linger before you leave
this first sonic morsel isn’t what it should be. this meditation is dripping with feeling.
“one more hour” is a break-up song, and like most of these it’s the imagined situation i find heartache-inducing, right as you enter the song. as if the couple sits in a room together, a sort of one hour deadline on the relationship — one hour left to say a painful goodbye, rue the past, hold each other close, or just mourn quietly. they look closely at each other to remember details (’oh you’ve got the darkest eyes…’), and rationalize (’i needed it…’).
of course by the end you realize it’s a bit complicated.
there’s nothing musically artful to my appreciation for “one more hour.” it basically captures me with its back story and its bookending of sleater-kinney’s career. the song is in reference to the break-up of two members of the band, and it’s the last song they played at their very last show (see that video above). the former — i don’t imagine it’s easy to play this song with the person you wrote it for, and to perform it for an audience.
i’m a sucker for heartache.
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i swear i’m listening now
a rationale for this new category, sonic morsels.
- in the wake of the semi-retirement of aural memories, a way to cultivate, if i can reference myself, “some appreciation for craftsmanship” in music and not default to pure personal affect. an encouragement to listen more closely than i have been, even at the risk of artist worship.
- the logic in writing about enjoyable bits, slivers, cuts of music: to pin-point and articulate is to know, and to know is to master. or to know is to conquer, if we want to get imperialistic about it. [can’t it be, ‘to know is to enjoy’? i’m sure enjoyment’s in there somewhere in the circuitry: desire propels curiosity (or perhaps they’re in a loop?) propels description and analysis, leads to defeat/victory/some lopsided relationship.]
substitute “to master” and “to conquer” with “to work toward getting better at it.”
- exercises in sonic description — the aural equivalent of ekphrasis (the written description of a visual text) — and playing around with how that would work.
- of course affect will retain its role. we feel something when we consume, i hope.
odds, ends, mostly ends
a new year’s resolution i just came up with as i listen to some arthur & yu, read ian watt, and think about the course i’m teaching this quarter –
those affective ties i foster to cultural products, specifically the tethering of music to emotions and events at certain moments in my life — those ties need to diminish. i used to acknowledge these openly, could view songs — even those tied to bitter moments — with some detached affection because they help maintain some connection or memory of the past, which i would otherwise lose. music, though, even more than images, only intensifies inevitably inaccurate projections of the past. and at that point, whatever enjoyment is to be gotten out of a well turned phrase, melancholy chord progression, or sweetly held note, is lost or buried under the weight of a memory.
[says marilynne robinson, explicating proust, to me via A (erm, A in LA, that is): “The mysteries of apprehension and comprehension, destiny and will are all negotiated by him [proust] in aesthetic terms. By this he means to restore us to a kind of experiential innocence, as if we could be recalled to a time when language and memory, when our mind and our senses, astonished us, as indeed they should never cease to do. His metaphor for this is the memory of the impassioned perceptions of childhood, but the state he describes is an atemporal one, in which the senses are awakened as they are only sometimes by art or when we are dreaming.”
there’s so much respect here for aesthetics as an enabler of awakening, as restorer. it is great when music can do this, but it’s much better in the abstract (ie, arthur & yu’s “1000 words” and its conjuring of a web of memories and feelings that don’t belong to me or correspond to a specific, real time or place — coolness, yearning, a man wooing a woman on the street in a city in the 1940s) than in the personally specific (”i summon you” and its tethering to drives through pennsylvania countryside when i’d think of a certain loss). better in the sense that sometimes i would like loss to be not so vivid, and not so immediate whenever i hear that song.]
a provisional retirement then of aural memory posts while i revise my thoughts on art, affect, and memory. maybe some genius worship, or at least some appreciation for craftsmanship, is in order.
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at an end, hopefully, to last quarter’s malaise and ambiguity. fellowships need applying for; books need reading; papers need writing; academic career needs prioritizing.
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and a photo of my family’s parol, the destruction of which signalled the end of our french-filipino, but mostly french, christmas:
consumed
in a week i’ll start teaching another round of freshman comp. i should have a reader put together by the end of the week, but what to include? the consensus seems to be that derrida, benjamin, and volosinov are too much. a few other thoughts aswirl in my mind as i plan for this course, hopefully the last of the sort that i’ll teach for another three years:
the most thoughtful papers i’ve received in the past year and a quarter have been those that force students to reflect on their practices of cultural consumption. to see how their choices of entertainment and art are social and political decisions that are inflected by and negotiated through their experiences, relationships, social status, and the institutions and discourses that structure these … if i can get my students to this point, or approach it somehow, that would be ideal.
close reading. how does one teach this?
writing: organizing arguments; being attentive to an audience but not strictured by it; stylizing oneself without resorting to cliches; taking chances with language; writing strong sentences (and being able to recognize these, and articulate why they are so); writing elegantly (or to recognize what this might be); recognizing and parroting (fine, and appreciating) “academic discourse.”
how does one teach rhetoric without reinforcing the norms that rhetoric presumes are in place to be recognized?
but mostly i’m into social aesthetics. why do they enjoy consuming what they consume? what social and aesthetic hierarchies buttress the evaluative remarks they make about a cultural text? how is the literary (or musical, or artistic) genius constructed? to even get my students to accept genius as a social, political concept — if we can get here, i’ll consider the political side of my job fulfilled.