Destroys the Idea of the Novel

Ten days ago at Ready Steady Book, Mark Thwaite articulated a manifesto of sorts, "Against Establishment Literary Fiction":

When I talk to folk, especially publishers, about what kinds of books I like to feature on RSB, I often reach for the phrase Literary Fiction ... and then I quickly backtrack. Literary Fiction is one of the genres of fiction that I'm happy to feature on TBD's homepage, alongside a host of other types of books. And Literary Fiction is, undoubtedly, the genre that many of the books that have been reviewed on RSB in the past have belonged to. But, editorially -- and by that I mean, via the blog, and from my heart -- I'd actually like RSB to be seen as being anti-Literary Fiction. Indeed, what I've taken to calling Establishment Literary Fiction is, to me, the very antithesis of literature: it is hubristic, formulaic and trite; it is non- essential.

Literary Fiction is genre fiction; literature, art, is writing that deconstructs the very idea of genre. Proust's In Search of Lost Time isn't literary fiction, but a novel that destroys the idea of the novel in its very realisation. Beckett's famous lines from Worstward Ho -- Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better. -- are in themselves a manifesto for writers and writing. If Literary Fiction is defined by its proud masterpieces, its smug perfections, literature should be known as a failed art that in its failing helps us to understand our own feeble inadequacies and helps us to fail better.

Mark rather pithily captures some of what I've been trying to get at here, where I've been banging away on this topic for a while now. I see The Existence Machine as, in part, engaging in this type of conversation. I, too, want to reach toward the phrase "Literary Fiction" when trying to characterize what I read and want to write about. But the term feels, aside from pretentious, false. The word "literary" is what grabs me, of course. I am interested in the literary, aesthetic qualities of fiction. I'm interested in figuring out what those are, in understanding them. I'm interested in discussion that attempts to deal with these things. But I am less and less interested in the hot "literary" titles. Certainly plenty of what I enjoy reading, and have written about, would fall under the rubric of "establishment literary fiction" (Philip Roth is surely establishment, no?). However, that some actual literature gets marketed as literary fiction is no reason to not read it. At the same time, I feel no particular need anymore to try to keep up with the latest releases. The point is not that none of this fiction is worthy, but that so much of it is as unquestioningly formulaic as the non-literary fiction genres. And all the chatter about it tends to obscure that.

One of the great things about blogs, of course, is the multitude of voices. It's useful and important to hear these voices. However, one of my personal frustrations with blogs--lit blogs in particular--is that there is so little baseline agreement on what is meant by certain ideas. For example, what is meant by "genre". Every so often a genre-fight/discussion will erupt in the comment section at this or that blog (like here, or here; see also Jonathan Lethem's much talked about piece on the alleged provincialism of science fiction, an exchange between Lethem and Ray Davis here, and Davis' longer reply here), but all too rarely, it seems to me, does the conversation build on itself. Each time the discussion appears as if anew--even as some of the participants express weariness at once again having to explain their particular point. And very few people seem to understand the word genre in the sense used by Mark, above. I've been trying to straddle that line. I've been trying to write about literature in a way that recognizes that "literary fiction" is merely another genre, but also trying to write about the more commonly understood sense of "genre"--science fiction, mystery, crime, etc.

About three weeks ago, Ellis Sharp had an interesting post in which he defended Philip K. Dick from the charge of writing awful prose:

In the case of Philip K. Dick, I don’t find the prose that bad. Yes, sometimes it’s very tired and lazy. Other times it’s dazzling. And when it comes to writing fiction, style and gleaming prose isn’t everything. Think about (for example) Henry James and Robert Louis Stevenson. Henry James might well seem to be the better writer, with a massively accomplished oeuvre. But I would argue that ultimately he never wrote anything as important as what Stevenson achieved in The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, which manages simultaneously to be a hugely accomplished piece of writing and a brilliant exploration of the contradictory nature of human identity and a very insightful account of Victorian society and its hypocrisies. And Stevenson arrived there by way of genre writing. Interesting.

Here, of course, Ellis uses the second sense of "genre" noted above. But more on Dick:

Dick reminds me of Stevenson in some ways. He’s more than just a great storyteller. He’s very good on paranoia, alienation and the self under stress. I first discovered Dick’s work as a young teenager, when I read his early work Eye in the Sky. At one point the characters discover their genitals have vanished, replaced by nothing more than smooth skin. I found that very disturbing. Rather more disturbing than, say, Gregor Samsa waking up and discovering that he’s turned into a giant insect.

[. . .]

What I require from any piece of fiction is: does the writer’s vision engage me? If so, is it true to itself as art? And is it true to the world? In the case of Philip K Dick the answer is yes, yes, yes.

In what way might a work of "establishment literary fiction", say, be true to itself as art and be true to the world? Is working within established forms necessarily lazy? What does it mean to arrive at an effect "by way of genre"? Could a writer not arrive at that effect by way of the genre of literary fiction? Or, instead, does the work written using the apparent tropes of an established genre (including that genre of literary fiction), cease to be of that genre when the work achieves a kind of artistic truth? (Even perhaps when the author might not be aware of it?) That is, when, for example, we speak of Proust's work which, in its realization "destroys the idea of the novel"--in what sense does this include or exclude fiction that appears to merely be of a genre (science fiction, etc), but instead in its realization itself destroys the idea of the novel? Proponents of genre per se might (and do) accuse readers who stick to that which can be called "literary fiction" as not being able to see those so-called genre works that do exactly that.

Anyway, this post has rambled on long enough. I feel these questions help illustrate the confusion that occurs when different types of readers try to talk about genre. Still further confusion occurs when the question of entertainment--escapism--versus literature arises. . .

A Storm of Consciousness

In my most recent pre-California post, on Bernhard's Frost, I quoted a passage that I said "represents an unexpected nod from Bernhard--almost as if he is telling us what the point is (almost), not just of Frost and Strauch's despairing voice within, but all of his narratives." This has bothered me; I might have made my own point better if I'd taken more time. What I was trying to say was not that it was Bernhard telling us what the "point" of his fictions is, but, instead, that it seemed to me that the passage in question described some of the aesthetic effect of reading Bernhard. Which could be the point, yes, the point in reading fiction being to experience a certain aesthetic effect. But I was afraid I was not as clear as I'd intended.

Speaking of Bernhard, about a week after my post Ellis Sharp wrote an excellent piece about On the Mountain, which was actually written by Bernhard in 1959, before Frost (which appeared in German in 1963), but not published until after his death, in 1991 (so it says here). Ellis focuses on Bernhard's use of the comma--the whole novel is one long sentence:

A fiction of friction: the grinding together of a consciousness and everything that impinges upon it. [. . .]

Language like a river, flowing, unstoppable. A babble alert to its own condition (in a way that soporific comfort fiction never knows that it is drugged and easy-dreaming). Every letter matters. A storm of consciousness, of language. It drives the narrator into society – into an Austrian condition – from which he (the gender is not in doubt) recoils.

[. . .]

A kind of vertigo ensues. When the narrative rages against ‘a gigantic wave of price increases, a colossal wave of price increases’ is this the narrator’s anger or is he mocking the peevish complaints of the bourgeoisie? I don’t find it at all easy to decide.

This, too, describes well the aesthetic effect of reading Bernhard's narratives.

For more on Bernhard, if you haven't already read it, see Jonathan Taylor's amusing article in The Believer, "Admiration Journey" (link via This Space). Taylor embarks on a tour of Bernhard's house and country--the titular admiration journey he feels certain Bernhard would have scoffed at. He includes various quotes from Bernhard's writing, and comments some on that writing. Says Taylor on Bernhard's aesthetic:

The greatness of Bernhard’s novels and memoirs is, after all, philosophical, and stylistic. A brutally simple and apparently universal idea—Everything is ridiculous when one thinks of death, he said upon receiving Austria’s Förderungspreis für Literature in 1968—is embroidered into a vivacious comedy of pure thought, through compulsive repetition, confident self-contradiction, and heady exaggeration.

Taylor finds that, along with the exaggeration and contradiction in Bernhard's fiction, there is the contradiction of his life:

Bernhard, who mocked the visiting of places associated with writers as well as admiration journeys to museums and churches, had done nothing less than design a museum for admirers like us to visit, in the same way that he devoted his life singlemindedly to writing even though the writings we possess are only nonsense because they can only be nonsense. Bernhard’s house is part and parcel of his literary legacy: a seriously satirical stance that eludes the initial urge to peg him as a misanthrope, a pessimist, or a nihilist.

Whenever I travel to a major city with fine bookstores, I think I'm bound to happen upon certain authors I have a hard time finding generally. I keep thinking I'll find cache of used copies of Thomas Bernhard or Peter Handke or Gabriel Josipovici books, but no. None of the stores we entered in either San Francisco or Oakland had anything by these authors, other than the occasional copy of Frost, which hardly counts since it's a new publication and I already have it (ditto Josipovici's Goldberg: Variations). If I'd known I was going to be a Bernhard enthusiast when I bought Concrete several years ago at the Borders in Washington, DC, I would have snapped up all the several titles I saw there around that time, none of which ever appear there or anywhere else anymore. (Yes, I know I can probably find them online, and I probably will. But it's more of a thrill finding one in a physical store.)

Blogs, Blogs, Blogs

I've been in California for the last week, so I have a lot of catching up to do. And I came home to like 500 blog posts to read in Bloglines. Perhaps not surprisingly, though, the blogs I think of as the most essential had comparatively very few new posts awaiting me. Both of these facts help to bring home something I've needed to realize about myself and blogs, and the net generally. I only have so much time. I need to recognize that fact, and act accordingly. So I will be making some changes in how I approach this blog, even if those changes may not be apparent to anyone who actually reads it (I may still post just as often--or as rarely). Some basic points, then: I am generally uninterested in book chatter, but I am very interested in actual discussion about literature. (Side note: I don't care in the least what non-blog people say about blogs.) The sheer quantity of book blogs that I "read" tires me, and too many of them engage more in the sort of chatter I have little interest in. Or they engage in actual discussion, yes, but of the kinds of books in which I have little interest, or the discussion is not of the sort that appeals to me. This is all by way of saying that, my time being limited, I'll have to curtail the amount of it I spend online--whether blogging or reading other blogs. Since I'd like to continue blogging, this means that my reading habits will have to change. (In part this is because, contra Ed, I find that the internet, while full of fantastic stuff, is indeed a great time-waster, that technology does indeed make it easier to not get things done, does help facilitate procrastination.)

The same holds with music, though since I rarely read any of the mp3 blogs, and spend very little time looking at the "music chatter" blogs, it's not as much of a problem. Most of the music blogs I frequent feature good, thoughtful writing about music.

The third big general Existence Machine topic has been, of course, politics. Naturally, I don't think I've posted anything explicitly about politics since I said I would be ramping up my blogging about the apparent run-up to an attack on Iran. This is because I just can't do it. I can't blog about current politics in anything resembling a timely manner. Those bloggers who do it and do it well amaze me. For example, I am in awe of the consistently excellent quality of the numerous posts that appear at Lenin's Tomb. One reason why I find myself unable to blog regularly about ongoing politics is that I tend to think in terms of longer pieces, but by the time I have a few minutes to scrape together to actually write something, the moment has passed, and the specific item is no longer "timely". Politics will not be disappearing from this blog, but I will make no attempt to be "on top" of things. Political posts that appear are likely to refer to news items or blog posts that are many weeks old, or else books. Again, this is really nothing new here, just more explicitly stated.

This has been a fairly pointless post. Happy blogging.

The Cerebral Pulse

Thomas Bernhard's fiction presents us with a singular vision. In his novels we are witness to voices crying out in despair. This voice sometimes comes to us direct--as with the procrastinating Rudolph in Concrete, who is supposed to be working on a book of musicology, but instead obsesses over the perfect first sentence and rants about his sister and Austria and his illness. Or the voice comes to us by way of another party--as in Old Masters, in which Atzbacher spends much of the book waiting for Reger in the museum, and as he waits we get detailed reminisces of the things Reger has said, along with thoughts of his own, as well as those of the museum guard (see my entry on Old Masters); or in The Loser, in which the narrator, after the suicide of his friend Wertheimer, ponders their abandonment of careers as concert pianists, in the face of their contact and relationship with the fictionalized Glenn Gould. In Correction, the narrator accepts an invitation to sift through the papers of his friend Roithamer (who also committed suicide, and who was reportedly based on Wittgenstein), and similarly recalls the words and actions of his late friend.

In each of these books, Bernhard employs similar methods in the service of similar concerns (full disclosure: I have not actually finished reading Correction; I read about 45 pages several weeks ago, but sleepiness ruled the day, and I was not up to the task; I intend to return to it soon). Huge half- or full-book-length paragraphs; long, winding, repetitive sentences; displaced narration. We encounter rants--about art, humanity, above all about the corruption and filth of Austria. It might sound as if these books are virtually identical, but while the methods and concerns are similar, the effect is unique to each.

For those of us who care about such things, the publication last year, for the first time in English (translated from the German by Michael Hoffmann), of Bernhard's first novel, Frost, was a major literary event--of significantly more importance than most of what seems to set the book world atwitter. Frost was originally published in 1963, twelve years before Correction (which is the earliest of the other Bernhard novels I own). Flipping through the book, right away differences are apparent: actual paragraph breaks! Rarely a paragraph longer than two pages! And, at 342 pages, the book is considerably longer than his other fiction (100-150 pages longer than Correction and The Loser, more than twice as long as both Old Masters and Concrete). In other ways, however, it quickly becomes clear that Bernhard's concerns in this novel were of a piece with his later fiction, though he had not yet refined his methods.

In Frost, we again have an anguished voice coming to us, this time again filtered through a narrator. The narrator is a medical internist who has been tasked to observe and report on a man named Strauch, a painter, the brother of the assistant doctor's. He poses as a law student so that Strauch will not suspect him of any connection with his brother, who he has not seen in years. And so we get Strauch's despairing and contradictory view of the world, which is not at all unrecognizable in a Bernhard character. We get comments like the following:

"Nothing is progressive, but nothing is less progressive than philosophy. Progress is tripe. Impossible." (86)

Or:

"Lawyers make nothing but confusion," he said. "A lawyer is an instrument of the devil. In general, he's a fiendish idiot, banking on the stupidity of people much more stupid than himself, and by God he's always right." [. . .] "Jurisprudence creates criminality, that's a fact. Without jurisprudence, there would be no crime. Did you know that? Unlikely as it may sound, that's the truth of the matter." (125)

Or:

Newspapers were the greatest wonders of the world, they knew everything, and only through them did the universe become animated for their readers, the ability to picture everything was only preserved by newspapers. [. . .] "Of course, you have to know how to go about reading them," said the painter, "you mustn't just gobble them up, and you mustn't take them too seriously either, but remember they are miraculous." [. . .] "The dirt which people hold against newspapers is just the dirt of the people themselves, and not the dirt of the newspapers, you understand! The newspapers do well to hold up a mirror to people that shows them as they are--which is to say, revolting." (140-141)

The use of quotations marks setting off Strauch's supposed actual words from the narrator's recounting of them is something Bernhard abandoned in the later books. The sentences are much shorter. Though the book is still darkly comic like the others, the tortured worrying of a topic from every possible angle, to extreme and ridiculous degrees, is foreshortened here. Strauch does beat on a subject for a time, per the internist's account, but not to the excessive extent of later Bernhard characters. Still, the methods are recognizable, though the effect is perhaps somewhat muted by comparison.

But, Strauch talks like this, on and on, bending the narrator's ear, occupying most of his time, till the narrator forgets why he is there, what he is supposed to be doing. What can he say about the painter? Everything seems clear to him, but impossible to convey to another. And here the narrator produces a fully formed thought that, I think, represents an unexpected nod from Bernhard--almost as if he is telling us what the point is (almost), not just of Frost and Strauch's despairing voice within, but all of his narratives. Here it is:

What sort of language is Strauch's language? What can I make of his scraps of thought? Things that initially struck me as disjointed and incoherent, actually possess "truly immense connections"; the whole thing is in the nature of an enormous transfusion of words into the world, into humans, "a pitiless proceeding against stupidity," as he would say, "an uninterrupted, regeneration-worthy backdrop of sound." How get that down? What notes? Schematic or systematic to what point? His outbursts descend on me like rockfalls. Abruptly, things he says detach themselves from the explosive guffaw of ridicule which he reserves for himself "and the world." Strauch's language is the language of the heart muscle, a scandalous "cerebral pulse." It is rhythmic self-abasement under the "subliminal creak" of his own rafters. His notions and subterfuges, fundamentally in accord with the barking of those dogs that he drew my attention to, with which he "scattered me to the air." Can it still be described as language? Yes, it is the false bottom of language, the heaven and hell of language, the mutiny of rivers, "the steaming word-nostrils of brains that are in a state of endless and shameless despair." Sometimes he will speak a poem, and then tear it apart, reformulate it as a "power plant," "a barracks for the raw philosophy of a wordless tribe," as he says. "The world is a world of recruits, it needs to be brutalized, you need to teach it to shoot, and not to shoot." He rips the words out of himself as from a swamp. This violent ripping out of words leaves him dripping with blood. (148-149)

A passage like this strikes me as highly unlikely to appear in the mature Bernhard fiction. But I submit that it serves very well as a description of not only Bernhard's fiction, but also, perhaps, the attitude we might take to the anguished voices contained in it. Because these are indeed voices of despair, from characters who are suffering, characters who have all but given up, in the articulation of the despair, and who, in some cases, ultimately actually do give up. A "pitiless proceeding against stupidity"; "rhythmic self-abasement": these phrases are incredibly apt. In Old Masters, Reger spends most of his time ranting about art, the awfulness of it, the absurdity of it, but art is ultimately all that makes life worth living. In the other books, as well as in Old Masters, life itself is found wanting, but life is all there is, except for death.

Axes of Judgment

At Fact Magazine, k-punk has a great interview with Simon Reynolds, on the occasion of his upcoming book, Bring the Noise: Twenty Years of writing about Hip Rock and Hip Hop. I've written some about my own approaches to pop and rock. I've wanted to open myself up to the possibilities of finding pleasure in different kinds of music previously unknown to me, but in thinking about it I've managed to confuse myself. Plenty of music I like I can only listen to as a complete outsider, unless I invest a lot of time and money into obsessing about each and every scene. Some of the anxiety I've felt about music has stemmed from the insane realization that I cannot do this (as if I should want to!). So the music comes to me as pop, and must come to me as pop, in a sense, or divorced from the scene from which it comes (unless it exists purely as pop, i.e., music to meant to chart, as something like Kelly Clarkson is). And I cherry-pick various styles of music, getting enjoyment across the board. But my main mode of association with music, I sometimes forget, is in delving deep. If I find something I dig, my tendency is to want to hear everything I can by that artist, and all related offshoots and bands. (Incidentally, I think of these questions as being related to certain literary questions I've been asking, particularly into "genre".)

Anyway, I'll be reading this book when it appears. Here's an excerpt from the interview.

Fact: Let’s turn now to your rehabilitation of 'rockism'. You situate the book as picking up the story where Rip it Up left off, but the attack on 'rockism' originated with post-punk. Is the reclaiming of 'rockism' an unlearning of post-punk orthodoxy, or can your take on rockism be seen as in some ways continuous with post-punk?

SR: A complicated area. Obviously, the idea of rockism as a bad thing, a blinkered mindset, was a really useful initiative when first mooted in post-punk days, and it carried on being salient and productive for some time after that. There are many aspects of rockism that remain worth attacking - privileging of the electric guitar; any approach that fixates on the song and sees rock as form of surrogate literature, the songwriter as story teller; limiting notions of authenticity, et al. I would agree with those who argue that rockism actually limits one’s understanding of rock music itself, of where its power lies. And those died-in-the-wool rockists still lurking out there who dismiss disco/rap/techno/etc aren’t “real” music are reactionary fools who deserve our scorn.

That said, the anti-rockist polemic that resurged this decade seems to have developed a kind of runaway momentum, a malign logic that some people followed through to absurd places. You started getting people arguing that singling out a figure like Timbaland as an auteur and an innovator, that is rockist. Or that if you allowed your sense of the artist’s personality - their intent and integrity - to interfere with your enjoyment of a record, that meant your mind was still shackled by rockist hang-ups. There seems to be a drive towards eliminating all axes of judgement beyond pure pleasure, the supposed purity of the consumer’s unmediated experience of the pop commodity. The distinction between “urgent” and “trivial” is obviously a no-no for these heroic anti-rockists, but you even get people seriously debating whether distinctions based on quality - good/bad - are rockist and should be jettisoned. The most recent test case figure for this lunatic fringe of anti-rockism is Paris Hilton. When you’re developing elaborate validating analyses of Paris Hilton, that ought to be a sign that you’re gone too far!

You Have to be Careful With the Essential

It's somehow not surprising that Lars at Spurious, one of our more enigmatic and literary bloggers, should be attracted to the music of Jandek, one of our more mysterious musicians. I have but one of the approximately 50 Jandek releases, but there is a hard-to-describe something--at once distancing and inviting--something which I can sense may draw me in further, though I haven't yet made the needed effort. I really know very little at all about him or his music.

Lars says:

Sometimes I think there's nothing I want to hear except for Jandek and nothing I want to think about except for Jandek. Everything else is pointless, non-essential. I listen to Comets on Fire and Espers and Boris and all that sort of thing. It's good, all good, but not essential. I listen to Mark Kozelek, which is nearly essential, and Bill Callahan and Michael Head - all very good, close to essential, but not quite essential. But you have to be careful with the essential, not to come too close to it. You need distance. You need time and space set aside. Sit down on the sofa. Do nothing else. Listen to nothing. Just Jandek. Just that: Jandek.

This more than anything I've yet read makes me want to spend some time with this music. But I come here, really, to talk about Bill Callahan, otherwise known as Smog. Because, for me, Bill Callahan's music is essential. I have and listen to a lot of music, but if I were forced to get rid of the bulk of my collection, Smog would survive. And if I were further forced to pare down to a tiny select few dozen albums--there would be much Smog remaining.

To Lars the essential requires distance, as well as time and space. The other music he references here can all be found in my collection (Michael Head aside, who I've not heard of), and they along with much else help form my daily soundtrack. But a lot of it is excellent aural wallpaper. Smog I listen to almost every day at work, too, his unlikely words and baritone voice piping in my ear while I'm doing something else, which would seem to not be the optimal use of this kind of essential music. The difference is Smog calls to me at odd other times. Those times when I'm home alone. After midnight. The quiet hours (though much of his music is plenty noisy).

Lately I've been listening continuously to the most recent Smog recording, A River Ain't Too Much To Love. A new album comes out next week credited to "Bill Callahan". Why the switch? Have we seen the last Smog record? Or (smog)? Will it make a difference? When A River Ain't Too Much To Love was released in 2005, I liked it right away, but it's not till recently that it's come to rival the very best of his music, which I consider to be, for example, 1997's Red Apple Falls or 2000's ill-titled Dongs of Sevotion. That my favorite had been ten years ago should not be taken as implying that the man's fallen off. He has not. Rain on Lens, from 2001, and Supper, from 2003, are both full of interesting, prickly music. Not to be ignored if you're interested in looking into Smog. (While we're at it, don't miss the great Wild Love (1995) and The Doctor Came at Dawn (1996), either. Or Knock Knock (1999). Ok. So I'm a fan.)

Reviewers have, with Callahan, all too often fallen prey to the tendency to attribute the opinions and attitudes in the songs, some of which are unsettling, to the man himself--the pitfall, I guess, of the music being the singular vision of one person, in a culture obsessed with personality, conditioned to only take art seriously, somehow, when it's factually true. Not to mention 40 years of confessional singer-songwriters. Callahan distances himself from this by the mere use of the Smog name, of course, but this doesn't stop people. (I can't imagine the adoption of his own name at this late date will do much to prevent this.) But his songs are true, the way art is true, true to themselves, to the singer, to the situation.

Callahan gives us excellent, quotable lines ("Whenever I get dressed up/I feel like an ex-con trying to make good", from "Ex-Con" on Red Apple Falls), but the unexpected grace notes are perhaps more striking. One of my favorite moments is in "Red Apple Falls" itself, when the singer pulls back from singing about the widow who "says it's hard to live/on the lonely version of love I give", reminded of the time his brother died, his parents "slowly trying to do themselves in/inch by inch/day by day/and the telephone ring's/like a banshee wail". This is a slow, dirge-like song, with minimal instrumentation, some acoustic guitar, piano. When the words "banshee wail" are sung, Callahan's voice is subtly louder, punctuating the startling moment.

One of the standout songs on A River Ain't Too Much To Love is "The Well", and it has a moment that has bothered me. As the song begins, over a minimal repeating guitar figure and simple drum pattern, with violin, the singer "could not work/so I threw a bottle into the woods", but he "felt bad for the doe paw/And the rabbit paw" (I love this). He runs into the woods and encounters "an old abandoned well", "With a drip hanging from the bucket still". Periodically the words are punctuated by a more insistent drum beat, which retreats to the original pattern. The singer pulls the boards off the well and stares into the "black black black". Then comes a great touch: "I guess everybody has their own thing/That they yell into a well". He yells his yell, into the black, only to find the drip has dropped onto his back:

I knew if I stood up
That drip would roll down my back
Into no man's land

So I stayed like that
Staring into the black black black

Then comes the line that nearly upends it for me: "Well they say black is all colors at once". Except that they don't. "They" conventionally say white is "all colors at once". I've stumbled on this line since I first heard it nearly two years ago. But I've decided to let it go, not least because he could merely mean that black absorbs all the colors of the visible spectrum and reflects none of them (oh come on! he could totally mean that!). But more importantly, the idea suits the song. It's true. In the specificity of the moment, it works. He sings:

So I gave it my red rage my yellow streak
The greenest parts of me
And my blues and I knew just what I had to do

I had to turn around and go back
And let that drip roll down my back
And I felt so bad about that

But wouldn't you know
When I turned to go
Another drip was forming
On the bottom of the bucket
And I felt so good about that

Paper Anniversary

One year ago today, right around now actually, Aimée and I were married. It's been a good year. We've learned a lot about ourselves and about each other, some of what it takes for two people to live together, committed to a life shared. Last year, I described Aimée as "a beautiful, wonderful woman: [...] fiercely intelligent, independent-minded, sexy, funny, sweet, and more than a little crazy." All true. I am fortunate just to know her, let alone find myself married to her.

It's chilly and rainy this Sunday here in Baltimore, whereas last year at this time it was an unseasonably warm, clear-skied Saturday. The rain has more or less kept us inside, which is nice. We've slept in lavishly and done a little calming yoga, later we'll eat dinner and watch Buffy before turning in. Next Friday we travel to California for our official anniversary gift to ourselves. But today, after several hectic weeks, quietness was just what we needed, and so we've marked the day itself just by being together.

Aimée, I am proud to know you and proud to call you my wife, my spouse, my partner in life, my love. Let's make the next year even better.