Slow Listener

This is Water-David Foster Wallace

Fri, 10 May 2013 10:25:55 -0400

http://vimeo.com/theglossary/thisiswater

If you have never heard any excerpts of this commencement speech by Davis Foster Wallace delivered at Kenyon College in 2005. I graduated that year as well and I have a close friend who graduated from Kenyon that year as well, a bit jealous that she got to hear this speech in person.

"Write as if this were your only book, your last book. Into it put everything you were..."

Mon, 29 Apr 2013 10:03:31 -0400

“Write as if this were your only book, your last book. Into it put everything you were saving—everything precious, every scrap of capital, every penny as it were. Don’t be afraid of being left with nothing.”

- André Gide (via austinkleon)

In memory of Scott Miller (1960-2013). I want to go bang on...

Thu, 18 Apr 2013 11:41:05 -0400

In memory of Scott Miller (1960-2013).

I want to go bang on every door

and say, “Wake up you’re sleeping through heaven.”

The Return of Sean Nelson

Mon, 08 Apr 2013 14:15:00 -0400

The Return of Sean Nelson:

“There’d be nothing wrong with “one-hit wonder” status if the term didn’t suggest some sort of creative limitation; if people didn’t assume that one hit means only one good song. But for Sean Nelson and Harvey Danger, the 1998 smash “Flagpole Sitta” has had a way of overshadowing the superior but less widely heard material that followed. By the time Harvey Danger self-released the tremendous 2005 album Little By Little…, the group’s incisive, catchy, thoughtful post-hit songs were known mostly to obsessives and cultists.

…

Thankfully, that wouldn’t be Nelson’s final musical chapter: He’s about to return with a solo debut eight years in the making, titled Make Good Choices. Recorded in a leisurely fashion between distractions — and aided by collaborators such as Peter Buck — the album comes out June 4, and finds Nelson sounding as wise and vital as ever.

[…]

"Contemporary humanity has lost the ability to engage in productive solitude."

Mon, 04 Mar 2013 17:08:00 -0500

“Contemporary humanity has lost the ability to engage in productive solitude.”

- Terry Waite, as reported by the novelist Richard Powers.

One of my favorite songs from 2012, Paul Kelly’s...

Wed, 27 Feb 2013 10:10:22 -0500

One of my favorite songs from 2012, Paul Kelly’s “Little Aches and Pains,” performed on a Melbourne tram.

Poet Jane Hirshfield: Unleashing the Mystery of Existence

Tue, 19 Feb 2013 16:06:56 -0500

Poet Jane Hirshfield: Unleashing the Mystery of Existence:

What do you hope your poems offer your readers and the world?

A door. One that stands outside our usual addresses and maps—or more truly, perhaps, many doors at once, that lead simultaneously outward and inward, into both the life we share with others and the privacy in which self can take stock with original eyes. I hope my poems might offer: “Here is one experience of life, of its possibilities, exhilarations, bewilderments, griefs. Enter. Now, here is another.” When we bring that spirit of openness, permeability, exploration, and courage into our lives and our hands, everything else follows: a deeper saturation and compassion, a recalibrating sense of proportion, an increase of the possible. Good poems make clarity without making simple. They do not erase darkness; if anything, they open into it. But wouldn’t the page of a day be dull and undistinguished, almost as if unsigned by existence, without its charcoal?

theparisreview: Our Southern editor John Jeremiah Sullivan on...

Thu, 14 Feb 2013 10:05:55 -0500

theparisreview:

Our Southern editor John Jeremiah Sullivan on his favorite love themed essays, via the Barnstorm Literary Journal.

“I was going to say Emerson’s essay on Love, which has a lot of good passages in it, including, ‘The passion rebuilds the world for the youth’ and ‘In the noon and the afternoon of life we still throb at the recollection of days when happiness was not happy enough, but must be drugged with the relish of pain and fear; for he touched the secret of the matter, who said of love, ‘All other pleasures are not worth its pains.’’

“But I think most of Bacon’s essay ‘Of Love,’ a disturbing piece because of how its prose seems to shudder with fear. Bacon genuinely feared love, its destructive tendencies, its power to undo otherwise sane-seeming people, ‘for in life it doth much mischief; sometimes like a siren, sometimes like a fury.’ Don’t quote him in any love letters. But that rebound relationship your friends are telling you is really bad for you? Read this before you marry that person. ‘This passion hath his floods, in very times of weakness; which are great prosperity, and great adversity; though this latter hath been less observed: both which times kindle love, and make it more fervent, and therefore show it to be the child of folly.’”

Photography Credit Jack Radcliffe

"Of course the problem is setting the goals in the first place; many enough ‘successful’ men end up..."

Mon, 11 Feb 2013 15:26:00 -0500

“Of course the problem is setting the goals in the first place; many enough ‘successful’ men end up drunks for having fulfilled goals the world set for them and then finding they’ve fulfilled nothing in themselves; many enough kids end up junkies for having decided the world’s goals aren’t worth trying for and being unable to set any of their own. A few fortunate combine the two (I don’t mean drink and drugs, but meaning your own and worldy goals), and your education and growing up now are vitally important because learning the world’s goals (even marks in school) gives you the material to form your own—and don’t misunderstand, I don’t mean that by your 16th birthday you should know whether you want to be a poet or an astronaut, but only have a hungry curiosity in all directions for anything that brings you and your mind to life.”

- William Gaddis, from a letter to his son, Matthew, written in 1973. From the forthcoming collection of his correspondence, published by Dalkey Archive: http://www.dalkeyarchive.com/book/?GCOI=15647100244880

The long-awaited release of My Bloody Valentine’s...

Fri, 08 Feb 2013 16:31:00 -0500

The long-awaited release of My Bloody Valentine’s follow-up to Loveless has sparked a reappraisal of their influence over the past 22 years of popular music. Not surprisingly, so much of the shoe-gaze skronk that arrived in its immediate wake has pretty much been consigned to the dustbin of derivative history. But “Marcia and Etrusca” by the Loud Family stands out as my favorite example of a band applying some of the Shields sound to push itself into new sonic and songcraft territory, and creating something timeless in the process.

bonkers for that bare bulb: Of course, even when you see the world as a trap and posit a...

Thu, 07 Feb 2013 11:48:48 -0500

bonkers for that bare bulb: Of course, even when you see the world as a trap and posit a...:

I certainly fell into the former category, as one who believed that for me to make a political difference, I needed to swallow the library before stepping outside to put my shoulder to the wheel of the world. I felt that my blind, guttural instinct for social justice was a passion I needed to harness, lest I undermine the cause by letting my loose tongue lose a winnable argument. Of course, I didn’t see it as a manifestation of my ego at the time; I probably viewed it as a charming shade of selfless, intellectual valor.

exoskull:

Of course, even when you see the world as a trap and posit a fundamental separation between liberation of self and transformation of society, you can still feel a compassionate impulse to help its suffering beings. In that case you tend to view the personal and the political in a sequential…

I went on a long Michael Penn jag last night during a flight...

Wed, 30 Jan 2013 16:04:52 -0500

I went on a long Michael Penn jag last night during a flight home, which reminded me to rewatch this Paul Thomas Anderson directed mini-epic, featuring Penn, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Thomas Jane, and Melora Walters.

Currently, you have to purchase the entire soundtrack to Girls...

Wed, 30 Jan 2013 09:41:44 -0500

Currently, you have to purchase the entire soundtrack to Girls in order to download Michael Penn’s “On Your Way.” I hope this ridiculous restriction is lifted soon.

apinchfeltinadream: do yourself a favor and press play Hard to...

Wed, 23 Jan 2013 11:56:55 -0500

apinchfeltinadream:

do yourself a favor and press play

Hard to beat 45 minutes spent in the presence of Elliott Smith and Jon Brion.

One of our finest musical thinkers, Joe Henry, reflects on the...

Fri, 18 Jan 2013 13:38:53 -0500

One of our finest musical thinkers, Joe Henry, reflects on the song that changed his life: Woody Guthrie’s “1913 Massacre.”

"I often wonder these days—when looking in the window of a record store, or when passing a jumbly..."

Thu, 06 Dec 2012 12:00:01 -0500

“

I often wonder these days—when looking in the window of a record store, or when passing a jumbly newsstand—if I would respond if someone were to call out my name: if I would involuntarily whop toward the sound of self, or even feel the old esophageal shimmy of potential recognition; I doubt it: I feel as if that mode of particularity is lapsing away (and accordingly, I can hardly care); but it doesn’t stop there: I can barely align myself with generics any longer: it’s difficult to feel like a runaway when no one has noticed that you’re gone; being other-directed becomes problematic in the realm of no faces…

It’s like that time a few summers ago—I think I was 15-when I brought my bicycle into Andy’s Getty station for air: I had a red, fenderless, 10-speed Raleigh then, with chrome-shiny Derailleur-system gears, and I took good care of it (it had been given to me for an earlier birthday); all that summer, I spent afternoons riding up and down the hill to Ritter Springs Park, with its green slopes and abandoned gazebo; but by mid-season the bike had become harder to pedal, so one day after I had gotten to the park, I checked the wheels and found they had gone soft; accordingly, I stopped off at Andy’s gasworks while on my way home; the station has a blood-red air pump across the tarmac from the garage, and though the sign above it says ‘10 cents,’ this was more intimidation for the untutored than a real request; so, without disturbing anyone, I rode up to the pump, got off my sticky-seated bike, pushed the kickstand down, and began the pleasant ritual: I rotated each of the bike’s wheels to bring its air nozzle to bottom, then went for the airhose; it hung in a looping circle from the bassety jowl of the pump’s dropping metal cradle; with silent aplomb, I found the hose’s bulbed tip, knelt on one knee, and pressed the chrome knob to the bicycle’s front wheel; immediately, then, the wheel began plumping with the arriving 45 pounds of pressure, and the bicycle-frame edged perceptibly up; again, it was a pleasant process: I had effected a working linkage, the pump-head was huffing and clanging in a passion of airy output, when, from nowhere, someone grabbed my arm, pulled me up and jolted me around—so abruptly that I lost control of the airhose and it snaked away, hissing, on the ground; for a second I thought that Andy had decided to get mad because I hadn’t paid the 10 cents, but then a man’s rough hand clamped over my face and crawled down over my mouth and chin; then the man pulled my throat up hard, making my throat-skin burn and sealing in my yelping; and then he wheeled me around toward the station, at which point I saw Andy, old and skinny Andy, come barreling out of his office beside the garage; Andy stopped dead, stared wildly in my direction, and faltered nervously; then, with his face grimaced and panicky, he slowly put his hands up…

The man holding me had a pistol in his other hand; I saw it in the corner of my eye just before I felt its cold hardness crunch into my temple; pressed against my face, the pistol was hard in a way that seemed absolute, bone-smashing, beyond argument, and cold in a way that seemed perfect and permanent; the man then wrenched me directly between him and Andy, whose eyes were as wide open as his hands, and then there was silence and then I heard the air hose puffing and then there were words: Hey and Come on and Leave him go; the gunman then began towing me backwards by my throat and chin, and I saw that Andy was fretting and rubbing his reddened cheek; but then a red station wagon drove in off Route 44 and went up to the gas island, and then gunman began exhaling shit…shit…, and my throat skin was burning, and my temple was erratically separating from and painfully banging back into the metal barrel of the pistol, and I was thinking this is really rather interesting: this feels like being in a movie … there is something to be said for this; but then the driver of the red station wagon leaned from his window and called out Hey Andy—, whereupon Andy fretted some more and began backing towards his office without saying anything; and then, all of a sudden, the station wagon gunned its engine and tore backwards around the gas pumps, then shot forward and snorted away down Route 44; and as the car disappeared, I thought of the bullet in the man’s pistol: before my eyes I saw the bullet in stunningly accurate cross-section, highly magnified but meticulously correct: the pointed projectile, gleamy within its snug chute, streak and striped with reflected light; and then I thought of how the bullet would be shoved through space-how a slug, a bit, would explode out of Zeno forth and reach pure continueness before streaming directly into frayable gun flesh; and I was thinking of what it would be like to have such a wound, to lift up the bottom of my shirt at school and have bandages to show, white brushstrokes on belly, when a horrendous force Huhhh captured me forward and my neck whipped back and I crumbled down to the pavement and my entire face began to cry; and then, after an evanescent interval, Andy was above me, just hovering there, splintering the sunlight and sputtering You OK?, you ok…?; but he didn’t touch me; he didn’t even bend down and from my kinked position on the tarmac, I looked over my shoulder and saw the gunman running towards a gray sedan waiting down the road; then he scrambled into the passenger door and took off; then, with miraculous rapidity, that was it; that was that; the whole thing was over, and things went back to the business as usual; Andy didn’t even want to bother calling the police—he said they aren’t concerned about things like this; he just helped me up, fluttered his hand over the front of my pants to help brush away some gravel, and went back into his office; I, of course, was all right: the gunman had only shoved me, that was all; he had strong hands but there was no harm done, and of course there hadn’t been any bullets—of course I hadn’t been shot…; there was nothing like that at all; so I just finished stuffing my bike with invisible air and went home; and thus ended my career as a hostage—briefly, inconclusively, with consummate inconsequentiality: a nonevent realizing its full potential, brave new currents in contemporary invisibility—

”

- Evan Dara, The Lost Scrapbook

"i read the bible cause i like the sound of that kind of english no longer around it’s all..."

Fri, 30 Nov 2012 09:51:00 -0500

““i read the bible cause i like the sound
of that kind of english no longer around
it’s all bits & bytes now & little that’s wise
most people don’t talk they just advertise
the preacher said that it is all vanity
do you love yourself babe when you’re lovin me?””

- Greg Brown, “End of the Party”

"Genius is not replicable. Inspiration, though, is contagious, and multiform."

Tue, 27 Nov 2012 11:06:44 -0500

““Genius is not replicable. Inspiration, though, is contagious, and multiform.””

- David Foster Wallace

exoskull: bamf The most dangerous woman in...

Mon, 05 Nov 2012 12:15:18 -0500

exoskull:

bamf

The most dangerous woman in America:

http://www.myspace.com/music/player?sid=56188796&ac=now

From one of The Tom Russell Band’s best albums,...

Mon, 29 Oct 2012 09:59:00 -0400

From one of The Tom Russell Band’s best albums, “Hurricane Season.”

“We saw our bedroom set floating down Piedmont street
Palm trees broken by the wind
So Baby starts packing the essential things
Diet pills, potato chips and gin/
Next thing I know we’re in a row boat
We’re watching our apartment house go down
And Baby’s got a jar of gin and tonics
She says, “Christ, I hope the next door neighbors drown.”