Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned

Photo: Tony Gutierrez/ Associated Press

It didn't make much sense to me then, what Gnut was going through, but after Pila and me had our little twins, and we put a family together, I got an understanding of how terrible love can be. You wish you hated those people, your wife and children, because you know the things the world will do to them, because you have done some of those things yourself. It's crazy-making, yet you cling to them with everything and close your eyes against the rest of it. But still you wake up late at night and lie there listening for the creak and splash of oars, the clank of steel, the sounds of men rowing toward your home.

--Wells Tower in Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned

Find the book and read it. Tower has crafted sad, beautiful and often desperate characters around prose filled with shimmering detail into what can make or break an afternoon, or an entire. I don't know why short stories don't get more love from the world of readers. Short stories are not only my quick-to-consume fixes, but also my secret love and source of envy.

Sure, the novel has the reputation of the record-setting home run slugger, or maybe more aptly, an entire baseball season. Novels are big, in both scope and cast of characters. They often play out slowly, taking long-passaged road trips and perhaps even an all-star break somewhere in the middle. Novels are the long slog, dealing with the minute details of many lives at the same time as grand conspiracies and odysseys.

The short story though, is the clutch shortstop who may not be swinging for the fences in plotted ambition, but the short story/stop has a scar under his left eye where a torrent of a grounder scorched off his glove, leaving a gash when he was fifteen. Every time he squints to field a ball, he can is aware of that momentary lapse of attention years ago. He has a secret communication with his glove, with the second-baseman, with the dryness of the dirt, so that he can elevate to acrobatic swoops after a line drive. The short story is the half-inning that ends in a miraculous double play and a toss of the ball to the the nine-year old girl behind the dugout.

Top Albums of 2008, 12 - 1

The final countdown.  On the final day of the year.  This time it's descending.  Deal with it.  I was hoping to post some audio links, but my free internet got turned off at home and so my internet is more limited than usual.  But on to the list.  Numbers one and two have been back and forth since I started putting this together all month, but I think Fleet Foxes have it.

12. She & Him - Volume 1

11. Deerhunter - Microcastle

10. Dr. Dog - Fate

9. Shearwater - Rook

8. Thao & The Get Down Stay Downs - We Brave Bee Stings and All 

7. TV On The Radio - Dear Science,

6. Miles Benjamin Anthony Robinson - Miles Benjamin Anthony Robinson

5. Frightened Rabbit - Midnight Organ Fight

4. Okkervil River - The Stand-Ins

3. No Age - Nouns

2. Bon Iver - For Emma, Forever Ago

1. Fleet Foxes - Fleet Foxes/Sun Giant EP

Top Albums 2008, 13 - 25

It's been a good year for music and a long time since a post.  But hey, I love lists.  Here are 13 - 25 on my favorite albums of the year list.  Stay tuned for the quorum of 12 to come. (In ascending order, don't ask why).

13. The Devil Whale - Like Paraders

14. Vampire Weekend - Vampire Weekend

15. Apple Miner Colony - The Heat Haunted Fever

16. Department of Eagles - In Ear Park

17. MGMT - Oracular Spectacular   

18. Wolf Parade - At Mount Zoomer

19. Randy Newman - Harps & Angels

20. Bonnie 'Prince' Billy - Lie Down in the Light

21. Calexico - Carried To Dust

22. Times New Viking - Rip It Off

23. Tolchock Trio - Abalone Skeleton

24. The Dodos - Visiter

25. Drive-By Truckers - Brighter Than Creations Dark

Farewell, David Foster Wallace

I am still trying to collect the ways that David Foster Wallace has changed my perspective on life and the way I approach my storytelling.  As he has been a rather recent discovery, I can't do justice, but all I know is that I can't remember a time that a figure whom I didn't know died that has left me so profoundly sad and unsettled.  He apparently hanged himself in his home.

The first writing of his I read was his May 21, 2005 Kenyon Commencement address.  I recently read his short story collection, Brief Interviews With Hideous Men and have been poking through his last published book, Oblivion, and his essays, A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again, since I received them through the mail last week.  It feels as though a conversation with someone stopped abruptly, like there was a pause mid-sentence and then he was dead.  But at least I can continue to read.  

In the short spurts of time I've had in front of the computer today, I've written a couple thousand words in an attempt at gratitude for his work, what it has meant to me, the understanding it has brought to me.  But thus far, it is jumbled, bloated and ineloquent.  Perhaps it is enough for now to say that I am sad, but it seems wrong to say when there are family and loved ones of his who no doubt feel a much greater loss.

An excerpt from the above commencement speech:

This, like many clichés, so lame and unexciting on the surface, actually 

expresses a great and terrible truth. It is not the least bit coincidental 

that adults who commit suicide with firearms almost always shoot 

themselves in: the head. They shoot the terrible master. And the truth 

is that most of these suicides are actually dead long before they pull 

the trigger.  

And I submit that this is what the real, no bullshit value of your liberal 

arts education is supposed to be about: how to keep from going through 

your comfortable, prosperous, respectable adult life dead, unconscious, 

a slave to your head and to your natural default setting of being uniquely,

 completely, imperially alone day in and day out. That may sound like 

hyperbole, or abstract nonsense. Let's get concrete. The plain fact is that 

you graduating seniors do not yet have any clue what "day in day out" 

really means. There happen to be whole, large parts of adult American 

life that nobody talks about in commencement speeches. One such part 

involves boredom, routine, and petty frustration. The parents and older 

folks here will know all too well what I'm talking about.

The minor fall and the major lift

It's amazing what a song can do.  Music can accentuate joy, provide solace, express things which we are not able to do ourselves at the time.  Great art can provide empathy as well or better than any person, even the person who created it, is possible to give.  The great Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah" is a very well-documented example of this.  It is perhaps one of the most covered songs of the past twenty years, probably because of the way it moved the artists who later decided to give their own version a try.  Jeff Buckley has the definitive version, his angelic voice reigns over the religious/sexual themed lyrics as though he and the song were paired by fate.

I have loved this song for years now, but its cathartic nature became very real to me recently when the only thing I could do to get out of the way I was feeling was play this over and over on my housemate's nylon-stringed guitar that has to be retuned every five minutes.  It came out as a prayer and a plea and left me feeling more in touch with the nature of existence like nothing else at the time could do.  

Below are some of my favorite versions I've come across.  Along with Cohen and Buckley is a great one from David Bazan aka Pedro the Lion, a ukelele version from Zach Condon of Beirut, Regina Spektor accompanied by a cello and John Cale's great, emotive performance with his piano.  There's also a live Buckley version, which is different, longer, and of course, beautiful.

Leonard Cohen - Hallelujah

Jeff Buckley - Hallelujah

David Bazan - Hallelujah

Beirut - Hallelujah

Regina Spektor - Hallelujah

John Cale - Hallelujah

Jeff Buckley - Hallelujah (live)

When the world collapses into the heat

Banks and financial giants are failing.  Everyone is worried about the price of oil and gasoline.  War is translated and morphed from gunfire to body counts over the span of thousands of miles.  Oh, and Andy Dick has been arrested again.

Seems like a good day for some music, literature and art.

 Pablo Picasso's La Vie can currently be seen at the Utah Museum of Fine Arts’ exhibit, "Monet to Picasso," which is definitely worth checking out if you're in the Hive.  That painting tore me down emotionally and then built me back up, completely refurbished, in the span of about fifteen minutes.

There is so much going on in the scene that has to do with grief, as though there is mourning on many different levels.  This resounded deeply within me because, in my most melancholic times, what keeps me from being engulfed by the harshness of the moment is this: the knowledge that I am a being, aware of the world, able to experience the full spectrum of existence.

Whether it be joy, sadness, anxiety, or feeling whole, there also comes solace and beauty from all things.  I may not understand in the moment, but ultimately I find gratitude that I am able to have a life of multivariate experience. That is what the painting brought to me.  

The scene shows a somber couple looking toward a woman holding a baby. Between the four are pictures of people grieving, like the young couple, in the nude.  This could represent generations of human suffering.   But the baby, so innocently unaware of the sadness around it, is the hope that even in the bleakest of moments, there is opportunity to start anew and experience life all over again.

It brought to mind a quote from Douglas Coupland's Life After God, which I recently reread for the first time since my summer after high school:

"Time ticks by; we grow older.  Before we know it, too much time has passed and we've missed the chance to have had other people hurt us.  To a younger me this sounded like luck; to an older me this sounds like a quiet tragedy."  

To the music, then.

Download entire playlist here:

Songs for An Altered Existence

Or individually on the links:

Man Man - Von Halsing Boombox
Black Kids - I'm Not Gonna Teach Your Boyfriend How to Dance with You

Conor Oberst & the Mystic Valley Band - Danny Callahan

Thao Nguyen & the Get Down Stay Downs - Feet Asleep

Neil Young - After the Gold Rush

Spoon - Believing Is Art

Beulah - Me and Jesus Don't Talk Anymore

Jolie Holland - Old Fashioned Morphine

Wilco - Theologins

White Williams - New Violence

The Dutchess & The Duke - You Can Tell The Truth, Now

King Khan & The Shrines - Welfare Bread

M. Ward - Sadie (Joanna Newsom song)

Two Poems: Joe Bolton

Last week I was introduced to an amazing poet named Joe Bolton.  He was from Kentucky and died at the age of 28.  His poems burrow themselves into my flesh and my soul, they are utterly overwhelming in their beauty and sadness.  I find that a lot of what makes the deepest impression on me in life is both sad and beautiful, so it's no surprise that I have been walking to my mailbox everyday in anxious hope that his posthumously published collection, Last Nostalgia:  Poems, 1982 - 1990, will make its way to my home.

A Sort of Praise

Some morning in my city, a woman
Sits putting make-up on, expecting
No one, separated by one white wall
From the landscape that needs her.

And I--risen from fear, letting
My loneliness dissolve into the sunlit
Bough of a pine--will step out
And enter the shadows of tall buildings:

The sky glazed blue & gold, the streets
Drawing me to her door, the places
My feet hit like stones sticking up
Through the surface of some wide river.

And when our eyes meet, it will be
In the hue that happens when light finds dark,
In the secret music of worlds spinning true,
That we will move toward a sort of praise.

Death In Orange County

It's in the way the waves fall like dull lead,
Water warmer by September but still cold,
The bougainvillea's crinoline, fresh blood,

The sky's blank face, the blank face of a child.
A skywriter spells SURRENDER. To what?
This ease? This difficulty? Of the mild

Astonishments of a Saturday night,
Not one survives—not her face, not her name,
Not her. And certainly not how the light

Spilled broken on the bay and made a game
Of whatever it was you were trying
To make clear between you there, over rum.

Sometimes you don't feel like doing anything.
Sometimes you're done before you even rise.
It's in the way the sun mutes everything,

The mist, the fog, the high latticed fences.
The girl on the plane was reading a book:
Death of a "Jewish American Princess."

Sometimes you don't know quite what you feel like.
You put on your favorite disc, Camelot, 
And walk around the house having the look.

A good part of the time, you feel like shit.
It's in the stylishness of restaurants,
In the sweet note of a single gunshot

Echoing off the glass of lit storefronts,
In the cool distances of these houses.
Nobody knows what anybody wants,

Or else knows all too well what those tan faces
Are trying hard not to show they don't feel.
And that's all that's left to you now are the traces:

House, stock, Jacuzzi, clothes, automobile.

More Joe Bolton at Identity Theory