July 29 - August 10, 2008

Chuck Klosterman IV

A Decade of Curious People and Dangerous Ideas

Chuck Klosterman

2006, hardcover

17 cards

I think this may be my favorite Chuck Klosterman book. If you're following this you might say, but you've only read one other one and you haven't even read the one everyone in the world seems to have read (Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs). I am reading said book now, and while I am enjoying it, I think Klosterman excels at the essay. Killing Yourself to Live was a well threaded story of stories, but the essay lets Klosterman engage an idea and then beat it around for a while before declaring victory over the topic. This collection of essays also touches on so many great topics, where in a book there are only a few main ideas he weaves together. Klosterman is also saving the footnote by making hilarious asides and revisions when gathering essays like this together with hindsight.

Three comments/thoughts: Klosterman mentions Black Sabbath a lot. I guess maybe it was just twice in this book but it seemed like more. His Chicken McNuggets diet also makes me think of a button Joel told me about seeing in a bar. It read, "Or will it be Chicken McNuggets?" I always look for this button in treasure shops. If I found it I might not give it to Joel (he found a sweet Chin Tiki ashtray that he kept) but I might give it to Chuck Klosterman. Maybe. His comments about the Olympics are also perfect to read right now.

Some selections:

1- "Can I tell you something weird?" he asked..."Always."

14- Britney Spears- "She is not so much a person as she is an idea, and that idea is this: you can want everything, so long as you get nothing."

24- "...is Bono's entire life a performance?"

28- Bono: "I write feelings not thoughts..."

37- Val Kilmer is nice.

43- OED and Webster's Second

45- Bob Dylan

50- (Morrissey) 30-year old ex-wallflowers "reminiscing about how The Queen is Dead convinced them not to hang themselves while everyone else was at the prom."

58- (McNuggets diet) "We are a nation obsessed."

59- orange drink

-"Does life make more sense if you're homeless? Perhaps."

60- (McDonald's) "It's the last universal place in America."

61- pirates, scurvy!

63- "Staying alive is complicated."

76- "...we were more like relationship spectators." (mentions Raymond Carver here and many times)

84- "If you're a true fan of a band, it doesn't matter where that band plays- you just go."

94- (Robert Plant) "...you cannot classify anything anywhere. Classification is a killer."

108- arrested development

109- Post traumatic stress disorder

110- Lars Ulrich from Metallica owned a Basquiat, but he sold it.

115- White Stripes- "Everything will be raw and unrehearsed and imperfect. And that's why it's so f***ing good."

116- formed on Bastille Day in 1997

117- "Detroit people"

119- "People in Detroit know their records."

120- "Record collectors are collecting. They're not really listening to music."

126- (Goths, Disneyland) "What makes someone a normal?"

-"The are not us...They wear polo shirts."

131- Radiohead- "All the wanted to talk about were books."

132- Radiohead's music- "smart on purpose"

138- exhibits Colin told him to check out

-"Everyone in this band probably reads more than you do..."

140- picking words for how they sound

149- footnote- hobo

155- Akron- at the time- "home to the Professional Bowlers Association Hall of Fame"

156- "Is life akin to bowling, or is bowling akin to life."

-"In bowling, your score is not only dependent on what you've done, but also on what you will do."

169- Billy Joel- "...he expresses absolute conviction in moments of wholly misguided affection"

181 and 194- Black Sabbath

200- (Ramones vs. Ratt) "what matters is who likes what you do artistically and what liking that art is supposed to say about who you are."

201- "The things that matter to normal people are not supposed to matter to smart people"

208- "Choice makes us depressed."

209- loss of shared experience

211- "...these shared experiences are how we connect with other people, and it's how we understand our own identity."

211-212-"...they are only pockets of a shared existence. They are things individual people choose to understand and finding others who understand them equally are products of coincidence."

226- "what you need is a) one quality nemesis and b) one archenemy."

235- (Advancement) "For example, Michael Stipe's lyrics don't really mean anything so any 16-year-old can convince himself that those words can mean whatever they want."

237- "'How can you hate the Olympics?' they ask me."

238- "I do not hate the Olympics. I just don't like they at all..."

-"...the Olympics are designed for people who want to care about something without considering why."

-"In order to enjoy the Olympics, you can't think critically about anything..."

240- "Life is f***ing confusing. I don't know anything and neither do you. But this is not what the Olympics want you to believe."

244- "I feel like a mannequin."

253- The Wonder Year- "the only tv program that allowed me to be nostalgic at the age of 17"

254- Kevin- "Did these girls 'like him' or did they 'like him like him'"

-Do we need to be liked, or do we merely want to be liked."

255- human rights, China

256- Bush- "Over 57 million people voted against him."

257- "At some point people confused being liked with being good."

259- "suspect that the most widespread problem we have is the ever-growing sentiment of anti-intellectualism that seems to infiltrate everything..."

-"guilty pleasures"

262- "It never matters what you like; what matters is why you like it."

263- "These things that give us pleasure- they are guilty of nothing. And neither are we.:

268- "If you feel betrayed by culture, it's not because you're right and the universe is f***ed; it's only because you're not like most other people. But this should make you happy, because- in all likelihood- you hate those other people, anyway. You are being betrayed by a culture that has no relationship to who you are or how you live."

277- talking about music too much- 2 words- "overrated and underrated"

283- pirate renaissance

287- "pro-pirate" vs. "pro-chump"

292- if it was 1904 "you wouldn't be reading this essay. Your life would be horrible, but your life would have purpose."

-"Machines allow humans the privilege of existential anxiety."

313- CNN Classic

322- "Pants are on my horizon..."

-"I might feel like putting my hands in my pockets later this afternoon..."

324- "Driving.

Driving.

Driving."

325- "Like all geniuses, I don't work before noon."

326- "Tonya is the kind of person who goes shopping the day after Thanksgiving."

332- "'Here's what's been on my mind,' I began, since intelligent people have no need for salutations."

333- "Part of the reason I have managed to thrive as the smartest man alive is because I'm still willing to keep learning. I totally enjoy evolving."

341- girlie girl [i always though it was spelled girly girl but how would I know]

August 10, 2008

Philadelphia's Magic Gardens

The Art of Isaiah Zagar

Text by Betsy Augustine

2004, paperback

2 cards

Someone wants me to know about Isaiah Zagar and I appreciate their persistence and multiple channels. Though I just realized it, my path first crossed with Zagar this spring when Full Frame showed the documentary about Zagar by his son. I wanted to go but it didn't work out. I didn't pay attention to the details of the film at the time so I didn't realize until today that the film was about Zagar who I have since encountered in other ways. When I was in Philadelphia this summer Joel, Amanda and I noticed a few of his mosaics and became intrigued by them and wondered who made these? Luckily the day after at the American Visionary Museum I found this book which provided the answer. Chances are if you've been in Philadelphia you've seen at least one of his mosaics since in 2004 he had made 64. This proves to be yet another of Philadelphia's many fabulous treasures and I can't wait to see more of his mosaics when visiting the city again. Poems, dreams, mirrors. Brilliant.

A few excerpts:

8-When Zagar visited Clarence Schmidt's garden of mirrors he "called it the singled most important day of his life."

13- "relief he experienced when he began making mosaics"

14- mirrors and dyslexia- qualities of reversal- printmaking

-"I never get tired of working. The mirrors is endless energy reflecting everything."

18- doesn't know WHY, MUST make them

-"process of sharing dreams"

-calls them "poems"

-in his neighborhood- "which he says has made him what he is"

21- grotto basement

22- "His goal, he says, is to live in an expanding world of his own creation"

-mirror- "Yes, it's YOU. YOU'RE here. YOUR dreams matter too."

August 4 - 5, 2008

Maps and Legends Reading and Writing Along the Borderlands
Michael Chabon
2008, hardcover
13 cards

Michael Chabon stop spying on me. I realize there's no way he was spying on me because this book came out before I encountered some of these things, BUT in this book there were a number of overlaps with things I'm interested in or have encountered recently. I love this convergence factor, but the ones that came up in this book were unexpected and just random. I received the book as one of the McSweeney's Book Club releases.

Many people have mentioned to me that they've enjoyed reading Chabon's other books but I haven't gotten around to reading any of them. The sticker on the back says its Chabon's first nonfiction book. It took me a few essays to realize, oh there are essays about maps and then there are some about legends and then there are others about writing. The phrase maps and legends makes me think of the R.E.M. song but that didn't come up anywhere.

Some selections:
14- proposes- "expanding our definition of entertainment to encompass everything pleasurable that arises from the encounter of an attentive mind with a page of literature." [Maybe we need a new word. I think he's right about the magic of books but when there are magazines called Entertainment Weekly can you really use the same word to refer to literature?]
15- pirates and Proust [in the same sentence but as a list, not next to each other]
16- "Pleasure is unreliable and transient."
17- nurse romances [this made me think of Richard Prince's Nurse paintings]
20- "'Science fiction' therefore, becomes any book sold in the section of the bookstore so designated.'" [I tend to steer clear of science fiction but Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower made me think that I might be misguided in my impulse.]
23- Benjamin name dropping
25- Borges [I just bought Borges's Labyrinths in DC]
-Kelly Link [whose book I read in July]
30- map [maps were the theme for my zine]
-street names
-"To me the remarkable thing about those names was not their oddity but the simple fact that most of them referred to locations that did not exist."
31 -"It was a powerful demonstration to me of the incantatory power of names and naming."
33- "...just because you have stopped believing in something you once were promised does not mean that the promise itself was a lie. Childhood, at its best, is a perpetual adventure...a setting- forth into trackless lands that might have come into existence the instant before you first laid eyes on them."
35- Sherlock Holmes [the title of a song I've been listening to]
37- "Like most writers Conan Doyle wrote for money. His misfortune as an artist was to make piles of it, and become famous around the world by writing stories he did not consider worthy of his talent, while receiving less credit or pay for works that meant more to him..."
38- secret sharers
43- inspired guessing
45- titles- The Adventure of...
46- Bentham's panopticon [Just learned about this a few months ago]
49- "Empires are built, however, by laying the groundwork for their own destruction." [Reminds me of current events but also Jared Diamond's book Collapse]
52-53- People who have written letters to Sherlock Holmes
56- Tolkien- end paper maps- "never visited or even referred to by the characters in The Lord of the Rings. All enduring popular literature had this open-ended quality, and extends this invitation to the reader to continue, on his or her own, with the adventure." [brought to my attention with the maps zine]
51- "All novels are sequels; influence is bliss."
59- D'Aularire's Book of Greek Myths [learned about this at work this fall]
63- "Loki is the God of Nothing in Particular yet unmistakably of the ambiguous world itself." [this is one of the found cats' who came with this name at my parent's house]
79- De Chirico streets [he uses this phrase at least 3 times, but it is a good one]
84- Harriet the Spy [one of my favorite books that made me excited about reading when I was younger]
88- "A quest is often, among other things, an extended bout of inspired madness."
91- comics abandoning children [This exhibition allowed me to discover the wonderful power of comics.]
93- "We should tell stories that we would have liked as kids. ...stories that, over time, build up an intricate, involved, involving mythology that is also accessible and comprehensible at any point of entry."
-"retell the same stories with endless embellishment...The key, as in baroque music, is repetition with variation. [I've been learning about Baroque art all summer.]
-"Let's blow their little minds."
93-94- "...but a mind is blown when something that you always feared but knew to be impossible turns out to be true...that everything you know is wrong..."
98- pop artisan incorporates "all the aesthetic moments her or she have ever fallen in love with in other movies or songs or novels..."
-"...a record of consciousness that was busy falling in love with those moments in the first place."
100- Bladerunner [saw this on the big screen this spring]
115- "In order to destroy the world it becomes necessary to save it."
120- "...testament to the abyss of a parent's greatest fears. The fear of leaving your child alone, of dying before your child has reached adulthood and learned to work the mechanisms and face the dangers of the world, or found a new partner to face them with."
124- King's College Cambridge [I stayed here a few nights while studying abroad]
125- H. P. Lovecraft [read about him recently in The Believer magazine]
132- "Perhaps all short stories can be understood as ghost stories, accounts of visitations and reckonings with the traces of the past."
133- Lawrence Weschler [just read one of his books]
137- Julius Knipel's regrets
139- "In the end it isn't nostalgia but loneliness of an impossible beauty and profundity that is the great theme of Knipl."
-clubs- "'Fellowship,' as a loyal member of the Holey Pocket League tells Mr. Knipl, 'is the only thing we crave.'" [I'm a big fan of clubs and fellowship- well when they're for the right things like pickles and corduroy.]
146- "I missed Pittsburgh."
151- "this time The Great Gatsby read me."

153- Bruce Springsteen [see last post]

154- dirigible [word bandied about this spring]

167- "Literature, like magic, has always been about the handling of secrets, about the pain, the destruction and the marvelous liberation that can result when they are revealed."

170- "One search, with a sole objective: a home, a world to call me own." [parallels here including the D.H. Lawrence book I read by Geoff Dyer earlier this year.]

205- "a baby chick of a man" [baby chicks!!!!]

August 3, 2008

Bye-bye Natalia
Michel Faber

While I don't usually post short stories (well ones not in books) or magazines I can't resist mentioning this one since it fits into this theme of writing about music I've become immersed in once again. My friend Megan passed along this is a story of a Ukrainian woman who needs to get out of the Ukraine- needs to get out. Her favorite band is Inward Path, a "dark metal" band. Natalia corresponds with a man through a mail-order bride service, Montana Bob. They start talking about music and it turns out he likes Bruce Springsteen. I'll let you read the story before giving it all away. Let's just say it matters that he likes Bruce Springsteen. Natalia is fabulous.

A few bits:
257- "she isn't much of a smiler"
267- (gloomy poster images) "...they make her happy, these things. Or, to be more precise, they don't make her unhappiness any worse."
-"Explaining what makes great music great is impossible, especially in a foreign tongue, but she can at least give him a flavor of Inward Path's poetry."
275- "What does it matter what music anyone likes?"

July 30 - August 2, 2008

Killing Yourself to Live 85% of a True Story

Chuck Klosterman

2005, hardcover

16 cards

Chuck Palahniuk and Chuck Klosterman are different people. I now know that. Even better, Chuck Klosterman's books are about music and they are interesting and they are well written. Klosterman writes about music as a listener but his gift is talking about it as it fits into a person's life, how it infiltrates thinking and understanding and relationships. While the larger subject of the book is an assignment about how rock stars have died, the personal epiphanies and thoughts of Klosterman loom larger than any discoveries that could be made (and rarely were) when say, standing on the spot of the plane crash of the Big Bopper Buddy Holly and Ritchie Valens. The observations Klosterman offers appear true to life he lives and there's a sense of honesty in the way he writes about them (even though that might factor into the 85%, 15% ratio). While he's wrong about a few things (no one needs to own Brittney Spears releases p. 16- thinking like this is why there are so many Jethro Tull records where used records are sold), that's ok, no one is perfect and if they were, that would probably be boring.

Some excerpts [with my comments in brackets]:

1- "Ohio. I was qualified to live in Ohio."

4- "We are all tourists, sort of. Life is tourism, sort of."

9- Chelsea Hotel- Stanley Beard, "The kind of person who wants to stay in Room 100 is just a cultic follower. These are people who have nothing to do....You will see that they are not serious-minded people. You will see that they are not trying to understand anything about death."

11- "I have no idea how people travel."

-"Death is part of life."

-"However, this is not necessarily true for rock stars; sometimes rock stars don't start living until they die." [The NYTimes recently had an article related to this- artists and death]

13- "Somewhere, at some point, somehow, somebody decided that death equals credibility. And I want to figure out why that is."

14- missing Car Rock

15- not owning vinyl or a turntable [hmmmmm]

18- diners [not that he really goes to many- chain restaurants instead]

19-compares a woman to the one in "Jolene" by Dolly Parton [How is this the first book I've read this year that mentions Dolly Parton????]

29- Honesty Room

-"...and one day I was structuring my entire life around spending time with her."

33- Springfield, Mass. Basketball Hall of Fame

-"Springfield is a poorly organized town." [So true!]

-"Like all museums, it's a rip-off." [not always true, but understood. Hall of Fames are always a rip-off.]

-"In theory, the Basketball Hall of Fame should simply serve as a pleasant distraction from the road and an opportunity to buy a t-shirt."

34- (Great White concert fire)- "In West Warwick, what used to be a tavern is now an ad hoc cemetery- which is the same role taverns play in most small towns, but not as obviously as this."

42- "Half the people who attend concerts only go so that they can tell other people that (a) certain shows were amazing, and (b) other shows sucked."

42-43- "I honestly believe that people of my generation despise authenticity, mostly because they're all so envious of it."

- Chevy Cavaliers [a friend, when I told her about his mentioning of Cavaliers as a working class car alongside IROCS, said that he probably meant Cavaliers from the 90s. And if he's not, Jettas and other non-working class cars are for suckers.]

45- Synchronicity by The Police

46- "Like all modern people, I had no relationship with anyone in my building."

53- (Washington monument) "but what is this 500-foot masonry structure supposed to tell me? What is it supposed to make me understand? ... I'll never understand why people need to see things just so they can say they saw them."

57- Petula Clark Downtown list

58- "Artists who believe they have any control over the interpretation of their work are completely fooling themselves."

61- "Every summer, Hollywood movie studios convince millions of people to see blockbuster movies they know they're going to hate."

-"Who really cares who Lindsay Lohan is dating? Almost no one."

-"But it's still information they need to have. This is because those people care about something else entirely; they're worried about the possibility of everyone else understanding something they're missing." [v. true]

63- North Carolina

64- "...I must run: Running keeps me alive." [also in agreement here]

64- "This NC oxygen is delicious..." (mentions Superchunk) [yes except when it is above 90]

67- "At their core, the final outcome to every football game (including the Super Bowl) is wholly meaningless.

70- Mary Beth- dreams and media

79- The Standard Hotel

84- (people talking about dreams) "It's a way for people to be honest without telling the truth."

86- Wilco- Yankee Hotel Foxtrot- 9/11 [The thing he missed with this is that the album was streaming on the internet when 9/11 happened. That was the really eerie part of the album and 9/11.]

87- "...what can you say when skyscrapers collapse?"

91- "Right now, most rock journalism is just mild criticism with a Q & A attached. Nobody learns anything (usually) and nothing new is created (ever).

92- "...the pursuit of intellect and the so-called 'life-of-the-mind' makes people broaden their classification for what can be reasonably classified as important."

112-113- "We are always dying, all the time. That's what living is; living is dying, little by little."

141- Rumors Fleetwood Mac [which I discovered is a fabulous album only this year]

143- Jeff Tweedy- transcendent moments, unintentional

-CK mentions guitar strong at the beginning of Fleetwood Mac's "I Don't Want to Know" [my favorite song on the album]- "we loved hearing the inside of a song."

164- "Nothing is going to happen tonight."

166- "...reading was a kind of neutral, reactive way to spend an evening."

171- (3 import stores) "I will never understand what people want out of life."

173- "...the things I write are often things I would never say."

195- Thomas Jefferson to Lewis and Clark- seeing mastodons

196- westerly

198- Led Zeppelin and guys

201- talk radio- though Dick Cheney dead

202- "Right now it would be easier to find uranium than college kids."

205- "I don't miss high school at all."

-"I have nothing to say, but I can't stop myself from talking."

216- "That's the history of KISS and those are the contents of my heart."

217- "I love KISS because the world makes sense when I think about them. Art and love are the same thing. It's the process of seeing yourself in things that are not you. It's understanding the unreasonable."

224- Kurt Cobain's death- people unconnected to Kurt, Seattle or grunge- "...suddenly chose to remember themselves in a completely different way."

227- "...his death changed the history of the living."

-"Kurt Cobain was that popular-yet-unpopular kid who dies for the sings of your personality."

230- (people needing to believe he lived under the bridge) "...Maybe it's something they need to believe, because if they don't, they will be stuck with the mildly depressing revelation that dead people are simply dead."

-"...everything else has nothing to do with the individual who died and everything to do with the people who are left behind..."

231- checking email

232- "We all have the potential to fall in love a thousand times in our lifetime. It's easy."

-"But there are certain people you love who do something else; they define how you classify what love is supposed to feel like....4 or 5 of these people."

-"the individual who embodies your personal definition of love does not really exist. The person is real and the feelings are real- but you create the context."

233- Lucy Chance- "The bar misses you."

235- "I am ready to be alone."

July 10 - August 2, 2008

Everything That Rises A Book of Convergences
Lawrence Weschler
2006 Hardcover
10 cards



I was aware of this book when McSweeney's released it, but at the time I didn't have time to read it. This fall I had time to listen to Weschler's talk from U of M's Penny Stamps lecture series and now by August I've finally finished reading the book. There are four very different sections of this book. I found the first two the most interesting in the connections the essays explore between works of art and other things. One of my favorites is a photo of the moon that Weschler compares to a late Mark Rothko painting. I also appreciate that he also puts forward such observations without trying to tie them up into perfect explanations or lines of influence.



Before this book I've experience synchronicities with material I've read and things in daily life, but this book led to a great one. On page 99 there's a reproduction of Velazquez's Aesop. Unfamiliar with this painting until encountering it here, while reading this book I saw a copy of Aesop's face by John Singer Sargent (a copy of the original Velazquez) at the Ackland Museum of Art. (I also have some photos from when I was younger that look somewhat similar to the photo on page 79 which is just creepy.)

Some excerpts:

15- "What's interesting to me is that history repeats itself, not only in how people arrange themselves but in how the portraits of them stands in relation to them."

22- Joel Meyerowitz: "...one is always carrying a chapbook of images around. ...For a street photographer like myself, randomness is everything, because that's one thin the world has in abundance and I am just passing through it with my share."

33- "The artist's task is not to alter the world as the eye sees it into a world of aesthetic reality but to perceive the aesthetic reality within the actual world."
-James Agee: "how deep and deft creative intelligence must be to recognize, foresee and make permanent [that world's] best moments."
42- Benjamin: "...There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism."
47- Rothko: "The people who weep before my paintings are having the same religious experience I had when I painted them."
-Rothko "If you are moved by the color relationships then you miss the point."
-"it draws you out and gives nothing back. Its presence, like that of a black hole, is of such density that you might lose your self there."
-"For those Rothkos do not make a statement; rather, they raise a demand, or more precisely maybe, a question."
-"There is a moment in looking at those paintings when we stop looking at them and they start looking at us- and if we are not careful, if there is not enough of us there, straight through us."
-"Rothko keeps bleeding out of aesthetical categories and into ethical ones. Not, is it beautiful? But rather, how should one lead one's life?"
-p. 46 and p. 49
-"And yet on the moon, there was nothing there...A vast interminable emptiness: a howling airless silence. A vacuum of meaning: absolute silence."
-W.H. Auden: "Out apparatniks will continue making/the usual squalid mess they call History:/all we can pray for is that artists,/chefs and saints may still appear to blithe it."
51- Eisenstein
-footnote- Larry McMurty (Lonesome Dove) (forefathers) "What they dreamed, we live and what they lived we dream."
53- "Funny the way mirrors (time or otherwise, canvas or crystal) are constantly doubling and redoubling possible significations in a vertiginous regress."
-Magritte, La reproduction interdite, 1937
54- Diebenkorn- solitary women
-"Abstraction: to be lost in thought, lost to thought transported out of oneself. But out of oneself toward what?"
57- trains- standard time
-Einstein- theory of relativity- trains- "one of the principal motifs in the exploration of simultaneity"
58- Einstein- day job- Swiss patent office- "mindless drudge work, something to help pay the bills while the real work of genius transpired late at night and around the margins."
-Georg Simmel's Philosophy of Money, 1900
-GS: "The meaning of money lies in the fact that it will be given away."
59- "As a tangible item, money is the most ephemeral thing in the external practical world; yet its content is the most stable since it stands as the point of indifference and balance between all other phenomena in the world..."
69- (Edward Snow- Vermeer's Girl with a Pearl Earring) LW- "Has she just turned toward us, Snow asks, by way of entry into the image, or is she just about to turn away?"
-"Capture and release. A punctum."
80- poster tribute to Bruno Schulz
89- (Herb) "He'd be my best reader and I was writing for him."
93 (Vermeer's Lacemaker) "...how everything in it is slightly out of focus, either too close or too far, except for the very thing the girl herself is focusing upon..."
133- Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists Midnight clock [currently it's 5 minutes to midnight]
159- (heart bumper stickers in 1981) "The phenomenon seemed at once naive and a bit hopeless- another American effort to single yourself out, to differentiate yourself (and your car) from the hordes of apparently identical beings and things. At the same time, it seemed like an attempt to reach out across the asphalt to signal your humanity (through what you hearted) to other souls..."
169- Persian proverb- "Fear those who fear you."
182- Rhonda Roland Shearer wrote in 1999 about Duchamp's L.H.O.O.Q.- "Duchamp had subtly superimposed a photo of his own strangely feminine face onto Da Vinci's portrait, before pencilling in the wicked little moustache and goatee."
-decades speculation about Da Vinci superimposing his face on the Mona Lisa
218- Proust
220- every cell in our bodies replaced every 7 years
223- W. G. Sebald's The Rings of Saturn- "The greater the distance, the clearer the view..."
232- Lao-Tzu- "...We shape clay into a pot, but it is the emptiness inside that holds whatever we want..."

July 28 - 30, 2008

The Importance of Music to Girls

Lavinia Greenlaw

2007, hardcover

10 cards

The music issue of The Believer came the other day and in it was an essay by Lavinia Greenlaw. In the essay she deals with issues of relationships, music and being, merging them all into a beautiful telling of life lived. I rushed to the library to find her book which sounded equally wonderful in title, The Importance of Music to Girls (!), and started reading fast and furiously.

It's a good book, it is, but somehow the magic in this essay doesn't carry through the whole book, though some moments are priceless and perfectly captured. It's always odd to me that people who love music, those who listen rather than make it, don't write as universally about its appeal as it seems one could. I haven't figured out the mystery myself by any means. Perhaps by trying to put into words those moments when you listen to music by yourself lets too many other people into the room. I believe someone can do it, and I thought it might be this book, but not so much.

Some excerpts:

14- "For the first time I understood that belonging was a way of escaping myself and of finding a place in the world..."

15- "I could keep up, but I did not belong because I had not learned to contain myself within the figure I was making."

26- records, starting with what's at hand- your parent's collection- Bob Dylan's Nashville Skyline and Simon and Garfunkel's Bridge Over Troubled Water

-"I read the titles and listened to the lyrics as if deciphering hieroglyphics."

28- "On this album, Dylan is feeling out the big words in particular and letting them go only when the edges have been worn down."

38- corduroy

46- (Donny Osmond) "...decided he would be my favorite pop star. Somehow I knew I needed one and as I'd never heard of him, I assumed no one else had either. I was looking for my first musical discovery and wanted it to be as private and singular as my feelings about the boy at school."

48- "I began to understand pop as a construction."

-"Marooned among them were bands I was beginning to classify. Like a child filling a stamp album or collecting eggs, I needed to create order and name names."

49- categories

52- "The waiting of childhood, the waiting to be told what was happening, was replace by waiting for something to happen- the arrival of a bus, the appearance of a friend."

84- "I was becoming a girl as instructed by girls but I knew I wasn't a real girl, at least not of this kind."

100- Eddie and the Hot Rods

101- The Damned

110- "...I realized that I was in a room with boys and music but nothing was meant to happen."

111- "As a rule of thumb, rock was for boys and disco was for girls, but soul was a place where we might meet."

112- "The interesting boys did not sing along, they discussed..."

114- "(Why did girls never play air guitar? Did we sing along because singing was what girls did or was it that girls only sand because they didn't play air guitar?)"
118- Punk- collaging images from NME

122- "God Save the Queen"- #1, blank spot on the charts

-"Jamie Reid's cover was more disturbing than the song itself."

127- Quote from Johann Wolfgag von Goethe, A Theory of Colors: "...color...exhibits itself by separation and contrast, by commixture and union by augmentation and neutralization, by communication and dissolution."

128- "The colors of punk, like its rumor, set off a vibration and cracks began to appear- orange socks, blue hair, lime-green nails, pink trousers."

-"In punk, color combinations were dishwater and vomit. It was a form of aesthetic resistance, a spectrum chosen to remind the world of all that was unnatural or decayed: pink like rubber rather than roses, green like snot rather than leaves."

132- "...while the boys were serious about music, they didn't expect me to be so too."

135- "The strongest impulse I had was toward freedom."

170- Barthes quote (though not an amazing one)

-"The greatest act of love was to make a tape for someone."

-"An LP was something of substance and vision."

172- "I bought two Velvet Underground LPs as soon as I found them..."

-"I declared allegiance, took a position and always had a view."

173- Joseph Beuys

-Pompidou Centre- "but I had never before come across a building (or song, or person...?) that did not hide how it was put together."

181- NME- "Serious music criticism was then very serious indeed. Records were assessed not only musically but also according to their cultural context and philosophical connotations."

-"I liked the way these critics wrote and feel under the rhetorical spell of their semicolons, qualifications and parentheses."

183- "These journalists used a cultural vocabulary that we deployed with the same thoughtlessness as teenage slang: postmodern (good), semiotic (?), eclectic (usually good), esoteric (v. good), moderne (trying too hard), postindustrial (interesting), decadent (usually bad)."

-"Irony protected you from accusations of sincerity- so much for being serious."

190- "Daniel and I discussed the world, but only in theory- Barthes and Foucault."

194- "Was it, after all, that men wanted to tell women things and not be told?"

200- t-shirt in a window- "Fuck Art, Let's Dance. I copied it onto the back of a postcard and sent it to Daniel. It was the first love letter I'd ever written."