Technologically Advanced
How fucked are we? Pretty fucked. Ten all but ignored stories of further scientific evidence that "human civilization is on the precipice". All depressing, each on their own catastrophic. And still we remain utterly delusional. The introduction to the list closes with a quotation from Elizabeth Kolbert’s Field Notes from a Catastrophe: "It may seem impossible to imagine that a technologically advanced society could choose, in essence, to destroy itself, but that is what we are now in the process of doing." It may seem impossible? To whom?
Dunbar's number, etc
Last month Ethan linked to this Wikileaks-related post at Americana called "Pathologies of Scale". The Wikileaks stuff is pretty good, but I'm more interested here in the first part of the post, in which the author, Justin, writes about his personal experience working at a smallish company as a software developer, because it dovetails nicely with some of what I've been thinking and wanting to write about here with respect to the future and how to act, etc. Justin tells of some advice he received from an older colleague who was leaving the company on "difficult terms", to the effect that he "should get out of there as soon as possible" that he "would do best in small, loose organizations" and that he "should begin looking for a new job as soon as [he] heard talk of a security badge policy". His friend
Dunbar's number is a concept first proposed by the anthropologist Robin Dunbar, as "a theoretical cognitive limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships"; "relationships in which an individual knows who each person is, and how each person relates to every other person" (Wikipedia). The number, it turns out, is roughly 150 people. I first learned about Dunbar's number by way of Stan Goff, and it so happens that Stan revisited the topic in a recent post at his essential Feral Scholar blog (seriously, Stan and his co-blogger DeAnander have been a crucial resource in recent years, in particular in such areas as gender and militarism and food praxis, among others; you should read them regularly):
(Incidentally, in the course of his brief lecture, Dunbar mentions almost in passing the importance of touch in maintaining relationships, something that science has pretty much completely overlooked. I naturally thought immediately of Gabriel Josipovici's book-length essay Touch, and again my sense that this all matters a great deal is mutually reinforced everywhere I turn.)
I don't have a lot of time to explore this topic right now, but I did want to throw it out there, in part in connection to the question of how we are to act, given the forces aligned against us and our own complicity in it all, the hugeness of it all. The battles before us seem massive, intractable, impossible even. The sheer scale of the problems we face tends to lead us to believe that large-scale solutions are needed. I admit that I am just as susceptible, if not more so, to this way of thinking as anyone else; I am an impatient git. And, lacking any personal connection to a tradition of political or social action, the tendency for me to just say it's impossible and do nothing is still all too strong. Nonetheless, action is possible. Lately I've come around to the idea that action must be local to have any hope of succeeding. But succeeding at what? Is a locally sustaining food economy going to arrest global warming? Well, no. Of course not, not when you put it like that. I don't honestly think anything will help when it comes to problems of that scale. We can only do what we can do. My position is one of both pessimism (we will eventually be forced to make do locally, so we may as well learn now) and optimism (we really do work better in small groups, live better when we know those around us, work better when we work together, etc).
As so many previous posts have been, this one is little more than a pointer towards future writing and activity. Localism is unpopular in certain quarters of the left, which tends to view it suspiciously as often so much mystical blood and soil fascist shit, and which itself is still very much wedded to the large-scale solution of state socialism. So this is another theme to which I hope to return. (Also: what does it mean to be left? or socialist? or liberal? or conservative? how meaningless are those terms?)
was really describing sicknesses that are endemic to organizational growth, the point at which an organization reaches critical mass and begins experiencing new kinds of communication breakdowns from scale. Businesses often call these issues 'growing pains', where in the early days of an organization, it is possible for everyone to talk with everyone and as the company grows, open communication and unrestricted access becomes impossible and counter-productive. To function, the organization needs protocols, proper channels and badges because it is no longer possible for everyone to know everything and everyone. He could have chosen any one of numerous symptoms; help desk tickets, organizational charts, whatever, but he chose security badges, which was interesting because security badges are vaguely authoritarian, betray a puffed up sense of self-importance and neurotic insecurity approaching paranoia.Other than simple recognition, two things in particular occurred to me as I read these paragraphs. The first was Dunbar's number; the second was the arguments put forth by James C. Scott in his book Seeing Like a State. I've written about Scott's book in the past (here, and also here; heh, that second post reads like a dry run for, or perhaps a better version of, this post of mine from last month: I do repeat myself); here I want to talk a little about Dunbar's number.
[...]
The unintended side effects of growth manifest as pathologies. The role of ‘proper channels’ in an organization is to synthesize raw data into actionable information for leadership to act upon. The problem is that any synthesis also, by definition, results in information loss. The information that is [lost] is partly determined by what underlings choose to report, which is influenced by their cognizance of the reality that no matter how rational they may believe themselves to be, leaders still sometimes resort to killing the messenger.
Dunbar's number is a concept first proposed by the anthropologist Robin Dunbar, as "a theoretical cognitive limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships"; "relationships in which an individual knows who each person is, and how each person relates to every other person" (Wikipedia). The number, it turns out, is roughly 150 people. I first learned about Dunbar's number by way of Stan Goff, and it so happens that Stan revisited the topic in a recent post at his essential Feral Scholar blog (seriously, Stan and his co-blogger DeAnander have been a crucial resource in recent years, in particular in such areas as gender and militarism and food praxis, among others; you should read them regularly):
. . .we ought to begin right now subjecting every institution to scrutiny, and work against the institutional tendency to transform from an in-itself into a for-itself.When I first learned about Dunbar's number the idea made immediate, intuitive sense to me. Stan opens his post by linking to a short video in which Dunbar explains the idea and some of the underpinnings of it. I recommend taking a look.Every time friends become a committee, we ought to exercise the precautionary principle; because our desire to get bigger and stronger to pursue tempo tasks can blind us to the more formidable strength we risk losing by neglecting – and underestimating – primary relations.
If we spend 80 percent of our time managing secondary relationships, then we need to figure out how we can flip that to 80 percent of our time nurturing primary relationships.
One of the reasons we have so little power to act creatively in the face of so many crises is that we are fragmented, yes, but cut off in a much deeper way by the lack of social cohesion that can only happen in the small, intimate group.
It is not hyperbole to say, I don’t think, that Management is the enemy of social cohesion, because it substitutes secondary weak bonds for primary strong ones.
It only seems symmetrical to suggest that by restrengthening primary bonds, we develop a greater capacity to resist, but also to creatively adapt to, the forces that seem so threatening now.
(Incidentally, in the course of his brief lecture, Dunbar mentions almost in passing the importance of touch in maintaining relationships, something that science has pretty much completely overlooked. I naturally thought immediately of Gabriel Josipovici's book-length essay Touch, and again my sense that this all matters a great deal is mutually reinforced everywhere I turn.)
I don't have a lot of time to explore this topic right now, but I did want to throw it out there, in part in connection to the question of how we are to act, given the forces aligned against us and our own complicity in it all, the hugeness of it all. The battles before us seem massive, intractable, impossible even. The sheer scale of the problems we face tends to lead us to believe that large-scale solutions are needed. I admit that I am just as susceptible, if not more so, to this way of thinking as anyone else; I am an impatient git. And, lacking any personal connection to a tradition of political or social action, the tendency for me to just say it's impossible and do nothing is still all too strong. Nonetheless, action is possible. Lately I've come around to the idea that action must be local to have any hope of succeeding. But succeeding at what? Is a locally sustaining food economy going to arrest global warming? Well, no. Of course not, not when you put it like that. I don't honestly think anything will help when it comes to problems of that scale. We can only do what we can do. My position is one of both pessimism (we will eventually be forced to make do locally, so we may as well learn now) and optimism (we really do work better in small groups, live better when we know those around us, work better when we work together, etc).
As so many previous posts have been, this one is little more than a pointer towards future writing and activity. Localism is unpopular in certain quarters of the left, which tends to view it suspiciously as often so much mystical blood and soil fascist shit, and which itself is still very much wedded to the large-scale solution of state socialism. So this is another theme to which I hope to return. (Also: what does it mean to be left? or socialist? or liberal? or conservative? how meaningless are those terms?)
A Bernhard Moment
If in the early part of last year my reading was dominated by Peter Handke, I anticipate the beginning of this year to be dominated by his fellow Austrian, the late Thomas Bernhard. Not only did I receive for Christmas the two newly published collections of his writings, Prose (early stories just now appearing in English for the first time) and My Prizes (his various pieces commenting on his several literary prizes), but I already had three other volumes still awaiting my attention. These are Wittgenstein's Nephew, Woodcutters, and the final novel, Extinction. The relentlessness of Bernhard's mature style means that I am especially loath to read him when exhausted and so has meant that I have not been reading him much of late, except where shorter works have been available. The Voice Imitator, for example, or Three Novellas. The latter collection, of similar vintage as the stories found in Prose, I did read last year, and each of the three stories successively came closer to that mature style, with "Walking" in particular being very much like the later Bernhard, and so reminding me of the considerable pleasure to be found in his music. It feels like time to read him again. (A re-read of Concrete, my first Bernhard, may also be in order.)
There have been several new paperback editions of Bernhard's work in recent years, which is just one reason why reviews have been appearing at some of the more popular litblogs. I admit to some ambivalence about this. It's great that people are reading Bernhard and that his books are coming back into print (though, alas, the new American Vintage reissues are fucking ugly; fortunately, I already have the vastly more attractive University of Chicago editions for most of them; The Lime Works appears to be the only one I am missing). I suppose I'm being a bit churlish. Few noticed when others of us were talking about Bernhard in the past. I'm not completely beyond the tendency to care whether (more) people notice. But, to be fair, I don't have many actual complaints about the recent blog-commentary I've seen, which is more than can be said for either mainstream coverage of Bernhard or the traditional critical responses to him.
For the former, Dale Peck's recent item in the New York Times has received some attention. Since Peck is the author, you can bet there is something wrong with it, but in fact I wasn't quite as bothered by it as some, if only because I don't much mind the practice of "a reviewer [using] a book merely as a soapbox on which to stand and expound". You'll notice I have referred to Peck's "item"; this is because, though it is ostensibly a review of the two new books, he doesn't really review either of them, instead using the occasion to cluelessly talk up Bernhard in general. Which, again, in itself isn't a bad thing. It depends on the nature of the argument being expounded. Obviously, "soapbox" and "expound" are words carrying negative connotations, and Peck does little to warrant a defense (though he does once or twice veer dangerously close to getting it). He goes on and on about alienation. (The article sounds at times like a less interesting version of Zadie Smith's much-discussed "Two Paths" essay from two years ago, though Peck doesn't really explore the question he raises.) The soapbox-line comes from Terry at Vertigo, in his excellent evisceration of the Peck review (which he follows up with a fine review of his own of Prose).
With respect to the traditional critical take on Bernhard, a recent review in the London Review of Books of a new UK edition of Old Masters, by the well-regarded translator Michael Hofmann (translator of Bernhard's first novel, Frost, among many other important German-language works), is a case in point (my own review of Old Masters, from four years ago, is here; see also John Self's fine review last year at Asylum). Waggish handles Hofmann's review superbly. Waggish was disappointed in the review,
One aspect of Waggish's review that is of particular interest to me is the distinction he makes between the middle narratives, culminating in Correction, and the later, more rant-fueled books, which include Concrete, The Loser (again, source of this blog's name), Old Masters, and Extinction. I am partial to these later works, and at times found Correction rough sledding. Correction is often named as Bernhard's best and most important (Waggish agrees), most prominently by George Steiner, who tended to dismiss the later work as the product of a writer "succumb[ing] to a monotone of hate". Steiner, like Hofmann, missed the point. Here is Waggish again (his post is much more than the excerpts I'm quoting in this post and is very much worth reading in its entirety):
Now, on to the reading.
There have been several new paperback editions of Bernhard's work in recent years, which is just one reason why reviews have been appearing at some of the more popular litblogs. I admit to some ambivalence about this. It's great that people are reading Bernhard and that his books are coming back into print (though, alas, the new American Vintage reissues are fucking ugly; fortunately, I already have the vastly more attractive University of Chicago editions for most of them; The Lime Works appears to be the only one I am missing). I suppose I'm being a bit churlish. Few noticed when others of us were talking about Bernhard in the past. I'm not completely beyond the tendency to care whether (more) people notice. But, to be fair, I don't have many actual complaints about the recent blog-commentary I've seen, which is more than can be said for either mainstream coverage of Bernhard or the traditional critical responses to him.
For the former, Dale Peck's recent item in the New York Times has received some attention. Since Peck is the author, you can bet there is something wrong with it, but in fact I wasn't quite as bothered by it as some, if only because I don't much mind the practice of "a reviewer [using] a book merely as a soapbox on which to stand and expound". You'll notice I have referred to Peck's "item"; this is because, though it is ostensibly a review of the two new books, he doesn't really review either of them, instead using the occasion to cluelessly talk up Bernhard in general. Which, again, in itself isn't a bad thing. It depends on the nature of the argument being expounded. Obviously, "soapbox" and "expound" are words carrying negative connotations, and Peck does little to warrant a defense (though he does once or twice veer dangerously close to getting it). He goes on and on about alienation. (The article sounds at times like a less interesting version of Zadie Smith's much-discussed "Two Paths" essay from two years ago, though Peck doesn't really explore the question he raises.) The soapbox-line comes from Terry at Vertigo, in his excellent evisceration of the Peck review (which he follows up with a fine review of his own of Prose).
With respect to the traditional critical take on Bernhard, a recent review in the London Review of Books of a new UK edition of Old Masters, by the well-regarded translator Michael Hofmann (translator of Bernhard's first novel, Frost, among many other important German-language works), is a case in point (my own review of Old Masters, from four years ago, is here; see also John Self's fine review last year at Asylum). Waggish handles Hofmann's review superbly. Waggish was disappointed in the review,
not only because it neglects the most important aspects of Bernhard’s work, but also because it seems to confirm so many preconceptions of him: the angry Austrian endlessly railing at everything, hating the country and its people and life and books and culture and everything. [...] [the ranting] is always contextualized. It is never ranting for its own sake, and the rants are never to be taken completely at face-value, no matter how appealing or justified the target.The voice in Bernhard is so vital that one is often tempted to nod along in agreement. I can't tell you the number of times I have encountered a passage that seems to perfectly capture a given position, or perfectly expresses a thought, and I have stopped to underline or jot it down, or have even blogged an excerpt, only to see it negated or comically undermined further down the page, or on the next page, or perhaps 30 or 60 pages on, this negation or reversal also perfectly expressed, by the same character, in the same marvelous music. I am reminded, again, in these moments, chastened even, that the opinion is not the point (which is not the same thing as saying that it's completely irrelevant, either to Bernhard or to his art). (Of course, I underline or excerpt anyway.) (Coetzee is another writer who is constantly reminding us of this; we seem to need the reminders.) In any event, Waggish's post is an excellent discussion of the purposes Bernhard's characters' rants serve in the narratives which contain them (which appear to some readers to simply be the totality of those narratives, the characters merely stand-ins for Bernhard himself).
One aspect of Waggish's review that is of particular interest to me is the distinction he makes between the middle narratives, culminating in Correction, and the later, more rant-fueled books, which include Concrete, The Loser (again, source of this blog's name), Old Masters, and Extinction. I am partial to these later works, and at times found Correction rough sledding. Correction is often named as Bernhard's best and most important (Waggish agrees), most prominently by George Steiner, who tended to dismiss the later work as the product of a writer "succumb[ing] to a monotone of hate". Steiner, like Hofmann, missed the point. Here is Waggish again (his post is much more than the excerpts I'm quoting in this post and is very much worth reading in its entirety):
All the exaggerations, the name-callings, the generalizations, the hate? These are not things that one quite means. They are flourishes. The flourishes (here is where the “musicality” of Bernhard’s prose is apt) are all there are, as Bernhard is hellbent on avoiding such meaningful content as argument, logic, evidence, and proof.Interestingly, from, say, the latter half of Gargoyles, through Correction, on through to the later novels, the musicality of Bernhard's voice, the refracted narrative, the repetitions, the negations, is so similar, so recognizably Bernhard, that I have to admit that I hadn't remembered that those of the middle-period are not "all that rant-filled at all" till Waggish pointed it out. Perhaps oddly, it's Correction that, for this reader, was the toughest to finish, and I think it's what Waggish calls the "hermetic approach" that helps to explain it. The later works, though superficially rant-filled, and certainly despairing, are at the same time lighter, and also funnier. I don't feel oppressed by the writing, even as it bears obvious similarities with the hermetic, oppressive writing of Correction. It is this lightness which, for me, elevates the later writing.And I think all this is fairly evident from Bernhard’s middle period, which isn’t all that rant-filled at all. Correction, which I consider to be his absolute masterpiece, is nothing but the turning-inward that falls on Bernhard’s ranters when they run out of venom. It’s about a man, or several men, who have nowhere to go, and yet are running at full throttle. I don’t think that the hermetic approach that culminated to Correction could possibly have gone any further, so Bernhard was forced to find a new direction, one dealing with the attempted evasions from the hermetic nightmare that consumes the men of Correction.
But the nightmare remains paramount.
Now, on to the reading.
Books Read - 2010
As is the annual tradition, here is the final list of books I completed reading in 2010, in chronological order of completion (with one exception); links are to posts in which I've either written about the book or the author, or posted excerpts; following the list are comments and observations, including remarks on my favorite books of the year, plus the always all-important statistical breakdown.
1. Short Letter, Long Farewell, Peter Handke (Ralph Manheim, trans.)
2. Once Again For Thucydides, Peter Handke (Tess Lewis, trans.)
3. Our Horses In Egypt, Rosalind Belben
4. One Dimensional Woman, Nina Power
5. Repetition, Peter Handke (Ralph Manheim, trans.)
6. Summertime, J.M. Coetzee
7. Capitalist Realism, Mark Fisher
8. After & Making Mistakes, Gabriel Josipovici
9. Possibilities: Essays on Hierarchy, Rebellion, and Desire, David Graeber (also, also)
10. Patriarchy & Accumulation on a World Scale: Women in the International Division of Labour, Maria Mies
11. 2666, Roberto Bolaño (Natasha Wimmer, trans.)
12. A Journey to the Rivers: Justice for Serbia, Peter Handke (Scott Abbott, trans.)
13. The Afternoon of a Writer, Peter Handke (Ralph Manheim, trans.)
14. First as Tragedy, Then as Farce, Slavoj Žižek
15. The Uncommon Reader, Alan Bennett
16. A Sorrow Beyond Dreams, Peter Handke (Ralph Manheim, trans.)
17. A Moment of True Feeling, Peter Handke (Ralph Manheim, trans.)
18. Say Uncle, Kay Ryan
19. The Drowned and the Saved, Primo Levi (Raymond Rosenthal, trans.)
20. Beckett's Dying Words, Christopher Ricks
21. The Letters of Samuel Beckett, 1929-1940 (Martha Dow Fehsenfeld & Lois More Overbeck, eds.) (also, also, also, also, also)
22. Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett, James Knowlson
23. Anarchism and its Aspirations, Cindy Milstein
24. Why School?: Reclaiming Education for All of Us, Mike Rose
25. The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power and the Origins of our Times, Giovanni Arrighi
26. The Schools Our Children Deserve: Moving Beyond Traditional Classrooms and "Tougher Standards", Alfie Kohn
27. Runaway, Alice Munro
28. Friend of My Youth, Alice Munro
29. Heidegger Explained: From Phenomenon to Thing, Graham Harman
30. The Exquisite, Laird Hunt
31. Too Much Flesh and Jabez, Coleman Dowell
32. Studies in Ancient Greek Society: The Prehistoric Aegean, George Thomson
33. Island People, Coleman Dowell
34. What Ever Happened to Modernism?, Gabriel Josipovici
35. Only Joking, Gabriel Josipovici
36. Cheap Motels and a Hot Plate: An Economist's Travelogue, Michael D. Yates
37. The Hesperides Tree, Nicholas Mosley
38. Doctor Faustus, Thomas Mann (John E. Woods, trans.)
39. Corruption, Tahar Ben Jelloun (Carol Volk, trans.)
40. Capital, Volume 1, Karl Marx (Ben Fowkes, trans.)
41. Spiderland, Scott Tennent
42. Portrait of a Romantic, Steven Millhauser
43. Three Novellas, Thomas Bernhard (Peter Jansen & Kenneth J. Northcott, trans.)
44. The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time, Karl Polanyi
45. The Sorrows of Empire, Chalmers Johnson
46. Mr. Sammler's Planet, Saul Bellow
47. If I Am Not For Myself: Journey of an Anti-Zionist Jew, Mike Marqusee
Some statistics
Number of books written by men: 40
Number of books written by women: 7 (!!)
Number of books which were acquired via the Big Dalkey Get: 3 (both Dowells, Mosley)
Number of other Dalkey books: 0
Number of books in translation: 14
Number of books by writers known primarily to me through their blogs: 4 (Power, Fisher, Harman, Tennent)
Fiction or Poetry (or sufficiently literary memoir):
Number of books: 25
Number that are poetry: 1
Number that are memoirs: 2 (two of the Handke books are memoirs of sorts)
Number that are re-reads: 0
Number of authors represented: 16
Number of books by female authors: 4
Number of female authors: 3
Number of books by American authors: 6
Number of American authors: 5
Number of books by African-American authors: 0
Number of African-American authors: 0
Number of books by non-American, English-language authors: 8
Number of non-American, English-language authors: 6 (Coetzee, Josipovici, Belben, Munro, Bennett, Mosley)
Number of books in translation: 11
Number of authors of books in translation: 5
Number of translated books by female authors: 0
Number of foreign languages represented in translation: 3 (German, French, Spanish)
Most represented foreign languages: German (9: 7 Handke books, 1 Bernhard, 1 Mann)
Number of Nobel Prize-winners: 4 (Beckett—for his Letters, counted as non-fiction, below—Bellow, Coetzee, Mann)
Number of books from before 1800: 0
Number of books from 1800 to 1899: 0
Number of books from 1900 to 1914: 0
Number of books from 1915-1944: 0
Number of books from 1945 to 1970: 3 (Bellow, Bernhard, Mann)
Number of books from 1971-1989: 8 (Millhauser, 5 of the Handkes, both Dowells)
Number of books from 1990 to 1999: 5
Number of books from 2000 to 2009: 9
Number of books from 2010: 0
Non-Fiction:
Number of non-fiction books: 22
Number of books by female authors: 3 (Power, Mies, Milstein)
Number of books in translation: 2 (Levi, Marx)
Number that are biographies or letters: 2 (Knowlson's bio of Beckett; Beckett's Letters)
Number that are philosophy or about philosophy: 2
Number that are books of criticism or essays: 2 (Josipovici's What Ever Happened to Modernism?, Ricks)
Number that are about politics or economics or history: 11
Number about pop music: 1
Number about science: 0
Number about parenting or education: 2
Comments & Observations:
Overall, I completed just over half as many books this year as I did last year. There are a few reasons for this. First, I spent a lot of time reading volume 1 of Capital and watching David Harvey's lecture series on it. Second, a few of the novels I read were long, or took long to read. Doctor Faustus, for example, or 2666. Third, I read a lot of partial books. Fourth, I do almost no reading at home anymore, because of my commute and the need to spend time with my family and my re-obsession this year with baseball and my inability to put my computer away. Fifth, and most important by far, in the middle of the year, I suffered from extreme sleep deprivation. All too often, I was simply too tired to read.
The concentration of links in the reading list is just another indicator of how quiet this blog has been for the last six months. I hope to be a little more active in 2011, though obviously I can make no guarantees.
Other general notes on the numbers: the ratio of men to women is higher than ever; uncharacteristically, I read no fiction published prior to 1948; non-fiction was dominated by economic history; fiction was dominated by Peter Handke, with Alice Munro and Coleman Dowell and Gabriel Josipovici the only other authors represented by more than one book; my intention to read a lot of feminism this year did not come to pass, though Mies' book is an important feminist perspective on capitalism (see below). . .
Which brings me to my main reading goal for 2010, to finally read Capital, volume 1, which I did in fact read. Marx's book is not exactly a walk in the park but far easier to read than I'd once feared (as is so often the case). My view of the history of capitalism was further deepened and complicated by Mies' Patriarchy & Accumulation on a World Scale, Arrighi's The Long Twentieth Century, and Polanyi's classic The Great Transformation. I rate all of these very highly, and I hope to synthesize in writing what I've taken from their arguments, though I have, admittedly, been very slow to get moving on such a project.
I had difficulty with fiction this year, which isn't too unusual when I'm having trouble sleeping. The early part of the year was dominated by Peter Handke, and I'd expected to follow my meta-Beckett hat trick with some of Beckett's shorter fiction. Unfortunately, that was the exact moment my troubles began, and I have no intention of doing half-assed readings of Beckett. I never did get back to him once my sleep returned. Anyway, fiction highlights for the year included Handke's beautiful novel Repetition (my third attempt finally proving successful), Coetzee's Summertime, Bolaño's much-hyped 2666, and Bellow's apparently notorious Mr. Sammler's Planet. I also enjoyed, as I always do, the Josipovici fiction I read this year. And allow me to mention with some affection Alice Munro. Her stories are more conventional than I normally read, but they are enjoyable and did ease me back into the reading of fiction this summer when nothing else seemed to do the trick, for which I offer thanks.
Once again poetry was hit-or-miss for me. Wallace Stevens, T.S. Eliot, Emily Dickinson, Rimbaud were all, again, the most common poets I read throughout the year. I read for the first time the American Kay Ryan, and I was delighted. I read her short volume Say Uncle several times with considerable pleasure. I look forward to reading more of her work in the future (and, hey!, I received her shiny new selected poems for Christmas; excellent). (I am grateful to Patrick Kurp for his several posts in praise of Ryan, who I may not otherwise have read.)
Brief interlude to include list of books I read substantial portions of without yet completing:
Blanchot, The Book to Come and The Infinite Conversation
Heidegger, History of the Concept of Time
Kierkegaard, Either/Or
Thoreau, The Journal
Philip Goodchild, Capitalism and Religion: The Price of Piety
Georg Lukács, History and Class Consciousness
Jenny Davidson, Breeding: A Partial History of the Eighteenth Century
Derrick Jensen, A Language Older Than Words
Christina Stead, The Man Who Loved Children
James C. Scott, The Moral Economy of the Peasant (I may not yet have finished reading this book, but I did write two posts on Scott's Seeing Like a State, which I read last year: one, two)
I finished just two books of literary criticism, but both were marvelous: Christopher Ricks' Beckett's Dying Words and Josipovici's What Ever Happened to Modernism? Of course, my love of Josipovici is no secret around here (and, yes, I do still have something in the works in response to his book, including, for once, some criticisms; what ever those end up being, it remains an essential volume), but Ricks' book was the first I'd read from that great critic. I doubt it will be the last. On a related note, the first volume of Beckett's Letters was a wonderful reading experience; I found Knowlson's bio Damned to Fame by turns fascinating and tedious (and certainly overlong: hate to say it, but I don't really care all that much about the many different productions of Beckett's various plays, just as in the editorial apparatus to his Letters, I could have quite done without the excessive minutiae about the works of art he viewed while visiting Germany in the 1930s). These were the first such books I'd ever read (that is, published letters or literary biography); I'm not rushing out to immediately add more to my reading list, but I welcome a good recommendation, and I'm happy to have read these.
You'll have noticed that my list of unfinished books is top-heavy with philosophy (including the inimitable Blanchot's philosophical literary criticism). I hope to get further along with philosophy this coming year; in aid of that, I read another "guide" to Heidegger, Graham Harman's very helpful Heidegger Explained. Coupled with Timothy Clark's excellent, though more literary-focused, Martin Heidegger, read last year, I feel I have a decent idea of how to best approach, for my purposes, that philosopher's often difficult writings. (I also, for months, have had in mind a post about an epiphany I had while reading one of the later sections in Harman's book, which I hope to publish early in the year.)
Finally, of the rest of the non-fiction that I read, Primo Levi's The Drowned and the Saved is a fascinating and moving meditation on the meaning of the Holocaust; Cindy Milstein's Anarchism and its Aspirations is the best book on the topic I've yet read; David Graeber's Possibilities is a stimulating collection of essays on anarchism and anthropology; Alfie Kohn's The Schools Our Children Deserve is an excellent book on education (though Mike Rose's Why School? is, alas, of very little value); and blog-friend Scott Tennent's Spiderland, his entry in the 33 1/3 series of books about classic albums, is an engaging narrative effectively contextualizing the mysterious Slint and their great album.
Ok, that wraps up another year of reading. Thank you.
1. Short Letter, Long Farewell, Peter Handke (Ralph Manheim, trans.)
2. Once Again For Thucydides, Peter Handke (Tess Lewis, trans.)
3. Our Horses In Egypt, Rosalind Belben
4. One Dimensional Woman, Nina Power
5. Repetition, Peter Handke (Ralph Manheim, trans.)
6. Summertime, J.M. Coetzee
7. Capitalist Realism, Mark Fisher
8. After & Making Mistakes, Gabriel Josipovici
9. Possibilities: Essays on Hierarchy, Rebellion, and Desire, David Graeber (also, also)
10. Patriarchy & Accumulation on a World Scale: Women in the International Division of Labour, Maria Mies
11. 2666, Roberto Bolaño (Natasha Wimmer, trans.)
12. A Journey to the Rivers: Justice for Serbia, Peter Handke (Scott Abbott, trans.)
13. The Afternoon of a Writer, Peter Handke (Ralph Manheim, trans.)
14. First as Tragedy, Then as Farce, Slavoj Žižek
15. The Uncommon Reader, Alan Bennett
16. A Sorrow Beyond Dreams, Peter Handke (Ralph Manheim, trans.)
17. A Moment of True Feeling, Peter Handke (Ralph Manheim, trans.)
18. Say Uncle, Kay Ryan
19. The Drowned and the Saved, Primo Levi (Raymond Rosenthal, trans.)
20. Beckett's Dying Words, Christopher Ricks
21. The Letters of Samuel Beckett, 1929-1940 (Martha Dow Fehsenfeld & Lois More Overbeck, eds.) (also, also, also, also, also)
22. Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett, James Knowlson
23. Anarchism and its Aspirations, Cindy Milstein
24. Why School?: Reclaiming Education for All of Us, Mike Rose
25. The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power and the Origins of our Times, Giovanni Arrighi
26. The Schools Our Children Deserve: Moving Beyond Traditional Classrooms and "Tougher Standards", Alfie Kohn
27. Runaway, Alice Munro
28. Friend of My Youth, Alice Munro
29. Heidegger Explained: From Phenomenon to Thing, Graham Harman
30. The Exquisite, Laird Hunt
31. Too Much Flesh and Jabez, Coleman Dowell
32. Studies in Ancient Greek Society: The Prehistoric Aegean, George Thomson
33. Island People, Coleman Dowell
34. What Ever Happened to Modernism?, Gabriel Josipovici
35. Only Joking, Gabriel Josipovici
36. Cheap Motels and a Hot Plate: An Economist's Travelogue, Michael D. Yates
37. The Hesperides Tree, Nicholas Mosley
38. Doctor Faustus, Thomas Mann (John E. Woods, trans.)
39. Corruption, Tahar Ben Jelloun (Carol Volk, trans.)
40. Capital, Volume 1, Karl Marx (Ben Fowkes, trans.)
41. Spiderland, Scott Tennent
42. Portrait of a Romantic, Steven Millhauser
43. Three Novellas, Thomas Bernhard (Peter Jansen & Kenneth J. Northcott, trans.)
44. The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time, Karl Polanyi
45. The Sorrows of Empire, Chalmers Johnson
46. Mr. Sammler's Planet, Saul Bellow
47. If I Am Not For Myself: Journey of an Anti-Zionist Jew, Mike Marqusee
Some statistics
Number of books written by men: 40
Number of books written by women: 7 (!!)
Number of books which were acquired via the Big Dalkey Get: 3 (both Dowells, Mosley)
Number of other Dalkey books: 0
Number of books in translation: 14
Number of books by writers known primarily to me through their blogs: 4 (Power, Fisher, Harman, Tennent)
Fiction or Poetry (or sufficiently literary memoir):
Number of books: 25
Number that are poetry: 1
Number that are memoirs: 2 (two of the Handke books are memoirs of sorts)
Number that are re-reads: 0
Number of authors represented: 16
Number of books by female authors: 4
Number of female authors: 3
Number of books by American authors: 6
Number of American authors: 5
Number of books by African-American authors: 0
Number of African-American authors: 0
Number of books by non-American, English-language authors: 8
Number of non-American, English-language authors: 6 (Coetzee, Josipovici, Belben, Munro, Bennett, Mosley)
Number of books in translation: 11
Number of authors of books in translation: 5
Number of translated books by female authors: 0
Number of foreign languages represented in translation: 3 (German, French, Spanish)
Most represented foreign languages: German (9: 7 Handke books, 1 Bernhard, 1 Mann)
Number of Nobel Prize-winners: 4 (Beckett—for his Letters, counted as non-fiction, below—Bellow, Coetzee, Mann)
Number of books from before 1800: 0
Number of books from 1800 to 1899: 0
Number of books from 1900 to 1914: 0
Number of books from 1915-1944: 0
Number of books from 1945 to 1970: 3 (Bellow, Bernhard, Mann)
Number of books from 1971-1989: 8 (Millhauser, 5 of the Handkes, both Dowells)
Number of books from 1990 to 1999: 5
Number of books from 2000 to 2009: 9
Number of books from 2010: 0
Non-Fiction:
Number of non-fiction books: 22
Number of books by female authors: 3 (Power, Mies, Milstein)
Number of books in translation: 2 (Levi, Marx)
Number that are biographies or letters: 2 (Knowlson's bio of Beckett; Beckett's Letters)
Number that are philosophy or about philosophy: 2
Number that are books of criticism or essays: 2 (Josipovici's What Ever Happened to Modernism?, Ricks)
Number that are about politics or economics or history: 11
Number about pop music: 1
Number about science: 0
Number about parenting or education: 2
Comments & Observations:
Overall, I completed just over half as many books this year as I did last year. There are a few reasons for this. First, I spent a lot of time reading volume 1 of Capital and watching David Harvey's lecture series on it. Second, a few of the novels I read were long, or took long to read. Doctor Faustus, for example, or 2666. Third, I read a lot of partial books. Fourth, I do almost no reading at home anymore, because of my commute and the need to spend time with my family and my re-obsession this year with baseball and my inability to put my computer away. Fifth, and most important by far, in the middle of the year, I suffered from extreme sleep deprivation. All too often, I was simply too tired to read.
The concentration of links in the reading list is just another indicator of how quiet this blog has been for the last six months. I hope to be a little more active in 2011, though obviously I can make no guarantees.
Other general notes on the numbers: the ratio of men to women is higher than ever; uncharacteristically, I read no fiction published prior to 1948; non-fiction was dominated by economic history; fiction was dominated by Peter Handke, with Alice Munro and Coleman Dowell and Gabriel Josipovici the only other authors represented by more than one book; my intention to read a lot of feminism this year did not come to pass, though Mies' book is an important feminist perspective on capitalism (see below). . .
Which brings me to my main reading goal for 2010, to finally read Capital, volume 1, which I did in fact read. Marx's book is not exactly a walk in the park but far easier to read than I'd once feared (as is so often the case). My view of the history of capitalism was further deepened and complicated by Mies' Patriarchy & Accumulation on a World Scale, Arrighi's The Long Twentieth Century, and Polanyi's classic The Great Transformation. I rate all of these very highly, and I hope to synthesize in writing what I've taken from their arguments, though I have, admittedly, been very slow to get moving on such a project.
I had difficulty with fiction this year, which isn't too unusual when I'm having trouble sleeping. The early part of the year was dominated by Peter Handke, and I'd expected to follow my meta-Beckett hat trick with some of Beckett's shorter fiction. Unfortunately, that was the exact moment my troubles began, and I have no intention of doing half-assed readings of Beckett. I never did get back to him once my sleep returned. Anyway, fiction highlights for the year included Handke's beautiful novel Repetition (my third attempt finally proving successful), Coetzee's Summertime, Bolaño's much-hyped 2666, and Bellow's apparently notorious Mr. Sammler's Planet. I also enjoyed, as I always do, the Josipovici fiction I read this year. And allow me to mention with some affection Alice Munro. Her stories are more conventional than I normally read, but they are enjoyable and did ease me back into the reading of fiction this summer when nothing else seemed to do the trick, for which I offer thanks.
Once again poetry was hit-or-miss for me. Wallace Stevens, T.S. Eliot, Emily Dickinson, Rimbaud were all, again, the most common poets I read throughout the year. I read for the first time the American Kay Ryan, and I was delighted. I read her short volume Say Uncle several times with considerable pleasure. I look forward to reading more of her work in the future (and, hey!, I received her shiny new selected poems for Christmas; excellent). (I am grateful to Patrick Kurp for his several posts in praise of Ryan, who I may not otherwise have read.)
Brief interlude to include list of books I read substantial portions of without yet completing:
Blanchot, The Book to Come and The Infinite Conversation
Heidegger, History of the Concept of Time
Kierkegaard, Either/Or
Thoreau, The Journal
Philip Goodchild, Capitalism and Religion: The Price of Piety
Georg Lukács, History and Class Consciousness
Jenny Davidson, Breeding: A Partial History of the Eighteenth Century
Derrick Jensen, A Language Older Than Words
Christina Stead, The Man Who Loved Children
James C. Scott, The Moral Economy of the Peasant (I may not yet have finished reading this book, but I did write two posts on Scott's Seeing Like a State, which I read last year: one, two)
I finished just two books of literary criticism, but both were marvelous: Christopher Ricks' Beckett's Dying Words and Josipovici's What Ever Happened to Modernism? Of course, my love of Josipovici is no secret around here (and, yes, I do still have something in the works in response to his book, including, for once, some criticisms; what ever those end up being, it remains an essential volume), but Ricks' book was the first I'd read from that great critic. I doubt it will be the last. On a related note, the first volume of Beckett's Letters was a wonderful reading experience; I found Knowlson's bio Damned to Fame by turns fascinating and tedious (and certainly overlong: hate to say it, but I don't really care all that much about the many different productions of Beckett's various plays, just as in the editorial apparatus to his Letters, I could have quite done without the excessive minutiae about the works of art he viewed while visiting Germany in the 1930s). These were the first such books I'd ever read (that is, published letters or literary biography); I'm not rushing out to immediately add more to my reading list, but I welcome a good recommendation, and I'm happy to have read these.
You'll have noticed that my list of unfinished books is top-heavy with philosophy (including the inimitable Blanchot's philosophical literary criticism). I hope to get further along with philosophy this coming year; in aid of that, I read another "guide" to Heidegger, Graham Harman's very helpful Heidegger Explained. Coupled with Timothy Clark's excellent, though more literary-focused, Martin Heidegger, read last year, I feel I have a decent idea of how to best approach, for my purposes, that philosopher's often difficult writings. (I also, for months, have had in mind a post about an epiphany I had while reading one of the later sections in Harman's book, which I hope to publish early in the year.)
Finally, of the rest of the non-fiction that I read, Primo Levi's The Drowned and the Saved is a fascinating and moving meditation on the meaning of the Holocaust; Cindy Milstein's Anarchism and its Aspirations is the best book on the topic I've yet read; David Graeber's Possibilities is a stimulating collection of essays on anarchism and anthropology; Alfie Kohn's The Schools Our Children Deserve is an excellent book on education (though Mike Rose's Why School? is, alas, of very little value); and blog-friend Scott Tennent's Spiderland, his entry in the 33 1/3 series of books about classic albums, is an engaging narrative effectively contextualizing the mysterious Slint and their great album.
Ok, that wraps up another year of reading. Thank you.
On top of the shitheap
The other day, BDR riffed on the obviousness of the various Wikileaks revelations and how "Corporate" is bound to make us pay for it somehow, as it always does, because that's what it does. Then a commenter chimed in to the effect that Julian Assange is an enemy of the state and should be dealt with accordingly, etc, causing much jaw-dropping and Ellsberg-referencing in the comment boxes and so forth. Then he says: "I sincerely believe that some data needs to be protected if we want our country to remain on top of the shitheap."
In a very early entry here at the blog, I closed out a political rant by saying that people who displayed those "War Is Not the Answer" signs or bumper stickers "didn't understand what the fucking question was". "War is not the answer" implies that there is some ideal being violated, some "problem" that could be "solved" by some peaceful measure if only we tried harder (you know, "diplomacy" or whatever). Implying, also, that in the case of this kind of presumed problem, it went without saying that "we", the United States of America, aka the civilized world, necessarily belong in the discussion of how to solve the problem. That it's a problem likely caused by American acts in the first place, or is a problem perhaps fabricated for the purposes of the senseless debate about solutions, is routinely and easily overlooked.
But: If we want our country to remain on top of the shitheap. That's the fucking question, isn't it?
Is that what we really want? I say it's not. Am I in the minority? Are we satisfied with what that implies? What does it mean to be on top? How is that position maintained?
At the end of World War II, U.S. planners recognized the uniquely dominant position of the United States relative to the rest of the world and explicitly set policy to protect and maintain that dominance. The Soviet Union more or less served as a brake. Thus the Cold War, which entrenched the war economy, in a break with the past and contrary to popular expectations. Aaron Bady summarizes this point nicely:
I don't think staying at or near the top of the shitheap is either desirable or maintainable. I don't accept the framework. I don't believe in our complicity. I believe we've been swindled and that sooner or later we or our children are going to be put in the position of being forced to quickly unlearn decades or more of unhelpful practices. If we don't do something about it before then. But what does it take? How to break out of the pattern? How to act?
In a very early entry here at the blog, I closed out a political rant by saying that people who displayed those "War Is Not the Answer" signs or bumper stickers "didn't understand what the fucking question was". "War is not the answer" implies that there is some ideal being violated, some "problem" that could be "solved" by some peaceful measure if only we tried harder (you know, "diplomacy" or whatever). Implying, also, that in the case of this kind of presumed problem, it went without saying that "we", the United States of America, aka the civilized world, necessarily belong in the discussion of how to solve the problem. That it's a problem likely caused by American acts in the first place, or is a problem perhaps fabricated for the purposes of the senseless debate about solutions, is routinely and easily overlooked.
But: If we want our country to remain on top of the shitheap. That's the fucking question, isn't it?
Is that what we really want? I say it's not. Am I in the minority? Are we satisfied with what that implies? What does it mean to be on top? How is that position maintained?
At the end of World War II, U.S. planners recognized the uniquely dominant position of the United States relative to the rest of the world and explicitly set policy to protect and maintain that dominance. The Soviet Union more or less served as a brake. Thus the Cold War, which entrenched the war economy, in a break with the past and contrary to popular expectations. Aaron Bady summarizes this point nicely:
The cold war changed how the country is supposed to work, not because we were “at war” but because it came to be normal, banal, and unquestionable that we would be permanently in a state of military preparedness, that “security” came to be synonymous with a standing army. And when that process goes on long enough, it acquires a momentum of its own: when the Soviet Union ended, we lost the existential enemy that we needed to justify the existence of a permanent security state, but it was barely a decade before we found another one.Whatever you want to say about the deficiencies of the United States before WWII, and there's plenty worth saying, the point is that things did indeed change. Aaron goes on to discuss briefly how alien this move really was, but I want to emphasize how much it's warped our thinking. Not just because we are constantly bombarded with propaganda about the need for this state of military preparedness but because so many of our livelihoods depend, in one way or another, on the maintenance of that state. Maybe you're in the military itself, or work for one of its branches, or at a McDonald's on a base; maybe you're a defense contractor, or maybe a lowly programmer on a government site; maybe you work at a VA hospital, or at a research university—the possibilities are endless. The fact is, we depend on war. Add that to the bullshit we've been breathing our entire lives about Hobbesian states of nature and competition and contracts and free markets and the telos of technological progress, not to mention American exceptionalism. By now, not enough of us question the logic of the system, even if plenty of us vehemently oppose this or that administration's application or management of that system. We don't question the system, as such, in fact we protect our role in it (our complicity, as BDR has it), but we can see the writing on the wall, though we can't read it. America power has been declining for decades; American prestige is at an all-time low (with perhaps a slight blip upward with the election of Obama, for whatever reason). Our position on top of the shitheap is imperiled. Many of us are naturally fearful of what the future holds. What will happen next? How will it affect us and the ones we love?
I don't think staying at or near the top of the shitheap is either desirable or maintainable. I don't accept the framework. I don't believe in our complicity. I believe we've been swindled and that sooner or later we or our children are going to be put in the position of being forced to quickly unlearn decades or more of unhelpful practices. If we don't do something about it before then. But what does it take? How to break out of the pattern? How to act?
“Yeah, well, you know, that's just, like, your opinion, man”
Damn, we're reaching the end of 2010 already and already people are generating music of the year lists and I can never seem to get anything done when I want it done and . . .
I used to write about music a lot here at the blog—with literature and politics, it was the third part of my intended three-prong approach to blogging. But it fell by the wayside to such an extent that I didn't even include any music posts in my clip show post from six months ago. Which is sort of too bad, because some of those music posts weren't too terrible. The most recent ones were those in response (1, 2) to last year's critical brouhaha about Sonic Youth (which is fitting, I guess, considering the more recent noise in response to Steve Albini's remarks about Sonic Youth's activities as major-label pimps, about which I may or may not have something of substance to blog, but for now suffice it to say that for all my considerable love of Sonic Youth, I tend to agree with Albini). There was one about mid-period Dylan and politics. There was the spate of posts (1, 2, 3, 4) dealing with "Indie Rock and whiteness", largely in response to the debate surrounding an article by critic Sasha Frere-Jones (notes: the third of those deals with literature as much as it does music; the fourth is really only an excerpt from related posts from Carl Wilson, but you should read those too). There was a post about my discovery that I unexpectedly liked a Stephen Stills album. There was another one jumping off of a discussion of free jazz into thoughts about literature and anxiety and artistic choices. Perhaps you're interested in my list of favorite jazz albums from the 1990s? Or my thoughts on the incomparable Bill Callahan/Smog? Or on the Beatles? Or my narrative upon discovering a mysterious, unplayed cd in my collection? My defense of the difficult (or even "boring") against the cult of the fun? My post about Richard & Linda Thompson? Or my post about post-punk, the history of my taste in music, and Simon Reynolds's Rip It Up and Start Again (which is of course not unrelated to my posts [1, 2] on rockism and authenticity, or my passing remarks about poptimism, or the one about interrogating bias in taste in music)? And, wow, I tend to forget I did these: there was that series of iPod rundowns, where I wrote about the songs that came up randomly on a given day; those ended up being less fun to do than I'd thought they would be (though they were fairly popular, relatively speaking), which is why it died three years ago. Or... um....
Anyway, I'm unlikely to post about music much going forward, so this serves as an ending of sorts. In any event, the pre-colon title to this post, if I could have figured out how to make post titles in Blogger exceed 90 characters, was going to be something pithy like: "A scientific survey of all the music of the decade comprising the years 2000-2009, culminating in an altogether objective list of the best albums from that self-same decade." Or not. But anyway, this post is, finally, about the music of the last decade, as experienced by yours truly, so the title would at least have had that right. Plus, you know, there's a list. It's not too late to post a list, is it? No? But it's still good that I got it in before most of the annual lists for the best music of the current year, right? Yes? Ok. But first a personal narrative:
In early 1999, I bought the March issue of CMJ's shitty little monthly music magazine. I bought this copy because it had Kurt Cobain on the cover. It was then five years since Cobain's suicide and so the copy read "The Day the Music Died" or something stupid like that (as if I'm not sure I quite remember what it said; in fact, that is exactly what it said). As I'm writing this, I am just now realizing that I must have been attracted to the issue, not just because I had been a fan of Nirvana, but because in a sense for me music had sort of died around then, or had started to. At any rate, I had long been at an impasse. This is fitting given what I'm about to relate, because the purchase of this magazine turned out to be a watershed moment for me and my music fandom and consumption. Naturally, the cover article itself was instantly forgettable, but as with all issues of CMJ Monthly, a cd came with the magazine featuring songs by artists reviewed inside. And, again, as with all such cds, most of the music was either terrible or forgettable or both. But the first song on this particular cd was "The Plan" by a band I'd barely heard of called Built to Spill.
Let me set the stage. By this time I already owned what any sane person would call a lot of music. I had passed 1000 cds the previous Fall (oh, how we remember the great moments in our lives!). I had worked at a record shop and had a fairly diverse taste in music, though by no means as diverse as I might have thought.
And Nirvana had, indeed, at one point changed my musical life. I was a classic rock guy through high school and most of college, spiced with a little REM, some Replacements, even Sonic Youth (though Goo), when I heard Nirvana for the first time: "Smells Like Teen Spirit" remains the only song by a theretofore unknown-by-me artist that I have stayed in the car to listen to the end the first time I ever heard it. It was, in a word, awesome. Then it turned out there was an underground bubbling up (I remember clearly hearing PJ Harvey's "Sheela-na-gig" for the first time the following year; but then it was the year-in-review show on WHFS: I was always late). But for me, it was the bubbling up that mattered. I didn't follow the threads down. Essentially, I learned about music through Spin magazine, and if it was really new, probably not till their own year-in-review issues. If it didn't get mentioned there, I likely didn't know about it. I was curious and open but not actively adventurous or confident. But still, I heard a lot of great independent music that way: Fugazi, Sleater-Kinney, Yo la Tengo. By the end of the decade, I was at a loss when it came to rock music and also felt I was losing the thread. I bought a lot of older jazz, folk, and classic country, and kept up with the indie rock bands I knew. I went to Bob Mould and Sonic Youth shows. I was obsessed with Kristin Hersh and Throwing Muses. I bought Yo La Tengo and REM albums the day they came out. I was into Bjork and Radiohead, and I liked Massive Attack and Tricky and Portishead and Cornershop. I cherry-picked the occasional rap album: Outkast's Aquemini, Missy Elliott's first album, cds by Bone Thugs-n-Harmony and Gang Starr.
There was obviously plenty of music for me to get into and plenty of stuff I enjoyed, but I was dissatisfied, without my own compass, and wanting something interesting, as well as something that rocked. (This is how I found myself buying, ::shudder::, a Korn album; in retrospect, that earlier me would have been much better off with the Deftones, if only because they're not Korn.) So, in the wake of this issue of CMJ, I bought Built to Spill's album Keep It Like a Secret. And, friends, it hit me like a ton of bricks. I listened to that cd over and over again, pressing it on roommates and friends, rocking out, singing along, singing along to guitar solos like it was Zeppelin or something, which it sort of was. I quickly bought everything in their back catalog. I was hooked. I read about them online extensively, spending a lot of time at CD Now (anyone remember that site?) following that site's flawed but addictive links to bands who influenced them or they influenced or whatever. And this dropped me square in the middle of the rock underground that I'd barely known existed. I was like a little kid again, obsessively tracking down leads, uncovering new-to-me bands, reading reviews and histories. My obsession with all things Kristin Hersh meant that I'd been spending a ton of time on the Throwing Music message boards, where in late 1999 someone posted a link to Pitchfork's list of the decade's best music, much of which I'd had no inkling (this list has disappeared from their site, by the way, replaced by a more recent stab at the same decade; the first list was aggressively indie rock). Built to Spill led me pretty easily to Modest Mouse and other current bands, but eventually and more importantly somehow also to Slint and forward and back from there. Then the rock or post-rock I got into dovetailed with the folk and jazz I was into, and I was doomed. (Example: I'd started buying John Fahey reissues as a consequence of my preexisting interest in folk music; around the same time, following my new threads, I bought Gastr del Sol's Upgrade & Afterlife because I erroneously thought band-member David Grubbs had been in Slint. I saw with excitement that the last track on that album was a cover of Fahey's "Dry Bones in the Valley" and my worlds collided.) I went sort of apeshit-crazy. It's hard to describe the ways in which my favorite musics crossed and spoke to each other and opened up giant avenues of exploration and thrilled me. Over the next few years, I estimate I bought between 250 and 300 albums a year. Obviously, huge amounts were backfills from the music I'd missed from the 90s, when I should have been more awake, as well as various and sundry post-punk, jazz, and reissues of what the hell ever—but even so, enough were from the 2000s so that the decade is the only decade for which I will ever have listened to enough new music to form an actual opinion about it while it was happening.
But then things got even more complicated. Some of the above-linked posts go into this in more detail, but I realized that I'd been missing stuff that I would have liked, music that my prejudices (in particular my pronounced anti-pop prejudice) prevented me from even hearing. Following the poptimists' challenge, I gave chart pop and dance music a chance; I listened to more new rap, started to buy new metal for the first time since Metallica was worth listening to. I had only just begun sampling non-Western music. And it all quickly became untenable. Around the same time I found myself happily in a new relationship, and I started to realize that I couldn't get to know what I already had let alone keep up with new music to anything like the same degree. Which, combined with my shifting political outlook, led me to re-assess my perspective on hyper-consumption. Which, combined with having a new baby and no time, led me to virtually stop buying music altogether.
But I still have what I have and I still listen to it and I have this list, see, the list of my top 101 albums of the years 2000-2009, and I'm going to share it with you. Why 101? Because I'd done all the trimming I'd wanted to do to get to 100 and then noticed I'd inexplicably overlooked Pan*American's gorgeous 360 Business/360 Bypass and didn't feel like finding room for it, so I just added it. Since the list is long, and it seems to me that further notes would be lost and unread if placed after such a list, some brief notes precede it. The albums are listed alphabetically by artist. I was going to limit the number of albums per artist but decided fuck it, I don't want to have to decide which Animal Collective album to remove, since they're so different from each other. In general, an album had to be more than just one or two great songs to be included (hence, no LCD Soundsystem, despite "All My Friends" being one of my favorite songs of the decade and possibly ever) and I generally had to have had some period of obsession with it (though even some of those didn't make the cut; hello Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, though it probably would have made it if the list bulged out to 110). Given the arc of the above-sketched narrative, you'll see that the list is very heavily, well, white. There are a few rap albums, a couple metal albums, a lot of post-rock or sort of psych-rock or stuff that once would have been called prog (possibly because I'm old, but also because I work in an office in front of a computer all day and that kind of thing sounds great in that context, not to mention sounding great when drifting off on a commuter train when too tired to read, which I really should be doing but motherfucker I'm exhausted a lot and why the fuck won't she sleep more?), not a ton of "indie rock du jour"-type records (for which I generally feel too old, as previously mentioned on the blog, but the definition of which may be meaningless to most, so whatever), almost no quote-unquote pop, a paucity of black artists (for which I routinely have felt guilty, but music is a social thing and few of the people I've run with after college have listened to much of anything other than indie rock or classic rock, or maybe jazz, so there's some older black music, but you know what I'm saying, so it was all on me, and it took too long before I became confident exploring pop and rap and whatnot, and it's way too late to effectively redress this or balance the scales or anything like that, etc); and I really wish more of my favorite jazz artists had released great and not just good albums this decade, or that I had them, but there it is (I'm especially sorry to not be able to include a Joe McPhee album, because dude is fucking awesome and also really nice). Artists of the decade for this listener? Animal Collective; Smog/Bill Callahan; Jackie-O Motherfucker; the Mountain Goats; Deerhoof. Enough. I could go on and fill in and expand and so on because inevitably I feel I'm leaving something personally crucial out of that narrative, but enough blather, enough. The list (sorry for the tiny type, but Blogger is annoying):
Acid Mothers Temple & the Melting Paraiso U.F.O., Univers zen ou de zero a zero, 2002
The Angels of Light, Everything Is Good Here/Please Come Home, 2003
Animal Collective, Spirit They're Gone Spirit They've Vanished, 2000
Animal Collective, Here Comes the Indian, 2003
Animal Collective, Sung Tongs, 2004
Animal Collective, Feels, 2005
Asa-Chang & Junray, Jun Ray Song Chang, 2002
Sir Richard Bishop, Improvika, 2004
Paul Bley/Evan Parker/Barre Phillips, Sankt Gerold Variations, 2000
Boards of Canada, Geogaddi, 2002
Bonnie 'Prince' Billy, Sings Greatest Palace Music, 2004
Boredoms, Seadrum/House of Sun, 2004
Boris, Akuma no Uta, 2005
Bowerbirds, Hymns for a Dark Horse, 2007
Broadcast, The Future Crayon, 2006
Broken Social Scene, You Forgot It In People, 2002
Burial, Burial, 2006
Califone, Quicksand/Cradlesnakes, 2003
Neko Case, Fox Confessor Brings the Flood, 2006
Neko Case, Middle Cyclone, 2009
Chumbawumba, English Rebel Songs 1381-1984, 2003
Deerhoof, Reveille, 2002
Deerhoof, Apple O', 2003
Deerhoof, Friend Opportunity, 2007
Dizzee Rascal, Boy in Da Corner, 2003
Double Leopards, Halve Maen, 2003
Do Make Say Think, & Yet & Yet, 2002
Bob Dylan, "Love and Theft", 2001
Missy Elliott, Miss E…So Addictive, 2001
The Ex, Dizzy Spells, 2001
Explosions in the Sky, The Earth Is Not A Cold Dead Place, 2003
Christine Fellows, Paper Anniversary, 2005
The For Carnation, The For Carnation, 2000
Fugazi, The Argument, 2001
Gang Gang Dance, God's Money, 2005
Geto Boys, The Foundation, 2004
Ghost, Hypnotic Underworld, 2004
Ghostface Killah, Fishscale, 2006
Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Yanqui U.X.O., 2002
David Grubbs, The Spectrum Between, 2000
Merle Haggard, If I Could Only Fly, 2000
Herbert, Bodily Functions, 2001
High on Fire, Blessed Black Wings, 2004
Jackie-O Motherfucker, The Magick Fire Music, 2000
Jackie-O Motherfucker, Fig. 5, 2000
Jackie-O Motherfucker, Liberation, 2001
Philip Jeck, Stoke, 2002
Jesu, Conqueror, 2007
Junior Boys, So This Is Goodbye, 2006
Labradford, fixed::context, 2000
Miranda Lambert, Kerosene, 2005
Love is All, Nine Times That Same Song, 2006
Low, Things We Lost In The Fire, 2001
Matmos, The Rose Has Teeth in the Mouth of the Beast, 2006
The Microphones, It Was Hot, We Stayed in the Water, 2000
Mission of Burma, Obliterati, 2006
Modest Mouse, The Moon & Antarctica, 2000
Juana Molina, Son, 2006
The Mountain Goats, The Coroner's Gambit, 2001
The Mountain Goats, All Hail West Texas, 2002
The Mountain Goats, Tallahassee, 2002
The National, Boxer, 2007
The Necks, Drive By, 2003
The Necks, Chemist, 2006
Alva Noto +Ryuichi Sakamoto, Vrioon, 2002
Om, Conference of the Birds, 2006
Jim O'Rourke, Insignificance, 2001
Pan*American, 360 Business/360 Bypass, 2000
Panda Bear, Person Pitch, 2007
William Parker Quartet, O'Neal's Porch, 2001
William Parker Clarinet Trio, Bob's Pink Cadillac, 2002
Pelt, Pearls from the River, 2003
Pinetop Seven, Bringing Home the Last Great Strike, 2000
Robert Plant, Dreamland, 2002
Robert Plant & Alison Krauss, Raising Sand, 2007
Polmo Polpo, Like Hearts Swelling, 2004
Radiohead, Kid A, 2000
Radiohead, Amnesiac, 2001
Scarface, The Fix, 2002
Shalabi Effect, The Trial of St. Orange, 2002
Shalabi Effect, Pink Abyss, 2004
Shellac, 1000 Hurts, 2000
Six Organs of Admittance, School of the Flower, 2005
Smog, Dongs of Sevotion, 2000
Smog, Supper, 2003
Smog, A River Ain't Too Much to Love, 2005
Songs: Ohia, Ghost Tropic, 2000
Songs: Ohia, Didn't It Rain, 2002
Songs: Ohia, The Magnolia Electric Co., 2003
Sonic Youth, Murray Street, 2002
Sonic Youth, Sonic Nurse, 2004
Sunburned Hand of the Man, Fire Escape, 2007
Supersilent, 6, 2003
Mia Doi Todd, Manzanita, 2005
Scott Tuma, The River 1234, 2003
US Maple, Acre Thrills, 2001
Vibracathedral Orchestra, Tuning to the Rooster, 2005
Volcano the Bear, The Idea of Wood, 2003
Gillian Welch, Soul Journey, 2003
Robert Wyatt, Cuckooland, 2003
Yo La Tengo, And then nothing turned itself inside-out, 2000
I used to write about music a lot here at the blog—with literature and politics, it was the third part of my intended three-prong approach to blogging. But it fell by the wayside to such an extent that I didn't even include any music posts in my clip show post from six months ago. Which is sort of too bad, because some of those music posts weren't too terrible. The most recent ones were those in response (1, 2) to last year's critical brouhaha about Sonic Youth (which is fitting, I guess, considering the more recent noise in response to Steve Albini's remarks about Sonic Youth's activities as major-label pimps, about which I may or may not have something of substance to blog, but for now suffice it to say that for all my considerable love of Sonic Youth, I tend to agree with Albini). There was one about mid-period Dylan and politics. There was the spate of posts (1, 2, 3, 4) dealing with "Indie Rock and whiteness", largely in response to the debate surrounding an article by critic Sasha Frere-Jones (notes: the third of those deals with literature as much as it does music; the fourth is really only an excerpt from related posts from Carl Wilson, but you should read those too). There was a post about my discovery that I unexpectedly liked a Stephen Stills album. There was another one jumping off of a discussion of free jazz into thoughts about literature and anxiety and artistic choices. Perhaps you're interested in my list of favorite jazz albums from the 1990s? Or my thoughts on the incomparable Bill Callahan/Smog? Or on the Beatles? Or my narrative upon discovering a mysterious, unplayed cd in my collection? My defense of the difficult (or even "boring") against the cult of the fun? My post about Richard & Linda Thompson? Or my post about post-punk, the history of my taste in music, and Simon Reynolds's Rip It Up and Start Again (which is of course not unrelated to my posts [1, 2] on rockism and authenticity, or my passing remarks about poptimism, or the one about interrogating bias in taste in music)? And, wow, I tend to forget I did these: there was that series of iPod rundowns, where I wrote about the songs that came up randomly on a given day; those ended up being less fun to do than I'd thought they would be (though they were fairly popular, relatively speaking), which is why it died three years ago. Or... um....
Anyway, I'm unlikely to post about music much going forward, so this serves as an ending of sorts. In any event, the pre-colon title to this post, if I could have figured out how to make post titles in Blogger exceed 90 characters, was going to be something pithy like: "A scientific survey of all the music of the decade comprising the years 2000-2009, culminating in an altogether objective list of the best albums from that self-same decade." Or not. But anyway, this post is, finally, about the music of the last decade, as experienced by yours truly, so the title would at least have had that right. Plus, you know, there's a list. It's not too late to post a list, is it? No? But it's still good that I got it in before most of the annual lists for the best music of the current year, right? Yes? Ok. But first a personal narrative:
In early 1999, I bought the March issue of CMJ's shitty little monthly music magazine. I bought this copy because it had Kurt Cobain on the cover. It was then five years since Cobain's suicide and so the copy read "The Day the Music Died" or something stupid like that (as if I'm not sure I quite remember what it said; in fact, that is exactly what it said). As I'm writing this, I am just now realizing that I must have been attracted to the issue, not just because I had been a fan of Nirvana, but because in a sense for me music had sort of died around then, or had started to. At any rate, I had long been at an impasse. This is fitting given what I'm about to relate, because the purchase of this magazine turned out to be a watershed moment for me and my music fandom and consumption. Naturally, the cover article itself was instantly forgettable, but as with all issues of CMJ Monthly, a cd came with the magazine featuring songs by artists reviewed inside. And, again, as with all such cds, most of the music was either terrible or forgettable or both. But the first song on this particular cd was "The Plan" by a band I'd barely heard of called Built to Spill.
Let me set the stage. By this time I already owned what any sane person would call a lot of music. I had passed 1000 cds the previous Fall (oh, how we remember the great moments in our lives!). I had worked at a record shop and had a fairly diverse taste in music, though by no means as diverse as I might have thought.
And Nirvana had, indeed, at one point changed my musical life. I was a classic rock guy through high school and most of college, spiced with a little REM, some Replacements, even Sonic Youth (though Goo), when I heard Nirvana for the first time: "Smells Like Teen Spirit" remains the only song by a theretofore unknown-by-me artist that I have stayed in the car to listen to the end the first time I ever heard it. It was, in a word, awesome. Then it turned out there was an underground bubbling up (I remember clearly hearing PJ Harvey's "Sheela-na-gig" for the first time the following year; but then it was the year-in-review show on WHFS: I was always late). But for me, it was the bubbling up that mattered. I didn't follow the threads down. Essentially, I learned about music through Spin magazine, and if it was really new, probably not till their own year-in-review issues. If it didn't get mentioned there, I likely didn't know about it. I was curious and open but not actively adventurous or confident. But still, I heard a lot of great independent music that way: Fugazi, Sleater-Kinney, Yo la Tengo. By the end of the decade, I was at a loss when it came to rock music and also felt I was losing the thread. I bought a lot of older jazz, folk, and classic country, and kept up with the indie rock bands I knew. I went to Bob Mould and Sonic Youth shows. I was obsessed with Kristin Hersh and Throwing Muses. I bought Yo La Tengo and REM albums the day they came out. I was into Bjork and Radiohead, and I liked Massive Attack and Tricky and Portishead and Cornershop. I cherry-picked the occasional rap album: Outkast's Aquemini, Missy Elliott's first album, cds by Bone Thugs-n-Harmony and Gang Starr.
There was obviously plenty of music for me to get into and plenty of stuff I enjoyed, but I was dissatisfied, without my own compass, and wanting something interesting, as well as something that rocked. (This is how I found myself buying, ::shudder::, a Korn album; in retrospect, that earlier me would have been much better off with the Deftones, if only because they're not Korn.) So, in the wake of this issue of CMJ, I bought Built to Spill's album Keep It Like a Secret. And, friends, it hit me like a ton of bricks. I listened to that cd over and over again, pressing it on roommates and friends, rocking out, singing along, singing along to guitar solos like it was Zeppelin or something, which it sort of was. I quickly bought everything in their back catalog. I was hooked. I read about them online extensively, spending a lot of time at CD Now (anyone remember that site?) following that site's flawed but addictive links to bands who influenced them or they influenced or whatever. And this dropped me square in the middle of the rock underground that I'd barely known existed. I was like a little kid again, obsessively tracking down leads, uncovering new-to-me bands, reading reviews and histories. My obsession with all things Kristin Hersh meant that I'd been spending a ton of time on the Throwing Music message boards, where in late 1999 someone posted a link to Pitchfork's list of the decade's best music, much of which I'd had no inkling (this list has disappeared from their site, by the way, replaced by a more recent stab at the same decade; the first list was aggressively indie rock). Built to Spill led me pretty easily to Modest Mouse and other current bands, but eventually and more importantly somehow also to Slint and forward and back from there. Then the rock or post-rock I got into dovetailed with the folk and jazz I was into, and I was doomed. (Example: I'd started buying John Fahey reissues as a consequence of my preexisting interest in folk music; around the same time, following my new threads, I bought Gastr del Sol's Upgrade & Afterlife because I erroneously thought band-member David Grubbs had been in Slint. I saw with excitement that the last track on that album was a cover of Fahey's "Dry Bones in the Valley" and my worlds collided.) I went sort of apeshit-crazy. It's hard to describe the ways in which my favorite musics crossed and spoke to each other and opened up giant avenues of exploration and thrilled me. Over the next few years, I estimate I bought between 250 and 300 albums a year. Obviously, huge amounts were backfills from the music I'd missed from the 90s, when I should have been more awake, as well as various and sundry post-punk, jazz, and reissues of what the hell ever—but even so, enough were from the 2000s so that the decade is the only decade for which I will ever have listened to enough new music to form an actual opinion about it while it was happening.
But then things got even more complicated. Some of the above-linked posts go into this in more detail, but I realized that I'd been missing stuff that I would have liked, music that my prejudices (in particular my pronounced anti-pop prejudice) prevented me from even hearing. Following the poptimists' challenge, I gave chart pop and dance music a chance; I listened to more new rap, started to buy new metal for the first time since Metallica was worth listening to. I had only just begun sampling non-Western music. And it all quickly became untenable. Around the same time I found myself happily in a new relationship, and I started to realize that I couldn't get to know what I already had let alone keep up with new music to anything like the same degree. Which, combined with my shifting political outlook, led me to re-assess my perspective on hyper-consumption. Which, combined with having a new baby and no time, led me to virtually stop buying music altogether.
But I still have what I have and I still listen to it and I have this list, see, the list of my top 101 albums of the years 2000-2009, and I'm going to share it with you. Why 101? Because I'd done all the trimming I'd wanted to do to get to 100 and then noticed I'd inexplicably overlooked Pan*American's gorgeous 360 Business/360 Bypass and didn't feel like finding room for it, so I just added it. Since the list is long, and it seems to me that further notes would be lost and unread if placed after such a list, some brief notes precede it. The albums are listed alphabetically by artist. I was going to limit the number of albums per artist but decided fuck it, I don't want to have to decide which Animal Collective album to remove, since they're so different from each other. In general, an album had to be more than just one or two great songs to be included (hence, no LCD Soundsystem, despite "All My Friends" being one of my favorite songs of the decade and possibly ever) and I generally had to have had some period of obsession with it (though even some of those didn't make the cut; hello Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, though it probably would have made it if the list bulged out to 110). Given the arc of the above-sketched narrative, you'll see that the list is very heavily, well, white. There are a few rap albums, a couple metal albums, a lot of post-rock or sort of psych-rock or stuff that once would have been called prog (possibly because I'm old, but also because I work in an office in front of a computer all day and that kind of thing sounds great in that context, not to mention sounding great when drifting off on a commuter train when too tired to read, which I really should be doing but motherfucker I'm exhausted a lot and why the fuck won't she sleep more?), not a ton of "indie rock du jour"-type records (for which I generally feel too old, as previously mentioned on the blog, but the definition of which may be meaningless to most, so whatever), almost no quote-unquote pop, a paucity of black artists (for which I routinely have felt guilty, but music is a social thing and few of the people I've run with after college have listened to much of anything other than indie rock or classic rock, or maybe jazz, so there's some older black music, but you know what I'm saying, so it was all on me, and it took too long before I became confident exploring pop and rap and whatnot, and it's way too late to effectively redress this or balance the scales or anything like that, etc); and I really wish more of my favorite jazz artists had released great and not just good albums this decade, or that I had them, but there it is (I'm especially sorry to not be able to include a Joe McPhee album, because dude is fucking awesome and also really nice). Artists of the decade for this listener? Animal Collective; Smog/Bill Callahan; Jackie-O Motherfucker; the Mountain Goats; Deerhoof. Enough. I could go on and fill in and expand and so on because inevitably I feel I'm leaving something personally crucial out of that narrative, but enough blather, enough. The list (sorry for the tiny type, but Blogger is annoying):
Acid Mothers Temple & the Melting Paraiso U.F.O., Univers zen ou de zero a zero, 2002
The Angels of Light, Everything Is Good Here/Please Come Home, 2003
Animal Collective, Spirit They're Gone Spirit They've Vanished, 2000
Animal Collective, Here Comes the Indian, 2003
Animal Collective, Sung Tongs, 2004
Animal Collective, Feels, 2005
Asa-Chang & Junray, Jun Ray Song Chang, 2002
Sir Richard Bishop, Improvika, 2004
Paul Bley/Evan Parker/Barre Phillips, Sankt Gerold Variations, 2000
Boards of Canada, Geogaddi, 2002
Bonnie 'Prince' Billy, Sings Greatest Palace Music, 2004
Boredoms, Seadrum/House of Sun, 2004
Boris, Akuma no Uta, 2005
Bowerbirds, Hymns for a Dark Horse, 2007
Broadcast, The Future Crayon, 2006
Broken Social Scene, You Forgot It In People, 2002
Burial, Burial, 2006
Califone, Quicksand/Cradlesnakes, 2003
Neko Case, Fox Confessor Brings the Flood, 2006
Neko Case, Middle Cyclone, 2009
Chumbawumba, English Rebel Songs 1381-1984, 2003
Deerhoof, Reveille, 2002
Deerhoof, Apple O', 2003
Deerhoof, Friend Opportunity, 2007
Dizzee Rascal, Boy in Da Corner, 2003
Double Leopards, Halve Maen, 2003
Do Make Say Think, & Yet & Yet, 2002
Bob Dylan, "Love and Theft", 2001
Missy Elliott, Miss E…So Addictive, 2001
The Ex, Dizzy Spells, 2001
Explosions in the Sky, The Earth Is Not A Cold Dead Place, 2003
Christine Fellows, Paper Anniversary, 2005
The For Carnation, The For Carnation, 2000
Fugazi, The Argument, 2001
Gang Gang Dance, God's Money, 2005
Geto Boys, The Foundation, 2004
Ghost, Hypnotic Underworld, 2004
Ghostface Killah, Fishscale, 2006
Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Yanqui U.X.O., 2002
David Grubbs, The Spectrum Between, 2000
Merle Haggard, If I Could Only Fly, 2000
Herbert, Bodily Functions, 2001
High on Fire, Blessed Black Wings, 2004
Jackie-O Motherfucker, The Magick Fire Music, 2000
Jackie-O Motherfucker, Fig. 5, 2000
Jackie-O Motherfucker, Liberation, 2001
Philip Jeck, Stoke, 2002
Jesu, Conqueror, 2007
Junior Boys, So This Is Goodbye, 2006
Labradford, fixed::context, 2000
Miranda Lambert, Kerosene, 2005
Love is All, Nine Times That Same Song, 2006
Low, Things We Lost In The Fire, 2001
Matmos, The Rose Has Teeth in the Mouth of the Beast, 2006
The Microphones, It Was Hot, We Stayed in the Water, 2000
Mission of Burma, Obliterati, 2006
Modest Mouse, The Moon & Antarctica, 2000
Juana Molina, Son, 2006
The Mountain Goats, The Coroner's Gambit, 2001
The Mountain Goats, All Hail West Texas, 2002
The Mountain Goats, Tallahassee, 2002
The National, Boxer, 2007
The Necks, Drive By, 2003
The Necks, Chemist, 2006
Alva Noto +Ryuichi Sakamoto, Vrioon, 2002
Om, Conference of the Birds, 2006
Jim O'Rourke, Insignificance, 2001
Pan*American, 360 Business/360 Bypass, 2000
Panda Bear, Person Pitch, 2007
William Parker Quartet, O'Neal's Porch, 2001
William Parker Clarinet Trio, Bob's Pink Cadillac, 2002
Pelt, Pearls from the River, 2003
Pinetop Seven, Bringing Home the Last Great Strike, 2000
Robert Plant, Dreamland, 2002
Robert Plant & Alison Krauss, Raising Sand, 2007
Polmo Polpo, Like Hearts Swelling, 2004
Radiohead, Kid A, 2000
Radiohead, Amnesiac, 2001
Scarface, The Fix, 2002
Shalabi Effect, The Trial of St. Orange, 2002
Shalabi Effect, Pink Abyss, 2004
Shellac, 1000 Hurts, 2000
Six Organs of Admittance, School of the Flower, 2005
Smog, Dongs of Sevotion, 2000
Smog, Supper, 2003
Smog, A River Ain't Too Much to Love, 2005
Songs: Ohia, Ghost Tropic, 2000
Songs: Ohia, Didn't It Rain, 2002
Songs: Ohia, The Magnolia Electric Co., 2003
Sonic Youth, Murray Street, 2002
Sonic Youth, Sonic Nurse, 2004
Sunburned Hand of the Man, Fire Escape, 2007
Supersilent, 6, 2003
Mia Doi Todd, Manzanita, 2005
Scott Tuma, The River 1234, 2003
US Maple, Acre Thrills, 2001
Vibracathedral Orchestra, Tuning to the Rooster, 2005
Volcano the Bear, The Idea of Wood, 2003
Gillian Welch, Soul Journey, 2003
Robert Wyatt, Cuckooland, 2003
Yo La Tengo, And then nothing turned itself inside-out, 2000
A captive audience
It was a beautiful day here in Baltimore yesterday, a day off from work for me (Veterans Day, you may have heard), so we went to the zoo. I often find myself in a melancholy mood when I'm at the zoo, especially on days when I have time to think, as I did yesterday, since it wasn't too crowded. It's the big cats prowling in their giant cages, back and forth, back and forth; the giraffes roaming about in their tiny yard, butting up against the back of a rounded wall of concrete; the chimps jumping about in their glassed-in fake forest, watching, watching; the zebras and ostriches and rhinos standing around; the elephants milling about in the sort of pathetic cement wading area, pushing a ball to and fro; the birds sitting under netting, flying from branch to branch.
I find animals fascinating, but zoos make me feel bad, always have. I thought about the efforts to breed them in captivity, how long it takes, why it has often taken so long.
On our way out yesterday, we stopped in at the polar bear area. They weren't up for entertaining. There was a brilliant white fox, sitting, watching us. I considered the area behind him, apparently the full expanse of his existence. As we left, there was the snow owl, two of them, under netting, also brilliantly white, with yellow owl eyes, also watching, but for what. I read the accompanying text, biological facts, reassuring, contained science. I was struck by the given life expectancy. In the wild: 9 years. In captivity: 28. Nineteen additional years of what? Would they say it was worth it if they could?
I thought about the trade-offs we make to live in the way we do, though the decisions have long since been made for us. We're told that we live in an advanced society. I find myself often declaiming about lost, pre-capitalist cultural forms and I am accused of romanticizing feudalism, or of downplaying the necessity of capitalism superseding feudalism. I am reminded of the benefits, the fruits we enjoy as a result of capitalism, improved health and leisure and longevity among them. Though, of course, not all of us enjoy them. I have to admit that I do; I enjoy enormous privileges, but I am not everybody; I also admit that I will not easily give them up, but I believe both that I will have to and that I ought to. And anyway, were our predecessors asked? Of course they were not.
We all know the famous line by Benjamin Franklin, often trotted out by liberals rightly decrying the latest panicked security response to some so-called terrorist activity or other: "They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety." But doesn't this describe our daily existence? Are we at liberty? Do we not trade it for some version of health and for illusory security simply as a matter of course? Are we not living in captivity ourselves? Wouldn't some of us trade many of those benefits for autonomy? For a more generalized, if lower-pitched, prosperity? In which we had a say? In which we were at least consulted? And how long will the benefits last? Are we justified in taking them for granted when others not only do not enjoy those benefits, but cannot? When the whole system in which we live is predicated on the relatively few enjoying the fruits of the many? What might it look like if it weren't?
I find animals fascinating, but zoos make me feel bad, always have. I thought about the efforts to breed them in captivity, how long it takes, why it has often taken so long.
On our way out yesterday, we stopped in at the polar bear area. They weren't up for entertaining. There was a brilliant white fox, sitting, watching us. I considered the area behind him, apparently the full expanse of his existence. As we left, there was the snow owl, two of them, under netting, also brilliantly white, with yellow owl eyes, also watching, but for what. I read the accompanying text, biological facts, reassuring, contained science. I was struck by the given life expectancy. In the wild: 9 years. In captivity: 28. Nineteen additional years of what? Would they say it was worth it if they could?
I thought about the trade-offs we make to live in the way we do, though the decisions have long since been made for us. We're told that we live in an advanced society. I find myself often declaiming about lost, pre-capitalist cultural forms and I am accused of romanticizing feudalism, or of downplaying the necessity of capitalism superseding feudalism. I am reminded of the benefits, the fruits we enjoy as a result of capitalism, improved health and leisure and longevity among them. Though, of course, not all of us enjoy them. I have to admit that I do; I enjoy enormous privileges, but I am not everybody; I also admit that I will not easily give them up, but I believe both that I will have to and that I ought to. And anyway, were our predecessors asked? Of course they were not.
We all know the famous line by Benjamin Franklin, often trotted out by liberals rightly decrying the latest panicked security response to some so-called terrorist activity or other: "They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety." But doesn't this describe our daily existence? Are we at liberty? Do we not trade it for some version of health and for illusory security simply as a matter of course? Are we not living in captivity ourselves? Wouldn't some of us trade many of those benefits for autonomy? For a more generalized, if lower-pitched, prosperity? In which we had a say? In which we were at least consulted? And how long will the benefits last? Are we justified in taking them for granted when others not only do not enjoy those benefits, but cannot? When the whole system in which we live is predicated on the relatively few enjoying the fruits of the many? What might it look like if it weren't?
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