The Show of Life

Phish at Verizon Wireless Arena, Manchester, NH, 10/26/10

What is the Glass Bead Game? Wouldn't you rather not know? I'm happy not knowing. The Swiss woman who played clarinet in my free jazz group in Pittsburgh gave me the feeling that it was the sort of book that, if you heard somebody older talking about it when you were in 10th grade, you'd believe could open a door like the one the Renaissance guy peeks through to see where the gears are that move the solar system. This feeling is enough for me; a copy of the edition on the left sits atop our TV; I bought it as a decoration. Maybe someday Tessa will wonder what it is.

While on a grad school interview trip, Hilary called me from the World Language Center to ask what I'd like for a present. I was in the process of scrutinizing every 420 reference I could find in Walter Benjamin, so I asked for Hesse's Steppenwolf†, on the basis of this quote from "Myslovice-Braunschweig-Marseilles"‡:

As I have said, I was not a novice when it came to using poison; but whether it was my almost daily feelings of homesickness, or the paucity of human contact and the uncongenial localities, never before had I felt myself so at home in the community of cognoscenti whose records of their experiences—from Baudelaire's Paradis artificiels to Herman Hesse's Steppenwolf—were perfectly familiar to me.

I made it maybe 75 pages into Hesse before giving up, and never got to the famously surreal ending with the talking cars or whatever, presumably a grove of psychedelia, but I read plenty of the old man's misanthropic grouching and his accounts of wandering around town avoiding old acquaintances, which was in any case probably more realistic on the cannabis front. When I realized that the grouchy man was Hesse, thinly fictionalized, the book began to make me ill, and I put it away. I read some of Siddhartha in high school; I remember nothing about it, aside from a certain hallway outside the gym where I sat reading before track practice. Bottom line is I'm 98% certain the content of The Glass Bead Game comes nowhere near the field of meaning suggested by the title.

So the question I wanted to ask is: What is the string that holds the glass beads together? You know, the FLOW GLUE? Ever write with, say, a blue uni-ball VISION micro and choose your words just to keep the ink flowing, just to pull the beautiful wet wells a couple characters longer? You're writing, but the whole continuity of the thing is contained in the act of drawing, its true guide (its OTHER COMPASS) is this act of sculpting in an unrelated space. And the reason I wanted about ask about FLOW GLUE AND THE OTHER COMPASS is that I think it gets at the problem that's been dogging Phish since their return in 2009: Trey is sober, he's no longer fingerpainting in the inner space of drugs and alcohol, and without that hidden primary medium of composition, nothing seems to be holding the music together. This is the drama of every show: will the Muse visit, even if just for a couple bars? Because if She does, this is proof that magic is true, that there are Renaissance doors in the actual world, that flow glue is free, if you can find it, and that God exists. I, for one, totally stand with sucky, groping new Phish, trying to get off the ground on its own wings.

†Benjamin, who died in 1940, never heard the music of Steppenwolf, though his colleagues Adorno and Horkheimer may have.

‡The first sentence of Benjamin's essay: "The story is not mine."

Phish at the Augusta Civic Center, Augusta, ME, 10/19/10

The day Hilary's water broke, I was rushing around like a madman, picking up supplies for our hospital stay, lanolin and cabbages and things, and when I got out of the grocery store and started the car, this song came on the radio and the first lyric I heard was something about looking into a newborn's eyes, and when the host came on, he was like "that's the Boneheads from Hallowell, ME, and they're here with me in the studio!" and my whole spiritual life seemed to crystallize in that moment. So when I saw Steve Jones from the Boneheads at Phish, I had to tell him of his role in our birth story. My state senator was there, too, and I thanked him for visiting the elementary school where I work. My high school principal was there; he remembered my name. The granddaughter of a Maine Country & Western legend and former co-proprietor of an ice cream stand in Hallowell at which one could order a ten-strip of LSD was there. The buddy with whom I canoed out to an island in China Lake in order to eat that acid was there. The first person I played a "Fire on the Mountain" jam with was there. And this is really just the tip of the social iceberg represented at the Civic Center that night.

I don't think I had set foot in the Augusta Civic Center since I went to see Guns N' Roses in the spring of 1993, on the day I got my braces off. I went to the circus there once, the only time I went to the circus, and my only really specific memory of this event is of a spherical iron cage in which three motorcyclists established and sustained death-defying interlocking orbits. The room was dark except for the motorcycles' headlights, whose shafts' churning pattern resembled, if I have this right, that of the roving headlights of the UFO in Explorers, which was roughly contemporary. I went to my friend's dad's dojo's karate tournament at the Civic Center and watched that dad chop wood. In fourth grade, Matt B.'s parents took me to a state championship girls' basketball game there, and we brought a giant bag of confetti and gleefully sprinkled it over the spectators below. I recall talking to Matt about the Dr. Who that was on the night before, Peter Davison's "Terminus," as we walked across the snowy lawn between the parking lot and the venue.

More evidence that the world no longer exists

Stanley Fish on the fate of French, Italian, classics, Russian and theater at SUNY Albany.

"To some degree, picture books force an analog way of thinking,"

said Karen Lotz, the publisher of Candlewick Press in Somerville, Mass. “From picture to picture, as the reader interacts with the book, their imagination is filling in the missing themes.”

As an argument, where the premises are supposed to add up to the conclusion, this statement is baffling—written texts, no less than pictorial ones, require that a reader supply imaginative analogs to hold characters and stories together from one sentence to the next (it would be insane to suggest that with the written word, everything you need to know is on the page); lacking information which the audience's imagination must reconstruct is typically held to be a property of digital representations, which are inherently gappy collections of samples—but something about it is right. You're going to lose if you try to make a philosophically sturdy distinction between picture-knowing and word-knowing—some written texts are as untranslatable as pictures, some pictures can be rendered in words; picture books have a symbolic vocabulary (reading one is not at all an experience of pure seeing); resembling the things they represent is not the unique province of pictures (nor, within language, is resemblance limited to obvious onomatopoeisis (read Seamus Heaney's Beowulf, or listen to him read it, and you'll hear how mimetic sense can be fully carried in sound)); nor is it vision's special privilege to overflow whatever linguistic map is applied to it, for language is as excessive as any sensory medium; words overflow themselves—but I want to say, yes, pictures open different worlds and call for different forms of thinking and occasion deeper swims of mind. So I think I agree with Karen Lotz, and I am horrified by the trend of forcing children to read at earlier and earlier ages.

We've been listening to more radio lately—it is a window onto a shared world, however limited, so even if we aren't getting out to see friends, we can still participate in social reality by listening to callers sound off on the Moss trade. Plus a Wilco CD is stuck in the player of the vehicle that was handed down to us. Plus unexpected rewards may be delivered by the radio, and as students of behavioral science, we know that an intermittent schedule of reinforcement is the best way to strengthen a given behavior—a slot-machine that pays out at random is going to be more addicting than one that pays out every time. "Jet Airliner" came on recently, and I guess I had never really listened to it, and my ecstatic experience of Steve Miller's pacing and delivery of rhyme fueled the next several weeks of Scan and Seek. Compulsive radio-checking was also reinforced by the rediscovery of Boston's "Let Me Take You Home Tonight," the (comparatively) grainy acoustic realism of which runs counter to the production aesthetic of the rest of the band's debut album. It just sounds less fake. Easier, funkier. In my currently impoverished mental life, its melody has taken on great importance. The austere Strat-nudity of "Before You 'Cuse Me" (the Journeyman version) is totally avant-garde, and the lameness of Clapton's fills is deceptive—if you can make it through the verses, the outro solo is other-worldly. Clapton is God. Driving over the bridge from Portsmouth to Kittery after a desperate afternoon of listening to the Shark, my ears were wiped clean by "Alive." You couldn't transcribe this melody without recourse to quarter-tone accidentals. Sasha Frere-Jones reviews the Pavement reunion in the current New Yorker, and he thinks they're pretty good, though not, as Robert Christgau claims, "the finest rock band of the nineties," an honor Frere-Jones reserves for Nirvana. Fuck that. Pearl Jam. This is just a guess, since I really don't know their music, but my hunch is that no 90s band is more deserving of critical reappraisal and hipster embrace. Last night WMPG happened to be playing a demo of "Inca Roads," and Tessa got wide-eyed and still and pursed her lips in a silent "ooh" shape of curiosity as she tuned into its sound-world.

Paul's Boutique

So Tessa appears to enjoy the Beastie Boys more than the Beatles. Could a preference for zone and flow over song be an early predictor of a Stones bias? (The only Beatles she reacted to was "The Inner Light"—the instrumental beginning got her attention, but she was then annoyed by the singing.)

Randy Moss traded to Minnesota Vikings

At the Social Security Administration's baby name website, you can type in a name and see where it ranks in the top 1000 over the last 130 years or so. "Rhiannon," for example, does not chart until 1976, and peaks in 1977 at #418. "Aja" appears in 1978, and peaks that year at #412; "Asia" has proven to be more durable.

Baby clothes

Having (justifiably, I think) skipped our friends' wedding yesterday afternoon, we stopped by the reception, our first social outing as a new family. I'm accustomed to the difficulty of interpreting certain vibrations in social space, given my own tendency to refract these vibrations through personal prisms of unease, but stepping out onto the interpersonal stage for the first time as a parent, I was unprepared for how much more mind-torquing bad vibes can be when it's not just you but your baby who's being judged. Like, if a friend says "...little cupcake" in response to the cupcake applique on the cardigan Tessa is wearing, and their general affect and tone seem to infuse the remark with irony and disapproval, like, "weird clothing choice," and this friend's personal taste in baby clothes runs more vintage ebay/boutiquey/pretend-it's-40-years-ago and seems just by example indirectly disdainful of mass-cultural, normative Babies R Us-wear, is the apparent hostility really just a reflection of my own ambivalence toward dressing my daughter in a frilly pink thing with a cupcake logo, or am I correct in sensing criticism and discomfort?

Allow me to discuss for a minute our choice to roll with the generic, over-the-counter baby clothes of 2010. Let's set aside arguments of practicality—that it was convenient to get most of Tessa's wardrobe as baby shower gifts, that we derive no personal enjoyment from the task of unearthing vintage gear, and that we happen not to be hooked into a reliable pipeline of tasteful hand-me-downs—and get to the ideological crux of the matter: dressing your child in commercial, traditionally gender-coded baby clothes gives her more autonomy than does a wardrobe curated to match what you, as an adult with developed taste, might personally wear. Believe me, I find threadbare cords and grubby old sweaters unbearably charming. But it's freeing to suspend your vision of coolness and let your baby be the world's baby for a while (I mean, she is anyway). Be as much of an elitist as you need to about experience, culture, learning, and nutrition—you want her to grow well, and this will require selective snobbery—but there's a difference between guiding the development of an intelligent being that has powers of agency and decorating a helpless possession. For to be unique and authentic does not require unique and authentic clothing chosen by someone else. (The same goes for choosing a name: the name is a container, and it can start out totally empty, and then it gets filled by a person. It's almost like some parents worry that a regular name won't be big enough for a non-regular person, as if they're front-loading the name because they don't trust their child, but isn't this the opposite of how language usually works, like, the more specific the word, the smaller its poetic world? I think of my friend John. For me, his name is a overflowing rainbow-range of connotation; an utterance of this syllable, however common, does not fail to call up his once-in-the-universe particularity. His parents did not attempt to reflect this particularity with an equally unique identifier; this would have been a category mistake, a confusion regarding the proper deployment of mimesis.) So let your child present as a decent, unassuming citizen of the world, and let her define herself with her abilities and actions. Like, if she's going to be the best in her class, let her be the best at sackbut, Go, Farsi, or Spenser, but not the best at being dressed by someone else.