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I’m sitting in a little coffeeshop in the neighborhood I used to live in. I come up here to work sometimes: it’s one of the few places in DC where there is both decent wireless and a good croissant. So I don’t mind particularly the long-ish trip through Georgetown and up Wisconsin Ave. There used to be a good cafe within walking distance of my apartment, but it closed a few months ago, much to the collective dismay of all the people like me who used to go there and spend $2 on tea so we could sit in a bustly, not-too-loud, sufficiently “indie” place for six hours and stare at our laptops.
I don’t like coming to this shop as much as I used to. After about 9 in the morning it fills up with people doing the normal coffeeshop things, by which I mean they are talking to friends, buying muffins for their kids that are too young still for school, reading, participating in some kind of physics study group, etc. Only one other person here is on a laptop, and I find I resent this a little. The vibe here is not what I want it to be. It reminds me that I’m taking up a whole three-person table with my computer, that if I’m laughing it’s because I read a funny xkcd comic, and that I have headphones in. Why come to this public place and sit alone?
I mean, I have reasons. Counter-intuitively, the noise helps me focus. Like I said, the croissants are pretty good. And if I spend too much time trying to write/work in my apartment, I will eventually be tempted to take a nap, which is impossible here.
I could extend this post into some kind of comment on modernity (aided by the literal name of the shop, up there in the title– that’s not fiction) and it wouldn’t surprise you one bit, I bet. But I’m not sure I have anything more to add right now than that I’m sitting in a place full of people but I’m very much isolated even as I send out a blogpost that you are reading, and that doesn’t seem like a very modern complaint at all. So, you know. Carry on.
I’m not very good at writing about music. I have tried. I don’t usually know how to describe what I’m hearing, I don’t have great recall of musical history (pop or otherwise), and I can barely follow a meter. The thing I DO know is lyrics and stories. Lucky for me, xx are as good at building their music lyrically as they are melodically. This means I can tell you why their new album (also titled xx) is dismantling my theory that Silversun Pickups’ Swoon is the best thing I heard all 2009.
Swoon is about responsibility and who is to blame for the dissolution of a relationship (“Don’t say I didn’t tell you so/ Maybe I didn’t but you’re taking it”), as much as anyone can be when aging is the real crime, but The xx might find that question asinine: the slow devolve taking place here has no agent. But their debut album is blindingly honest in the same way. In “Shelter,” Romy Croft asks, “Maybe I have said, something that was wrong/ Can I make it better, with the lights turned on?” The answer xx provides is probably not, since lies are not the problem.
“Crystalised,” which I’ve included above, is the album’s anthem of trepidation. This song, with one player as the sun and another as the glacier, reverses roles frequently, as Croft and Sim remind each other to “go slow” and the music oozes down to a finish. Like the rest of the album, these songs are quiet, like a set of conversations we’re overhearing from another room, and any disturbances are spoken as quietly as confessions. But “Fantasy” is the real turning point of the album. It’s the shortest track aside from the intro, and the least coherent, but perhaps the most important in terms of the record’s narrative. Placed right in the middle of the album, it lacks much in the way of melody, the few lyrics reverbing and almost lost, like the rhythm. This is where time has stopped, or perhaps reversed: “I’ll see you August, see you June.” And in this careful dismantling, each chord, each word bears more weight, and the whole thing shuffles, one uneven synth glide at a time, towards a climax: “I’m burning to impress / It’s deep in the middle of me/ I can be fantasy.”
This confusing of time, of the real sequence of events, is one of the recurring themes of the album, and might also be my favorite thing about it. “Stars,” the last track, is really its own beginning, a first date, or maybe a second or a third or fourth first date– it doesn’t really matter. The more time is rearranged, the better: this story doesn’t have to follow a line, as long as it’s played out with the beloved. “But if stars, shouldn’t shine / By the very first time / Then dear it’s fine, so fine by me / ‘Cos we can give it time / So much time / With me.” “Infinity” continues to develop this theme, but after all the dates have failed. It’s endless and slow, with Oliver Sim’s voice more mumbly than we thought possible so far, and a drumbeat that sounds at first like a death march. We’ve reached stasis, and time has stopped for real, in the absence of the ability to move on: “I can’t give it up / To someone else’s touch / Because I care too much.” After the superstar hope of “Vcr”(which sounds a little like something The Cure would have dreamed up) and relief implicit in “Islands,” it’s easy to believe that neither of these singers will be able to move on.
So, it’s not a very optimistic album. The minimalism is taken almost to an extreme in both note and narrative, and the space that it occupies, cycling between dawn and dusk, is in the end negative. Each choice on the part of the to withhold is an act of self-preservation, crystallized like a statue’s hand raised in warning or refusal.
But that’s really the point. Basic Space, one of the jauntier tracks, with the kind of hook that indie popsters dream of, talks about being dipped into wax, stopped in a moment of bliss (“I’m setting us in stone / Piece by piece, before I’m alone / Air tight, before we break / Keep it in, keep us safe”), although the album’s other time-traveling tracks jumps show this to be explicitly impossible, both on the album and in the real world. Even the title may now be suspect: xx was chosen because all the band members would be turning twenty by the time of its release, which of course they all are now, since time won’t stop even for a record this good.
So, I was writing this whole long post about Kanye and Taylor Swift, like everyone else on the internet, which was going to start with this conversation I had with a friend who grew up in the same church that I did, who always hates how the guys he knew said they wanted the girls to “dress modestly” but of course then asked out the (maybe wiser?) “hoochie” girls who dress the way they do because they have (correctly) figured out how the (typical) boy thinks and how to get attention and therefore bypass the gender gap and get what they want, by doing so earning the hatred of the original/smart/tshirt-wearing/earnest girl (from “You Belong to Me” by Taylor Swift) who may in fact grow into a normal and well-adjusted and brilliant woman but for now condescends to those who dress “provocatively” because the most terrifying thing in the world is sexual attention from boys, and she can’t admit that she wants it anyway (which is what Twilight is all about, which is why Twilight and Taylor Swift are dominating us all culturally), and how those things all together are what made this whole Kanye outrage thing possible and may get Barack Obama reelected (because he came down on the side of country music fans and puppies and rainbows and pretty teenage girls), but I think too slow, dammit, because this one is so much better and smarter and you should read it.
My conclusion, by the way, was going to be that I never think there’s an excuse for person-to-person rudeness, except in theatre, of course, which is not real, so what’s all the fuss about? This memes thing is way more awesome.
William Logan, on Louise Glück:
The poet has long resisted giving her interior world any richness of description — a poem may contain rain, sea, clouds, sheep, a mountain, yet you learn little beyond the naked nouns. When a simile comes along, it’s as if she had declared a public holiday (I’d max out my credit card for a few adjectives). What she chooses to reveal of this static pastoral lies in the predations or evasions of her verbs: flood, escape, shudder, vanish, scuffle, prowl, stalk. This mimesis denied creates a terrible hunger in the reader — Glück’s intensity is often a form of starvation. It’s like watching a black-and-white movie; the landscape is drawn in chiaroscuro. For a poetic world to be this narrow, the poet’s desires must be powerfully austere. The real world, in other words, is so overwhelming it must be edited.
I think he’s described her perfectly: the reluctant use of descriptive words, the drawing on elemental motifs. But what’s interesting to me is that I’ve been reading Glück for several years, and what bothers Logan about her writing– its surgical, almost clinical avoidance of sentimentality– is precisely the thing I like about her. She could almost as easily be writing about science as love; her hypotheses, particularly the ones that could be personally meaningful, are so suspect.
Despite her attraction to the archetypal, she’s always shied away from writing about the hero. She rarely writes from Odysseus’s point of view: she’s more likely to pick Telemachus, Persephone, a garden weed. Sideline characters, not heroes. Her narrators seem to avoid the spotlight, an interesting choice especially in the pieces derived from the oral tales recorded by Homer and the like, which are really the oldest theatres. In Meadowlands, Odysseus is described by his son as “prone to dramatizing/ acting out,” something that Telemachus pities. [I haven't read A Village Life, which is the primary subject of the review, simply because I haven't gotten around to it, but I will, because I'm interested to see what happens when she trades one set of myths (the Greeks, a permanent subject of hers) for another (small-town life, which I think may be equally a product of creation, these days).]
It’s sort of a crank move, as a writer, to pick the peripheral character, tell a depressing story, talk a lot about death, and make it just readable enough that we can’t look away. There’s no lushness there, no wordplay or games or rhymes or cleverness. Just tight, short elegies. This, I think, is why Logan describes her as a “hilarious, in a ghoulish way– like a stand-up vampire.” She’s reliably skeptical of certain things: love, marriage, happiness, a year without a tomato blight. In one poem, she says, beauty is “gagging you so you couldn’t breathe.”
There’s an anxiety in Glück’s poems, which is either a fear of life or the fear of being melodramatic in one’s response to it. Logan assumes this comes from a personal vulnerability or depression, which, of course, could be the case. I read it differently, as a relationship to language that is fundamentally troubled. In “Persephone the Wanderer,” in Averno, she writes,
As is well known, the return of the beloved
does not correct
the loss of the beloved: Persephone
returns home
stained with red juice like
a character in Hawthorne—
I am not certain I will
keep this word: is earth
“home” to Persephone? Is she at home, conceivably,
in the bed of the god? Is she
at home nowhere? Is she a born wanderer, in other words
an existential
replica of her own mother, less
hamstrung by ideas of causality?
What’s happening here is that Persephone, abducted by Hades, ate a pomegranate in the underworld, effectively tying here there. Her mother, earth goddess Demeter, retaliated by cursing the entire world with winter until Hades was forced by the other gods to give her up for half the year. When she comes back to the surface, we have spring and summer, and when she goes back to the underworld, everything dies again. The seasons are tied to her mother’s grief. And the poet, who makes herself obvious in the narrative, as you see above, questions even the basic assumption that her retelling of the tale will use the appropriate nouns. The concept of home is as up for battle as Persephone herself, who she later describes as “just meat” in the “argument between the mother and the lover.”
Back when I was writing about couches for a living (remember that? sometimes I forget), I had to sort of come to terms with minimalism as an artistic movement that meant something other than ”lazy.” It was kind of a revelation to me, at least when it came to interior design. I used to look at all those griege rooms and think they were totally unlivable, and after bothering to take a second look, I started to see how actually a lot of neutrals together make a certain kind of sense, when taken as a whole. It’s a palette cleanser, like wearing beige and tan and gray instead of the jewel tones, so that when you see an actual jewel, you aren’t “over it,” so to speak. The movement as a whole, of course, is about much more than that, but to me its attraction comes from the relentless paring to essentials— essentials that, by necessity, bear more weight by virtue of being the only objects valuable enough to remain. Minimalism overwhelms you by what has been removed, by the lack of melodrama.
So with Glück. I think her aversion to overdescription, to purple of any kind in her writing, makes me more likely to trust her as a reader. As if, when she uses the word beauty, or love, or prayer, I have to believe her because the word must have been dragged out of her kicking and screaming. There was simply no other noun or verb that would do, and it feels like a grudging admission on her part: “What can I tell you,” she asks, in Meadowlands. “What can I tell you that you don’t know/ that will make you tremble again?”
So maybe Glück’s world IS unlivable and skeletal, and that’s the point. It’s been so stripped of excess that it’s hardly worth inhabiting. Maybe her entire project is not merely to present the skepticism of the language and expression itself, but to force the reader past it through sheer despair?
That may be too optimistic, of course, but in one of my favorite poems, appropriately titled “Rainy Morning,” she writes (to herself or from the perspective of a second narrator, it isn’t clear), “You don’t love the world./ If you loved the world you’d have/ images in your poems.” She mocks her own “tame spiritual themes,/ autumn, loss, darkness, etc.” But then, the poem ends with “We can all write about suffering/ with our eyes closed. You should show people/ more of yourself; show them your clandestine/ passion for red meat.”
It’s good, you guys. Really, really good. Also this one.
I’ll tell you a secret
let’s make this perfectly clear
there’s no secrets this year
I saw (500) Days of Summer on Friday, and I loved it. I’ll just say that right at the beginning. In fact, I thought it was one of the most sincere films I’ve ever seen.
The movie sets up Tom as a melodramatic and deeply disappointed romantic, opposite the skeptical but equally melancholy Summer, and the narrator tells you right at the beginning that the couple doesn’t make it and that this is not a love story. Which is true. But it is, I think, a story about what happens when love is missing, or when it’s defined wrongly. But more than love, the movie is about honesty: as a virtue, a shield, a tool. Summer, the object of adoration in her inferiority-complex-inducing vintage dresses, is maddeningly frank with Tom, and his inability to accept her version of truth as real, at least for her, is the eventual downfall of the relationship.
“Love is a fantasy,” she says to Tom. Romantic comedies are full of this sort of line: usually spoken by a character who’s lost faith in love, but who is eventually convinced otherwise by an infatuated partner in a last-ditch race to the airport. I always laugh a little here, because the point was never whether love is real or not. The point is what you believe and what you’re willing to prioritize and make real, and if someone who is invested in your choice, who stands to gain from it, is trying to convince you that you believe something you don’t and YOU GO WITH THEM, then YOU are at fault when it eventually goes down in flames. Because all you’ve done is accept their version of the truth, not changed your own in any appreciable way, and that is going to come back to you someday.
Lay your head down at my feet
I’ll blow you kisses while you sleep
and when I know you’re safe and dreaming
my escape plans in full swing
Summer doesn’t make this mistake. She likes Tom, likes being around him, likes having sex with him, but when she suspects that might not be enough for him, she makes this even clearer than she had before. “I’m not looking for anything serious,” she says. “Is that ok with you?” Girls and boys, this is when HE becomes responsible for his own problems. Right here. Because he says that’s fine, and then has the audacity later to blame her for his pain. Blames her for being 100% completely honest with him. Blames her for not feeling the way he wants. Which is understandable, because being in love makes you lose some of your control and rationality, but it’s sort of like blaming gravity for being such a downer.
I’m thinking of the latest Silversun Pickups album, particularly the first track, There’s No Secrets This Year. That’s the song at the top of the post here and that I’m quoting, in case you skipped it, and it’s too perfect not to include when talking about this movie. Just listen to the slide at at 4:44, which is when the song goes from an avowal of perfect forthrightness into an almost threatening declaration of non est mea culpa:
Better make sure
Better make sure you’re looking closely
before you fall into your swoon
YES, for reals. I love that moment so much, because the thing people don’t say about honesty is that truth can be as much a shield as anything else. How often has someone said to you, baby, I just want you to be honest with me, and not thought about the consequences? Like, if I told you I might leave you, and then I did, you maybe have grounds to be sad, but you have forfeited your right to be angry. See how I did that? Non est mea culpa. It’s not a revelation of personal truth that makes one more vulnerable, in fact it’s exactly the opposite: it protects, and it’s what Summer does from day one. The whole album continues in that vein, it’s this really delicious seduction somehow accomplished with a baseball bat. By the time you get to Catch and Release, the line, “Later on, don’t say I didn’t tell you so. Maybe I didn’t but you’re taking it,” is almost unnecessary: a really poetic, calculated admission of the abdication of responsibility. And no one but Tom can be blamed for taking the lure.
Not that he remembers any of this. “You just do what you want, don’t you,” he accuses, in the final scene when he asks her why she danced with him when she was about to marry another man. To her credit, she doesn’t answer him the way I would have wanted to, with, “Yes, you moron. Why won’t you pay attention?” She doesn’t even roll her eyes, which is gracious of her, and probably due to the benefit of being in the position of security here, being the married one. It no longer matters whether he thinks of her as selfish, whether he thinks she cares about his feelings or not, because it is probably better for him in the long run to think of her as flawed. In fact, that was the problem all along, says the movie, that he made her too perfectly idiosyncratic, quirky but essentially harmless, with no hidden rocks he might crash upon, which seems extraordinarily unfair given that she told him that was exactly what might happen. We only ever see Summer as Tom wants her to be, not as she actually is.
Consider with your ear
We are still sincere
Not that Tom is a jerk, not really. Just deeply misguided, which the narrator points out right at the beginning: he works for a greeting card company and thought the end of The Graduate was about true love. All of which makes him patient, and adoring, and very cute, but also the most frustrating creature we have ever seen. I have to feel a little sorry for him, though. Summer lives in the real world, and Tom doesn’t, and therefore Tom’s life is always going to suck a little more, as he proves in a sad-sack I-quit outburst that manages to offend all of his coworkers except the stupid one, who claps. (Because he likes it when morons make a scene? Because he’s bored? Because he also thought the nice lady’s pictures of her cats would make terrible cards but was too cowardly to actually put that into words and say so? Not sure.) Whereas Summer doesn’t even have to feel guilty about any of this, because her own straightforwardness absolves her.
Who knows?
How this feeling grows?
Was it truly worth –
Truly worth the starting
Who knows?
Why the engine’s blown
Hope it’s truly worth –
Truly worth the parting
We never find out if that frankness makes her happy, though. She does end up getting married, and the thing she didn’t think would happen, that she would be sure of love as a truth for her in specific, not the vague dreamy bliss that Tom is after, seems to come true, so maybe. It’s a nice thought.
All in all, it’s quite a delicately rendered little movie, very pretty and luminously shot, and with the kind of story I can get behind. Both characters are played well, I think, and the director heightened the adulation of Deschanel’s character, which is exactly as it should be. She has a muse-like quality that works here. And Gordon-Leavitt’s Tom is puppy-earnest and violent at the same time, wonderfully childish. You have my 100% recommendation to see it, and I hope you tell me what you think if you do.
I may be slightly over-susceptible, due to hanging out with my friend’s newborn last night, but this is really sweet: Neil Gaiman’s Blueberry Girl.
This is all over the internet already, but just in case you missed it, I’m going to give you a reason to take a look. Shenk’s article about “What Makes Us Happy” is long, but useful, and unlike most reports on sociological studies, doesn’t focus purely on data, but on the humanity behind it. Which makes sense when the object of your study is humans.
Vaillant became a kind of godfather to the field, and a champion of its message that psychology can improve ordinary lives, not just treat disease. But in many ways, his role in the movement is as provocateur. Last October, I watched him give a lecture to Seligman’s graduate students on the power of positive emotions—awe, love, compassion, gratitude, forgiveness, joy, hope, and trust (or faith). “The happiness books say, ‘Try happiness. You’ll like it a lot more than misery’—which is perfectly true,” he told them. But why, he asked, do people tell psychologists they’d cross the street to avoid someone who had given them a compliment the previous day?
In fact, Vaillant went on, positive emotions make us more vulnerable than negative ones. One reason is that they’re future-oriented. Fear and sadness have immediate payoffs—protecting us from attack or attracting resources at times of distress. Gratitude and joy, over time, will yield better health and deeper connections—but in the short term actually put us at risk. That’s because, while negative emotions tend to be insulating, positive emotions expose us to the common elements of rejection and heartbreak.
To illustrate his point, he told a story about one of his “prize” Grant Study men, a doctor and well-loved husband. “On his 70th birthday,” Vaillant said, “when he retired from the faculty of medicine, his wife got hold of his patient list and secretly wrote to many of his longest-running patients, ‘Would you write a letter of appreciation?’ And back came 100 single-spaced, desperately loving letters—often with pictures attached. And she put them in a lovely presentation box covered with Thai silk, and gave it to him.” Eight years later, Vaillant interviewed the man, who proudly pulled the box down from his shelf. “George, I don’t know what you’re going to make of this,” the man said, as he began to cry, “but I’ve never read it.” “It’s very hard,” Vaillant said, “for most of us to tolerate being loved.”
Yeah. It’s that good.
E.B. White describes the fleeting magic of abandoned places way, way better than I do:
“I thought how pleasant it would be to start life fresh on the old Herrick place, with a one-room shack and no appurtenances–no equipment, no stock, no pets, no family responsibilities, no program. But knowing myself as well as I do, I well knew that it wouldn’t be twenty minutes before I would acquire or contrive something to establish the roots of complexity in firm soil–a cold chisel perhaps, or an inamorata, or a folding towel rack. In no time at all I would destroy the old Herrick place by setting out a pansy plant or repairing a rotten sill. And then it would be just like any other spot–beloved but not removed. A man sometimes gets homesick for the loneliness that he has at one time or another experienced in his life and that is a part of all life in some degree, and sometimes a secluded and half-mournful yet beautiful place will suddenly revive the sensation of pain and melancholy and unfulfillment that are associated with that loneliness, and it will make him want to seize it and recapture it; but I know with me it is a passing want and not to be compared with my taste for domesticity, which is most of the time so strong as to be overpowering.”
(One Man’s Meat)
