The followers of churches with lights and big drums, those who evangelize their faith, perceive it as radical and say so in redundant phrases and typefaces. If I desired modern life, I would turn to the city. Their enemy is imagined. Ours is the city’s project to abolish our faith because it cant satisfy our longings, furnished in impossibility.

Man can only desire one thing at a time, and thus he always desires above all to free himself from what constrains him, or bothers him, or makes him suffer now. And since constraints, bothers, and sufferings do not cease to arise in this world, he never has the time to desire the good for its own sake, whatever meaning one may give to this expression. But also, as soon as present ill-being is eliminated, he is content. This contentment is necessarily of short duration; it lasts the time of transition from one ill-being to another in a never-ending process.

Second release from Coexist! New XX!

(via carlovely)

• Didn’t want to follow so many people. “I don’t want to read every thought that passes through these people’s heads, or their cleverness.”
• Didn’t realize you create a big funnel, though still selected (the total funnel is way too big, so if you’re just a little interested in something or think that person may one day post something you’d like to see (even outside the Twitter mindset), you should click it.

It doesn’t come as a surprise the critics didn’t receive Valtari well. Its sound is too subtle to be picked apart fairly in a first impression. The only reason I gave the album as concerted effort as I did was because of my respect for the group and relief in their return to their classic style. Otherwise I would have only given it as much time as the critics did: enough to see that there’s nothing new, no loud revelations, and only so much reflection on their past success. The four years aged their style past its peak of flavor, so to speak.

Unlike Agaetis Byrjun and Takk… there is no outright moment of conversion when the group’s artistic style bows to its new prince. There’s no single song on Valtari that can stand alone like Hjartað Hamast or Glósóli. You experience from song to song a steady widening that slowly inflates the boundaries of what they’ve built in the past. Adding nothing, Valtari spreads the old pieces around in a dark room waiting for the participant to fumble his way to them and lay his hands on them. I think this is what the New York Times’ Jon Pereles, the most apt of the Valtari critics, meant when he wrote that “each of the new songs looms within a larger, obsessively detailed ambience … as if the band’s old pure musical sanctuary has been overgrown and started to crumble, with different light and air glinting through the cracks,” except that I don’t agree the softening is really like the passage of time. This is just a positive spin on the critics’ observation. To show this I’ll merit his metaphor with an extension. The sanctuary was always overgrown and crumbling, but Agaetis and ( ) were so deep inside it you wouldn’t know. Takk was really the first sight of washed out light seeping in. Valtari has tentatively emerged.

You can even note a difference among Sigur Rós fans, too. Valtari has separated the sheep from the goats. (As a clue to who is who, it’s significant that one bandmember has said Valtari is the only album he’ll sit down and listen to.) This is a work that demands your time and patience, and the half of us just waiting for flair give up on it. I listened to the album twice (without breaks) with the expectation of just familiarizing myself. Music usually grips, excites, or fractures me. Each listen, my experience came up just a little short of what I wanted, and I deferred my “real” listen to the future. Before my third time I recognized it was the moment, and this time I heard it as something from the past, maybe jumping over the present to the future, but certainly not something existing then at that hour I could affect intellectually. After about fifteen minutes I stopped thinking about the music, and I felt like a stone had been dropped into the surface of my mind as into a lake, and I observed, in medias res, the chords and harmonies as ripples spreading out smoothly within me. It was a calming word: “You are capable of waiting; you waited for this.” I have never been so abundantly awarded by contemporary music. Valtari hasn’t gotten over the old albums. It has consummated them.

I suppose that’s why they say this is the classical music of the twenty-first century. At the same time, this is a vignette, not a masterpiece. I think even those other fans defending it will agree with me on this one. You do have to hear the album end-to-end, and it operates more as an artistic moment than a narrative or epic. I think that’s a good thing. Jonsi has said enough pretentious things in the past to make me believe they’d attempt the latter too soon. But they may be prepared now, with Valtari as groundwork. Whether or not Sigur Rós need a long haitus like their inspiration, Arvo Pärt, in order to achieve that, their flock will wait to see.

I’ve waited too long to review this book, so my feelings on the particulars aren’t fresh, but I can say for sure from the time that’s passed that reading this book permanently changed my intellectual relationship with Cuba. Before, I appreciated Cuban music and culture, but in Diaz’s narrative style I found a backdoor into the Cuban consciousness so in brief moments I understood the emotional birth of the dancing and music, and even of the Revolution.

At times his narration style abruptly changed. After a hundred pages the main character enlisted in the military and the prose straightened out, no longer fractured or colorful. For a young reader who admittedly reads Joyce and Faulkner more for the thrill of it than to become vulnerable to the story, this stylistic change almost made me start skimming. But then, just as abruptly, the story jumped forward a couple years and the fractured narrative style returned. I realized then and during other changes, and the broadening at the novel’s end, that the third person voice emanates from the main character’s experience, not from an objective source. Diaz achieved this style so perfectly that for the longest time I didn’t notice.

Ross (the translator) believes that some Spanish phrases in the novel, especially all the puns, aren’t translatable, so I had to flip back to the glossary a lot while reading. This was well worth it. I was conscious of the cultural mannerisms I was missing and put more effort into bridging those mental gaps between my language and that of the characters and author.

I don’t think I can here produce a succinct argument for why this novel is, say, the prime novel of the Revolution, or Diaz’s true contributions to the world of Latin American literature. But I do know that it was a challenging (and yet not beleaguering) read with lasting affects on my cultural conciencia. I read the novel to make a presentation for a class in Latin American history, and I strongly recommended it be included in the future as the novel paired with historical readings on the Revolution.

I finished this novel on April 22, 2012. I read it for a class presentation. I recommend it. This review is also published at Amazon.

I’m not sure a song has ever made me weep before, especially not of its own merit. Critics complain this LP is pretty but not shocking, but that’s why I love it. Tocqueville said democrats would prefer to be shocked than to be pleased, by the arts. I guess that’s why Agaetis Bjurn was so well received. This LP abides strictly within the rules Sigur Ros has made for itself, as New York Times writer Jon Pereles wrote, “taking their songs for granted.” The band isn’t trying to discover new territory or expand their style, thankfully. The critic in me urged at disappointment when I listened to it for the first time walking through downtown Chattanooga. To prepare myself I listened to it again on the way down to Atlanta. The next morning during the watch at the monastery, between five and six, I listened to it as sunlight began seeping into the sky and mist coagulated on the surface of the lake, and I exchanged pretention for vulnerability.

I wasn’t taken for a sightseeing tour, as on Agaetis Bjurn, and the sound did not lead me to the past or to the future. It called to the lake and the hope of day (cf. Hopelandish) and lofted a quilt of recognition above its head saying, The way you should think is not what is at stake here, this is an invulnerable provincial monument that will put your edification in rest and let you just stand with it. There’s something creeping into this album, and Jon Pereles noticed this when he wrote the best thing I’ve read about it:

Each of the new songs looms within a larger, obsessively detailed ambience, a realm of magnified creaks and rustles, children’s voices, tinkling music boxes and shadowy orchestras. It’s as if the band’s old pure musical sanctuary has been overgrown and started to crumble, with different light and air glinting through the cracks.

Somewhere in that space, and not because of a released emotion in catharsis, or something I thought in an epiphanic release, I heard all of it: the space they built and stayed in, the echoes, and that faint birdcall or stream of water from behind a corner behind my peripheral vision. And it reverberated. Maybe I wept because I knew I was weeping and I knew it was only because of the music, and that if this is possible in what new age do I stand with these artists? It was beyond me, which explains the straying narrative here trying to capture without lunging. There does not need to be the most clear explanation.

This is a review of The Stone Raft by José Saramago that begins with the preceding perfunctory statement of a categorical fact that would become quickly obvious even without the help of the title, followed by a critical clause which offers a less obvious foreshadowing of the word-effacing, grammar-conscious language Saramago employs.

I can’t say I was surprised that a novel about political and geographical dislocation and alienation didn’t pull me in. The plot was gripping, and it’s not like the book has no plot, it just a book where the plot is not only not really the point but really is unimportant at all points. More fairly, Saramago didn’t offer the sort of commentary on meaning I expected. Maybe my research into his political views spoiled my perspective, but there’s a reason I researched them, so it’s not clear which caused which or if one can be labelled “cause” and the other “effect,” and it may be the case that their causation and action are not interested in arriving at each in sequence or drawing paths whose salient characteristics are found at those points, a dynamic situation that indicates the sort of world you live in while reading Saramago.

Usually I read novels for what they do with my emotions, or I discover myself reading them for that purpose. Such was the case of East of Eden and I Am Charlotte Simmons (novels about which I have decidedly different opinions, just to throw that in your face and then comment on it in a way decidedly less insightful than Saramago’s). I had emotional, yet flat feelings regarding the main characters in this book, so after I finished my opinion was a little iffy, and I decided to withhold it until I read one of his even more highly reviewed books.

Now I realize that I experienced new emotions regarding language, which changed during my reading, and I notice that while the story about the people doesn’t really change, the religious and political commentary is a vanilla canvas for a developing story about the words the canvas is made of. (It’s different than Faulkner. When I read my first Faulkner novel, Light in August, which I read after The Unvanquished and two short stories, I had to deal with the language, but once I did that it wasn’t about the language anymore, because his stories are really about the characters, or the culture or something like that.) How The Stone Raft developed on this front was a subtly I missed on a conscious level because I wasn’t openminded enough. But this failure and the profuse comma splices did not inhibit me from appreciating it, a book read and enjoyed is a book read and enjoyed.

I finished this novel on May 9, 2012. It was leisure reading. I recommend it.

My personal information that Facebook has is not available to most of the people whose friend requests I have approved. My profile is my frontpage on that website, which is just a variant on email, not me.

Because the point of Facebook, à la Franzen on sex and electronic devices, is to create a likable, edgy version of yourself you can dote on to censure your dissatisfaction with the depicted life, it is better to permit a few narratively fragmented idols for the viewer to reconstruct into what they want most for themselves.

Since I write to inspire envy, not to assuage my own.

You don’t even realize.