Free at last, so here's a cross-posting from the book of face

You have received this note because someone thinks you are a literary geek. Copy the questions into your own note, answer the questions, and tag any friends who would appreciate the quiz, including the person who sent you this. Don't bother trying to italicize your book titles. We know you want to.


1) What author(s) do you own the most books by?
Stephen King, Neil Gaiman, Clive Barker, Ernest Hemingway, Cormac McCarthy, William Shakespeare, J.K. Rowling, Ken Wilber

2) What book do you own the most copies of?
I have three copies of The Hobbit. I have two different versions of Ulysses. Between Jacki and I, we have three copies of The Sound and the Fury. I have two copies of The Dead Zone, Christine, Thinner, and The Stand (cut paperback and uncut hardcover). Dubliners (two) + "The Dead" (three). I have a couple copies of crossover of several classic books because my mother began a subscription to a series of special edition leatherbound books from a publishing company called The Easton Press when I was in fifth or sixth grade. I am still receiving books from them. The first two I received were Moby Dick and The Last of the Mohicans. I have still not read the entirety of either. So I have had three copies of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, but gave one to a friend. I have two copies of the Odyssey, two copies of the Aeneid, as many as three editions of some of Shakespeare's play, two copies of War and Peace, etc. I tend to give someone the other copy of a book when I get a new one unless I am really attached to the old edition.

3) Did it bother you that both of those questions ended with prepositions?
I didn't notice at first. It bothers me when I am writing and I cannot figure a way to not make a sentence end with a preposition.

4) What fictional character are you secretly in love with?
Well, there are different kinds of love. I love cranky, bitter old men, but not at all in a sexual way. So, I fell in love with Colonel Cantwell when reading Across the River and into the Trees. If a writer writes well, I usually fall in love with the protagonist's love interest. I was definitely in love with Sarah in The Dead Zone the afternoon she and John made love in the barn. Crush that burgeoned into love for Hermione. Absolute love of unbreakable frienship for Sam Gamgee. I was madly in love with Susan, Roland's amour in Wizard and Glass. I was so madly in love with her I can't stand looking at Jae Lee's too computerized, too perfect renderings of her in those Dark Tower comics in which I have less than zero interest. I had the hots for Rosa when I read Sacrament in ninth grade. And, of course, I have it for Death. Talk about a fundamentally unworkable relationship. That's me and my draw to futility, I guess.

5) What book have you read the most times in your life (excluding picture books read to children)?
There are so many books I want to read, and so many books that, for one reason or another, I only make it halfway through, that I rarely read a book more than once. I have read King Lear three times, The Thief of Always twice, The Hobbit twice, A Farewell to Arms twice, Huck Finn twice, The Gunslinger twice. Short stories I often read more than twice if I love them. I love short stories. And then there are books that I keep starting over and over again. Blood Meridian, Ulysses, The Stand, The Sun Also Rises, Genesis.

6) What was your favorite book when you were ten years old?
The Hobbit.

7) What is the worst book you've read in the past year?
It's been a strange year. Last summer I read Hemingway and McCarthy, so there's nothing ill to speak of, but last fall semester I took two classes I absolutely loathed. I didn't finish anything I was supposed to read as my life and mind unraveled. So though I could list a history of rhetoric at colleges in the past hundred years or a polemical book about what the goals of a composition course ought to be and what the politics are behind those decisions are, or essays by French authors I cannot stand, I will not. The worst fiction book I have read in the past ten years and probably my whole life is The DaVinci Code. The worst literary book I have tried reading since becoming a graduate student in 2007 is Lord Jim. I fucking hate Lord Jim and I fucking hate Joseph Conrad.

8) What is the best book you've read in the past year?
Well, I just finished a course on Shakespeare, so that sets the bar pretty high. King Lear? Hamlet? It's pretty tough to go up against that. I read another play called The Sunset Limited by Cormac McCarthy and that affected me deeply. Last summer I was reading The Sun Also Rises and Blood Meridian, so that's pretty hard to beat as well. But the best book I read the entirety of and read for the first time in the past year is Watchmen.

9) If you could force everyone you tagged to read one book, what would it be?
Watchmen or The Road. For some, And the Ass Saw the Angel. But most of them have probably read the first two or all three by now.

10) Who deserves to win the next Nobel Prize for Literature?
Last I heard, one of the people on that board had some pretty disparaging things to say about Americans and our culture, so fuck 'em.

11) What book would you most like to see made into a movie?
None. Please stop attempting to ruin great books. I don't even see my dork-stuff touched. A Sandman movie? Ugh. No thanks. American Gods? Hard to imagine. Dark Tower? Hell, no. Though if JJ Abrams and Damen Lindelof are involved, I would give it a chance. The high brow stuff I have been reading would be equally bad. There's no movie waiting to be made in Across the River and into the Trees. What makes Blood Meridian so amazing has only a little to do with the actions that occur. It would make one of the bloodiest movies ever made. I am looking forward, with slight reservation, to The Road, to movie I at first opposed, then realized John Hillcoat (The Proposition) was directing, Viggo Mortensen wasn't looking too good, and Nick Cave and Warren Ellis were doing score.

12) What book would you least like to see made into a movie?
Um, Ulysses. I think they have tried it, which is ridiculous.

13) Describe your weirdest dream involving a writer, book, or literary character.
I've got two for you. One involved Stephen King. I was living down the street from the Boston Common at the time. I dreamt I went walking late at night, past midnight but before dawn, into the Common. I came across Stephen King. He was wearing a Red Sox cap, throwing baseballs into the air, and slugging them with a great wood bat. Every now and then you would hear a glass shatter in the distance. With the great amount of wealth he has, this was no problem. He had people who took care of that thing the next day for him. This was a meditative practice he did sometimes. He was not bothered by my intrusion. Instead, he continued tossing balls in the air and slamming them while he gave my writing advice. I do not remember much of the advice. Then, last year in the spring sometime, I had a dream with Faulkner in it. He gave me writing advice, too. Good advice, and a couple book suggestions, too, which I am going to get started on finally. He told me to read Robinson Crusoe and The Pilgrim's Progress. I have his advice written down.

14) What is the most lowbrow book you've read as an adult?
When did I become an adult? 18, 21. 26, never? I read the first of Anne Rice's smutty A.N. Roquelare Sleeping Beauty books at the age of 19. Awful. Again, I read The DaVinci Code six years ago. Worst book I have ever read.

15) What is the most difficult book you've ever read?
Jen said Ulysses. I could almost agree with her, but I read much of Finnegans Wake. It is a book insofar as it is constituted of pages with black markings and discernible letters all over them, occasionally making words that are known to the English speaking person and words that are made of two or more words from languages or names one may know. But it is not a novel, a poem, a play, a non-fiction book or any other form you might know. It is its own thing: Finnegans Wake. Even reading a whole book on it by Umberto Eco, and buying and reading parts of two other books on it, A Reader's Guide to Finnegans Wake and Joyce's Book of the Dark, I still got absolutely nothing out of it. I deeply love Joyce but am at this time incapable of giving a damn about the final book he wrote. I think I will use it as bedtime lullaby reading for my children one day. In philosophy, the most difficult book I've read is Totality and Infinity by Levinas.

16) What is the most obscure Shakespearean play you've seen?
I have not seen that much theater, something I am working on with Jacki. I also do not like watching things I have not read yet, something I am personally working on. For example, I will watch Benjamin Button without having read the Fitzgerald story.

17) Do you prefer the French or the Russians?
And now begins a series of shocking revelations. I have not read the Russians. I have begun Hadji Murád, but that is it. This is something I have been getting around to for a long time. I thought I would finally get the chance in Graduate School, but my department does not allow for the reading of anything in translation, unless the chair of the graduate program is teaching it, and then we can read every willfully obscure, onanistic French fuck ever to set pen to page. So there's your answer. I am sure I will like the Russians, when I get to them, more than the French. Though I love Antoine de St. Exupery and eventually came away with something profound after wrestling with Levinas for a few months. The jury's out on Foucault. I like him a lot more than some of his contemporaries. I am going to try to continue reading him. And I have not read Camus yet, something I am planning on getting to this summer.

18) Roth or Updike?
Haven't read either yet. Oh, wait, I did read A & P. I like A & P.

19) David Sedaris or Dave Eggers?
Haven't read either. What?! The What is the What.

20) Shakespeare, Milton, or Chaucer?
Was Milton for awhile, now it's definitely Shakespeare.

21) Austen or Eliot?
I know this refers to George Eliot, not T.S., so I cannot answer it. I have read neither.

22) What is the biggest or most embarrassing gap in your reading?
See the past several questions. That, and that I haven't read the entirety of The Bible, and that I haven't read Moby Dick, and that I haven't read Othello, and that I haven't finished some books I have lead most people to believe I have, and that I haven't finished reading some books and series of books that I've gotten my friends into reading.

23) What is your favorite novel?
Impossible. When I was a kid, it was The Hobbit. Then it was Watchers. Starting around seventh grade, it was The Vampire Lestat. Then it was It. Then it was Imajica. Then it was The Scarlet Letter. Then it was One Hundred Years of Solitude. Then it was A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Then it was The Lord of the Rings. Then it was American Gods. Then I barely read any fiction for years. Then I read a bunch of Harry Potter and Stephen King that I loved, but none of which qualified as favorite novel ever. Then it was The Road. Then it was And the Ass Saw the Angel. Then it was Across the River and into the Trees. What will it be next?

24) Play?
King Lear.

25) Poem?
Another hard one. A few favorites: Song of Myself. St. Kevin and the Blackbird. Interrogation at the Womb Door. Four Quartets is my favorite book of poetry. I'm not going further than that.

26) Essay?
What really constitutes an essay? Can any article in a magazine be an essay? Can any piece of literary criticism be an essay? Can any postmodern exercise in self-titillation be an essay? What about things our students write that we find very satisfying? I am not passionate about essays as a classification of literature, though I am becoming increasingly passionate about literary criticism. I dabbled around in last years Best American Essays of 2007 collection, edited by recently departed Dave Foster Wallace, and didn't find anything that pleased.

Here's a few I enjoy: Poe's essay on the unity of effect in a short story, "On a Florida Key" by E.B. White, "Nature" by Ralph Waldo Emerson, "What is an Author?" by Foucault, "The WOrd Made Flesh" and "The Secret Life of the Love Song" by Nick Cave, "Nothing Under the Sun: Nada, Light, and the Grace of God in Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises" by Mark W. Bellomo, and especially "Integral Art and Literary Theory, Parts 1 and 2" by Ken Wilber, collected in his book The Eye of Spirit. What I remember most is him writing about a painting Van Gogh made of shoes and Heidegger's misreading and projection on that painting. What Wilber informed me about that painting laid the gorundwork for me to suddenly become overcome looking at the painting in the Met, where I began, inexplicably to myself, to weep before it.

27) Short story?
Here's the good stuff. "Cathedral," Raymond Carver. "Teddy" and "For Esmé, with Love and Squalor," J.D. Salinger. "Young Goodman Brown" and "Ethan Brand: An Abortive Romance" Nathaniel Hawthorne. "Barn Burning" by William Faulkner. "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber," "The Battler," "Soldier's Home," "Indian Camp," "Now I Lay Me," "The Snows of Kilimanjaro," and "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place" by Ernest Hemingway. "Araby" and "The Dead" by James Joyce. "The Deluge at Norderney" and "The Old Chevalier" by Isak Dinesen. "Smith of Wootton Major," by J.R.R. Tolkien. "Monologue of Isabel Watching It Rain in Macondo," The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World," and "A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings" by Gabriel García Márquez. "Troll Bridge," "Murder Mysteries," "The Goldfish Pool and Other Stories," "Snow, Glass, Apples," October in the Chair," "Bitter Grounds," and "Forbidden Brides f the Faceless Slaves in the Secret House of the Night of Dread Desire," by Neil Gaiman. "William Wilson" and "The Pit and the Pendulum" by Edgar Allan Poe. "The Shadow Over Innsmouth" by H.P. Lovecraft. "The Midnight Meat Train" and "In the Hills, The Cities" by Clive Barker. ""The Reach," "The Monkey," "Children of the Corn," "The Last Rung on the Ladder" "1408," "Everything's Eventual," by Stephen King. And the two most recent additions: "Best New Horror" and especially "20th Century Ghost" by Joe Hill, who happens to be Stephen King's son and is trying to carry on in the name of his father, but to maybe improve what he did, in the same way Nick Cave, Jeff Buckley, and arguably Jesus have (as Nick Cave argues in "The Flesh Made Word."

Finally, I leave it to you to decide whether Go Down, Moses is a short story collection. I would include "The Fire and The Hearth," at least, if it is a short story collection, but I do not think it is. Others argue In Our Time is not a short story collection. I love In Our Time, I think it's thematic, it obviously has several stories with Nick Adams (as do later short story collections by EH), but I think you can take a story out of it, read it, and not miss the entire point of the story. Furthermore, if it is one thematic more-than-a-short-story-collection book, putting "My Old Man" in there is a huge mistake.

28) Work of nonfiction?
Sex, Ecology, Spirituality by Ken Wilber. That I have never finished the book is irrelevant.
Some others I have enjoyed. On Writing by Stephen King. A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway. Chronicles: Volume 1 by Bob Dylan. Introduction to Metaphysics by Martin Heidegger. Reading Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises by H.R. Stoneback.

I am currently enjoying Will in the World and Hamlet in Purgatory by Stephen Greenblatt a lot.

29) Who is your favorite writer?
Top Five: Ernest Hemingway, William Shakespeare, J.R.R. Tolkien, Cormac McCarthy, Stephen King. Neil Gaiman was in the top five for a long time, but he's losing hold. He's still in the top ten, though.

30) Who is the most overrated writer alive today?
That's a difficult question. I am hesitant to answer, though "overrated people" lists are frequently on my mind. I am in part hesitant because I have not read a lot of the authors who are living today that people seem to love. I did attempt reading Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections, and thought it sucked ass for a host of reasons. So he's up there. Jen was so bold as to list Chuck Palahnuik, her own favorite author. I do think he is overrated, but I also enjoyed teaching Fight Club to my students last year. No one is claiming Dan Brown is the new Joyce, but I think he is incredibly overrated on even a beach read level of aesthetic gauges. He is incompetent at crafting characters, at providing a rewarding or even shocking ending, making a plot that holds, writing a compelling sentence or a beautiful description, making me feel any kind of suspense and real danger, adequately playing with any of the huge matrices of meaning he tries to bring into his work, etc.

Okay, here's a ballsier, more shocking answer. I have tried again and again to get into Ray Bradbury's work. I am so resistant to the possibility that I may not love an author I feel so totally expected to love that I am still believing that I will get the right book or try again at the right time and discover how awesome he truly is. I do think he has some marks of a great writer. But I am yet to finish reading anything he has written. So I might say Bradbury.

31) What is your desert island book?
I would bring a book that is huge that I wouldn't mind using to start fires. So I'll go with one I already burned years ago. The Faerie Queen, by Edmund Spenser.

32) And... what are you reading right now?
Right now, the semester just ended. It's a transitional time. Do I jump into some light fare? Do I keep reading what I was reading? Etc. So, at the moment I am reading Julius Caesar, the last scheduled book for Studies in Shakespeare that Olsen cut. I am continuing to read Hamlet in Purgatory by Stephen Greenblatt. I am returning to reading Cormac McCarthy's first novel The Orchard Keeper, which I began just before the semester reached the point where any extracurricular reading is an impossibility. I also left myself toward the end of the first half of Joe Hill's debut collection 20th Century Ghosts, so I will return to that. The Book of Matthew. And I'm in the middle of reading an interview with Dylan in Rolling Stone, which I am reading for the first time in years.

Now, I am going to add one more question to this list, because 33 is a much better number than 32.

33) What do you plan on reading this summer?

Before I answer, let me say this: I always "plan" on reading ten times as much as I end up reading. It is my job at this point in life to read slowly and write about or teach what I read. So when the summer comes, sometimes I am too busy playing guitar, hiking, swimming, working non-academic jobs, watching all the movies I put off watching, drinking without having to worry about not being clear-headed enough to write my paper, and so on to actually accomplish what I set out to read. So here's a bunch of books I am thinking about reading or reading again this summer.

I Am Legend, Duel by Richard Matheson
The Fall by Albert Camus
Heart Shaped Box by Joe Hill
From Hell by Alan Moore
Titus Andronicus by William Shakespeare
As many Cormac McCarthy novels in chronological order as I can or feel like.
The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner (haven't read it yet!)
Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe
The Pilgrim's Progress by John Bunyan
The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien
Moby Dick, or, The Whale by Herman Mellville
Hadi Murád by Leo Tolstoy
the next two -thirds of Christine, by Stephen King

and you know what, maybe I will finally jump back into The Dark Tower and finish it already.

and maybe something by this Ellis fellow who I hear writes such tremendous comics.

To the Stars and Back, The Universe is a Celebrated Black

With its minimalist cover evocative of early eighties Factory Records synth-classics, its impressive series of in-studio peeks, its disturbing promotional video for lead single “Wrong,” its numerous editions, and especially its playful yet enticing title, Depeche Mode’s new album Sounds of the Universe seems to promise a world of aural pleasure, maybe the right balance of Playing the Angel’s songs and hooks with Exciter’s lush textures and risks. Now that it is out, Sounds of the Universe suffers a bit from suggesting too much. The album as it stands is at first sadly underwhelming, but grows on the listener as familiarity with the songs increases. Often, hardcore fans insist that the singles are the least impressive work of their beloved band or artist, or maybe fall in the middle road. Sounds of the Universe’s first surprise is that “Wrong,” the album’s third track, really is one of the album’s best songs. While much of the album has the relaxed feeling to it that Exciter had (without verging into the sleepiness of “When the Body Speaks,” “Easy Tiger,” or “Goodnight Lovers”), “Wrong” is one of the few moments of intensity. It seethes with a dark urgency, as compelling as a suicidal drive on a rainy night down the wrong streets. Other songs that grab the listener’s attention and incite riotous hips include “Come Back,” possibly the album’s catchiest moment, “In Sympathy,” probably the album’s finest song, and “Fragile Tension,” a beautiful mid-tempo dance song with electronic flourishes and a delicate ache that shows what a perfect vessel of voice Dave Gahan has become in his older age. (The box set contains a “bare” version of the former that is all pounded piano chords and forceful rhythm, best enjoyed with a warm comforting beverage and a morose look on one’s face, staring out the window at a cold gray day—more on that later). For those who like Martin Gore’s voice, he only takes full vocal duty on one song here but it is one of his finest moments. “Jezebel,” along with many of the other best songs on the album, reinforces the idea of Depeche Mode as champions for the melancholic outsider. It holds up with “A Question of Lust,” “The Things You Said,” “Sweetest Perfection,” and “Breathe” as one of Gore’s finest moments as a singer, songwriter, and instrumentalist of great tact, delicacy, and nuance. The song conjures images and emotions of a tragic romance either fantasized or realized, a compassionate man seeing the public abuse of a sad and gorgeous woman—undeniably sexy but also full of mysterious pain—and longing to heal her psychic pain through the art of love. Unfortunately, this penultimate song of the collection is ravaged by the closing song, “Corrupt,” a reverse of the same idea where everything that is good about the previous song goes wrong.

The album opens in a way that suggests maybe you will be given a sonic tour of the universe. The opening minute could be the new THX sound system check. It all sounds good, destination unknown, next frontier, space cliché of your choice…until the opening words of the album tread trodden ground: “The way you move/has got me yearning.” The title is “In Chains,” and it is the first indication that much of the album is going to lyrically retread the past thirty years of the band’s work. Sin, bondage, suffering, lust, love not going right, an opponent’s faulty viewpoint, and the general populace’s misunderstanding comprise the bulk of the album’s lyrical content. Depeche Mode have great strengths and weaknesses; this album emphasizes both. It emphasizes their tendency to lush full sound and perfect production, to layers of electronics and synthesizers buzzing beautifully, their penchant for minor motifs and slightly dissonant melodies, and their ongoing dedication to making dance music that isn’t stupid or flat. It also emphasizes their inability to radically change any part of their sound, their limited lyric-writing, and their increasing tendency to include utterly forgettable instrumentals (this album’s is called “Spacewalker”—hey, I only report the facts). The weakest songs seem to be “Peace” and “Little Soul.” “Peace” is a positive song, deserving credit for a new direction in lyrics, with a nice spacey sound to it; though rather innocuous and as retro as the cover, it seems to serve no purpose, forgettable after it has passed, barely noticed while it is on. “Little Soul,” however, is cloying in every possible sense, a textbook of all the things Depeche Mode should avoid, the worst facets of the band. “Perfect” also ambles along, pleasant enough in its warm synths, its crunches and squeals, and its ambient room, but not compelling or emotionally gripping either lyrically or musically. It is too bad that the many people who buy the album are going to have these songs and not the stellar music hiding out on the bonus discs of the box set.

Unfortunately for the casual fan or the newcomer, the real treat is the “bonus” (read “superior”) material in the deluxe box set. When Radiohead put together their special box edition of In Rainbows, they put together gorgeous artwork, slipped in two 180 gram records (that annoyingly spin at 45 speed) of the main album for the audiophiles, provided an extra disk of good music, but made sure all the best stuff was on the original album that everybody would have access to, perhaps part of the democratic nature of the whole project. Depeche Mode has done the exact opposite here. They have put out a good album, but reserved much of the best material for dedicated fans. Depeche Mode seem to be implicitly challenging their fans, as if saying, “If you’re a real fan, you’ll slap down the hundred dollars for the box set and get the real deal. You can even wear a badge to show your DM pride.” This is especially sad and alarming given the current economy and the number of artists doing it. It seems most albums by established bands and artists now come out in a mind-boggling number of options. One would think that now would be the worst time to count on people having the extra income to drop on a box set, yet expensive special editions come out every month. Depeche Mode do it right here. With the exception that there is no vinyl in the box, it is what the ultimate fan desires: extra tracks, demo versions of new songs and old ones, remixes, videos of the making of the album and in-studio performances, books, and aesthetically brilliant but also manageable packaging. Unbelievably, some of the “demoes” are better than the album versions. Martin sings on the “Corrupt” demo, the song which closes the album (on a rather ambivalent note for this reviewer —the lyrical matter seems to follow in the seedy tradition of “Little 15” and “We Are the Dead of Night,” but does not seem to be from a character’s perspective), and every impulse of the original is exactly right. Reworkings here did a disservice to the song. Other demo versions, if they do not surpass the original, provide interesting alternate possibilities of what the song could sound like. Some of yesterday’s favorites are here to be freshly relived. One of Playing the Angel’s strongest songs, “Nothing’s Impossible” is here in a quieter version that is just as dark and delicious as the original, and “Sweetest Perfection” and “I Feel You” demoes are here for interested parties. But the most stunning material is the first five tracks on the first bonus disc. If Depeche Mode decided to release an EP (as they had planned to do with Ultra), this would be a perfect one. “Light,” “Ghost,” and “Oh Well” are as fine as Dave Gahan dance/mood DM songs go. “Light” pulls the listener into the collection in the way “In Chains” intended to but failed. “Ghost” shows what Dave Gahan learned making his impeccable second solo abum, Hourglass; the sexy atmospherics, steady beat, and excellent vocal work are all present in magnificent profusion. “The Sun and The Moon and The Stars” is a sonic treasure-chest, layered expertly by Martin and rounded out with his wavering high vocals romantically swooning, underscored by Gahan. “Esque” is the possibly the best instrumental Depeche Mode have yet done. “Christmas Island” and “Headstar” are its only contenders. “Oh Well” is another very strong dance-based song. It attacks and slithers and builds and pulls back and comes back harder with deliciously occilating textures. These five songs deliver on the promise that the beginning review mentions, make good on all the bizarre, old, analog and synth equipment Martin Gore is said to have been constantly buying from eBay during the making of the album. The end result is that one has to make their own version of Sounds of the Universe. In our increasingly mp3-based, iPod-driven music world, each person is left to construct their own universe, choosing what sounds best represent their vision of a trip to the stars and back. Fortunately, it makes brilliant headphone music.

Sounds of the Universe.

As I thought, it is growing on me.

I hope to get back to writing longer and more interesting entries here. Currently, I have been looking for work and researching, reading, and writing Shakespeare-related studies, so the time I can dedicate to the blog with a clear conscience has been nil.

If you are new to the blog, please scroll back to past months and years, where much more of value, substance, or interest may be found.

Upcoming: the long-delayed Chinese Democracy review (need to find it again and type it up) and a short piece about communication.

Why The Birthday Party had to end.

This month marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of the recording of side a. Spin it and be reminded what awesome, original music truly sounds like.

[sound of non-existent breeze]

This is a dustball

tumbling its way

leisurely

through an abandoned piece

of cyberspace.

The Wrong Ascendancy

Wrong is growing on me. A thoroughly unnerving video always helps. Take that, Karma Police.

No Career On the Horizon

I listened to No Line on the Horizon again last night, or at least tried to. If there is one thing U2 have proved on David Letterman this week, it has been that they can still create a massive amount of energy playing live and make it catch fire, spreading from person to person in the space before them. That's cool to see. But if there's another thing they've proven, it's that they're really over. I hate to say this. I don't take delight in writing negative things about deified bands on the internet. I really don't. But as someone who has passionately loved U2 for about thirteen years, I have to say that it is painful both to see what Bono has become (as a singer) and to listen to the new album.

Last night was my third listen, and it was also the first time I couldn't even get through it. Why was I trying to listen to an album that made me feel angry, disappointed, sore, and thoroughly upset the first time and that left little impression the second time? Because I had listened to Neko Case's new, wonderful, amazing, "magnificent" Middle Cyclone for the second time of the day (I usually listen to it four or five times a day, leaving the crickets playing maybe one of those times) and I had found many more reasons to love the album and also found myself unable to concentrate on anything else at the same time. So, tempted as I was to listen to what may well be the best album of the year so far (a mighty statement given how many great albums are already out), I wanted to read The Tempest and I was reminded of what I heard my cousin had said. A passionate U2 fan himself who also faced hard facts when he heard "Get On Yr Boots" and called a spade a spade, he reported that there was a lot more to get out of the album listening to it on headphones. Knowing Eno and Lanois had manned the decks, this seemed highly plausible.

But, alas, what I found was crap. I went looking for Larry Mullen, Jr.'s exceptional drumming and found utterly forgettable drumming smothered under a bunch of syrupy keyboards. I went looking for something fresh and I found U2 trying to recreate Zooropa and The Unforgettable Fire. They came close to the former with the agreeable "Magnificent," with the exception that there was some croaker fronting the band for that song while an Orpheic god had fronted the band for the earlier album, making it a sexy affair at the same time it was experimental. As for the second album, they didn't come close to touching it. Frankly put, Bono cannot sing anymore. It breaks my heart every time to watch him try or listen to this new album. Some people get broken that way, and move on in a way that inspires awe. Dylan sounds like he's about to send part of his lung in your face as he roars against his "Lonesome Day Blues" on "Love and Theft." I went looking for the voice that had lifted my unnameable emotions in my guts and heart over and over again in the past and found that voice gone. I went looking for the sexiest, most understated bass lines this side of the post-punk explosion of which they were a vibrant part and found something more like—dare I say it—noodling. I went looking for the shimmering, mountainous, occasionally surprising Edge and I found David Gilmour. Did they take the guitar parts from On An Island or The Division Bell and superimpose them? When he did sound like The Edge, he sounded too much like The Edge. I know: damned if you do, damned if you don't. I went looking for memorable lyrics you love to quote. I got "Force Escape Move to Trash," stuff about punching in pin codes in ATM machines, lines about submarines and gasoline, and most annoyingly, some line about ego not being the enemy but rather a baby trying to cross the highway. WHAT?! The ego is not a cute version of Frogger. It is almost indestructible, unlike the frail innocent vision he paints here. When things come along to correct or trash the ego, it explodes in a supernovaic rage, becoming more deadly and more all-consuming. The ego is where landslides begin. Remember, Bono? By track eight or nine, "Fez—Being Born" or "White as Snow," I still hadn't found what I was looking for and I had developed a headache from the effort of trying to like the album and trying to comprehend late-period Shakespeare syntax at the same time, and I ran screaming to the freezer for ice cream as a way to lick my wounds.

Now, many fans of the new album are going to speak up, "Oh man, you missed the best song—'Cedars of Lebanon.'" No, I did not miss the best song. I missed U2 running out of clean clothes and going to play in their father's closet. And it feels dirty. "Cedars of Lebanon" takes elements from ambient Eno music and puts down spoken word on top of it with a lazy, hesitant drum beat. The composition that Eno seems to be selling into slavery for U2 here is one of my all time favorites. It is the numinous conclusion to Ambient 4: On Land, "Dunwich Beach, Autumn, 1960"mildly altered. Since that is my favorite piece on my favorite Eno album, I have no interest in hearing U2 at the lowest point of their career messing it up. As if all of this wasn't bad enough, the song abruptly stops, and with it the album. I like abrupt stops, when done right. I end many of my songs that way. It especially works well for short, heavy songs. It does not work well for ambient album-closers. What it reveals is that the last song, like every other song on the album except the first, is an unfinished idea, an unrealized song.

I mention here the first song, so let me clarify. The album opens with wonderful strength. "No Line on the Horizon" is an excellent song that takes its worthy place among U2's career of excellent songs. It is by no means very original; it takes a very familiar musical motif that I love and does it well. Most importantly, Bono sounds like he is really trying with everything he has left in that song. I have no doubt that Bono is very conscious of the twilight of his powers and is rightfully depressed about it. In this song, he rages against the dying of the light. Had this album been eight songs just like "No Line On the Horizon," the song that gives the album its name, it would have been a great album. But the cover tells us everything we need to know.

The title of the album is No Line on the Horizon. Yet we see, very clearly, that there is a thick gray line on the horizon. This means the title is a lie. Therefore, whatever the title track sounds like is not going to be indicative of what the cover really represents. So what does the cover really represent?



It represents U2's fervent desire to go back. To recreate the past. To be back at the peak of their powers. A return to the boyhood of their band. The first album's cover is also done in soft shades of gray and white, with a minimal amount from the black side of the spectrum. A circular shape occupies a little over half of both covers. A horizontal line intersects the middle of both images. The darker, grayer side of theBoy image occupies the upper half of the picture. This makes sense for the album because the songs on Boy explore the transition from childhood to manhood, from innocence to experience. This transition has everything to do with the observations the maturing mind makes and what it does with them. For many, it creates a darker reality. On the new album's cover, we see the patterns of the image's reverse. Here, the mostly white, mostly light space occupies the upper half and the mostly dark space, oceanic, occupies the bottom half. The light circle reflects the upper half. Whereas in childhood, the body's natural curiosity and love of play is so much a part of the innocence that Bono is mourning the loss of on U2's unsurpassable first album, now the body is dark because it represents sin, and the mind, conventionally located in and around the head, is united with soul as animus, the body's and self's only link to God. The body is liberated from this sinful nature when it relfects God's light. This is the old Western duality anyway, and we can see it all over the new U2 album. On the first song, Bono quotes some woman as saying "Time is irrelevant; it is not linear," before she goes on to stick her tongue in his ear. The woman's tongue that says something interesting and wise before going on to hit up my ear with some pleasant action is usually a source of joy for me, but Bono does not sound happy as he sings these lines. Is it because the woman is not Ali? This would give creedence to a notion that the lower half is the darker half, only capable of light when governed by the mind unified with the soul. U2 has always sung about God and God as Love. In the past, they have done this in interesting ways. Stuart Davis once described U2's work in the eighties as a Trojan Horse sneaking mysticism into the pop world. On this album, it becomes very simple. Love, Love, ohohoh. "Only love can leave such a mark." Boy is an album for the body and the darkening mind, and it succeeds on every level. The new album is supposed to be an album for the soul, a soul that transcends time and wants to occupy the same moments as when it participated in the creation of Boy, The Unforgettable Fire, and Zooropa. But the past is inaccessible to and irreproducible. U2 wants to have it both ways. They want to make experimental albums and be revered as the greatest band on earth. They didn't get that treatment after Pop, which is a good album. They want to make saccharine pop-by-numbers pop albums and still have the respect of long time fans who know what the band is capable of when they take chances, songs like "Your Blue Room" and "Miss Sarajevo." Caught in a circle of response to inevitable criticism and lacking an actual direction, the new album tries to both and succeeds as neither. There is nothing truly experimental about the "experimental" songs, and there is nothing catchy and moving about the pop songs. We got neither the radiant white of the sky or the dark depths of the ocean, just a barely discernible straight gray line on the horizon.

What the cover tells us about the new album is that it is an attempt to go back in time that went horribly wrong, like Jeff Goldlbum trying to teleport in The Fly. It took the wonderful human elements out and gave us failed high-art pretension. It took the youthful vigor out and gave us something dull. So we get an inverse image of the first album.


Having gone to bed feeling sick again from No Line, I woke up this morning and decided I needed to do something to remedy what I was feeling. I can't stand being mad or feeling upset by a favorite band. Feeling like I had a bad piece of steak for dinner and spending an ill-rested night, I made myself a piece of filet mignon for breakfast—I listened to Boy.

And you know what?

It never gets old.