can only occur within the confines of the institution. “Rather than restoring and recovering texts,” he writes in his well-known essay “Interpreting the Variorium,” “I am in the business of making texts and teaching others to make them.” This is to repeat the basic claim he makes against the “political” readings of those like Kendrick; but the earlier example also illustrates how Fish’s appeal to the institution as “a definable set of commonly held assumptions” fails to account for the indeterminacy and debate that defines this supposedly untranscendable category. As Samuel Weber has argued, Fish’s concept of an interpretive community is “ultimately nothing but generalized, indeed universalized form of the individualist monad: autonomous, self-contained and internally unified, not merely despite but because of the diversity it contains.” When Fish opposes a critic like Kendrick, his strategy is to explain away their difference by placing it within the unity of the institution. In Weber’s words, “The institution thus emerges as the condition of possibility of controversy, and hence, as its arbiter."

Northrop Frye on the Bible

2011-12-05T09:42:00.000-08:00

Just as I was beginning to worry about what to do after celebrating Marshall Mcluhan's centenary year, I stumbled across some plans to honor another great Canadian theorist whose 100th birthday is coming up in 2012.

This is all thanks to Margaret Atwood's Twitter feed. Apparently, she was an auditor back in '82.

From the website:

In 2012, the world will celebrate the 100th anniversary of the birth of Northrop Frye, a globally distinguished literary theorist and one of the 20th century's most important thinkers. Providentially, an academic treasure for students of the humanities has just been recovered in the renowned Robarts Library at the University of Toronto – video recordings from 1982-83 of all of Frye's famous lectures on the Bible and Literature. These recordings have now been digitally restored and will be made available for acquisition by educators, libraries, institutions, and individuals as part of the Frye Centennial.

Lecture 1: Approaches to the Bible and Translations of the Bible

Milton contra Hobbes

2011-11-22T10:15:00.000-08:00

His widow assures me that Mr. T Hobbes was not one of his acquaintance, that her husband did not like him at all, but he would acknowledge him to be a man of great parts, and a learned man. Their interests and tenets did run counter to each other vide Mr. Hobbes' Behemoth.
-Minutes of the Life of Mr. John Milton by John Aubrey

Well after the Authorized version of the Bible became standard issue in churches and the translation of choice for private reading, Thomas Hobbes drew a clear connection between what he described as an “anarchy of interpretations” and the political unrest that characterized the 1640s and 1650s (documented and analyzed in his Behemoth, written at behest of King Charles II in 1668), insisting that the king authorize a singular reading of Scripture, or at least install official interpreters of Scripture to monitor its meaning. Hobbes’ anxiety over competing interpretations of Scripture and the proliferation of disparate sects in mid-seventeenth century England was common among royalists. This diffuse outcome of the Reformation’s elevation of individualized authority provided conservative commentators with a clear cause behind the civil war and revolution.

At issue for Hobbes was not the availability of the vernacular Bible, but interpretation itself, which, as an outward activity, must be ordered and regulated so as not to contradict the established order of the state. As Hobbes puts it in his Leviathan, “the question [of Biblical interpretation] is not of obedience to God, but of when, and what God hath said; which to Subjects that have no supernaturall revelation, cannot be known, but by that natural reason, which guided them, for the obtaining of Peace and Justice, to obey the authority of their severall Comonwealths; that is to say, of their lawful Soveraigns.” Because he understands faith as a gift of God that “never follow[s] men’s commands,” Hobbes distinguishes it from the activity of interpretation, instead arguing that it can only be made visible through subordination to power, in accord with natural law.

At the same time, Hobbes maintained an important distinction between internal and external behavior—shared by other Reformers including Milton— which led him to argue that internal belief cannot and should not be regulated (Rosendale 164). The difference between the positions of more radical English Reformers and that of Hobbes is that the latter privileges outward actions as the only means by which the state can ensure its peaceful conformity. Indeed, Leviathan is itself an attempt to show how the collective will of state subjects are brought into outward unity through the “artificial” representation of the sovereign ruler. Milton, by contrast, cannot easily accept this contradiction between private belief and political subjectivity, just as he cannot accept such an appeal to an ultimately allegorical model of social life.

postmodernism remembered

2011-11-16T00:05:00.000-08:00

Marcus A. Jansen, "Surreal" (2009)

Postmodernism was certainly an expression of the late capitalist economy. Indeed, it's rare to find this much derided period of American optimism mentioned in academic writing without a reference to Fredric Jameson, who first coined the expression ("postmodernism, or the cultural logic of late capitalism") in the mid 1980s. On many fronts, it appears that we've entered something of a new cultural moment, where contemporary anxieties over life and death have trounced the optimistic attitudes of previous decades and demystified the ideals of free play and ironic detachment which came to define an aesthetic. And yet despite our return to the "hard truths" of the Real (or as Mark Fisher describes it, "capitalist realism") following 9/11, we've carried this cultural logic still further. If we have, in fact, moved into something beyond postmodernism, it might be worth asking what's at stake in breaking from it. Jameson's point is that the denigration of meta-narratives serves an important function in the perpetuation of capitalism. In literary terms, we might say, capital continues to play the main character in a meta-narrative perhaps even more insidious than those which postmodernism had sought to upend.

Marcus Jansen's "Surreal," featured above, illustrates the tenacity but also the continued appeal of the postmodern aesthetic. It also reminds me of one of my favourite book covers: Faber and Faber's first edition of Paul Auster's New York Trilogy. Its cover perfectly captures the neo-noir aesthetic of Auster's postmodern detective story with its pastiche of American objects cast, along with the solitary figure, against a monochromatic backdrop. As much as I love this book, it's hard not to see a similar logic (recall Marx's explanation of the process of commodification in Capital) at work in Auster's description of the detective genre. "In the good mystery," Auster writes in City of Glass, "there is nothing wasted, no sentence, no word that is not significant. And even if it is not significant, it has the power to be so – which amounts to the same thing…even the slightest, most trivial thing, can bear connection to the outcome of the story, nothing must be overlooked. Everything becomes essence."

catholic commons (shout out)

2011-11-14T19:42:00.000-08:00

My previous post on PJ Harvey and Walter Benjamin was the offshoot of a piece I was writing for a blog called Catholic Commons. The full article is now up, but there's plenty of other good writing to check out as well, most of it by friends and former colleagues.

Remembrance Day with Walter Benjamin and PJ Harvey

2011-11-11T12:29:00.000-08:00

Whoever has emerged victorious participates to this day in the triumphal procession in which the present rulers step over those who are lying prostrate. According to traditional practice, the spoils are carried along in the procession. They are called cultural treasures, and a historical materialist views them with cautious detachment. For without exception the cultural treasures he surveys have an origin which he cannot contemplate without horror. They owe their existence not only to the efforts of the great minds and talents who have created them, but also to the anonymous toil of their contemporaries. There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism. And just as such a document is not free of barbarism, barbarism taints also the manner in which it was transmitted from one owner to another.

~ Benjamin, Theses on the Philosophy of History

Leading up to Remembrance Day, I've spent a lot of time with Let England Shake, PJ Harvey's Mercury Prize-winning release from earlier this year. For me, it invites the kind of reflections on memory and history that were made by Walter Benjamin. Such an awareness of historical representation seems all the more necessary on a day when we are constantly met with the imperative to "remember." Much of the media recites this platitude as though the task at hand is self-evident, but I think Harvey's album, like the work of Benjamin, draws such rituals of remembrance into question. Remember how? What's at stake in such practices? How do they help construct and inform our current condition?

The celebrated war photographer Seamus Murphy shot a video for each of the album's twelve tracks. Each one is quite remarkable. I've posted several here, but I'd highly recommend searching out all of them.

"What is capitalism?" (1948)

2011-11-05T17:04:00.000-07:00

Global Occupy Movement Roundtable (audio)

2011-10-30T14:48:00.000-07:00

Here's the audio file I hinted at in yesterday's post. You'll here me at the beginning, giving introductions.

Occupy Edmonton Panel by fsobhani

Fragments from an Occupation

2011-10-29T19:13:00.000-07:00

Posted below is a collection of concerns, questions, and reflections generated by a recent round-table on the global occupy movement that took place at the University of Alberta. I was involved in planning the event and I'm still hoping that I'll be able to post a recording of the discussion on this site; for now, I've assembled some thoughts (my own, as well as those of other participants) both on the movement more generally and on its current manifestation in Edmonton.

Although a significant action took place today (a march calling for governments to introduce what's been nicknamed "the Robin Hood tax") and our camp at the corner of Jasper Ave and 102 Street is still functional after nearly two weeks of occupation, there has a noticeable decline in participation, both at a day-to-day level (a small number of volunteers are doing all the work to maintain camp infrustructure) and at our regularly held general assemblies. There are ongoing discussions about the future of the downtown camp: none of us are so naive that we think this can continue (at least in its current form) through an Edmonton winter. There have been also been an increasing amount of concerns regarding the homeless individuals who frequent the camp, many of whom are intoxicated or seeking a fix. Thankfully, most of us are of the opinion that the participation of the disenfranchised is just as (if not more) important to this occupation as our own, not least because they had been "occupying" this harsh and unwelcoming environment well before we arrived with our tents. However, many of the problems that currently plague the camp are due to decreased involvement and attendance, and so it is all the more imperative that we think through ways of continuing what we've started that don't sacrifice momentum but are still realistic about the movements material limitations.

It's with those immediate concerns in mind that I turn to some reflections that emerged from last week's discussion at U of A.

First, the global occupy movement is based around local attempts to build permanent zones of autonomy that stand in contradiction to the processes of capitalism that determine our lived condition. Proof of this contradiction can be seen in the violent responses from the state in places like Oakland, Rome and elsewhere.

Unlike the many institutions of collectivity that have become complicit with or have developed out of Western capitalism, the occupy movement is not interested simply in the performance of community and actively resists its commodification. As has been noted, the movement is characterized by a strong negative impulse which draws it into opposition with the political-economic apparatus as it functions today; people are increasingly recognizing that our system has enabled the consolidation of wealth and power by an indifferent upper-class. Despite the reactionary criticism perpetuated by mainstream media outlets, the movement has a clear target in its aim.

There is a conscious effort to privilege local struggle while recognizing its relationship to and solidarity with the larger global struggle. Here in Edmonton, we have begun most of our meetings with an acknowledgment that we are living on Treaty 6 land: once a place of flourishing for the Cree, now a place of alienation and embarrassment for many indigenous peoples due to the first occupation of this land by British settlers. Can we understand our current occupation as a conscious effort to reorient ourselves to a land that was never ours to begin with? Are we participating in the prolongation of colonial structures, or opposing them with and on behalf of the disenfranchised? Does the language of occupation (which has drawn fire from numerous participants) not reflect and produce the very logic of private ownership that we oppose? In addition to the creation of new forms of social relation (not premised on capital), it is also up to us to imagine new possibilities for discourse and representation.

Perhaps one of the most important characteristics of this movement is that it has proceeded without any serious acknowledgment of what today falls under the name “politics.” Our choices in the political establishment offer no substantial choice or change, but instead give us slightly different ways of maintaining untenable lifestyles. In short, the official institutions that claim to embody our democracy have been treated as the ineffective sideshow that they are.

It has been pointed out repeatedly that there is a frustrating lack of collective demands. Our unwillingness to identify or hand over specific demands arises from a fear that those demands will be perverted and co-opted by the powers we seek to oppose. This is certainly a weakness of the movement, but it is also one of its great strengths. Many of the social movements of the late twentieth century had their basis in identity-politics and, consequently, were grounded by an axiom of equilibrium that sought to establish a basic equality of rights among exclusive groups. Such movements were therefore mobilized by a certain degree of self-interest that could easily be put into the service of capital; it seems, in contrast, that the global occupy movement is mobilized by a collective hunger for justice that looks beyond individual needs, not to some universal projection of identity, but to a universal that is necessarily open, but is equally opposed to privatization.

Terry Eagleton on Milton, Paradise Lost and Revolution

2011-10-24T09:46:00.000-07:00

From Terry Eagleton. "The God that Failed." Re-membering Milton, eds. Mary Nyquist and Margaret W. Ferguson. New York: Methuen, Inc., 1987. 345, 349.

Throwing history into reverse, the left wing retreats to an origin in order to keep alive a future beyond the shabby sell-outs of the bourgeoisie. Their mythologies glean the trace of the revolution within the revolution, a submerged subtext within the dispiriting narratives of official bourgeois history, whether this subtext is, as with Milton, the salvific history of the godly remnant or, as with Walter Benjamin, the tradition of the oppressed that haunts ruling-class history as its silenced underside. Blake knew that only a revolution which penetrated to the body itself could finally be victorious; Milton, as Christopher Hill remarks, believed that “the desire for reformation did not sink deeply enough into the consciences of supporters of the Revolution, did not transform their lives.” Thus Hill reads Paradise Lost not as the expression of political defeat but as the urging of a new political phase: “the foundations must be dug deeper, into the hearts of individual believers, in order to build more securely.”

[…]

To blame Marxism for [the conditions of Stalinism] is then somewhat akin to blaming God for the failure of seventeenth-century revolutionary hopes. To blame God in this way, Milton sees, can only mean one thing: that the Puritan bureaucrats, opportunists and careerists are then let comfortably off the moral and political hook. It was destiny after all; nothing to feel guilty about. But the failure of revolutionary hopes was not of course predestined and neither was Stalinism. . . . There are always those who, like the Koestlers and the Orwells, find it convenient and persuasive to blame the God that failed; but if we wanted a more accurate analogue of Paradise Lost in the twentieth century, we might do worse than looking at Trotsky’s The Revolution Betrayed.

New Music: Stephen Malkmus and the Jicks

2011-10-21T09:53:00.000-07:00

The latest record from the former Pavement frontman has been out for several months now, and I've been putting off writing about it, perhaps because, like previous releases by Stephen Malkmus, it's acquired a rather personal significance--I'm cringing as I write this. I should also mention that it took some time to warm up to Mirror Traffic, perhaps because the first few tracks just aren't very good.

In my opinion, aside from a few duds (always par for the course with Malkmus), it's right up there with his best solo work, and constitutes a real step forward after 2008's less-than-spectacular Real Emotional Trash. The guitars are still prominent but the riffs are better and the poppier fare on Mirror Traffic makes better use of them. Somehow, the Malkmus continues to be juvenile and mature at the same time--he's that crazy uncle you idolized as a kid; the man who now earns your qualified appreciation as an adult. You may at times cringe at his wordplay, but (as with Real Emotional Trash) much of the sentiment comes from an archive of experiences that can only be amassed by middle-age. Malkmus is a family-man, a beloved veteran of indie rock, a recreational drug-user, an emotional screw-up, a witty comedian, and, of course, a guitar god. That compelling mess is all on display here: from the frenetic pulse of a song like "Tune Grief" to the laid-back, tender style of "Share the Red," it could be said that Malkmus calls it in. Indeed, none of this is new for fans of Pavement, even with Beck (another veteran of the nineties) lending his name to the production. Be that as it may, if Mirror Traffic is one of my favourite albums of the year, it's because Malkmus' penchant for melody is still unmatched in guitar-based indie rock, and wherever I'm at in my life, his songs continue to resonate, connect and, ultimately, illuminate the aspects of my life that require a soundtrack, if not a roadmap.

Here's "Stick Figures in Love," one of several tracks from Mirror Traffic that fit that somewhat personal (and embarrassing) description.

Milton on Interpretation and Crisis

2011-10-20T15:56:00.000-07:00

In words which admitt of various sense, the libertie is ours to choose that interpretation which may best minde us of what our restless enemies endeavor, and what wee are timely to prevent.

(Eikonoklastes, Preface. 1649)

Zizek at Occupy Wall Street

2011-10-11T08:59:00.000-07:00

This past weekend, I came across a set of videos from the ongoing demonstration that began in New York, and is now gathering steam across North America. Amid the celebrities flocking to Wall Street for a photo opp and the indie heart-throbs busting out their acoustic guitars, there was Zizek offering protesters some well-considered words. What struck me about Zizek's speech was not simply its content (however, there were several highlights, especially the terse reminder to conservative fundamentalists of subversive nature of Christianity--here, with regard to the Holy Spirit), but it's strange, rather liturgical process of delivery. While some might see this as no more than a high profile power grab, or might criticize Zizek for assuming and inculcating the voice of the people, I see an intellectual actually doing something useful: lending his words and giving protesters an opportunity to speak collectively in ways they otherwise wouldn't: here, it seems to me, Zizek is less a dictator than a worship leader (though, I'm sure he'd prefer the former designation to the latter).

See for yourself. If you can't tolerate the low-grade videos, Verso has provided a transcript, also reposted below.

Don't fall in love with yourselves, with the nice time we are having here. Carnivals come cheap—the true test of their worth is what remains the day after, how our normal daily life will be changed. Fall in love with hard and patient work—we are the beginning, not the end. Our basic message is: the taboo is broken, we do not live in the best possible world, we are allowed and obliged even to think about alternatives. There is a long road ahead, and soon we will have to address the truly difficult questions—questions not about what we do not want, but about what we DO want. What social organization can replace the existing capitalism? What type of new leaders we need? The XXth century alternatives obviously did not work.

So do not blame people and their attitudes: the problem is not corruption or greed, the problem is the system that pushes you to be corrupt. The solution is not “Main street, not Wall street,” but to change the system where main street cannot function without Wall street. Beware not only of enemies, but also of false friends who pretend to support us, but are already working hard to dilute our protest. In the same way we get coffee without caffeine, beer without alcohol, ice-cream without fat, they will try to make us into a harmless moral protest. But the reason we are here is that we had enough of the world where to recycle your Coke cans, to give a couple of dollars for charity, or to buy Starbucks cappuccino where 1% goes for the Third World troubles is enough to make us feel good. After outsourcing work and torture, after the marriage agencies started to outsource even our dating, we see that for a long time we were allowing our political engagements also to be outsourced—we want them back.

They will tell us we are un-American. But when conservative fundamentalists tell you that America is a Christian nation, remember what Christianity is: the Holy Spirit, the free egalitarian community of believers united by love. We here are the Holy Spirit, while on Wall Street they are pagans worshipping false idols.

They will tell us we are violent, that our very language is violent: occupation, and so on. Yes we are violent, but only in the sense in which Mahathma Gandhi was violent. We are violent because we want to put a stop on the way things go—but what is this purely symbolic violence compared to the violence needed to sustain the smooth functioning of the global capitalist system?

We were called losers—but are the true losers not there on the Wall Street, and were they not bailed out by hundreds of billions of your money? You are called socialists—but in the US, there already is socialism for the rich. They will tell you that you don't respect private property—but the Wall Street speculations that led to the crash of 2008 erased more hard-earned private property than if we were to be destroying it here night and day—just think of thousands of homes foreclosed...

We are not Communists, if Communism means the system which deservedly collapsed in 1990—and remember that Communists who are still in power run today the most ruthless capitalism (in China). The success of Chinese Communist-run capitalism is an ominous sign that the marriage between capitalism and democracy is approaching a divorce. The only sense in which we are Communists is that we care for the commons—the commons of nature, of knowledge—which are threatened by the system.

They will tell you that you are dreaming, but the true dreamers are those who think that things can go on indefinitely they way they are, just with some cosmetic changes. We are not dreamers, we are the awakening from a dream which is turning into a nightmare. We are not destroying anything, we are merely witness how the system is gradually destroying itself. We all know the classic scene from cartoons: the cat reaches a precipice, but it goes on walking, ignoring the fact that there is no ground under its feet; it starts to fall only when it looks down and notices the abyss. What we are doing is just reminding those in power to look down...

So is the change really possible? Today, the possible and the impossible are distributed in a strange way. In the domains of personal freedoms and scientific technology, the impossible is becoming increasingly possible (or so we are told): “nothing is impossible,” we can enjoy sex in all its perverse versions; entire archives of music, films, and TV series are available for downloading; space travel is available to everyone (with the money...); we can enhance our physical and psychic abilities through interventions into the genome, right up to the techno-gnostic dream of achieving immortality by transforming our identity into a software program. On the other hand, in the domain of social and economic relations, we are bombarded all the time by a You cannot ... engage in collective political acts (which necessarily end in totalitarian terror), or cling to the old Welfare State (it makes you non-competitive and leads to economic crisis), or isolate yourself from the global market, and so on.

When austerity measures are imposed, we are repeatedly told that this is simply what has to be done. Maybe, the time has come to turn around these coordinates of what is possible and what is impossible; maybe, we cannot become immortal, but we can have more solidarity and healthcare?

In mid-April 2011, the media reported that Chinese government has prohibited showing on TV and in theatres films which deal with time travel and alternate history, with the argument that such stories introduce frivolity into serious historical matters—even the fictional escape into alternate reality is considered too dangerous. We in the liberal West do not need such an explicit prohibition: ideology exerts enough material power to prevent alternate history narratives being taken with a minimum of seriousness. It is easy for us to imagine the end of the world—see numerous apocalyptic films -, but not end of capitalism.

In an old joke from the defunct German Democratic Republic, a German worker gets a job in Siberia; aware of how all mail will be read by censors, he tells his friends: “Let's establish a code: if a letter you will get from me is written in ordinary blue ink, it is true; if it is written in red ink, it is false.” After a month, his friends get the first letter written in blue ink: “Everything is wonderful here: stores are full, food is abundant, apartments are large and properly heated, movie theatres show films from the West, there are many beautiful girls ready for an affair—the only thing unavailable is red ink.” And is this not our situation till now? We have all the freedoms one wants—the only thing missing is the red ink: we feel free because we lack the very language to articulate our unfreedom. What this lack of red ink means is that, today, all the main terms we use to designate the present conflict—'war on terror,' "democracy and freedom,' 'human rights,' etc—are FALSE terms, mystifying our perception of the situation instead of allowing us to think it. You, here, you are giving to all of us red ink.

2011-10-04T09:22:00.000-07:00

Why should I not confess that earth was then
To me, what an inheritance, new-fallen,
Seems, when the first time visited, to one
Who thither comes to find in it his home?
He walks about and looks upon the spot
With cordial transport, moulds it and remoulds,
And is half pleased with things that are amiss,
'Twill be such joy to see them disappear.

William Wordsworth, The Prelude

Radiohead on the Colbert Report

2011-09-27T09:18:00.000-07:00

Last night the boys from Radiohead were special guests on an hour long episode of The Colbert Report. It's reportedly their first late-night television appearance in 18 years. That's right; not since performing "Creep" for Conan O'Brien back in '93 has the band graced the stage of a late-night talk show. Apart from all the anti-corporate jokes (there were a lot, and they were tiresome at best), Radiohead's live performances left a serious impression on me. Colbert was also visibly stunned. Here's an excerpt from what Pitchfork posted earlier this morning:

The brilliance of Colbert is that he makes the people sitting across from him (including aloof British bands) look good because of his asshole posturing while, obviously, remaining totally knowing and somehow lovable. When not on air, he came off more like a warm, goofy dad, explaining the editing of the show and even briefly serenading his wife, who was in attendance. As Colbert combed through the vinyl version of Limbs onstage between songs, guitarist Ed O'Brien joked, "It's like having a headmaster look at your homework." From his toe-tapping during Radiohead's performance, as well as his general giddiness throughout the night, on and off camera, it definitely seemed like Colbert approved.

Radiohead performed a total of six songs, four of which were from their release earlier this year, The King of Limbs. The best of the lot, however, was their newest song, "The Daily Mail" (below, albeit from a different concert), which is of course quite timely given the Rupert Murdoch fiasco that, despite its disappearance from the headlines, rages on.

Thoughts arrive like butterflies

2011-09-26T22:54:00.000-07:00

A lot of immediately "classic" albums came out in 1991. Not only has it become a touchstone year for grunge, it also marks a milestone for mainstream hip-hop. While most media outlets are obsessing over the deluxe anniversary boxset for Nirvana's Nevermind, some gripping documentaries like Pearl Jam 20 (by Cameron Crowe) and Beats Rhymes and Life: The Travels of A Tribe Called Quest (by Michael Rapaport) are hitting small screens across the country.

For now, here's a pair of music videos from twenty years back: a very dated but no less thrilling music video for Pearl Jam's "Even Flow" (skip ahead to 3:47 if you're getting impatient) and an outmoded video for A Tribe Called Quest's "Check the Rhyme." For me, both clips perfectly capture early nineties zeitgeist: the optimism, the over-the-top aesthetics, and the impulse towards innovation. Pearl Jam tapped into something that sounded primordial and at times universal, while ATCQ pushed the envelope in hip-hop production, with surprising samples and clever rhymes.

Biblical myth: Ernst Bloch meets Milton

2011-09-23T20:27:00.000-07:00

I've started to work my way through Ernst Bloch's Atheism and Christianity: an intriguing attempt to reconcile ideological critique, Biblical exegesis, and the principle of hope (here, enabled by and contained within the Christian faith) that incites the revolts of subjected groups against their oppressors. My interest in this particular book comes not only from my interest in Bloch's work (including his exchanges with Adorno, Brecht and Lukacs), but from the similarities that his approach to biblical myth shares with that of Milton.

As with Milton, the very failure of the heretic against the powers of authority is a guarantee of his utopian premise. The struggle is all. Rather than adhering to the “either/or” debate over religion and secularism, Bloch’s dialectical method recognizes that the contradictions within a situation carry within them the potential solution of that situation—the surplus of one situation, in other words, carries over into the corpus of another. Not only do religious myths mark the limitations of the historical world, they also allow us to pass out of “anamnetic circularity” into active potentiality.

Taking his cue from Feuerbach, Bloch collapses the hierarchy of being embedded within orthodox theology so that “the Christ-impulse live[s] even when God is dead” (167). What is important is not some transcendent other, detached and uncontaminated by the world; rather it is the revolutionary impulse that founds this other-wordly reality that Bloch wants to endorse (in this way he carries the latter, often ignored part of Marx's famous indictment of religion to it's logical conclusion). According the Fredric Jameson, Bloch’s conception of utopia was one which would emerge out of a hermeneutical process of becoming: it was “an allegorical process in which various utopian figures seep into the daily life of things and people and afford an incremental, and often unconscious, bonus of pleasure unrelated to their functional value or official satisfactions.” As for Milton, Christianity for Bloch is also defined by a dialectic between freedom and necessity: liberationist impulses are always subsumed by the state, but in that process of sublimation one sees the active workings of human desire beyond the law’s authority. Bloch’s emphasis on the humanity of Christ offers another way in which we might interpret the contradictions of the Son of God in Paradise Regained (fully in the world, but wholly oriented in subservience beyond it). Much like Milton’s stark division between local hermeneutic practices and adherence to state-mandated worship (which, like Milton’s critique of Catholicism is sinful precisely because it accommodates the unquestioned transmission of doctrine, hierarchy and church traditions), Bloch understands the Bible as a dialectic between the Creator-God, on the one hand, co-opted by the state and the state church “whose all-seeing eye strikes not only fear (against which one can maintain one’s strength of opposition) but dread, which paralyses,” individualizes and alienates; and, on the other hand, “the religion of Exodus and the Kingdom,” which is carried to completion (i.e. to the end of religion) in the person of Christ.

As Bloch writes, perhaps looking back to Milton, “The best thing about religion is that it makes for heretics.”

La Passion de Jeanne d' Arc

2011-09-18T21:10:00.000-07:00

Last night at Edmonton's Metro Cinema there was a special showing of Carl Theodore Dreyer's La Passion de Jeanne d' Arc, featuring an original score written and performed live by an eclectic group of local musicians. A silent film, originally released in 1928, La Passion de Jeanne d'Arc, is based on the record of the trial of Joan of Arc and is remarkable not only for its production and its innovative cinematography, but also for the riveting performance of Renee Jeanne Falconetti as the title character. The staggering depth of emotion in Falconetti's performance as Joan of Arc, as well as the austere portraits of her judges (the sinister church fathers), are expertly brought out by Dreyer's careful attention to the to the human face. Especially with a thoughtful score behind it, the film is simply devastating.

Originally, the music for the film was played live in the theatre and it's widely believed that Dreyer purposefully avoided giving the film a definitive score. Since being rediscovered in 1981, the film has even been scored by the likes of Nick Cave and Cat Power. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to find any footage with the accompanying music online, but just by watching the part of the film, you can begin to see why it continues to serve as a muse for all kinds of musicians and composers.

Beirut - Payne's Bay

2011-09-16T20:35:00.000-07:00

Albums, concerts, and '90s nostalgia

2011-08-29T12:09:00.000-07:00

“This is the way that pop ends,” Simon Reynolds writes in the introduction to his new book Retromania, “not with a BANG but with a box set whose fourth disc you never get around to playing and an overpriced ticket to the track-by-track restaging of the Pixies or Pavement album you played to death in your first year at university.”

Chances are that if you attended a major music festival in North America this summer, you witnessed a now canonical alt-rock artist playing through one of their seminal albums in its entirity. This past April I saw the Pixies perform their third (and best) album, Doolittle; and, more recently, I saw the Flaming Lips perform their 1999 album, The Soft Bulletin, at the Osheaga Music Festival in Montreal. Believe it or not, the "album concert" trend has been in full swing for a number of years. My best guess as to how it began involves Don't Look Back, an annual series of concerts that began in 2005, where London-based promoters All Tomorrow's Parties ask artists to play through their most celebrated albums in a live setting. The most well-known festivals with stages hosted by ATP are Barcelona's Primavera Sound festival and the Pitchfork Music Festival in Chicago.

As a fan who holds some loyalty to the formal constraints of the LP, I've been pleasantly surprised by the amount of artists who've taken up the idea and are currently using it as a touring strategy. In the case of the Pixies (a band I've now seen three times), seeing them perform their best album in its entirety was good enough incentive to see them again. There are always tracks that bands never (if rarely) perform live, and I was sure the Pixies wouldn't simply end their set after they were done playing through a forty-five minute album. I was right: not only did they play through a bunch of b-sides as a "warm-up" for the album, they followed Doolittle with an assortment of fan favourites. In the end, it was money well spent.

But it's worth asking why this trend in concerts continues to gather steam? Of course, such sentiments are pretty common among music fans from my generation. Not only does my demographic still have enough disposable income to pay for extraneous concerts, most of us gained an appreciation for popular music just as the LP format was on it's way out. For this reason, the British music critic Simon Reynolds is right to lament the current appetite for nostalgia in popular music. Reynold's new book, which I have not yet read, is full of insights into why music from a bygone era continues to take hold of popular imagination.

In a recent article for Slate, Reynolds offers a fair, if not overly grim, indictment of the pop music's current attachment to the '90s, arguing that we're witnessing an ever shortening gap between present trends in music and a detached, apolitical (i.e. nostalgic) appreciation of the past. It's become very apparent (from the growing numbers of new indie bands aspiring to the grungy sounds of bands like the Smashing Pumpkins and Nirvana, to the resurgence of plaid, baggy t-shirts, shows like Portlandia (above), and novels by David Foster Wallace) that the nineties are back in full force. But did they ever really go away? I know I can't speak for everyone who's currently lapping up nineties nostalgia, but ask any of my friends and they'll tell you that I've been loyal to early nineties zeitgeist since junior high (1999-2001). Still, I have to agree with Reynolds when he suggests that

an undercurrent to grunge retrospection is the music media's and record industry's own nostalgia for the heyday of the rock monoculture. It was already crumbling in the early '90s, thanks to rap (the rebel music of black youth, obviously, but a lot of white kids had defected to hip-hop, too) and to the emergence of rave and electronic dance culture (in America destined always to be a minority subculture, but in Europe the dominant form of '90s pop). Grunge was the last blast of rock as a force at once central in popular culture yet also running counter to mainstream show biz values.

Reynolds would be the first to admit that nostalgia and popular music are inseparable--indeed, such retrospection is not only vital to the well-being of high-powered business execs, it usually works at a local level as well. It's also necessary to address the troubled relation to the past that defined gen-x culture: not simply a break from the past failures (whether they be associated with the music of babyboomers or their drawn-out depoliticization since the sixties), but a new sense of optimism and faith in the free market, dot-coms, and American expansion. I'm wondering, in other words, whether there's a certain kind of nostalgia that the nineties, in their burgeoning diversity (what Reynolds sees as a "crumbling rock monoculture") helped condition; how did particular cultural productions of the decade mediate the past, and why are such mediations now attracting a new audience? I suppose I'll just have to read Reynolds' book and see for myself.

Je me souviens: A final note on Quebec and music festivals

2011-08-26T11:29:00.000-07:00

My French immersion program was set up quite well. Classes ran for four hours every morning, but afternoons, evenings, and weekends were ours to spend as we pleased. This meant we could go and explore Vieux Quebec (the old city) for ourselves, or take off to Montreal (just over a two hour drive) for the weekend. I can't praise Quebec City highly enough. It's a manageable size (slightly smaller than Winnipeg) and the older sections are really quite stunning. Surprisingly enough, its also a relatively affordable place to live.

Several weeks ago, some friends and I drove to Montreal to catch the final day of the Osheaga Music Festival. Eels (aka Mark Oliver Everett) was grooving when we arrived, and was followed soon after by one of the 90s' most popular stoner-rap groups, Cypress Hill. After an impressive and wickedly funny set by Cypress Hill (who are clearly riding the present wave of 90s nostalgia, which is suddenly everywhere), we were subjected to music of several outmoded, European indie rock groups (The Sounds, The Raveonettes). A good time to search out the port-a-potties.

The day's headlining acts did not disappoint: Beirut were predictably charming, aspiring to a level of musical sophistication and professional tact that I wasn't expecting from scruffy looking indie darlings. Seeing them perform live was easily worth the price of admission. They dipped into some new material from The Rip Tide, but mostly stuck to playing favourites from Gulag Orkestar and The Flying Club Cup.

The Tragically Hip also kept to their hits. As a casual fan, I was surprised by how many songs I not only recognized but could sing along to; and, as anyone who's ever attended a Hip concert will tell you, Gord Downie's concert routine is a spectacle in itself. I was honestly blown away by Downie's showmanship (the apparent ease with which he steps into and maintains his onstage persona), and how significant the Hip (not to mention Downie's lyrics) are to Canada's cultural self-identity.

Malajube and Death Cab for Cutie were relatively low-key in comparison. In a festival setting, this shift in tempo and energy isn't necessarily a bad thing. It gave us some downtime before witnessing what I have call (in all hyperbole) the concert event of lifetime: The Flaming Lips play The Soft Bulletin.

The Flaming Lips, who've actually been together since 1983, are widely celebrated for their live performances. I've never had so much fun at a concert, and, as a member of the audience, I've definitely never felt so loved and appreciated by the performers on stage. Of course, it wouldn't have been the same without Wayne Coyne's ridiculous props (the hamsterball, the giant laser hands, the balloons, the confetti guns), the emotional rawness of his monologues, or the bizarre video projections that accompanied each song. I've been to a lot of concerts (and summer festivals are especially bad for this) where the performers give their audience sparse attention. With the Lips you get the exact opposite of those pretentious performances; here, the audience isn't merely a conduit for coolness, or a mirror that reflects back the performer's aura. From my perspective, every moment that the Flaming Lips were on stage seemed to be in service of a greater collective experience.

God's away on business

2011-08-23T00:24:00.000-07:00

Sometimes things just click. This video of the Cookie Monster performing Tom Waits' "God's Away on Business" from 2002's Blood Money is one of those things. Another gift from the internet.

courses I should be taking

2011-08-22T20:47:00.000-07:00

Although I'm sure that writing my thesis will be totally exhilarating, I can't help feeling the sting of bereavement as I look over the graduate course calendar for the coming school year and realize what I'll be missing. I can't be too bitter. If I end up doing a PhD, I'll have another chance to feel jaded and overwhelmed by reading lists and intimidated by the precious competition of colossal egos attempting to out-radical one another. There's also a slight chance I'll be able to sit in on one or two of them.

Cultural Forms and Social Circulation
How do we understand how the relationships between literary and cultural forms (both old and new) and their efficacy for generating new modes of sociability? To address this question, this seminar will focus on theories of cultural production and circulation as well as case studies from both earlier historical periods and contemporary culture.

Every historical period has its examples of the ways literature has generated new forms or modes of sociability and transformed old ones: literary debates generated new modes of cultural engagement in Enlightenment-era coffee houses; out of Restoration theatre culture inspired controversy about the relationship between women and prostitution; 1830s New York City saw publics coalesce around racial performance and textual “blackface” in newspapers. For more recent examples, we can turn to the ways second-wave feminists made poetry-reading central to their consciousness-raising groups, the uses anti-globalization activists make of global technologies to organize alternative cultural resistance, or the emergence of transgender identities in the wake of Leslie Feinberg’s book Transgender Warriors. But how exactly should we understand the relationship between cultural forms and the audience forms and the publics they produce? What, in short, are the possibilities—as well as the limits—of what literature can do in the world?

In recent years, it has been common for literary and cultural critics to focus on the politics of literature and culture in terms of the (usually narrative) content of a cultural object. This course aims to augment this approach to reading politically by focusing less on what texts mean and more on how they mean and what they can be said to do: the forms they take, the media and objects through which they circulate, the affects they generate, and the social constituencies they help consolidate. This course thus invites students to consider theories of texts’ social effects in terms of their cultural circulation: how they produce audiences, take unpredicted paths through the world, consolidate social groups, and even generate identity categories.

To do so, we will bring together concerns from a number of overlapping fields including reader response criticism, linguistic anthropology, history of the book, French and German cultural theory (from the Adorno to Bourdieu), public sphere theory, and literary criticism. Theoretical texts will include readings such as the following: Theodor Adorno “Lyric and Society”; Greg Urban from Metaphysical Community: The Interplay Between the Senses and the Intellect; Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht The Production of Presence: What Meaning Cannot Convey; Karl Marx The Grundrisse and from Capital; Lauren Berlant from The Female Complaint, Michael Warner Publics and Counterpublics; Benjamin Lee Talking Heads; Gerard Genette Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation; Nietzche “On The Utility and Liability of History for Life”; Frederic Jameson The Political Unconscious; Stanley Fish Is There a Text In This Class?; Janice Radway Reading the Romance; and Walter Benjamin The Work of Art In the Age of Mechanical Reproduction and Pierre Bourdieu The Field of Cultural Production; D.F. McKenzie “The Sociology of a Text: Orality, Literacy, and Print in early New Zealand,” Martin Heidegger “The Age of the World Picture.”

Medieval Texts: Medieval Dissent: Plowmen, Lollards, and Outlaws
In 1381, Wat Tyler led an army of peasants into London in the first documented popular revolt in English history. Driven by agrarian unrest, encouraged by priests like John Ball, and calling for legal and social reform, they burned the palace of the Savoy, London home of John of Gaunt, and confronted the king himself on the plain of Smithfield. It is said that at the head of the peasants' procession was someone reciting a passage from The Vision of Piers the Plowman by William Langland. While this use of his text may have shocked Langland into a more conservative revision of the work, it was not inappropriate. The issues of social responsibility among the "estates," and of the failure of the religious to practice what they preach, were central to his work.

Piers refers disparagingly to those who recite ballads of Robin Hood, and this is the period of Robin Hood ballads, which, despite Langland's dismissal of them, are closely linked to the themes of Piers Plowman. The earliest stories of Robin Hood make him a representative of the yeoman class, the lower gentry, who, like the peasants, had grievances against the powerful, including the "lords" of religion. It is interesting that in our earliest known Robin Hood story, it is the Abbot of St. Mary's Abbey in York who is the principal villain; it is Robin, not the abbot, who proves to be the "true" Christian, practicing the virtue of charity and honouring St. Mary Magdalene, patron saint of the lowly.

This is also the period of calls for religious and social reform under John Wyclif, and his followers, the Lollards, raised another revolt in the early fifteenth century, seeking the violent overthrow of Henry IV. They were violently suppressed, outlawed and driven underground, but survived and continued to be a voice for reform until the period of the Protestant Reformation.

In this course, we will consider some of the literature produced by dissenting voices in late medieval England, including the letters of John Ball, the writings of the Lollards, works of anti-clerical satire, Langland's Piers Plowman and other "Piers" works which it inspired in subsequent generations, and various of the earliest tales of Robin Hood. Issues of social criticism and difference, of heresy and rebellion, of tolerance and intolerance will be considered within the literature and history of fourteenth- and fifteenth-century England.

Literary Themes: On Violence
This course will provide an opportunity to compare philosophical, sociocultural, and literary conceptions of violence in order to evaluate how each portrays the interrelations between subject formation, witnessing, complicity, and resistance. The general aim is to introduce methods of critical discourse analysis (with an emphasis on modes of figuration) while familiarizing ourselves with the interdisciplinary intellectual histories that inform recent topics in literary and cultural studies. This term, we will begin in the 19th century with the master-slave dialectic from G.W.F. Hegel’s The Phenomenology of Spirit as well as selections from his Philosophy of Right (week 1). Georges Sorel’s syndicalist theory of the state and revolution will prepare us for a close reading of Walter Benjamin’s grafting of Marxism onto Jewish Messianism in “The Critique of Violence,” which revises Sorelian figures (week 2). A close friend of Benjamin, Hannah Arendt shared his inclination to rethink the narrative form of historical writing as evinced in The Origins of Totalitarianism, which configures the histories of anti-Semitism and imperialism with the modes of persecution and terror deployed by the Third Reich and the USSR (weeks 3-5). Having reviewed Arendt’s prescient yet contested theses about imperialism from The Origins, we will subsequently look at Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth (week 5) in order to reflect on the case for violence that contravenes against colonial and racist structures of domination. Following our evaluation of selected writings and lectures on governmentality, security, and biopower by Michel Foucault (weeks 6-7), Giorgio Agamben’s Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (week 8) will bridge our reading of Arendt with both Foucault and Judith Butler’s Precarious Life, a collection of essays that draws on Agamben among others as she targets both the covert and explicit forms of violence that states have mobilized in the course of pursuing the so-called “war on terror” (week 9). Susan Sontag’s Regarding the Pain of Others (week 10) and J.M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians (week 11) will serve as departure points for our reflections on the power dynamics at stake in witnessing war and atrocities at different levels of proximity. The course will conclude with Talal Asad’s On Suicide Bombing (week 12) and Don DeLillo’s Falling Man (week 13), which will provide occasions to mark the 10th year anniversary of September 11th. Ultimately, then, Coetzee’s and DeLillo’s novels will also give us opportunities to reassess the explanatory value of the theories we have read up until this point as we explore examples of literature’s capacity to bear witness to cataclysmic histories and events.

An Epithalamion

2011-08-20T19:38:00.000-07:00

John Donne has long been among my favourite poets. In the context of seventeenth century English literature, he (along with George Herbert, another Anglican parishoner) provides a nice counterbalance to Milton's tepid relationship to the body.

Indeed, it seemed quite natural that I should turn to Donne's poetry after being asked to select and read something "poetic" at a friend's wedding. But selecting a poem from Donne's corpus turned out to be quite difficult; if it's not about death or sex, it's about frustrated desire--not the kind of thing you want to read at the wedding of one of your best friends. After poring through an anthology of Donne's poetry, this epithalamion, or marriage song, turned out to be my best option. Not only does it locate love in the life/death of St. Valentine; it's also full of understated Christian allegory. Although it was a little bit awkward to read (maybe I should have just gone with something by e.e. cummings), I thought it quite fitting for an outdoor wedding. I guess I'm on a bird kick.

Below, I've posted what I ended up reading. Follow the link for the last several stanzas.

AN EPITHALAMION, OR MARRIAGE SONG ON THE LADY ELIZABETH AND COUNT PALATINE BEING MARRIED ON ST. VALENTINE'S DAY

by John Donne

I.
HAIL Bishop Valentine, whose day this is ;
         All the air is thy diocese,
         And all the chirping choristers
And other birds are thy parishioners ;
         Thou marriest every year
The lyric lark, and the grave whispering dove,
The sparrow that neglects his life for love,
The household bird with the red stomacher ;
         Thou makest the blackbird speed as soon,
As doth the goldfinch, or the halcyon ;
The husband cock looks out, and straight is sped,
And meets his wife, which brings her feather-bed.
This day more cheerfully than ever shine ;
This day, which might enflame thyself, old Valentine.

II.
Till now, thou warmd'st with multiplying loves
         Two larks, two sparrows, or two doves ;
         All that is nothing unto this ;
For thou this day couplest two phoenixes ;
         Thou makst a taper see
What the sun never saw, and what the ark
—Which was of fouls and beasts the cage and park—
Did not contain, one bed contains, through thee ;
         Two phoenixes, whose joined breasts
Are unto one another mutual nests,
Where motion kindles such fires as shall give
Young phoenixes, and yet the old shall live ;
Whose love and courage never shall decline,
But make the whole year through, thy day, O Valentine.

On the London riots

2011-08-10T09:59:00.000-07:00

In the flurry of media coverage on this week's UK riots (see below), the most polarized commentaries take the form of a classic dialectic between structure and agency. Right wing commentators are quick to condemn such violence as immoral and apolitical, while left wing commentators just as predictably turn our attention to the social/economic structures that underwrite this mayhem. If the Right is too narrow in its naive understanding of human agency--and it usually is--the Left can also be at fault for privileging structural analysis over individual accountability, coming dangerously close to a fatalistic understanding of the status quo and thereby eroding the possibilities for the improvement of actually existing social conditions. Such social pessimism is precisely what the Left has traditionally sought to counter. Indeed, a broader scope of critical analysis is necessary (which can and should include moral outrage), but we must be careful where we direct our outrage and consider how best to counter these events.

Real collective responsibility doesn't write off individual agency, but places it in a broader network of social forces. As the global economic crisis increasingly demonstrates, such responsibility is barely present within Western capitalism; rather, we are witnessing a growing disparity between rich and poor, as countries in Europe and North America struggle to maintain class stratification with increased austerity measures.

Here, I've collected links to some of the best articles and blog posts on the UK riots I've come across so far:

Panic on the Streets of London - Laurie Penny (via Common Dreams)
An open letter to those who condemn looting - Evan Calder Williams (via Socialism and/or Barbarism)
The Riots: A grim mirror image of neo-liberal Britain - Tom Fox (via Red Pepper)
The London riots: On consumerism coming home to roost - Zygmunt Bauman (via Social Europe Journal)
Caring costs - but so do riots - Camila Batmanghelidjh (via The Independent)
Things I believe about the London riots - David Hill (via The Guardian)
There is a context to London's riots that can't be ignored - Nina Power (via The Guardian)

Finally, a special report from Al-Jezeera demonstrates the difficulty (and divisiveness) of accounting for and pinpointing the specific social/economic/cultural forces that have contributed to the riots.

Language and immersion in French Canada

2011-08-08T08:40:00.000-07:00

Sadly, bi-lingualism is one of Canada's least convincing national myths. Can you really blame me for being cynical, having come to Quebec from Alberta, Canada's bastion of Western interests (replete with it's own weird separatist fantasies)?

French immersion in Quebec is particularly embarrassing for those of us who've been taught French as a second language for the better part of our young lives (I was in French classes from Grade 4 until Grade 11--that's seven years!) and come away without the ability to communicate. One significant problem with the French education I received in elementary/secondary school is that there was no attention given to phonetics; oral communication in general was little more than an afterthought. This makes sense, given the fact that French is rarely spoken outside of Quebec, and, as with all skills, practice is everything.  

It's been eight years since I've taken a French class, so not only was I way out of practice when I began this immersion program, I had forgotten almost all of the little vocabulary I was taught in school. In Quebec, I felt like I was actually learning something. There was a lot of review, but review was what I needed, especially because my mindset was completely different this time around. I suppose that's one of the major differences between the immersion experience and the mandatory language classes I remember hating in elementary school. With this new sense of urgency, several things became clear to me.  

First, and most obviously, context is crucial. To an Anglophone like me, spoken French seems like its riddled with homonyms. Not only that: French is spoken with incredibly fluidity. It's often hard to know where one word stops and another begins. This was true for my own comprehension but also in my efforts to communicate. There were many occasions where I put forward what I thought was a clear phrase--grammatically correct, and so on--and it turned out I had said something I hadn't intended.

Second, speech is a bodily practice. You'd think that after taking French through most of elementary/secondary school, I'd at least be able to pronounce things properly, but there are plenty of words and phrases that are next to impossible for native English speakers to say. It also works from the other side: all the French people I met had just as much difficulty with common English words (a hard "H" is next to impossible). While English is riddled with harsh-sounding consonants, with stops and starts, French strings soft vowel sounds together in unworkable combinations. In both cases, it really tires out your mouth; which, of course, has a lot to do with where the tongue is positioned and which muscles have been conditioned by everyday speech.   

There are elementary schools in Western Canada that offer programs in French immersion--and had the option been available to me, I would have been glad for it--but until our public schools treat second language classes like the invaluable resources for life that they are (and this means hiring French teachers who can actually speak French), we'll have to rely on programs like Explore.

New Music: Bjork's Biophilia

2011-07-26T12:48:00.000-07:00

I've now been following Bjork for over a decade. Listening to 2007's Volta, I remember feeling that she was trying to do too much. 2011's Biophilia seems like it could be more focused; then again, it's also been specially designed as an ipod app, and as someone who doesn't have an iphone, I don't really know what this entails.

Her first single, "Crystalline," leaked weeks ago and has reemerged with video treatment by Michel Gondry. Gondry's video collaborations with Bjork are second to none and, in my opinion, "Crystalline" follows suit. Not only is it her best track in years, Gondry taps into the funkadelic pulse of Bjork's rapturous eco-narrative. The result is dazzling and properly ridiculous.

Biophilia is out 9/27 via Nonesuch/One Little Indian

For those hot summer nights...

2011-07-24T20:11:00.000-07:00

On Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

2011-07-22T17:21:00.000-07:00

"My childhood just gasped its last breath."

I heard many statements like this as I left the movie theatre the other night, and I'm not going to pretend like I don't share the sentiment: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part II effectively concluded an important period of collective imagination for a large portion of my generation.

Some of us have been following J.K. Rowling's series for over twelve years, enjoying the exploits of Harry, Ron and Hermione through our most awkward (i.e., formative) years. When I first sat down with Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows four years ago, I was, like many, dismayed at the final book's cringe-inducing epilogue; but after seeing the final scene acted out on film (where Harry, Ron and Hermione meet at Platform 9 & 3/4 nineteen years into the future, helping their own children board the train to Hogwarts), I was actually glad it was there. It's still slightly clunky and out of place; but after the gravity of what had just passed for Rowling's characters--the destruction of Hogwarts, the defeat of Voldemort, and the inexplicable "resurrection" of Harry--the context of the theatre helped me realize that we all desired some kind of denouement, some kind of release of tension and anxiety. It was nearly tangible. As the "well-aged" figures of Harry, Ron, and Hermione appeared on screen, laughter filled the theatre; applause soon followed. After bringing to climax seven films' worth of rising action, The Deathly Hallows ended with a reminder that the franchise has always been an irreducibly social phenomenon, and, as such, the various anxieties that permeate contemporary British culture (economic, religious, environmental, and so on) surface of in compelling ways. (I was reminded of this again in Voldemort's death scene, where he more or less disintegrates into flakes of ash that fill the sky, much like the volcanic ash that grounded flights and caused European airports to shut down their services a couple years back).

For me, the final installment of the Harry Potter franchise demonstrated again that a large part of our social imaginary has been forged not only in the practice of reading literature, but via the very Western archetypes I've committed a good deal of my time and effort to studying. This observation may seem banal and obvious, but, all the same, it has significance for me. Why? Because over the last year, I've become (rightly) discouraged in my studies: most of the difficulty with my project and the methodology I'm currently working through has to do with historical anachronism and cultural currency. Perhaps such difficulty has something to do with the critical position I've more or less taken up, wherein one's methodology must not only be historically appropriate, but socially progressive and politically conscious. Yeah, it's a tall order. No wonder I'm having doubts.

I'll be the first to argue that we still have much to learn from the literary production of the seventeenth century--while acknowledging that "literary production" itself is generally a product of retrospective analysis. But how can I be attentive to my own time and place, as well as the critical resources that are ready to hand, while giving the objects of my study their due? This is perhaps the most important of several questions that I'll be struggling through (or bumping up against) as I write my thesis.

Of course, the last novel of the Harry Potter saga arrived in 2007, but the film series inadvertently prolonged the narrative and, for the vast majority of Harry Potter fans (who are more accustomed to the flashes of a screen than they are to the pages of a book), instantiated it. The popularity of such a film demonstrates again that the generation currently preparing for positions of power is no less (perhaps even more) responsive to Christian allegory and classical archetypes than their progenitors. Again, the social and economic factors that currently condition this kind of popular nostalgia go without saying.

Summer Anthems 2011

2011-07-08T13:47:00.000-07:00

I've recently begun a French immersion program in Quebec City, and can actually feel my aptitude for English dwindling as I write this. Processing every word twice can be pretty exhausting, especially for monolingual anglophones from the prairies. That being said, it's only my first week, and I've already fallen in love with the city. It definitely lives up to the hype.

Below, you'll find two gorgeous videos with music to match. At this point in the summer, you can't go wrong with psychedelic chamber-pop.

And, finally, an electro-pop anthem for all the clubbers out there:

Pictureplane - "Real is a Feeling"

Sled Island recap

2011-06-27T22:23:00.000-07:00

I've spent the last five days in Calgary listening to live music, complaining about scenesters, and staying up well past my bedtime. The Sled Island music and arts festival boasts over 200 artists hosted by twenty-odd venues scattered throughout downtown Calgary.

As with most large-scale festivals, scheduling conflicts are inevitable, so you've got to choose your venues carefully. I was sad to miss the lo-fi prestige of Thee Oh Sees and Times New Viking, as well as Kurt Vile's nostagia trip through the sixties, and pretty devastated to miss an unadvertised performance by Purity Ring (a little-known group from Edmonton that has only released two songs, each of which are among my favourite tracks of the year).

For every amazing performance there was a band that turned my stomach. For me, the worst of these were Crocodiles (a band I was excited to see) and the Dandy Warhols (a band I stopped caring about ages ago). The same level of self-aware coolness was common to both. Perhaps I saw Crocodiles at the wrong point in the evening, but for a group of musicians so wholly infatuated with themselves, I expected some musical inventiveness or some acknowledgment of the crowd that was lapping up their lacklustre homage to the Jesus and Mary Chain. Pretense is a given at festivals like this, but intoxicated crowds aren't going to let you off the hook for merely producing cool-sounding drivel (then again, I can't see how else anyone can enjoy the Dandy Warhols).

On a different note, here's a sampling of some of the outstanding artists I got to see perform.

Blonde Redhead were hit and miss. I consider myself a relatively devoted fan, but I can't say I was totally impressed with their show. It was clear from the start that they were seasoned professionals with loads of talent, but their setlist kept losing momentum. Their old material shone but their most recent songs, especially from the unsuccessful Penny Sparkle didn't translate well into a live setting.
"23"

Wild Flag were one of the festival's most pleasant surprises. Despite being comprised of legendary rock 'n roll babes from the nineties (members of Sleater-Kinney, Helium, and the Minders), they played every show like it was their first: unlike dismally trendy hipster acts (Crocodiles, for instance), the girls in Wild Flag had no sense of entitlement. Every song was a struggle to win over the audience.
"Glass Tambourine"

I wasn't sure what to expect with Twin Shadow, but they managed to transform the disco stylings of their studio album into successful arena rock.
"Castles in the Snow"

Parts & Labor, another great band I came into the festival knowing very little about, put on a noisy, high energy show that I had to cut short. Three songs in, I could see they were just getting started and I was sad to go. Scheduling, dammit!
"Fractured Skies"

Chad Vangaalen, as always, did not disappoint. He seemed characteristically awkward and uncomfortable on stage, which I wasn't expecting since he was playing for a hometown audience. Then again, it's that social anxiety that makes his stage banter so entertaining. His set was made up mostly of new material from the reverb-heavy Diaper Island, and I think the songs actually grew on me as I saw them being performed.
"Freedom for a Policeman"

Of Montreal were as advertised. Kevin Barnes doesn't have the class of David Bowie, but he's probably the closest thing our generation has to the thin white duke. I was thankful for a strong showing of material from Hissing Fauna, are you the Destroyer?, which I still consider their best to date. There were about half a dozen extras on stage during a given song, each one dressed like a flamboyant Mexican wrestler; and they provided the crowd with balloons, streamers, and all the libido they could handle.
"Coquet Coquette"

Bob Mould on church going

2011-06-27T13:51:00.000-07:00

I was recently sent this excerpt from Bob Mould's newly released autobiography, See a Little Light: The Trail of Rage and Melody. For those unfamiliar with Mould's significance, he's considered one of America's post-punk greats--the abrasive, absolutely relentless frontman of Hüsker Dü: a band that brought hardcore punk music into a head-on collision with arena-sized ambition and pop melody. Although I'm not very familiar with Mould's solo work, Zen Arcade (1984) and New Day Rising (1985) are among my favourite albums to blast when my mood is particularly volatile. In his memoir, Mould shares about his battles with substance abuse, coming to terms with his homosexuality, his ambivalent Catholicism, and his ongoing music career. Here's Mould on a recent church going experience:

It was a late-afternoon Mass on Saturday, and St. Matthew’s is one of the biggest Catholic churches in DC. . . . I walked in, went up the stairs, dipped my hand into the water, and motioned the sign of the cross. We went in, found Steve’s usual pew, knelt in the aisle before entering, and I again crossed myself. We lowered the altar bench, and for the first time in thirty years, I knelt in front of God. I hadn’t been to church since confirmation.

Down the aisle comes Father Caulfield, thirty-something, handsome, tall, inspirational—the kind of person who believes so hard that, when he looked up to the top of the cathedral, I feared he would shoot right through the roof. He’s that close to God, speaking in measured words, and we people begin singing again.

The routine comes back to me, the whole drill; it didn’t change one bit. It’s not like they start with the sermon and then put a Sun Ra song in the middle—everything stays exactly the same. The set list doesn’t change. I’m up, I’m down, I’m kneeling, I’m standing, I’m singing, I’m praying. The service lasted an hour.

Mass was a levelling and humbling experience that gave me a different perspective on life. There was music, there was readings, there was community. There was the moment in the service when you greet your neighbour, someone you’ve probably never seen before in your life and may never see again outside of the church. Everyone is united around one thing—the religious experience. It brings many different kinds of people together into one room, which is the opposite of living in the gay ghetto.

I realized I was going to be a ‘cafeteria Catholic,’ picking and choosing the parts that worked for me. Instead of rebelling against or wholesale dismissing the Church, I tried to find the goodness in what the Church had to offer. And I tried to find a point of compassion in the experience that I could build from. (348-350)

Bob Mould, with Michael Azerrad. See a Little Light: The Trail of Rage and Melody. New York: Little, Brown, 2011.

New Music: Bon Iver

2011-06-22T16:09:00.000-07:00

Bon Iver (aka Justin Vernon) has just released his self-titled follow-up to 2007's For Emma, Forever Ago, an album I never really got into. I streamed the new album last week and was struck by its dense orchestration and carefully crafted soundscapes. Now that it's officially out, Bon Iver (which probably has more in common with the style of Vernon's side project, Volcano Choir) is garnering rave reviews across the board: it's lush, layered, and, like Bon Iver's celebrated debut, seems to capture Vernon at his most intimate and vulnerable. It also features some beautiful album art (above).

Below you'll find Vernon in a recent interview with Stephen Colbert and a performance of the album's lead single, "Calgary." The guy is incredibly likable, and I'm expecting to see Bon Iver near the top of virtually every critic's list come December. It may sound a little too close to Coldplay at first, but don't let his Chris Martin-esque falsetto fool you: this isn't mere sentimental schmaltz. It's friggin' gorgeous.

bi on tcr by yardie4lifever2

The Lighter Side: Tina Fey's Bossypants and Carl Wilson's Let's Talk About Love

2011-06-21T09:56:00.000-07:00

I wouldn't still be in academia if I didn't find some pleasure in it, but during the school semester there's usually something else at stake beyond personal enjoyment. Summer is a bit different. I've finally had the chance to get through two books I've been dying to read. The first, Tina Fey's new "memoir" Bossypants, is pretty much what you'd expect from the former Saturday Night Live writer (and 30 Rock star/writer/creator/etc.). In other words, it's full of smart, funny, sarcastic, and occasionally sentimental stories/observations from her experiences as a suburban improv nerd, Second City starlet, SNL writer, and reluctant Sarah Palin impersonator. The cover image gets the tone of the book just right: Fey is full of self-deprecation, and rarely makes a joke without including herself as the punchline; but she's equally eager to take up the feminist mantle, especially when it comes to equality in the workplace. Even though it's crammed with humour, Bossypants has a semi-serious subtheme: it's not a man's world anymore (well, in a lot of cases it still is, but Fey and her SNL buddy, Amy Poehler, aren't gonna let that dictate the terms of their comedy).

Second, and even more enjoyable: Carl Wilson's 2007 book for the 33 1/3 series, devoted to the 1997 album by Celine Dion, Let's Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste. I've known about this book for a while and have had friends/roommates read it right in front of me. Why couldn't I take the hint and read it back then? I probably could have saved my self some embarrassment.

It's a strange little book, even within the context of Continuum's series on seminal or classic albums. Every other book in the series finds its writer enamoured with its subject, but Wilson chooses to write on the music critics favourite scapegoat, Celine Dion. Wilson took on this project because he's curious about her global popularity and because he wants to understand his own deep-seated bias toward her music. Some of the content is confessional (like myself, Wilson grew up listening to alternative rock music and made a constant effort distance himself from the "shmaltz" of contemporary pop), but the book seamlessly weaves together interviews with fans; cultural, economic, political and sociological analysis (including the Francophone tumult that gave rise to Celine Dion's career, the way this tension appears throughout her albums and career, and the apex of her popularity at the Oscars in 1997) ; as well as several brief accounts of aesthetic theory, from Kant's theory of "disinterestedness" to Pierre Bourdieu's sociological analysis of "cultural capital." The largest success of Wilson's book, in my reading, is in forcing me to locate my own cultural biases, and see the ways my taste for or appreciation of more "difficult" music is often more shallow than the mainstream offerings of ubiquitous artists like Celine Dion.

The "lesson" is well-represented in the dialectical pairing of Dion with another artist who performed at the 1997 Oscars. As Wilson recounts in an interview, "Elliott Smith serves as Celine Dion's foil in the early part of the book, partly because they met upon the field of not-much-honor at the Oscars in 1998 and Dion roundly trounced my own little indie-songwriting hero. . . . The irony is that when Dion and Smith met at the Oscars, she was so unexpectedly sweet to him that he ended up defending her to friends who criticized her, for the rest of his all-too-brief, burnt life."

Another related success of the book, for me anyway, is that it points out the hypocrisy of most anti-sentimentalist positions. Wilson is talking about music (we antisentimentalists are often prone to celebrating Noise/Industrial music, as well as the authentic sounds of lo-fi indie rock), but I think he also meant it to apply more broadly, to other cultural experiences. Especially in the more serious realms of literature and critical theory, sentiment (often characterized as the flip-side of cold rationalism) is often the scapegoat. Such critical posturing shows how much our culture still celebrates the strong and the stoic without questioning its presuppositions. Hating Celine Dion isn't just an aesthetic choice, it also has ethical implications: it's a way of elevating oneself above her fans, who tend to be poor adult women living in flyover states and shopping at big-box stores. Celine Dion's music, writes Wilson, "deals with problems that don’t require leaps of imagination but require other efforts, like patience, or compromise”; although it is “lousy music to make aesthetic judgments to,” it “might be excellent for having a first kiss, or burying your grandma, or breaking down in tears.” And he ends the book with a Celine-inspired plea for “democratic” criticism: “not a limp open-mindedness” but a refusal to let ourselves (and our own "conspicuous consumption") off the hook and pigeon-hole others. Celine, he says, “stinks of democracy,” and his effort to understand her has taught him to “relish the plenitude of tastes, to admire a well-put-together taste set that’s alien to our own.”

Beirut revisited

2011-06-07T13:21:00.000-07:00

Today it was announced that indie pop darlings Beirut (the Eastern-European-gypsy styled project of New Mexico native Zach Condon) will have a new LP on store shelves this August. Beirut emerged in the latter half of the 00s, as I was beginning my first degree; so I have a special attachment to Condon's work--one that I'd forgotten about until today. It's always struck me as rather odd that Beirut could emerge from the annals of indie pop and find such favour among kids who've been conditioned by punchy guitars, new wave synths and driving disco beats. Perhaps what makes Beirut's deeply anachronistic sound so refreshing is the fact that it's defiantly not a trendy revival of, say, eighties synth-pop or sixties psych-rock--instead, we hear a style of music that our generation never had a chance to forget.

One of the remarkable things about Beirut is how little things change from album to album; and how wonderfully simple Condon's songwriting remains throughout his discography. This isn't mere nostalgia: every one of Beirut's releases is irreducibly romantic, sure, but such romance is deeply self-aware. Even Condon's most recent pair of EPs, which are decidedly less straightforward than anything he's ever done (one of them flirts with electronica), hold the clues of a past that we never knew.

I suppose what I'm trying to get across is that describing the music of Beirut as nostalgic, anachronistic, or even romantic (as nearly all music critics do), seems to miss something. I prefer to think of Beirut's music as a utopian form of art, not unrelated to the way in which Victorians like William Morris reproduced medieval legends (or alternate histories) in a context of rapid industrialization and the ongoing erosion of social distinctions. Of course, Condon's music doesn't really lend itself to any real kind of social unification; personally, I find it makes me mopey and introspective, and I imagine that it provokes similar emotions in other listeners. But the utopian impulse is there all the same, and I can't help thinking that Beirut's "no place" of the past supplements my generation's collective hunger for a better history.

On his forthcoming album, The Rip Tide, Condon returns again to the whimsical folk music and the Balkan sound that initially inspired him. Take a listen to the album's debut single "East Harlem."

Beirut - East Harlem by Revolver USA

Panda Bear - "Slow Motion" + Interview

2011-06-07T12:07:00.000-07:00

Behold!

2011-06-02T12:14:00.000-07:00

Images of the spray booth I helped build a couple weeks back. This sleek, modern design has been brought to you by Global Finishing Solutions Inc., a massive corporation that's only half as scary as its name suggests. No doubt the Winkler labourers will feel inspired when they roll in to work.

Summer at a glance

2011-05-28T19:25:00.000-07:00

At the end of the winter semester, I was treacherously close to returning to my old summer job: that perilous occupation known as treeplanting. My summer schedule was looking rather irregular and, with all the commuting I knew I'd be doing--back and forth between Manitoba and Alberta--I realized it would be hard to find a job for the summer. Instead of treeplanting, I've spent the last two weeks working at a construction-type job in my hometown. It wasn't hell, but given the fact that I had little to no down-time, it was incredibly draining. Even with the holiday this past week, I ended up at over a hundred hours. Waking up at 6am and driving home after 10pm was pretty typical. My longest day was 15 hours, but there were occasional lulls in which we stood around and ate peanuts (we didn't actually take breaks--although I got a half hour for lunch at 3pm). Our project consisted of building a massive steel booth to be used for painting farming machinery. It was the perfect job for my wild summer schedule (short!), it gave me a taste of the sort of manual labour I'd been dreaming about throughout last semester, and it provided me a chance to redeem myself (my last construction job didn't go so well); not only that, I have now made an exceptional contribution to Winkler's booming economy. Let's just say, Winkler's industrial sector makes for a pretty awkward bike ride.

I'll be spending the rest of the summer months working on my French (off to Laval in Quebec City for July), doing research preparation for my thesis (I'm visiting the Newberry Library in Chicago, which is home to a fantastic John Milton collection), and attending weddings (it seems that I'm running out of single friends).

Originally, I wanted to time my trip to Chicago so that it would coincide with the Pitchfork Music Festival. Although this didn't work out, there are so many festivals in the city over the summer, I should be able to make one of them work. For a $5.00 donation, I can attend the Green Music Fest in late June and see Yo La Tengo, the Thermals, and Les Savy Fav.

I've also assembled a list of preliminary readings that should get me in the right headspace for the next school year. Most of them offer accounts of political and religious turmoil in England during the latter half of the of seventeenth century. In particular, I'm interested in the work of the celebrated (but highly contested) Marxist historian, Christopher Hill. Part of my task for the summer is to position Milton's writing not only in relation to the political philosophies of his time (namely, those of Hobbes and Locke), but in relation to emerging groups of religious radicals and the consolidation of an English middle-class.

New Music: Wye Oak, Chad VanGaalen

2011-05-11T20:48:00.000-07:00

Of all the stuff I've been listening to over the last month it was Wye Oak's new album Civilian, in particular, that carried me through to the end of the semester. It's a soothing, satisfying record: cohesive and gentle, but incredibly cathartic and uncompromising at the same time. It's the kind of record, in other words, that you'll want to listen to all the way through. This is going to sound like the worst kind of cliche, but for me, Wye Oak have found a paradoxical balance, the fullest expression of which can be found in the alt-rock of the early 90s (I have no problem admitting that the closer an album comes to mapping fragility and aggression simultaneously--like, say, Siamese Dream or Rid of Me--the more likely I am to embrace it). So it's a little creepy how much this album seems suited to my tastes. Wye Oak's second proper LP highlights a stunning vocalist (Jenn Wasner), ample feedback, grungy breakdowns and lyrics with vaguely religious themes. For instance, there seems to be an ongoing dialectic between Creation and Evolution in Wasner's lyrics that's oddly compelling. Musically, things appear relatively stripped down (the band performs as a two-piece), but every so often Wye Oak's sound becomes incredibly expansive. I've posted my favourite track ("Dog Eyes") below. It rocks pretty hard.

I've also been enjoying Chad VanGaalen's latest (fourth, I guess) album, Diaper Island. It appears to be tied together by themes of domestic life, but no worries: there's still plenty of weird stuff going on. Musically, however, it's significantly more well-behaved than his previous albums. That's not necessarily a bad thing, especially for those of us who loved Women's Public Strain (produced by Chad last year). Most of the press surrounding the album has emphasized its straight forward rock aesthetic, but Chad's been toeing that line as long as he's been putting out records. He's reported to have submitted over three albums worth of post-Soft Airplane material to Sub Pop for this album, so we'll have plenty of b-sides to look forward to. The record is out May 17, and is currently available for streaming via Paste. I've devoted a lot of time to Chad's previous records, so I'm not going to get ahead of myself and call this his best; then again, I'm not going to pretend that Diaper Island isn't awesome, and I'm sure I'll be posting on it again. The song below is a real stunner. This ain't Bob Dylan's "Sara."

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I should probably also mention some of the big guns.

Yes, Panda Bear's Tomboy makes good on the hype, and, personally, I think it betters 2007's Person Pitch. While we're speaking of albums that improve on their predecessors, I've also been enjoying the latest effort from Seattle's Fleet Foxes (Helplessness Blues) and tUnEyArDs' (yes, the mixed cases are intentional) second album, w h o k i l l. In the coming weeks, I'll be looking forward to new music from the Antlers, Wild Beasts, and Gang Gang Dance.

the end of coursework

2011-05-07T15:31:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I submitted the last assignment required for my MA coursework. I guess that means I'm half-way done my degree. I'll be spending the summer working on my French and preparing for my thesis. Over the past semester, I've been posting excerpts from paper proposals, and I thought it might be worth linking to them here as a way of wrapping things up.

I wrote two essays that dealt extensively with the work of Walter Benjamin. This research strategy ended up saving me a lot of time and effort. One essay focused on Benjamin's methodology of historical materialism in order to engage questions of cultural memory--raised by poststructuralism (most notably in Derrida's Archive Fever and Foucault's Archaeology of Knowledge)--summed up in the figure of the archive; the other essay was an attempt to convince my deluded professor that there was more to recover from Benjamin's discussion of literature than its "inherent" power to "defamiliarize" readers. See related posts here and here.

My third and final essay developed out of a class on Shakespeare that brought his early modern representations of class into conversation with the return of the commons we're witnessing in contemporary theory. My paper drew on Cesare Casarino's discussion of the common, as well as Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri's redefinition of love (as a force of ontological becoming witnessed in the collective solidarity of the poor) from their 2010 book Commonwealth, in order to address the apparent class transitions that occur in King Lear and Timon of Athens. See related post here.

I'm not sure whether these papers ended up being successful, but the readings they allowed me to do were absolutely worthwhile.

R.E.M. - Talk about the Passion

2011-04-22T08:22:00.000-07:00

Failing Christ's Passion

2011-04-21T23:21:00.000-07:00

Milton is often chided for being squeamish when it comes to the subject of the body. Nowhere is this discomfort more evident than in the fact that his only poem devoted to Christ's Passion remains unfinished. Even Paradise Regain'd, his later work on the life of Christ, can only offer several vague gestures toward the Son's impending crucifixion. The Passion was begun at Christmas 1629, when Milton was 21. Later in his 1645 Poems Milton marks the unfinished poem's impasse with a statement of explanation:

"This subject the author finding it to be above the years he had when he wrote it, and nothing satisfied with what was begun, left it unfinished."

Thus, despite its failure, Milton still chose to include the poem in his first collection of published verse. Indeed, one does not have to look hard for poetry that fully invests itself in the suffering of Christ (Donne and Herbert are not far off); in Milton's own life and work, however, this failure to recount Christ's death shows that some of the best theological points are made in their absence.

            The Passion

 
  Ere-while of Musick, and Ethereal mirth,
  Wherwith the stage of Ayr and Earth did ring,
  And joyous news of heav'nly Infants birth,
  My muse with Angels did divide to sing;
  But headlong joy is ever on the wing,
    In Wintry solstice like the shortn'd light
  Soon swallow'd up in dark and long out-living night.

                     II

  For now to sorrow must I tune my song,
  And set my Harpe to notes of saddest wo,
  Which on our dearest Lord did sease er'e long,
  Dangers, and snares, and wrongs, and worse then so,
  Which he for us did freely undergo.
    Most perfect Heroe, try'd in heaviest plight
  Of labours huge and hard, too hard for human wight.

                     III

  He sov'ran Priest stooping his regall head
  That dropt with odorous oil down his fair eyes,
  Poor fleshly Tabernacle entered,
  His starry front low-rooft beneath the skies;
  O what a Mask was there, what a disguise!
    Yet more; the stroke of death he must abide,
  Then lies him meekly down fast by his Brethrens side.

                     IV

  These latter scenes confine my roving vers,
  To this Horizon is my Phoebus bound,
  His Godlike acts, and his temptations fierce,
  And former sufferings other where are found;
  Loud o're the rest Cremona's Trump doth sound;
    Me softer airs befit, and softer strings
  Of Lute, or Viol still, more apt for mournful things.

                      V

  Befriend me night best Patroness of grief,
  Over the Pole thy thickest mantle throw,
  And work my flatter'd fancy to belief,
  That Heav'n and Earth are colour'd with my wo;
  My sorrows are too dark for day to know:
    The leaves should all be black whereon I write,
  And letters where my tears have washt a wannish white.

                       VI

  See see the Chariot, and those rushing wheels,
  That whirl'd the Prophet up at Chebar flood,
  My spirit som transporting Cherub feels,
  To bear me where the Towers of Salem stood,
  Once glorious Towers, now sunk in guiltles blood;
    There doth my soul in holy vision sit
  In pensive trance, and anguish, and ecstatick fit.

                      VII

  Mine eye hath found that sad Sepulchral rock
  That was the Casket of Heav'ns richest store,
  And here though grief my feeble hands up-lock,
  Yet on the softned Quarry would I score
  My plaining vers as lively as before;
    For sure so well instructed are my tears,
  That they would fitly fall in order'd Characters.

                      VIII

  Or should I thence hurried on viewles wing,
  Take up a weeping on the Mountains wilde,
  The gentle neighbourhood of grove and spring
  Would soon unboosom all their Echoes milde,
  And I (for grief is easily beguild)
    Might think th' infection of my sorrows loud,
  Had got a race of mourners on som pregnant cloud.

  This Subject the Author finding to be above the yeers he had, when
he wrote it, and nothing satisfi'd with what was begun, left it
unfinisht.

Walter Benjamin: Archiving as Dialectical Strategy

2011-04-17T22:04:00.000-07:00

The Autumn of Central Paris (after Walter Benjamin)
R. B. Kitaj

History, for Walter Benjamin, always marks a site of political struggle. In this way, his ongoing attempt to rid his own work of the “ideology of progress” cannot be separated from a commitment to revolutionary politics. As Benjamin puts it in the Arcades Project, “the object’s rescue” by way of historical materialism “carries with it an immanent critique of the concept of progress.” Indeed, the commodification of all aspects of urban life in Benjamin’s time made Marx’s analysis of capital a necessity for historical materialism; but where Marx still relied on a discourse of progress, Benjamin set forward a dialectical model that froze contradiction in the form of an image: “where thinking comes to a standstill in a constellation saturated with tensions—there the dialectical image appears.” This version of the dialectic, writes Benjamin, “refutes everything ‘gradual’ about becoming and shows seeming ‘development’ to be a dialectical reversal . . . [as] the awakening from [a] dream.” Thus the Arcades Project, Benjamin’s unfinished attempt at a dialectical intervention in the dream-life of the collective, sees him assembling the material traces of nineteenth century Paris as “talismans” in order to present a “collective history—not life as it was, nor even life remembered, but life as it has been forgotten.”

Among well-known characters like the flaneur and the gambler, the collector is a recurrent figure in Benjamin’s writing. “What is decisive in collecting,” writes Benjamin, “is that the object is detached from all its original functions in order to enter the closest conceivable relation to things of the same kind.” In the collector, therefore, we see at work the beginnings of a dialectic of “reconstruction and recuperation.” The collector preserves objects only to reinsert them into new contexts and arrangements, thus transforming a metaphorical relation (which is tied to value as a commodity) into a metonymic one. This distinction between “metaphor” and “metonym” is, for Benjamin, displayed in his early work on Baroque allegory, and is not unrelated to the death of the “aura,” which we witness later in “an age of mechanical reproduction.” This leveling of signification closely parallels the production of value in the commodity.

Following Karl Krauss, Benjamin’s practice of collection, which defines the structure of the Arcades Project, is a form of citation, which restores writing to significance by displacing it from its original context and organizing it in another. “History,” writes Benjamin, “belongs to the concept of citation, however, that the historical object is in each case torn from its context.” As Terry Eagleton explains it, citation resembles “reproduction” (which opens possibilities) rather than “repetition” (which, like the commodity form, perpetually reinstates the “aura”): “in the mosaic of quotation as in the explications of baroque emblem, discourse is released from its own reified environs into a conveniently portable kind of signifying practice . . . to weave fresh correspondences across language.” Citation, then, is not simple transmission, but rather a dialectical interruption, which, through the reactivation of historical tensions produces new situations, and consequently, moments of awakening. In contrast to the bourgeois notion of a causal, monumental historicism, Benjamin understands “tradition” as a dynamic activity of destruction and production.

The destructive character stands at the front line of the traditionalists. Some pass things down to posterity, by making them untouchable and thus conserving them, others pass on situations, by making them practicable and thus liquidating them. The latter are called destructive. . . . The destructive character sees nothing permanent. But for this very reason he sees ways everywhere.

For Benjamin, history is opposed to tradition as the ruling classes are opposed to the exploited. Tradition is not alternative history, nor is it a secret narrative that runs beneath the history of the powerful; rather, suggests Eagleton, it is “a series of spasms or crises within class history itself, a particular set of articulations of that history.” Thus rather than charting out an alternate course, the historical materialist draws such crises, such forgotten situations, into a complex “constellation” of dialectical tension with the present.

Love and Property in King Lear

2011-04-13T08:33:00.000-07:00

Shakespeare's King Lear is often moralized into a plea for the body as a measure of equivalence between sense and speech, matter and value. The thrust of Edgar’s closing imperative, “Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say,” has been modeled for us by Cordelia, but as the play’s first scene of property exchange among Lear's daughters demonstrates, even speech that is reconciled in the body can render the subject as property (V.iii.326). While Goneril describes her love as “beyond what can be valued, rich or rare” and Regan gestures toward a love that makes her “an enemy to all other joys” (I.i.63, 75), Cordelia articulates a love that is no more than the self-evident “bond” she has daily performed; and, against the extravagant returns of her sisters, Lear interprets Cordelia’s love as a “nothing” because she refuses to give it the illusion of totality. Rather, her pragmatism and honesty sees her dividing up her love as though it were property, like a parody of Lear’s division of his kingdom: “half my love with him, half my care and duty” (I.i.104). By articulating the status of her love (and her body) as property (rather than dealing in abstract valuations like her sisters), Cordelia shows how the resolution of speech and feeling in the body (or, in Lear’s eyes, into “nothing”) still produces a valued object for exchange. As France declares, “She is herself a dowry” (I.i.243). By her negative gesture Cordelia makes herself into a surplus value in Lear’s filial system of exchange. What was “unprized” has now been made “precious.”

The play moves from Lear’s first mention of “nothing” (a sovereign annulment of filial bonds, which still governs the system of exchange) to a negative mode of “incorporation.” To negate the body’s value only to reinstall it as a more “desireable” of property follows from an understanding of love that is predicated on possession; but as the play progresses we see articulated a love that simultaneously dispossesses the loving subject and recognizes its own surplus in the common.

King Lear presents us with a handful of nobles who, as Edgar muses in Act 2 Scene 3, must become “nothing” in order to remain “something.” Before rushing to the play’s ambiguous conclusion and making that “something” into restored social capital, we might dwell on those scenes from the heath. Of course, we can read Edgar and Kent as figures that desire repatriation; figures that retain allegiance to a king who has provided them with wealth and friendship. But on the heath, Edgar recognizes the power of the negative as a kind of surplus common: “To be worst, / The lowest and most dejected thing of fortune, / Stands still in esperance, lives not in fear: / The lamentable change is from the best, / The worst turns to laughter” (IV.i.2-6). Here, Edgar expresses the surplus of his dejection: he has moved outside a debt economy and “owes nothing” to the hands that have shaped his fortune. In the same scene, the recently blinded Gloucester realizes something similar when he suggests, “Our means secure us, and our mere defects / Prove our commodities” (IV.i.20-21). Gloucester scorns the man “that will not see / Because he does not feel,” points to the “power” of the poor, and calls for “distribution to undo excess” (IV.i.70-73). Later as he prepares for suicide, Gloucester offers the rest of his “purse” to Edgar, unaware of the obvious irony that this small redistribution of wealth to the poor is, in fact, a transaction of filial obligation.
While “nothing” assists the exchange of property in Lear’s court and masquerades as “something” in Timon’s Athens, it takes on a different function on the heath. Here, Lear moves beyond the love-as-possession that animates his attitude towards his daughters and colours their “ingratitude” as a lost love-object (a loss that haunts the paternal bonds of love throughout the play). When Lear suggests that “Our basest beggars / Are in the poorest things superfluous” he points to a desire for surplus that is common to all.

Eagleton and Benjamin on tradition

2011-04-06T22:44:00.000-07:00

I'm currently working on a paper that deals with the archive (as a concept, a space, an activity, etc.) and with the historical materialist method of Walter Benjamin. Among other things, this means I can finally get around to reading Terry Eagleton's extended study of Benjamin from 1981, Walter Benjamin, or Towards a Revolutionary Criticism. So far, so good, though, as always, I find Eagleton's unrestrained verbosity rather tiresome. Eagleton begins with an unexpected detour into 17th century English literature (which, to my delight, features a good discussion of Milton) and proceeds through Benjamin's study of German tragic drama to a sporadic critique of post-structuralism. As is often the case, Eagleton's criticisms of Derrida and Foucault hold little water. On the other hand, he's a fine reader of Benjamin:

"Some pass things down to posterity," writes Benjamin in The Destructive Character, "by making them untouchable and thus conserving them, others pass on situations, by making them practical and thus liquidating them." What is transmitted by tradition is not "things," and least of all "monuments," but "situations"--not solitary artifacts but the strategies that construct and mobilize them. It is not that we constantly revaluate tradition; tradition is the practice of ceaselessly excavating, safeguarding, violating, discarding, and reinscribing the past. There is no tradition other than this, no set of ideal landmarks that then suffer modification. . . . What is at stake is not merely the spoils of situations but the situations themselves, the practices of digging and discovery, sightings and oversightings, which trace through the exhumed objects so deeply as to constitute a major part of their meaning.

New Music: the Liptonians, Flying Fox and the Hunter Gatherers

2011-03-28T23:10:00.000-07:00

Two bands visiting Edmonton this week happen to include friends of mine from Winnipeg. First, Flying Fox and the Hunter Gatherers ("operatic indie jazz") will be in town Wednesday night in support of their new album, Hans my Lion. Then on Friday, the Liptonians ("piano groove folky noise"), who are currently touring in support of Let's All March Back into the Sea, will be stopping in and playing a show with Edmonton's Whitsundays.

I should also point out that you can stream most of the new Flying Fox album and a few tracks from the Liptonians album through their respective websites.

Common time: Benjamin, Agamben and the Messianic

2011-03-15T10:29:00.000-07:00

While the historicist finds satisfaction with the establishment of causal connections between various events, suggests Walter Benjamin, the materialist historian “establishes a conception of the present as the ‘time of the now’ which is shot through with chips of Messianic time." Such a view of the past is inevitably bound up with redemption, and the Messianic promise of revolutionary act will, according to Benjamin, retroactively redeem and realize the muffled longings of the past—it will make good on the utopian promise of its failed revolutionary attempts. Therefore, our attempts to understand the past must take this negated longing into account. “Like every generation that preceded us,” writes Benjamin in his second of his Theses on the Philosophy of History, “we have been endowed with a weak Messianic power, a power to which the past has a claim. That claim cannot be settled cheaply. Historical materialists are aware of that."

In The Time That Remains, a commentary on Paul’s letter to the Romans, Agamben attempts “rescue” Messianic time from its common misconception as eschatology; this distinction, he argues, is essential to Paul’s letters. A Messianic conception of history does not wait for the Messiah to come (i.e., for the end of history), but is instead a paradigm of historical time in which we act as though the Messiah is already here. As Agamben has pointed out, this is not an apocalyptic vision of history; “the Messianic is not the end of time, but the time of the end.” Such time does not wait for a decisive moment but instead sees the present as "now-time." Another word for this is kairos (often translated as occasion, but in Paul’s sense, properly Messianic), which is traditionally opposed to chronos (chronological or secular time). Both concepts, Agamben points out, are necessarily interlaced such that “kairos is nothing more than seized chronos, a time remaining.” Messianic time, says Agamben, rather enigmatically, is the relation itself. The difference is minute, but it is also decisive.

For Paul, this means that we will retain out distinctions (callings, vocations), but they will cease to divide us—such categories (circumcision, for example) become “nothing.” For Paul, the divisions of law are not forgotten or annihilated, but are rendered "inoperative." The community that Paul is attempting to assemble is both inside and outside the law.

Benjamin’s “real state of exception” coincides with the messianic interruption. As Agamben points out in Homo Sacer, “from the juridico-political perspective, messianism is . . . a theory of the state of exception—except for the fact that in messianism there is no authority to proclaim the state of exception; instead, there is the Messiah to subvert its power.” Benjamin emphasizes that a connection to the Messiah is not to be created from this side of history.

Benjamin's conception of messianic time (now-time) shows us that we have something in common with the past, and lives in the faith that we will have something in common with the future.

Introduction to the Forest: As You Like It and the Pastoral

2011-03-07T20:52:00.000-08:00

As You Like It is peppered with pastoral ballads that characterize the forest as a sanctuary of subsistence and justice and a passing reference to "old Robin Hood of England" marks off the Forest of Arden as a potentially dangerous space of economic redistribution. While Shakespeare was busy writing the play, the actual forest of Arden was experiencing acute demographic problems, as timber was cleared for mining, industry, and convertible farming, and squatters vied with commoners for land.

With the Forest of Arden, Shakespeare also draws on a longstanding cultural tradition that dates back to the Norman invasion. Indeed, forest law goes back to the Norman conquest, indicated, as I’m sure many of us are aware, in the "Rhyme of King William." Not only a space of animal refuge, forests also became an asylum for English noblemen dispossessed of their lands and rights: many who could not accept subjugation or work the land as labourers, and who were too proud to beg, took to the forests and lived their as they could, hunting animals and harassing the Normans. Originally a juridical term for land that had been placed off limits by royal decree, the forest lies “outside the common juridical sphere." In his book on forests, Robert Harrison draws our attention to a treatise on forest law composed in 1592 by John Manwood. During this time of environmental degradation and enclosure, Manwood’s treatise set out to define the forest, in contrast to other natural habitats and explain the ancient laws that had seemingly been forgotten. For Manwood, writes Harrison, "a forest is a natural sanctuary [granted by the king]. The royal forests [gave] wildlife the same sort of asylum that the Church granted criminals or fugitives who entered its precincts. Forests and churches thus become equivalent in their authority to offer asylum, one to men or outlaws and the other to beasts of pleasure." From the external perspective of the forest (and, we might add, the fool!), "the institutional world reveals its absurdity, or corruption, or contradictions, or arbitrariness, or even its virtues." In this way, the outlaws of the forest, such as Robin Hood, were more interested in reformation than revolution. According to Harrison, the inverted world of the forest, as well as the ruses of deception its outlaws employ have an instrumental purpose in that they expose the deception and unlawfulness of society: "As a guardian of the law’s ideal justice, he takes to the forest to wage his war, but his happy ending lies in vindication—his repatriation within the system."

In The Magna Carta Manifesto Peter Lindebaugh notes that the Magna Carta defined the limits of privatization and spoke to the customs that defined the commons. Citing Henry VIII’s dissolution of the monasteries in 1536, Lindebaugh argues that, “Enclosures were not the only force in the creation of the land market but they destroyed the spiritual claim on the soil and prepared for the proletarianization of the common people, subjecting them to multifaceted labor discipline” (51). As You Like It emerges from this milieu of transition; a crisis between old and new forms of production, and with them the emergence of a new noble class.

"Application" (from Kant to Schmitt) in Measure for Measure

2011-03-07T18:48:00.000-08:00

In his introduction to Valences of the Dialectic, the Marxist literary critic Fredric Jameson uses the word "application" ironically (if not dialectically). This is because in the context of his system, such a term presumes an agency that is abstracted from the matter at hand, thereby distinguishing a unified inside from from a fragmentary outside (the common sense appearance of the separation of essence and appearance, which the classic dialectical operation upsets). But he goes on to show that this view itself belongs to an untroubled (undialectical) dialectic. For this reason, the properly dialectical (the dialectic as operation) can only name "application" insofar as it prefigures its negation.

The underlying logic of the dialect as a system that is "applicable to everything" (a mode of the dialectic which Jameson aims to dismantle) can perhaps be traced back to the Kant and his attempt to unite universal ideals and rational necessity. In his Metaphysics of Morals, Kant approaches moral law in much the same way that he did knowledge in the first critique: such laws "must be valid not merely for men, but for all rational creatures generally, not merely under certain contingent conditions or with exceptions, but with absolute necessity." Here we see Kant as a precursor to (or, getting a bit ahead of ourselves, an instrument within) Carl Schmitt's conception of the sovereign, whose power rests his ability to decide the state of exception and, consequently, to be "in force without signification." In Homo Sacer, Agamben quotes Kant from the Critique of Practical Reason: "Now if we abstract every content, that is, every object of the will (as determining motive) from the law . . . there is nothing left but the simple form of universal legislation." Because the pure will is unaffected by questions of freedom and self-interest, the law can be totally binding (as with Kant's other faculties). Here, law becomes indistinguishable from life, for individual motivation is shown to be "nothing other than the law itself through the respect that it inspires. . . . For once the content of free will is eliminated, the law is the only thing left in relation to the formal element of the free will."

In Measure for Measure, Angelo is the clear expression of this sort of moral necessity. Indeed, our "common sense" impression is that the Duke's moral laxity is what occasions the law's application in the figure of Angelo: in the interest of government, the Duke has "Lent [Angelo] our terror, dress’d him with our love” (1.1.20). Angelo first appears to embody pure identity (the unity of appearance and essence, application and law) with his role, while the Duke (along with the audience) is aware of the discrepancy that exists appearance and reality. In other words, the true sovereign has laid out a space of exception by giving over the pretense of the law to Angelo: the Duke does not transfer his sovereignty but its appearance. Thus while the Duke is able to negotiate between both spaces, Angelo is consigned to the realm of appearances (which makes his Kantian bent all the more fitting) and deals with subjects through a rigid logic of exchange value. For this reason, Angelo cannot even consider mercy or forgiveness but, instead, easily slips into the law's perverse underside (by trading Claudio's crime against wedlock in for Isabel's chastity). Angelo's rule can thus be characterized by a series of ultimately incomplete (that is, suspended) applications, which lay the groundwork for the sovereignty of the Duke to be reestablished and the bodies of his subjects redistributed.

Like Angelo for the Duke, Kant is merely a stepping stone for the true exercise of Schmittian sovereignty. As Agamben writes in State of Exception,

The concept of application is certainly one of the most problematic categories of legal (and non-legal) theory. The question was put on a false track by being related to Kant's theory of judgment as a faculty of thinking the particular as contained in the general. The application of the norm would thus be a case of determinate judgment, which the general (the rule) is given, and the particular case is to be subsumed in it.

Kant's mistake, suggests Agamben, "is that the relation between the particular case and the norm appears as a merely logical operation." Rather the passage of generic to particular always contains the practical activity of mediation: "Just as between language and world, so between the norm and its application there exists no internal nexus that allows one to be derived immediately from the other." Thus we might think of Angelo (as the Duke's instrument for enacting the state of exception and emergency, of applying the law by suspending his own authority) when Agamben writes, "the state of exception is the opening of a space in which application and norm reveal their separation and a pure force-of-law realizes (that is, applies by ceasing to apply) a norm whose application has been suspended."

The state of exception separates norm and application to the utmost limit in order to make its application possible. This is the only way that the Duke can hold Vienna's reality together with the appearance of governance; he therefore effectively suspends his own application of the norm by installing Angelo, whose "pure violence without logos claims to realize an enuciation without any real reference."

New Music: PJ Harvey, Radiohead

2011-02-23T16:26:00.000-08:00

It appears to the be the year for English pop artists to engage in political critique -- well, sort of. Who knew musicians could still find their arsenal by tarrying with the pastoral tradition?

PJ Harvey's Let England Shake isn't terribly complex ("How is our glorious country sown? Not with wheat and corn" -- "Our land is plowed by tanks!" Harvey sings on "The Glorious Land"), but musically there's a lot going on. Harvey's familiar songwriting style is stronger than ever (best heard in songs like "Bitter Branches" and "In the Dark Places"), but it seems she's taken the lessons of failed albums like White Chalk and her recent collaboration with John Parish (A Woman a Man Walked By) to heart: here, murky production, disparate soundscapes, and a Victorian-gothic aesthetic merge with reflections on post-colonial England: a nation constantly in dialogue with its own legacy (as she demonstrates on the haunting centerpiece, "England"). Harvey's approach is to play with, juxtapose, subvert cultural resting places with a downright bloody history: into this mix she throws lines from English protest songs, reggae samples, and tons of autoharp. In other words, Harvey's task with Let England Shake is to re-energize the English tradition of political critique. It could have been a heavy-handed train-wreck, but in Harvey's hands (and thanks incredible team she's assembled: Rob Ellis, Mick Harvey, John Parish, Flood, etc.), Let England Shake reminds PJ Harvey fans why we came to love her in the first place: not for her brilliant insights, but for the raw emotion that can only come by looking the devil in the face.

Radiohead's music always gestures toward some kind of late capitalist malaise, and The King of Limbs is no different. Indeed, this time around there seems to be a strong resonance between the natural imagery transparently there (both in the cover art and in Yorke's lyrics) and a recently resurfaced debate over forest enclosures throughout much of Britain. But regardless of its political timeliness, The King of Limbs is a strange animal. As is often the case with Radiohead's albums, early reviews have been typically vague. It's not their best album -- I think we're all agreed on that -- but neither should it be written off as a misstep. The King of Limbs is a good album, but it's also their most idiosyncratic -- only Amnesiac comes close. There's a strong dubstep influence and the more organic elements that characterized In Rainbows have retreated into the shadows only to reemerge in two oddly situated tracks: the lovely, effortless, out-of-place piano ballad, "Codex," and its partner, the echo-chamber folk song, "Give up the Ghost." The rest of the album is comprised of rhythmically complex songs that seem to fold in on themselves; at times, one wonders what the rest of the band was up to during recording sessions. As for immediate highlights, there's the devious lead single (below) "Lotus Flower" (in my opinion, this is one best tracks of the year so far), the very catchy, occasionally clumsy "Little by Little" (which picks up nicely from Amnesiac's "I Might be Wrong") and an album closer ("Separator") that actually does something -- to put it a bit differently, "Separator" is more expansive than what we get on the rest of The King of Limbs: it incorporates a fantastic lead guitar line, releases some (dearly missed) ambient steam, and gets as close to an anthem ("Wake me up") as Radiohead can currently get. We Radiohead fans need not despair. The King of Limbs is full of fine moments. More than anything else, we're victims of our own anticipation.

New Radiohead: The King of Limbs

2011-02-14T09:48:00.000-08:00

RADIOHEAD! Aw, shucks. You guys totally had me. I never expected you to announce a your new album, The King of Limbs, on Valentine's Day; no less, the week before it's available for download from your website. Those of us who still like holding a physical album in our hands have to wait until May 9. Last time you guys pulled a stunt like this, I bought your album twice. I imagine that's going to happen again.

Apparently The King Of Limbs is a reference to an oak tree in Wiltshire, England's Savernake Forest. Thought to be more than 1,000 years old, the ancient tree and Savernake Forest are located close to Tottenham House, where Radiohead recorded part of In Rainbows. So here's something related (but totally different) that I've recently been enjoying:

valentine

2011-02-14T00:12:00.000-08:00

On a day dedicated to last-minute gifts and forced romance, Siamese Dream, the 1994 album by my beloved Smashing Pumpkins, does the martyred saint (Valentine) a small degree of justice. Not only does it capture the band (well, its cheif songwriter, anyway) at their best; it's features all the best parts of the early nineties grunge aesthetic (musically, visually, etc.). Siamese Dream surges with antagonism and resentment (after all this is the early nineties), but, like Gish before it and Melancholy and the Infinite Sadness after it, Siamese Dream ends with a schmaltzy doozy of lovesong: "Luna," comes after almost sixty minutes of emotional turmoil, existential uncertainty, and full-on rage.

Immediately following the abrasive, irritating taunt of "Sweet Sweet," (which is, of course, anything but), "Luna" is the opposite: sincere, but certainly not innocent. I'll be the first to admit that Billy Corgan has produced a massive amount unlistenable mush, but "Luna" isn't as naive or deluded as it first comes across. The popular myth surrounding the songwriting and production of Siamese Dream emphasizes Corgan's depression, which is noticeably channelled here. On any other album, a song like this might be considered overly sentimental, but on Siamese Dream it arrives quite unexpectedly--it's appearance is almost graceful--what begins like a tragedy ends as a comedy.

2011-02-10T16:54:00.000-08:00

Industrialized Peasants by Georg Scholz, 1920.

presentation time!

2011-02-08T12:12:00.000-08:00

For most introverted English majors, class presentations spell disaster. For grad students it's a reality that one can't avoid. Right now, I'm in the thick of a dense presentation schedule and there's no end in sight.

Released last year, Lower Dens' excellent Twin Hand Movement takes its cue from Yo La Tengo and puts the introvert on display. The reason I picked this particular performance has to do with singer/songwriter Jana Hunter's bangs, which, like the expressionless restraint of the band, foreground the (seeming) absurdity of this exhibition: no eye contact! In this way, "I Get Nervous" is the musical equivalent of my presentation approach, only more laid back and without all the false starts.

Brian Massumi on the Super Bowl

2011-02-04T23:02:00.000-08:00

The Superbowl airs this Sunday and I probably won't be watching it. But I make mention of it because I've been waiting to share this excerpt from a reading I did last semester from Brian Massumi's Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation. Affect theory is a relatively new/current stream of Deleuzian thought that attempts to explain social phenomena (power relationships, and so on) not relying on theory of subjective agency, but focusing instead on the interactions which occur between bodies as they are played out along a plane of immanence. Here, he distinguishes between the stadium crowd and the audience watching at home on their televisions; and the way in which the affective response of the domestic (predominantly male) audience spills out in unexpected ways and/or is recontained:

The way in which the audience's perspective is included in the game is not through the regulatory application but by affective means. The excitement of disappointment of the stadium audience adds auditory elements to the mix that directly contribute to modulating the intensity of the field of potential. The audience feedback is itself modulated by the spectators' accumulated individualizations of the game--their already-constituted knowledge of and attachment to the histories of the players and teams.

The point of view of the television audience is quite different. Its individuations do not fold directly back on the field of play. Quite the contrary, through the TV audience the play folds out of its own event space and into another. The televised game enters the home as a domestic player. Take for example American football. Superbowl Sunday, the peak event of the football season, is said to correspond to an increase in domestic violence. The home entry of the game, at its crest of intensity, upsets the fragile equilibrium of the household. The pattern of relations between household bodies is reproblematized. The game even momentarily interrupts the pattern of extrinsic relations generally obtaining between domestic bodies, as typed by gender. A struggle ensues: a gender struggle over clashing codes of socieality, rights of access to portions of the home and its contents, and rituals of servitude. The sociohistorical home place coverts to an event-space. The television suddenly stands out from the background of the furnishings, imposing itself as a catalytic part-subject, arraying domestic bodies around itself according to the differential potentials generally attaching to their gender type. For a moment, everything is up in the air--and around the TV set, and between the living room and the kitchen. In proximity to the TV, words and gestures take on unaccustomed intensity. The home space is repotentialized. Anything could happen. The male body, sensing the potential, transduces the heterogeneity of the elements of the situation into a reflex of readiness to violence. The "game" is rigged by the male's already-constituted propensity to strike. The typical pattern of relations is reimposed in the unity of movement of hand against face. The strike expresses the empirical reality of the situation: recontainment by the male-dominated power formation of the domestic. The event short-circuits. The event is recapture. The home event-space is back to the place it was: a container of asymmetric relations between terms already constituted according to gender. Folding back onto domestication. Coded belonging, not becoming.

Massumi, Brian. Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation. Durham: Duke University Press, 2002.

dwelling, relating

2011-01-30T18:46:00.000-08:00

In his study of the cultural history of forests, the well-known Dante scholar (and radio host) Robert Pogue Harrison traces the Greek origins of the word "ecology":

The Greek word logos is usually translated as "language," but more originally it means "relation." It binds humans to nature in the mode of openness and difference. It is that wherein we dwell and by which we relate ourselves to this or that place. Without logos there is no place, only habitat; no domus, only niche; no finitude, only the endless reproductive cycle of species-being; no dwelling, only subsisting. In short, logos is that which opens the human abode on the earth.

The word "eco-logy" names this abode. In Greek, oikos means "house" or "abode"--the Latin domus. In this sense oikos and logos belong together inseparably, for logos is the oikos of humanity. Thus the word "ecology" names far more than the science that studies ecosystems; it names the universal human manner of being in the world. As a cause that takes us beyond the end of history, ecology cannot remain naive about the deeper meaning of the word that summarizes its vocation. We dwell not in nature but in relation to nature. We do not inhabit the earth but inhabit our excess of the earth. We dwell not in the forest but in an exteriority with regard to its closure. We do not subsist as much as transcend. To be human means to be always and already outside of the forest's inclusion, so to speak, insofar as the forest remains an index of our exclusion. . . . We will find that the relation is the abode, and that this relation remains one of estrangement from, as well as domestic familiarity with, the earth.

Stuart Hall on socialism and "popular" culture

2011-01-20T14:32:00.000-08:00

[. . .] The people versus the power-bloc: this, rather than "class-against-class", is the central line of contradiction around which the terrain of culture is polarized. Popular culture, especially, is organized around the contradiction: the popular forces versus the power-bloc. This gives to the terrain of cultural struggle its own kind of specificity. But the term "popular", and even more, the collective subject to which it must refer -- "the people" -- is highly problematic. It is made problematic by, say, the ability of Mrs Thatcher to pronounce a sentence like, "We have to limit the power of the trade unions because this is what the people want." That suggests to me that just as there is no fixed content in the category of "popular culture", so there is no fixed subject to attach to it -- "the people". "The people are not always back there, where they have always been, their culture untouched, their liberties and their instincts intact, still struggling on against the Norman yoke or whatever: as if we can "discover" them and bring them back on stage, they will always stand up in the right appointed place and be counted. The capacity to constitute classes and individuals as a popular force -- that is the nature of political and cultural struggle: to make the divided classes and the separate peoples -- divided and separated by culture as much as by other factors -- into a popular-democratic cultural force.

[. . .] Popular culture is one of the sites where this struggle for and against a culture of the powerful is engaged: it is the stake to be one or lost in that struggle. It is the arena of consent and resistance. It is partly where hegemony arises, and where it is secured. It is not a sphere where socialism, a socialist culture -- already fully formed -- might be simply "expressed". But it is one of the places where socialism might be constituted. That is why "popular culture" matters. Otherwise, to tell you the truth, I don't give a damn about it.

Stuart Hall, "Notes on Deconstructing 'the Popular,'" pp. 227-39 from People's History and Socialist Theory, ed. R. Samuel. London: Routledge, 1981.

common value

2011-01-16T20:45:00.000-08:00

Although Plato’s dialogues were written in the form of conversations, they have founded the philosophical tradition as an introspective, monological pursuit. At least, this is the line of reasoning put forth by Cesar Casarino in the preface to In Praise of the Common (University of Minnesota Press), an effort of collaboration with the Italian Marxist critic Antonio Negri. Not suprisingly, when the other (Socrates' dialogue partner) speaks in a Platonic dialogue, he does so by the rules of dialectical progress, based on fixed (that is, assimilated) identities that tend toward sublation. The history of the Platonic dialogue, writes Cesar Casarino,

has culminated in the now hegemonic liberal-democratic discourse of identity and in its suffering invocations of “dialogue” as a means of negotiating and reconciling differences among various and sundry identities (as if there was actually any real difference rather than sheer equivalence among identities, even despite the incommensurable inequities that they always index and that they are meant to redress in the realm of representation alone, and as if, hence, anything like a real dialogic relation—that is, anything like dialogue at the level of the real—could even begin to take place among them).

It is for this reason that the “dialogic” nature of Platonic discourse must be distinguished from Mikhail Bakhtin’s conception of the dialogic relation. For Bakhtin, the “entire dialogue-monologue binary opposition” is constituted by this relation: the dialogue materializes this relation by affirming it, while the monologue materializes it by foreclosing it. In both cases, language invites (or desires) some form of response, which in turn requires its own response and so on ad infinitum. If the dialogic relation unfolds in this way then the conversation is dialogical, “for it involves response to and from—rather than sublation of—the other.” But to avoid the Platonic connotations (which are due both to the currency and the history of a loaded term like “dialogue”) Casarino wisely opts to speak of such intellectual negotiation as “conversation” (deriving from the Latin conversari: to keep company with) in his discussion of the common.

Conversation is the language of the common because it brings us together as different rather than identical to one another. Casarino points to an early text by Dante, a treatise on the vernacular (De vulgari eloquentia), in which language is described as common to the human collective. Dante argues for the superiority of the vernacular over locutio secundaria (scholarly language) because it is employed by the whole world and because it is more “natural.” The vernacular is, in Casarino’s words, a “linguistic potential (that is, the capacity to learn language) and a linguistic practice (that is, the process by which such a capacity comes to its fruition through acquisition and usage) common to all human beings.” Here, we do not have two different types of language, but instead two different ways of learning, using, and conceptualizing language.

For Dante, the linguistic sign is a translating apparatus that is at once both sensory and rational. It must be comprised of both, for pure sensory knowledge is only possible for beasts and purely rational knowledge is only possible for angels. Human beings are unique because communication occurs across a subjective gap (beasts and angels do not have this problem): language must be sensed in order to be rationalized. Casarino highlights four points regarding Dante’s linguistic configuration: first, in Dante’s schema, the vernacular and the sign are equivalent to one another; second, the sign is able to translate and transcend the individual differences of every human being; third, the sign is described as a medium of exchange which move back and forth between producer and consumer; fourth, the sign is, as we have seen, both sensory and rational, bodily and spiritual. In sum, writes Casarino, “for Dante the linguistic sign functions already like the modern sign of value par excellence, namely, money.” The primary opposition between matter and spirit, which characterizes the majority of Hellenistic and medieval theocracy, is eventually displaced by a new fundamental opposition: matter vs. value. As Kiarina Kordela writes,

While spirit could manifest itself only in the Word, value has two manifestations: a semantic one, as the word or the signifier representing the concept that refers to a thing; and an economic one, as the equivalent exchange-value representing the relevant value of a thing (commodity). The advent of secular capitalism amounts to the transformation of the economy into a representational system.

In Dante’s sign, therefore, we see the beginning of value as a mediating third term: the sign partakes of both matter and spirit and enables their exchanges, and consequently their differential semantic value.

Slavoj Zizek on the Book of Job, the first Critique of Ideology

2011-01-11T08:58:00.000-08:00

starting off on the wrong foot

2011-01-10T10:02:00.000-08:00

Today marks the beginning of my second term in Edmonton. It's been snowing nonstop for the past three days and it's hard to say when I'll begin biking again (residential streets are not a priority for snow plows). It looks like I'll be doing plenty of walking, so it's a good thing I found my old winter boots. Here's how my upcoming semester looks:

Shakespeare and the Commons
This graduate seminar in the Shakespearean drama takes up the challenge of much contemporary legal theorizing of the common, which urges a turning-back to the early modern period for reclamation of ideas and practices displaced by the rise of capitalism. Its principal premise is that one way to understand what early modernity might offer to a contemporary politics of the common is to turn back to one of the most important writers of the early modern period and investigate the various constructions of the common and the commons in his work. To study the various expressions of the common in Shakespeare is herefore to ask (with a specific writer as test-case) how literature contributes to the common, and thus to contribute to a theory of literature (if only by theorizing one of the things that it does). The course’s second premise is that we can only achieve this, in Shakespeare’s case, by bringing historical conceptions of the common and the commons to bear, and so the enterprise demands historical enquiry. We will therefore read, in addition to select plays by Shakespeare including Henry VI Part II, Timon of Athens, and King Lear, some early modern case material, the text of key early modern laws, and excerpts from debates in the Elizabethan and Jacobean House of Commons. Some of our readings will be philosophical, some legal, but the emphasis will fall on our inquiry into the Shakespearean theatre as a forum for a practice of communing, for it is only by understanding the Shakespearean theatre as a historical practice of the ‘common’ that we help the early modern irrupt into and shape what Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri call ‘altermodernity.’ Depending on student interest, we could build towards a study of contemporary constructions of the ‘creative commons’ in order to consider how we might, with our investigation of Shakespeare’s engagements with the ‘common,’ revise standard constructions of Shakespearean authorship (which continue to be bourgeois, Romantic, and Lockean).

Introduction to Cultural Theory
The primary aim of this course is to give graduate students in English an opportunity to focus on the complex relationships that exist between forms of power, the constitution of knowledge, and the activity of contemporary criticism. By working through the ideas and concepts deployed in a number of influential essays in cultural theory, the goal is to enhance students' critical vocabularies and to challenge the 'commonsense' of contemporary theory in an effort to help students develop new insights into their own projects and fields of interests. With respect to the study of culture, what can we do with the theoretical concepts and approaches we have inherited? What relevance do these have to contemporary circumstances and situations? What are the connections that we have identified between knowledge and power? And how do we imagine that criticism intervenes in this relationship to interrupt regimes of knowledge/power in order to create new ways of thinking, knowing, acting, and feeling? These are the kinds of macro-questions that will guide us as we work through key concepts in cultural theory across seven areas: culture, power, ideology, scale and space, time and history, subjectivity and collectivity.

Aesthetics and Politics of Literary Reading
What it means to read a literary text has become a highly contested question. Are our readings determined by our cultural position, or are they an outcome of the power of literary language and our experience as readers? Stanley Fish argues that understanding is constrained by the institution we fi nd ourselves in. Interpreters “are situated in that institution, their interpretive activities are not free, but what constrains them are the understood practices and assumptions of the institution and not the rules and fixed meanings of a language system” (Is There a Text 306). Fish goes on to argue that, for this reason, an interpretation is always to hand. Reading literature does not involve puzzling out its meaning: “sentences emerge only in situations, and within those situations, the normative meaning of an utterance will always be obvious or at least accessible” (307). This representive view is open to challenge: according to Martha Nussbaum “good literature is disturbing in a way that history and social science writing frequently are not. Because it summons powerful emotions, it disconcerts and puzzles” (Poetic Justice 5). The reader who “is not at risk,” says Howard Brodkey, “is not reading.”
While these contrasting approaches also have much to say about the role of criticism and theory, and the institutional practices of English as a discipline over the last 150 years, in this course we will primarily be concerned with their implications for reading. We will interrogate historical and current practices of reading in their light. We will also compare them with a third possibility, that of investigating actual readers, a focus that has so far received little attention and has been actively discouraged by some authorities. Jonathan Culler, for example warned of “the dangers of an experimental or socio-psychological approach which would take too seriously the actual and doubtless idiosyncratic performance of individual readers” (Structuralist Poetics 258). But are readers really idiosyncratic? What do empirical studies show occurring during literary reading? First we will review the history of formalist accounts of reading, from Kant and Coleridge, through the Russian Formalists, to the Lancaster school of stylistics (Geoffrey Leech, Mike Short, Willie Van Peer) and the cognitive poetics of Reuven Tsur. Second we will look at some of the standard theoretical accounts of the reading process, contrasting the aesthetic approaches of Roman Ingarden and Wolfgang Iser with the constructivist views of Stanley Fish, Barbara Herrnstein Smith, and Siegfried Schmidt. We will go on to look at empirical studies of literary reading, beginning with studies of historical readers by Richard Altick and Jonathan Rose, then examine several typical modern studies of readers, including a critical review of the methods used to study actual readers and the different levels at which response to literary features has been studied, from phonetic to narrative.

Albums of 2010 part 2 (10-1)

2010-12-23T10:20:00.000-08:00

10. Tame Impala - Innerspeaker (Modular)

It's nearly impossible for me to listen to Tame Impala without thinking of the Beatles and getting a bit nostalgic about classic rock. On Innerspeaker, there's no shortage of psychedelic jams; Zeppelin, Hendrix are all invoked here. And surely some of the credit for this big "classic" sound is due to Flaming Lips producer David Fridmann. Remember that supposed garage rock revival in the early 00s? Tame Impala's high octane riffs and melodic vocals wouldn't have sounded out of place during this retro revival, but their Aussie rivals (i.e., the Vines) would have fled for the hills.

"Solitude is Bliss"

9. Arcade Fire - The Suburbs (Merge)

This record provided part of the soundtrack for my relocation to Edmonton. It was especially appropriate for the drive through Calgary (shudder). The Suburbs isn't perfect, but it has the kind of emotional energy that only Arcade Fire can provide. Thematically, it's also the group's most sophisticated record; sure, the ideas are big and obvious (that's kind of a given in pop music), but the Arcade Fire handle them with delicacy and nuance. (Read my initial review.)

"Sprawl II (Mountains Beyond Mountains)"

8. Joanna Newsom - Have One on Me (Drag City)

With every release, Joanna Newsom becomes more surprising and less compromising. That being said, Have One on Me is more relaxed and refined than both Ys and The Milk-Eyed Mender. When the drums kick in on the effortless, swaggering "Soft as Chalk," for example, Newsom seems unsurpassable in her coolness. She steals a few octave jumps from Joni Mitchell, clumsily pounding the ivory like every great folk artist before her. By now, it seems inappropriate to even question her place among the finest of folk-singers.

"81"

7. Future Islands - In Evening Air (Thrill Jockey)

Over the last six months Sam Herring has become one of my favourite vocalists. Channelling Frank Black, Carey Mercer, and Ian Curtis, Herring's ecstatic growl cuts against up-tempo beats and new wave ornaments. Amounting to nine tracks in under forty mintues, In Evening Air is a punchy record, as affective as it is economical. (It also doesn't hurt that In Evening Air boasts some of the best album artwork of the year.) Musically, Herring & co. demonstrate plenty of range (from the angsty "Tin Man" to the hopeful, introspective "Swept Inside"), and the emotional drive that sustains this album (which rests heavily on Herring's vocal maneuvers and the chugging basslines) never feels forced or contrived.

"Tin Man"

6. Deerhunter - Halcyon Digest (4AD)

2008's Microcastle seemed like a big leap for Deerhunter (a leap that ended up being my favourite of the year); on Halcyon Digest, the band's feet are firmly planted. The ambient diversions and transitions have all but disappeared. Instead, we get a more diverse display of Deerhunter's best qualities. At times it's a pretty heavy record: mortality, aging, and transcendence are, as usual, heavily mined themes. Bradford Cox still seems preoccupied with obscure stories of religious affectation ("Revival" and "Helicopter"), while secondary songwriter Lockett Pundt aims for arena-rock with "Desire Lines." Cox & co. have yet to disappoint with their songwriting, but it's the stylistic moves and the instrumental additions (like the wicked saxophone solo on "Coronado") that make Halcyon Digest a great record.

"Desire Lines"

5. Beach House - Teen Dream (Sub Pop)

Sometimes its a good thing that music puts you to sleep. On Teen Dream, Victoria Legrand and Alex Scally practically pull open the covers and crawl into bed with you. When this album leaked early last spring, I made sure to keep it circulating through my stereo. Nearly every song could be a single and nearly every song could make for a great cover by a children's choir (please do yourself a favour and check out "Zebra," sung by the P22 Chorus). No record this year was as soft around the edges, as warm or as comforting. Teen dreams make for the best kind of nostalgia; Beach House present them with all of emotion and none of the regret.

"Norway"

4. The National - High Violet (4AD)

I like to imagine that The National's frontman Matt Beringer is the Don Draper of the indie rock world. It works on a few levels. Both dudes manage to embody a sadness that's not only believable, but attractive; they're both solitary figures with family problems (see, for example, the heart-wrenching "Lemonworld") and neither one is shy about his dependence on certain substances to make it through the day (and night). But the parallel breaks down just as easily. Beringer comes by his confessions honestly. Not only that, he's a sad dude you can actually relate to. I've given up wondering whether High Violet improves on 2007's Boxer, or even 2005's underrated Alligator. It may take less time to warm up to the National's new material than it used to be, but songs like "Anyone's Ghost," "Bloodbuzz Ohio," and the unbelievably epic "England," have serious staying power. And how can you not love I guy who confesses, "I was afraid I'd eat your brains"? I want to see this song ("Conversation 16") on The Walking Dead. I love albums that finish strong. High Violet ends as strongly as it begins. (Read my initial review.)

"England"

3. Menomena - Mines (Barsuk)

No one sounds quite like Menomena; but somehow Menomena manage to sound like almost everyone. Paradox! Well, it might be if I didn't have qualify it so much. But the point still stands. Menomena dwell in contradiction, and it appears they're quite suited for it. Brent Knopf's slight vocals appear pinned against massive walls of sound, while the rich baritones of Danny Seim and Justin Harris are just as often laid bare. If this is music for the end of the world, why do these guys insist fighting the forces of darkness with the weapon's of a bygone era? Why do they keep singing about religion when it's just as dead as everything else? Those familiar tropes keep popping up, and just as often, Menomena go for boldly sentimental choruses, with equal parts squealing guitar rawk and booming choral chant. With three brilliant multi-instrumentalist songwriters working together, Menomena's music is always more than the sum of its parts, and the songs on Mines move around so much you never know quite where you'll end up. (Read my initial review.)

"Lunchmeat"

2. Balmorhea - Constellations (Western Vinyl)

Thank God for this album. For most of the semester it was the only music I could study to. But classifying it as "study music" sells it short. Constellations is an achingly beautiful hybrid of southern folk and classical arrangements; imagine a cross between dust-bowl sounds of Gillian Welch and the careful precision of the French pianist, Debussy. It's the only instrumental album on my list, but the fourth album by this band from Austin, Texas seemed like a special discovery this past year and I'm grateful for the composure it offered during the long autumn months. There's nothing immediately jawdropping here; instead Balmorhea strive for slow-building understatement while staying true to their southern beginnings. Perhaps this strange fusion explains why these carefully arranged Constellations sound so warm and inviting.

"Bowspirit"

1. Women - Public Strain (Flemish Eye / Jagjaguwar)

Women had a mixed year. After releasing their second album to critical acclaim, the band made headlines for self-destructing on stage at show in Victoria, BC. I had tickets for their show in Edmonton the following weekend. I've never had to return tickets and I never expected that I'd have to do so because a band broke up the week before I was supposed to see them. By this point in November, I knew Public Strain was my favourite album of the year. It may be odd to say for an album this noise-y, but this was my go-to album when I felt stressed out during the past semester. Like the snow storm featured on their album cover (totally surrounding its victims, making for poor visibility), Women smother their surf-guitar pop in dissonant feedback. That might have been too obvious, but I'd add that Women's musical blizzard is the kind of storm you take comfort in. At times Public Strain feels like the musical equivalent of wearing beer-goggles: disorienting, disconcerting, and kind of fun. Like the best experimental art-rockers (seriously, Sonic Youth, just quit and pass the torch to these guys; the same goes for No Age), Women make you work for those melodies; there's some digging to do here, but when you find that golden chord it feels new every time. I'm looking forward to their reunion tour. (Read my initial review.)

"Untogether"

Albums of 2010 part 1 (20-11)

2010-12-22T14:29:00.000-08:00

Despite their orderly appearance, lists are never finished. There's always far too much to choose from, and timing is everything. Something could be on my computer since February and suddenly appear partway through November like some divine revelation. This year I have to make concessions to Vampire Weekend's Contra, Liars' Sisterworld, Sufjan Stevens' Age of Adz, as well as excellent albums by Shearwater, Ariel Pink's Haunted Graffiti, Lower Dens, and Marnie Stern (to name a few): these records could have easily ended up on this list had I given them the time they deserved. What follows is a list of albums that I couldn't imagine going through my last twelve months without.

20. Kanye West - My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy (Def Jam)

It seems appropriate here to begin with a bit of an apology. (Before this record dropped, Yeezy was making a lot of them, but now that MBDTF has already achieved "classic" status, it seems unlikely that we'll be seeing a humble Ye any time soon.) How could I place this at the very bottom of my list, considering its mass appeal, its artistic sophistication, flawless production, etc? I've been blathering about it for the past week, making sure that "Monster" (and Nicki Minaj!) makes its rounds. If this was a list of songs, rather than albums, I'm sure it'd look quite different. Beginning with "Power," you're not likely to find a better three track sequence anywhere. So, Yeezy, while I must agree with most everyone else about the all-around awesomeness of your record (even your incredible list of collaborators seem aware that they're involved in a project bigger than their collective egos), I must also confess that I don't really know how to place it. Congratulations.

A word of warning: I've posted the most explicit song on the album. Headphones up!

19. Baths - Cerulean (Anticon)

On Cerulean, Will Wiesenfeld (aka Baths) switches easily between the sentimental ("Hall," for example) and bedroom-spun chill-wave ("Animal"), electronic and otherwise. In all cases the music is immediate and undeniable. Baths' occasionally freakish mix of vocal layers brings to mind the grating sounds of Passion Pit, but its Wiesenfeld's nack for sunny jams that makes Cerulean worthwhile.

18. Crystal Castles - Crystal Castles (Last Gang)

To be honest, I don't much care for Crystal Castles. But after hearing "Empathy" and "Year of Silence" I was more or less hooked. More of a pop record than their first self-titled effort, Crystal Castles (II) offers plenty of accessible songs without sacrificing the group's signature style. Their Atari-inspired electronica still features harsh moments of screaming and distortion, but the warmth of songs like "Celestia" and "Baptism" showoff a group that's willing to adapt.

17. Villagers - Becoming a Jackal (Domino)

Irish folk troubadour Connor O'Brien (aka Villagers) was a finalist for this year's Mercury Prize. This being his debut, there's little doubt he'll have another go at the award. Becoming a Jackal is unpretentious and sincere, if at times a bit heavy-handed. Regardless of his weak spots, however, the guy is incredibly likeable. Then again, Becoming a Jackal finally works because O'Brien allows his material to take the lead. I think it's time for Bright Eyes to step aside: there's a new Connor in town. Snap!

16. These New Puritans - Hidden (Domino)

On their third album, These New Puritans blend together a mix of influences (and samples) from classical music, trip-hop, garage, etc. The result is music that feels confrontational to its very core. In the spirit of post-punk outfits like The Fall and The Wire, TNP put large emphasis on cut and paste electronic samples and angular rhythmic shifts. I like to think of most of these tracks as perverse Christmas carols.

15. Tara Jane O'Neil - A Ways Away (K Records)

A Ways Away is comprised of 36 minutes of introspective haze. How could it not be good? Even if you don't share my fondness for reverb, you won't be able to deny O'Neil's crystal clear vocals and her songwriting ability. Another quickly forgotten album from an incredibly gifted artist, A Ways Away came out early in the year and I was instantly absorbed by it. It's been impossible to shake ever since.

14. Gorillaz - Plastic Beach (Virgin)

Damon Albarn is a genius. This, dear reader, is not up for debate. So what if he hates Glee? Most reviews of this record don't even bother to mention Albarn's incredible work with Blur over the last two decades. With every release Gorillaz seem to up their game. "Stylo" was an interesting first single. I, for one, was expecting another "Feel Good Inc.," but instead we got an undanceable car chase sequence featuring Bobby Womack and Mos Def. Among the many other guest spots on Plastic Beach (Snoop Dogg, Ruff Grys, De La Soul, to name a few), it was Lou Reed's bone-chilling contribution to "Some Kind of Nature" that I found most compelling. Creepy? Sure. Catchy? Always.

13. Warpaint - The Fool (Rough Trade)

I'm always happy when I discover a nineties throwback. Enter Warpaint. Even The Fool'spacing seems like it belongs to a bygone era. Stylistically, this was a near favourite of the year. The bass lines dance, the guitars rarely veer away from tremolo, and the vocal harmonies are delicately balanced. Shame about that hideous album cover.

12. Wild Nothing - Gemini (Captured Tracks)

It's hard to believe that Gemini is the product of one guy. Clearly a gifted songwriter, Jack Tatum mines the 80s for inspiration and finds it in the work of dreampop legends like Slowdive, the Cure, and the Cocteau Twins. Heavy on the reverb, lazy with the vocals, Gemini allowed me to pretend that summer didn't end when the temperature dropped. "Summer Holiday," where were you when I needed you?

11. Surfer Blood - Astro Coast (Kanine)

As the boys in Surfer Blood well know, on a ten song album, there's no room for filler, nor is there any reason to hold back. Along with the Morning Benders' Big Echo, this was one of the best (and most straightforward) indie rock records of the year. No flashy tricks; just power-pop with big hooks and radio-ready choruses that'll channel your inner teenager. Check out "Anchorage" (below); you'll know what I mean.

Milton and protestant toleration

2010-12-12T23:53:00.000-08:00

Currently, Of True Religion, John Milton's writing on toleration (trendy topic, don't you think?), is providing Miltonists with a good deal of critical energy and just as much cultural relevance. Hot on the heels of the so-called "Wars of Religion," Milton’s writing on toleration demonstrates how the Protestant emphasis on sola scriptura is fundamental to the early modern development of various heresies and sects, many of which claim to represent the true Christian religion. Indeed, by claiming that "Scripture is our only principle in religion," Milton must accommodate for the differences of interpretation that have resulted in a diversity of Christian sects. By privileging reading—that is, the honest pursuit of truth in God’s Word—over doctrine, Milton is able to draw a hard line between an active Protestant faith and what he configures as a passive, necessarily idolatrous Catholicism.

How, Milton asks, are we to combat popery, here in England? His answers are not surprising, but they are intriguing. First, “we must remove their idolatry, and all the furniture thereof, whether idols, or the mass wherein they adore their God under bread and wine: for the commandment forbids to adore, not only any graven image, but the likeness of any thing in heaven above, or in earth beneath, or in the water under the earth.” And if Catholics play the conscience card, “we have no warrant to regard conscience which is not grounded on Scripture.” In other words, conscience can only be legitimized by the reading of Scripture; that is, by the trial of interpretation. If tradition, or any other outside influence governs one’s conscience and orders one’s faith, Milton believes, one’s conscience is in error and one’s faith is idolatrous. Besides the removal of idols, Milton urges Protestants to combat popery by “duly and diligently” reading Scripture, by the “constant reading of Scripture” with others (“who agree in the main . . . though dissenting in some opinions”), and finally by “mending our lives.”

As a recovering Anabaptist with Anglican inclinations, I can sympathize with certain moments of Milton’s iconoclasm and I can even endorse the sort of tolerance he briefly articulates by bringing up the disagreements that can arise from different communities of interpretation. However, I find Milton’s straw man of tradition not only troubling, but inexcusable, especially since he fails to acknowledge the fact that he himself is part of a tradition, albeit a rival one. How can Milton show such a deep love for the literary tradition, in which he reads and interprets literary texts—the classics, but also Chaucer, Spencer, etc.—and so easily dismiss the a tradition of orthodoxy that selected and produced the very Scriptures to which Protestant reformers believe they can simply and freely return? In the end, I suppose, I see Milton’s (and the Reformation’s) distinction between Scripture and Tradition as a false dichotomy.

It comes down to the way in which Milton defines heresy, and, indeed, Milton’s own heretical opinions seem to haunt this tract: “Heresy is the will and choice professedly against Scripture,” whereas “error is against the will, in misunderstanding the Scripture after all sincere endeavors to understand it rightly.” This distinction allows Milton to accommodate the fervent Protestants while at the same time distancing them from the inauthenticity of Catholic faith. Freedom and self-definition become the very fundamentals of faith, while the public and the social are denounced. Perhaps this turn inward is all that Milton can do to rescue what is left of Christianity from a process of secularization, at once tied to the Reformation, which appears to be at work in Enlightenment Europe. Milton admirably argues against truth as an institutional possession, but by closing it off from the Catholic tradition, Milton draws boundaries that appear to limit divine revelation. Purely internal notions of reading and interpretation that are irreconcilable with the tradition strike me as being vaguely satanic.