Week 7: Keeping a TIL Log

While Reddit is a website whose users are often torn between their best intentions and worst impulses — with the latter often winning out — one of the site's more charming subreddits is r/todayilearned. On TIL, redditors share . . . wait for it . . . things that they've newly discovered that day, and these can range from the highbrow to the lowbrow, serious to frivolous. A few from today's front page:

• TIL Steve Buscemi adamantly refuses to have his famously misaligned teeth fixed and claims he won't work again if they are altered.
• TIL in a private cemetery in small-town Arkansas, a woman single-handedly buried and gave funerals to more than 40 gay men during the height of the AIDS epidemic, when their families wouldn't claim them.
• TIL The original Super Mario Bros game had 256 "Hidden" levels that were only accessible by swapping the game cartridge with a copy of "Tennis" while the game was running.

While this is largely about the joy of trivial knowledge I think there's an important idea underscoring the practice: namely being mindful of our own processes of learning (and specifically, what and where we learn).

Towards that end, and in preparation for the work we'll be doing in the semester's second half, I'd like all of you to log one thing that you learn daily from Monday to Friday of next week. I'll put up a post on our Facebook group and you'll all comment on that post with what you learned. Take note you don't need to go into great detail — basically a headline-style summary is fine — but you need to cite your source (either as a link or just stating what it is). As an example, here's something I learned this morning:

TIL that the US Postal Service Creed ("Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds") is taken from Greek historian Herodotus [source: X-Factor #31 (1988)]

Week 7: Maggie Nelson's "Bluets"

Our last stop before our semester shifts gears is the book which, more than anything, influenced the way in which I've organized this course and the sorts of writing I want you to do in its second half. I am certainly not the only person to be blown away upon first encountering Maggie Nelson's Bluets (Wave Books, 2009) — an unassuming, slight book of tiny prose fragments whose minimalisms disguise an intoxicating complexity — and I hope your reaction will be similar to mine.

"Suppose I were to begin by saying that I had fallen in love with a color," the book begins, "Suppose I were to speak this as though it were a confession; suppose I shredded my napkin as we spoke. It began slowly. An appreciation, an affinity. Then, one day, it became more serious. Then (looking into an empty teacup, its bottom stained with thin brown excre­ment coiled into the shape of a sea horse) it became some­how personal." Thus we likewise begin our journey alongside Nelson through her love affair with the color blue, a process she tells us happened "as if falling under a spell, a spell I fought to stay un­der and get out from under, in turns," over the course of 240 brief number prose vignettes.

Along the way, she'll consider the color and its wider implications through a number of frames — from literature to the fine arts, music to film, philosophy to psychology,  science to religion, medicine to geography — all the while remaining deeply-rooted in Nelson's own personal experiences. In one regard, this is a book with a singular focus, but in reality that specificity merely serves as the nexus for an exploration of incredible breadth.

By the same token, as the central model for the sort of writing you'll be doing as soon as our time with this book ends, I hope that the ambitious flexibility of Nelson's form will serve you as well as it does her in Bluets.

Here's our reading breakdown for our week with Bluets (n.b. the numbers here refer to the book's individual sections, not pages):

• Monday, Oct. 5: sections 1–79
• Wednesday, Oct. 7: sections 80–164
• Friday, Oct. 9: sections 165–240

And here are some supplemental resources related to the text:

• PennSound's Maggie Nelson author page — which houses two readings in which Nelson reads selections from Bluets
• Rob Schlegel reviews the book for Jacket2
• Gina Myers reviews the book for Bookslut
• Thomas Nelson discusses the book for Triquarterly
• Katie Schmid discusses the book on The Rumpus
• Charlotteshane reviews the book for The Hairpin

Weeks 5–6: Claudia Rankine's "Don't Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric"

After our pre-millennial jitters subsided and the celebrations ended, our new century got off to a jumpy start. First, there was the contested presidential election in November 2000, which was stressful enough for the nation, but that seemed inconsequential after the morning of Tuesday, September 11, 2001, when our American way of life was changed forever.   

The 9/11 attacks are the catalyst for Claudia Rankine's Don't Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric (Graywolf, 2004) — the key event that frames this ambitious book-length experiment in hybrid forms, and the present context that it's set against — but as she makes clear to us from the very beginning, it's just one of many tragedies (both private and public) that shape her perspective as she writes.  As the title suggests, Don't Let Me Be Lonely is a deeply personal book, a vulnerable and revealing narrative in which Rankine explores her struggles with depression, illness and mortality (in herself and loved ones), and injustice.  At one point in the book, she writes:

It strikes me that what the attack on the World Trade Center stole from us is our willingness to be complex.  Or what the attack on the World Trade Center revealed to us is that we were never complex.  We might want to believe that we can condemn and we can love and we can condemn because we love our country, but that's too complex (91).

and yet what makes Don't Let Me Be Lonely so compelling a read is its complexity, its intermingling of storylines large and small, and its shuffling of forms, combining prose poetry fragments with a variety of different media (photographs, television, found objects) and end notes.  Though it's an experimental construct, it's also highly readable and emotionally compelling, and for these reasons, it's one of the models for the multi-modal thematic writing you'll be doing this semester. If you enjoy this book, I wholeheartedly recommend you take a look at Rankine's latest, Citizen: An American Lyric (2014), one of the most lauded books in recent memory and a strikingly haunting evocation of our nation's troubled racial milieu. 

Here’s the reading breakdown for our time with Rankine:

• Wednesday, Sept. 23: pgs 1–36
• Friday, Sept. 25: pgs 37–63
• Monday, Sept. 28: pgs 64–100
• Wednesday, Sept. 30: 101–131

(don't forget to read the end notes, which begin on pg 133, alongside each day's readings)

And here are a few supplemental links:

• PennSound's Claudia Rankine author page — where you can listen to several recordings of the poet reading from Don't Let Me Be Lonely
• "The Dead Spectator" — Alex Young's review of the book in The Brooklyn Rail
• “The Ethics of Language” — Alan Gilbert's review of the book in Boston Review
• a 2006 interview with Rankine from jubilat
• Roxanne Gay on Don't Let Me Be Lonely

Monday, Sept. 21 — Doing Words

Before we get to today's readings I'd like to you take a little quiz. Specifically, the New York Times regional dialect quiz — based on the decade-old work of linguistics researchers Bert Vaux and Scott Golder — which went viral in late 2013 thanks to a novel presentation in a quiz format and some well-constructed heat maps that allowed users to drill down to local variations in speech. Given that we probably have some level of geographic variety in our class composition this should be a good way for you to start thinking about the relative flexibility of day-to-day speech conventions that we take for granted as absolute.

Regional differences in the term used for soft drinks.

That linguistic variability is intimately tied to our sense of English as a uniquely mutable and evolving language, and that's certainly not a new idea, as we discover when reading Walt Whitman's 1885 essay, "Slang in America" [PDF], which extends ideas present in his poetry from the very beginning (recall Whitman published Leaves of Grass with a brief glossary explaining to unfamiliar readers what terms like "pismire," "Paumanok," "Tuckahoe," and "quahog" meant).

This appreciation of regional and temporal variability frequently yields modern-day listicles like Slate's recent "The United Slang of America," The Guardian's "Basic Question: Did Sylvia Plath Write Like a 21st-Century Teenager?," "These Words You Use Every Day Have Racist/Prejudiced Pasts, And You Had No Idea" from The Huffington Post, and NPR's "16 'Spiffy' Words College Students Used in 1916," and certainly, pop-cultural pieces like that point us in the right direction of thinking more objectively about the origins and uses of language.

Still, these pieces aren't quite as critically robust as we might wish they were. I'd like to point out two examples of entities doing great ongoing writing about words and their history and use. First, from Slate's excellent "Lexicon Valley" column, here are a few recent articles:

• Jacob Brogan, "What is the F--kboy?" [link] (as promised on day one)
• Katy Waldman, "When Did Feminism Get So 'Sneaky'?" [link]
• Katy Waldman, "The Incredible Shrinking Zeitgeist: How Did This Great Word Lose Its Meaning?" [link]
• Katy Waldman, "Why We Be Loving the Habitual Be" [link]

Next, NPR's wonderful "Code Switch" column, which explores the "frontiers of race, culture, and ethnicity," has an occasional feature entitled "Word Watch," which offers up well-researched analyses of the racially-charged language we might not even realize surrounds us. A few examples from "Word Watch":

• Gene Denby, "The Secret History Of The Word 'Cracker'" [link]
• Kat Chow, "Running Late? Nah, Just On 'CPT'" [link]
• Lakshmi Gandhi, "What A Thug's Life Looked Like In 19th Century India" [link]
• Kat Chow, "How 'Ching Chong' Became The Go-To Slur For Mocking East Asians" [link]

So how might you try to do this sort of etymological writing on your own? First take stock of the techniques and approaches that the writers above have used — remember, good writers cite their sources so that you can follow their bread crumb trail. Dictionaries — whether hard copy or online; as august an institution as the OED or as wonderfully crass and spontaneous as Urban Dictionary — are your best friends, and even basic Google searches will often reveal the complicated histories and origins of words.

That notwithstanding, much of the power and identity of individual words lies (as our examples show) in their day-to-day use and their evolution over time. Aside from finding specific examples from books, magazines, newspapers, and other media, one of the more useful tools at your disposal is Google's powerful Ngram viewer, which allows you to trace trends in usage in books over time from 1800 to 2000 (using the complete corpus of Google Books' archives) and make conclusions about what influences those trends. Here, for example, we can see the use of "Dylan" as it gets a boost from Dylan Thomas in the 1950s, a bigger boost from Bob Dylan in the 60s into the 70s, and then become the name of at least seven kids in your eighth grade class:

For more recent queries — from 2004 to the present — accounting for web traffic vs. appearances in books and other printed media indexed in Google Books you can use Google Trends to track interest over time, regional interest, and related search terms. Here, for example, you can see Google traffic surrounding the search term "Sam Dubose" over the last 90 days:

Friday, Sept. 18 — Doing Objects

French literary and cultural critic Roland Barthes, whose Mythologies (1957)
sets the stage for modern critiques of material culture

As we think about the field of English studies in the late 20th and early 21st century we're at home with the idea that our work might focus on subjects other than traditional written texts — audio recordings, videos, photographs, and other art objects, for example, as our work over the last several classes have revealed — but on the esoteric and interdisciplinary fringes, where innovative creative work is being done, there's something even more abstract (and, simultaneously, concrete): the object. Interdisciplinary is the key word here, since the way in which one addresses a given object might touch upon any number of other subject areas, from history to philosophy, economics to sociology, psychology to religion.

We'll start with a few selections from Roland Barthes' Mythologies, a book of brief essays that originally ran as a column in Les Lettres Nouvelles and explore the greater resonances of everyday things. In the second part of the book, Barthes explains the motivation behind his observations, offering the notion of "second-level signification," which builds upon the basic linguistic transaction (i.e. a signifier and a signified combining to form a symbol), moving from denotation to connotation. Still, even if that sentence doesn't make any sense to you at all, the ideas behind Barthes' seductive prose will.

Roland Barthes, from Mythologies [PDF]

• Soap-powders and Detergents
• Toys
• Wine and Milk
• Steak and Chips
• Plastic

We'll stay in France for our next brief reading, Georges Perec's, "Notes Concerning the Objects That Are on My Work Table" [PDF] — a short portion of the larger series published as Species of Spaces, which is concerned with everyday materiality.

Next, we'll shift gears from the literary mode to something more journalistic, with two examples of contemporary historical writing about objects. I've already talked in class about the Cooper Hewitt Museum's excellent "Object of the Day" column, which takes a brief look at interesting objects from the museum's vast archives, and we'll start by looking at a few selections from there:

• Think Different
• Pluck 'Em!
• Come, All Ye Weary
• Mini-Maglite
• Tea, Anyone?
• Juwel for a Tool
• A Dandy of a Camera
• Sweetheart Toaster

Then, just as records have the 33 1/3 series, and there are numerous similar series dedicated to individual films, objects have now gotten into the act with the "Object Lessons" series of books and essays. So far, full-length books have been released on objects as diverse as the remote control, the golf ball, bread, glass, the phone booth, hair, dust, and doorknobs (among other titles), and The Atlantic has partnered with the series to publish essays in a similar vein. We'll take a look at three such essays for Friday:

• Mary Niall Mitchell, "The Piano That Can't Play a Tune" [link]
• T. Hugh Crawford, "Where Have All the Axes Gone" [link]
• Josh Giesbrecht, "How the Ballpoint Pen Killed Cursive" [link] 

Lydia Burkhalter's collection of gray sweatshirts (from WiC)

We'll close with two selections from one of last year's most ambitious books, Women in Clothes. Edited by Sheila Heti, Heidi Julavits, and Leanne Shapton, with contributions from more than 600 other women, this wide ranging book "explores the wide range of motives that inform how women present themselves through clothes, and what style really means" via questionnaires, interviews, short essays, photo galleries and many other hybridized forms. 

Were this book not so big and not so expensive, I'd have used it in this class, but hopefully this little taste will spur your interest to explore further:

• Tavi Gevinson, "Color Taxonomy" [PDF]
• Amy Fusselman, "The Mom Coat" [PDF]

Wednesday, Sept. 16 — Doing Video

Just as last week we occupied ourselves with "doing audio," which more or less meant writing about music, our concept of "doing video" today will focus mostly on writing about film (and to a lesser degree, television), though it could encompass a far wider range of topics, from cartoons and video games to music videos, YouTube clips, and even GIFs. Still, the ideas and techniques employed in our readings below could just as easily apply to those other disparate media.

In terms of film criticism, there's perhaps no more esteemed figure than the late Roger Ebert (above), who practically revolutionized the field, along with colleague Gene Siskel, through their popular eponymous television show. Folks who tuned in on any given week could hear serious, well-considered (if often disagreeing) viewpoints on contemporary movies — from the finest new releases to mainstream dreck — and be exposed to independent productions, foreign films, and cinema classics that might not get coverage in their daily newspapers (though both Siskel and Ebert wrote for competing Chicago newspapers for much of their careers).  The good-natured competition between them, along with their passionate perspectives, often resulted in compelling television, and off-screen they could be even more lovingly vicious:

We'll start with one of Ebert's favorite films of all time, and then move on to a few more recent films that you might be familiar with. In most cases, I've linked both his original review and a later analysis for his "Great Movies" series:

• Citizen Kane (1941) ["Great Movie" appraisal]
• Star Wars (1977) [original review] ["Great Movie" appraisal]
• Lost in Translation (2003) [original review] ["Great Movie" appraisal]
• Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004) [original review] ["Great Movie" appraisal]

Even Ebert's most scathing reviews are fine examples of critical writing and perhaps even more so than his praise for classic films reveal the depths of his love and respect for the medium. Here are two of his most infamous pans. You don't necessarily need to read these, but it is quite pleasurable to do so:

• North (1994) [link]
• Baby Geniuses (1999) [link]

Pauline Kael at The New Yorker in 1985.

Aside from Gene Siskel, one of Roger Ebert's few true peers was Pauline Kael, The New Yorker's film critic from 1968–1991. Kael's highly individual voice — frank and brazen, while unapologetically passionate about films that deeply moved her — won her as many enemies as friends, and while her tenure was relatively brief (she retired after twenty-three years due to Parkinson's disease), her influence was long-lasting, most notably through the "Paulettes." This group of young critics that Kael took under her wing in the 1970s (including A.O. Scott, Elvis Mitchell, David Edelstein, and the two men who'd take her place at The New Yorker, Anthony Lane and David Denby) continue in her footsteps to this day.

We'll look at a few pieces from throughout her career that vary in length and tone, from French New Wave and American Auteur to one of Scorcese's earliest masterpieces and Dustin Hoffman in drag:

• Masculin Féminin (1966) [link]
• Bonnie and Clyde (1968) [PDF]
• Raging Bull (1980) [PDF]
• Tootsie (1982) [PDF]

Of course, while the film critic has long been held in high esteem, her peers writing on the small screen have not always received the same respect. Nonetheless, just as we find ourselves overwhelmed by excellent scripted television choices in this day and age, a new class of insightful critics have risen to the challenge of writing about this unique medium. While we don't have the time to cover their work as thoroughly, I'd like to offer up a few interesting examples, and also happily point you towards (as an optional read) Matt Zoller Seitz's article "There Has Never Been a Better Time for TV Criticism" in Vulture, which highlights some of the very best writers in this field.

Let's begin with Emily Nussbaum, The New Yorker's television critic. Given the high-profile nature of that role, I found her recent reversal of opinion on the Cinemax series The Knick, to be a refreshing act of critical transparency that also made clear some of the challenges TV writers face vs. their film reviewer peers:

• "Surgical Strikeout: Steven Soderbergh's Disappointing 'The Knick'" (8/11/14) [link]
• "I Changed My Mind About 'The Knick'" (10/2/14) [link]

Next, I thought I'd offer up two contemporaneous articles covering very similar ground: the topic of race on one of my favorite recent TV series, 30 Rock. Given the disparate profiles of the two venues and the authors' individual styles, there's as much in common between these pieces as there are differences:

• Wesley Morris, "30 Rock Landed on Us: Identity Politics and NBC's Most Subversive Show" in Grantland (1/31/13) [link]
• Alyssa Rosenberg, "Liz Lemon's White Guilt, The Black Crusaders, and Grizz and Dot Com: Why '30 Rock' Mattered On Race" in ThinkProgress (1/29/13) [link]

Finally, because writing about the moving image can imply more than film or television, I'm also giving you two 2012 pieces by Daniel Zalewski from The New Yorker on Christian Marclay's 2010 installation/film The Clock (you can view an excerpt from The Clock above):

• "The Hours" [link]
• "Night Shift with 'The Clock'" [link]

º º º

As I've done with the previous posts, here's a glossary of film terminology from the British Film Institute that might be a useful resource if you choose to write about the moving image.

Monday, Sept. 14 — Doing Visual Arts

Visitors appreciating the unique architecture of New York City's Guggenheim Museum.

Much like the other disciplines we'll be looking at over the next few weeks, the visual arts is a remarkably broad and complex field that's not really all that easy to encapsulate briefly. At the same time, it's (sadly) a far more marginalized discourse than popular media like music and film and there's not quite the same pantheon of critics as we see in those fields — moreover, among the big names in art writing we find work that's both longer and more theoretically dense than what might be useful for our goals this semester (cf. Susan Sontag or Roland Barthes on photography). I've finally decided upon an approach that I'll also employ for some of our film readings: using parallel reviews of the same materials so that we might think analytically about the style and substance of each. For today, I've chosen a few landmark shows from the last decade.

Keith Haring poses with one of his graffiti pieces in the NYC subway system.

First up, we'll look at a few responses to "Keith Haring: 1978–1982," a wonderfully-constructed 2011 show highlighting the early development of the celebrated pop iconographer, which was co-curated by Cincinnati's own Contemporary Arts Center and later traveled to the Brooklyn Museum (where most of these reviews are from):

• Karen Rosenberg, "A Pop Shop for a New Generation: 'Keith Haring: 1978-1982' at Brooklyn Museum," The New York Times [link] (related slideshow [link])
• Rachel Wolff, "Where the Radiant Baby Was Born," New York Magazine [link]
• Matt Morris, "You Don't Know Keith," CityBeat [link]

Next, we'll consider three pieces on the Brooklyn Museum's 2005 retrospective on Jean-Michel Basquiat, a friend and contemporary of Haring (and, I should add, a painter with a lot of literary influences who's also influenced a lot of writers):

• Roberta Smith, "Collisions on Canvas That Still Make Noise," The New York Times [link]
• Jerry Saltz, "To Hell and Back," The Village Voice [link]
• Mark Stevens, "American Graffiti," New York Magazine [link]

Kara Walker's A Subtlety, 2014.

Since Jerry Saltz — a respected, if sometimes controversial figure in contemporary arts criticism (folks are just jealous they didn't get to be a judge on an art-themed reality TV competition on Bravo), who's written for The Village Voice and New York Magazine, among other venues — has come up, we can use him for a different sort of parallel investigation. We'll take a look at two pairs of pieces on the same artist (multimedia artist Kara Walker and photographer Cindy Sherman) each written four years apart:

• "An Explosion of Color, in Black and White" (on Kara Walker, 2007) [link]
• "Drawing from Nightmares" (on Kara Walker, 2011) [link]

• "Sherman's March of Time" (on Cindy Sherman, 2008) [link]
• "Cindy Sherman: Becoming" (2012) [link]

Yoko Ono recreates her Museum of Modern (F)art cover outsude MoMA, 2015.

We'll conclude with several pieces reflecting on one of this summer's most celebrated exhibitions, "Yoko Ono: One Woman Show, 1960–1971" at New York's Museum of Modern Art. Faced with a little more than 24 hours in the city this summer, I made it a top priority to see this show:

• Holland Cotter, "Review: In 'Yoko Ono: One Woman Show, 1960-1971,' Text Messages From the Edge," The New York Times [link]
• Ellen Pearlman, "Yoko Ono Finally Gets the Solo She Deserves," Hyperallergic [link]
• Edward M. Gómez, "MoMA's 'One Woman Show': Now, the Ballad of Yoko," Hyperallergic [link]
• Jason Farago, "Yoko Ono at MoMA Review — A Misunderstood Artist Finally Gets Her Due," The Guardian [link]

Friday, Sept. 11 — Doing Audio

The record shelves of legendary BBC Radio 1 DJ John Peel.

When we think of doing audio, our mind most readily thinks of music, though, as our readings for last class suggested, sound can be a part of our conception of poetry, and sound can be a critical component of our analysis of film (which we'll be discussing next week) as well.

Much of our reading for today will be devoted to music criticism, but I wanted to start you off with a brief excerpt from French composer and sound theorist Michel Chion's book Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen, that I think is an excellent introduction to the practice of critical listening:

• "The Three Listening Modes" [PDF]

While all three modes are important to understanding and analyzing sound, I think that there's real room for individual expression once we move beyond the causal and semantic modes to reduced listening. You might want to consider how these three approaches are used in the readings that will follow.

Lester Bangs, patron saint of rock critics, in 1977.

In terms of historically significant rock critics, there's perhaps no better place to start than the late, great Lester Bangs. During his tenure at Rolling Stone and Creem from the late 60s to the mid-70s, and later as a freelance writer, Bangs tirelessly championed artists he deemed worthy — effectively conceptualizing the genre of punk rock, and later advocating for heavy metal and new wave acts — in a rapturous, free-wheeling style that displayed considerable musical knowledge along with an admiration for authors like Jack Kerouac, William S. Burroughs, and Hunter S. Thompson. Here's a taste of his ornery style:

You'll be reading a few excerpts from Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung: The Work of a Legendary Critic: Rock'N'Roll as Literature and Literature as Rock 'N'Roll, a posthumous collection of Bangs' best assembled by Greil Marcus in 1988: [PDF]

• "Kraftwerkfeature" (on Krautrock pioneers Kraftwerk)
• "The Greatest Album Ever Made" (on Lou Reed's notorious Metal Machine Music)
• "A Reasonable Guide to Horrible Music" (a brief list-piece on noise music)

While Bangs inspired many, there are few who can match his feverish approach. One person who gets close is Camden Joy (a pseudonym for author Tom Adelman) who wrote several strange and wonderful novels steeped in the culture of America's rock scenes of the 70s, 80s, and 90s (1998's The Last Rock Star Book: Or: Liz Phair, a Rant is my favorite). Here's a brief feature on Pavement from 2000:

• "Rattled by the Rush" [link]

Greil Marcus, perhaps America's most venerable living rock critic, has been writing for nearly 50 years for magazines as diverse as Rolling Stone, Creem, The Village Voice, Interview, The Believer, and Artforum. He's also the author of a number of ambitious, critically-lauded books — Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock 'n' Roll Music, Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the 20th Century, and The Shape of Things to Come: Prophecy in the American Voice — which cast broad cultural histories of our nation, drawing on music, literature, history, and more.

Here are a pair of short pieces from his "Days Between Stations" column for Interview in the 1990s:

• "Screams from the Basement" (on PJ Harvey's Rid of Me, 1993) [link]
• "The Sound of Being Watched" (on DJ Shadow's Endtroducing, 1997) [link]

And a few older pieces from Rolling Stone:

• "Keith Moon: The Different Drummer" (a 1978 tribute to the Who's late drummer) [link]
• a 1979 review of David Bowie's Lodger [link]

The first 50 (of 106 total) books in the 33 1/3 series. I've read 22 of these and 28 altogether.
Currently, I'm currently reading my 29th (on The Who Sell Out) (click to enlarge).

As our examples above suggest, there's a tension in music criticism — as in many other fields — between the maximal and the minimal: talented authors who are capable of writing book-length explorations of complex topics banging their heads up against the strictures of popular journalism (where 300 word reviews are considered a luxury). One of my favorite venues for the former over the past decade has been the 33 1/3 series, which has released more than a hundred books on important albums from ABBA to Neil Young, which address their subjects with startling insightfulness through a diverse array of approaches.*

We'll take our final readings from Marc Woodworth and Ally-Jane Grossan's recent volume, How to Write About Music: Excerpts from the 33 1/3 Series, Magazines, Books and Blogs with Advice from Industry-leading Writers, which, among other things, contains exemplary reviews of very contemporary albums you're more like to be familiar with. I've also included a few bits of advice and a useful writing prompt from the book: [PDF]

• "Expert Advice from Our Writers"
• Ann Powers on Daft Punk's Random Access Memories
• Jim DeRogatis on Simon and Garfunkel's Bookends
• Lou Reed on Kanye West's Yeezus
• "Writing Prompt: The Blind Review"
• "The Five Things Every Music Writer or Editor Needs"
• Tavi Gevinson on Taylor Swift
• Marty Davis on Black Flag
• Carl Wilson on Céline Dion

* I've submitted two proposals to the series' open call over the past decade — one on Elliott Smith's XO, the other on John Cage and David Tudor's Indeterminacy. Neither were chosen.

º º º

As was the case with our last post, file away this very detailed technical Glossary of Jazz and Popular Music Terminology from Wikipedia for future use.

Also, as a very interesting footnote to our discussions of the evolution of discourses, fields, and canons over time, here's a fascinating piece from Ratter about newspapers' early flailing attempts to describe rap: "What is 'Rap Music'?"

Wednesday, Sept. 9 — Doing Poetry

As we've discussed in class already, there's a certain bias inherent to our contemporary canons privileging prose — and specifically fiction (and even more specifically, the novel) — over all other genres. This was not always the case. If you were to take a traditional literary criticism course (i.e. one using a venerable text like Hazard Adams' Critical Theory Since Plato) most of your readings would be what might reasonable called explorations of poetics up until well into the 19th century, since that was dominant literary genre.

Nonetheless, poetry does occupy a somewhat marginalized place in the present, and is somewhat unfairly notorious for being both intimidating and impenetrable. As a poet, I'm disheartened by this characterization — which often, I think, is rooted in the disjuncture between traditional verse and more adventurous modern poetic forms, along with the misconception that you can "answer" this sort of poetry as if it was a riddle. Instead of there being one correct interpretation, there's a lot of room for individual response, but that can be a scary prospect, particularly when you're not very comfortable or familiar with the genre. So, for the sake of making you more comfortable, I present the following resources:

First, I've put together a basic set of Tools for Analyzing Poetry, which I often give to classes as a resource, that offers two approaches for readers to make their way through a poem: the first, a very rudimentary, brick-by-brick method that works its way from the most basic details to overall understanding; the second an excellent set of questions borrowed by poet and critic Ann Lauterbach. There are also some general instructions regarding the proper quotation and citation of poetry in academic writing.

In addition to that, I'd like you to read a few short poetics essays by a handful of notable 20th/21st century American poets, and in each case I've provided a few representative poems from each so that you can explore the relationship between their ideas as expressed in their prose vs. those in poetic form:

Adrienne Rich

Adrienne Rich

• "Someone is Writing a Poem" [link]

• "Diving Into the Wreck" [link] [video] [MP3 (incomplete)]
• five poems in The Nation [link]
• "Delivered Clean" [link]

Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones)

• "Expressive Language" [link]

• "In Memory of Radio" [link]
• "A Poem for Speculative Hipsters" [link] [MP3]
• "Short Speech to My Friends" [link] [MP3]
• "Way Out West" [link]

Frank O'Hara

• "Personism: a Manifesto" [PDF]

  

  Charles Bernstein

• "A Step Away from Them" [link]
• "Personal Poem"[link]
• "Poem ['Lana Turner Has Collapsed']" [link] [audio]
• "The Day Lady Died" [link] [video]
• "Ave Maria" [link]

Charles Bernstein

• "The Difficult Poem" [link]
• "Against National Poetry Month As Such" [link]

• "Self-Help" [link] [MP3]
• "Thank You For Saying Thank You" [link] [MP3]
• "Morality" [link] [video]

Finally, because the sonic aspects of poetry, whether performed or recorded, are an oft-neglected but important characteristic of the medium, I humbly offer up my observations on Charles Bernstein's 1976 tapework piece, "Class" (this excerpt is taken from a longer article, with the opening paragraphs followed by my discussion of this specific piece). I do so not because it's particularly brilliant, but rather because it's close at hand. 

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One last tool, not to be read for Wednesday, but rather filed away for future use — the Poetry Foundation's excellent glossary of poetic terms that covers five basic categories: forms and types, rhythm and meter, schools and periods, techniques and figures of speech, and theory and criticism.