Getting It Right

In his treatise on the necessity of liberal education, Culture and Anarchy, Matthew Arnold argues for a curriculum which establishes a clear line of (Western) tradition handed down from the Greeks and Romans as a defense against what he saw as a devolution or a descent into barbarism – anarchy in the UK. When I was 16, I listened to the Sex Pistols and tagged public property with Sharpies and canned paint and profanity and then proceeded to sniff the excesses of our vandalism. Matthew Arnold was writing to convince people to hate us and hang with him because we were trash talking the sexual fidelity of his mother in bathroom stalls. Matthew Arnold wrote his book about Plato and Aristotle and Longinus and Horace. We wrote Shit on Horace and Longinus and Aristotle and Plato, mostly because we knew that they were just men repeating the words of other men. Plato was an ancient greek dude who wrote about other greek dudes who overheard the activities of So-crates – a possible ancient greek dude, much like Jesus is a possible ancient Jewish dude – in order to teach other ancient greek dudes to not end up like us, writing shit on Horace and Longinus and Aristotle and Plato. Plato's Symposium is a morality play that looks like a fictional gossip column. A narrator is asked to tell a story told to him about how the god, I mean the man, Socrates tricked the Aristocrats into kissing the ass of the gods, when he knew full well that the gods were only a metaphor of human attempts to escape mortality. Accordingly, the story is told so that the Aristocrats (and presumably Plato's audience would find this "sensible") went on and on one-upping each other in praising the nobility and qualities of love until Socrates steps in and starts asking questions to which he already knows the answer. HA! HA! So much for believing in the abundance of love. According to Socrates, by the way of some narrator by the way of Plato (so according to Plato?), logic and deduction are the key – critical distance – to becoming aware of the trace of love in one's soul, so the body and the soul are distinctly separate. And we read Plato and we called Breton a Platonist and the Platonism scholars said we were being irrational and so we shit on the Symposium. And the Aristotelians thought us too barbaric and suggested we consult Aristotle, and so we read the Poetics and noted the importance of mimesis, of keeping our ideas as close to the archetype. And we handed out flyers saying, Andy Warhol is an Aristotelian, but the Aristotelian scholars said we were vulgar to compare mimesis to a Xerox, and so we shit on the poetics. And the followers of Longinus suggested we read On the Sublime because we needed some restraint. And so we read that great writing is about great conceptions, about lifting the reader out of the ordinary through a refined elegance and simplicity. And so we called into radio shows proclaiming Kenneth Goldsmith as the second coming of Longinus. And the scholars of Longinus freaked and expelled us for plagiarism. And so we wiped our asses with Longinus's text and mailed it with our expulsion appeals. And the faculty recommended we read Horace, and so we read the Ars Poetica. And we read how ornament needs to be cut down such that a reader need be brought in almost in medias res. And we began proclaiming Kurt Vonnegut in the tradition of Horace, but the scholars of fine verse suggested we were comparing tigers and lambs, which showed us to be vulgar plebeians incapable of understanding how the world works, and they sent us to work at the water treatment facility, where we mimeographed copies of journal we titled Arse Poetica, a compendium of butts and farts in the tradition of Horace. And we took our sharpies and we tagged everything we were told was beautiful with words like "shit" and "fuck," and we shat on Matthew Arnold and enjoyed ourselves immensely.

A Gift Outright

In true honor and avant-respect to the new administration, Kenny G (otherwise known as Kenneth Goldsmith) has posted 50 remixes of Elizabeth Alexander's Innaugural Poem over at Harriet, the blog for The Poetry Foundation. Check it out.

“Some Sort of Time Machine”

Let me begin with a caveat, Neutral Milk Hotel's second full-length album, In the Aeroplane over the Sea, embodies nearly every aesthetic I've grown disappointed in with American pop music – the self-absorbed, first-person narrator who often speaks in stock sentimentalities about adolescent love, an unblinking nostalgia for antiquity, and a bald-faced Romanticism and mythos on par with worst Coleridge lyric. The very thought that Jeff Mangum says he wrote the entire album in some fitful wake from the nightmares he encountered after having read a copy of Anne Frank's, The Diary of a Young Girl, makes me want to roll my eyes so far back they could see out my asshole, and yet…

And yet, ten years after its initial release, Aeroplane, is consistently at the top of my "recently played" I-tunes list. Why? Because the album, not in spite of the above-mentioned flaws but because of them, questions the very reasons for which I have erected aesthetic scaffolds in the first place. In the Aeroplane may be personal, but it is no biography. This is a free-associative romp of images, shards really, of historical imagination, on par with the best sections of Andre Breton's Nadja – a fractured dream that sounds eerily like what Stephen Dedalus, the protagonist of Ulysses, called the nightmare of history. In short, Mangum is encountering past the way a child encounters the present – leaping from parents impaling each other with cutlery to the sacramental handling of rattlesnakes without even batting an eye. Thus there is no need for editorial restraint because everything, even the clichéd romantic gestures, is shrouded in strangeness.

In one sense this strangeness is achieved lyrically through Mangum's attention to the physicality of memory when he addresses his imaginary Frank saying, "now how I remember you/ how I would push my fingers through your mouth/ to make those muscles move." Later he places himself in the shoes of both her adolescent love and his own adolescence, ignoring overt descriptions of sex that come with previous experience and bookishness, and instead seeing sex in everything, where even "semen stains the mountaintops" and where the act in all its mystery becomes violent and risky, where gentle touch transforms into "fingers through the notches of your spine."

But that's just the beginning. The real inventiveness of the album is in the music, the presentation, which comes across something like Harry Smith's catalogue of homemade folk music history on an acid trip. Even though the album was recorded on somewhat of a shoestring budget (especially compared to something like Bruce Springsteen's homage to Pete Seeger, We Shall Overcome [2005]), Mangum has employed a wide range of folk instrumentation – banjos, bagpipes, accordions, army horns, and even singing saws – that could resonate with nearly every decade of 20^th century folk music. There are shards of funeral marches, carnival parades, hoedowns, mid-sixties psychodelia, all set to Mangum's scowling voice that one reviewer, punning on a lyric from the title track, likened to "a dead dog howl" that just keeps barking more and more frantically.

And it keeps barking after all these ten years. Barking that history is an untamed beast. That fragmentation can be beautiful in its violence. That our person is the only defense we have against the ruthless systems of power and money that keep pounding down the metaphor of Anne Frank with the countless other voices into the mass graves of collateral damage. Maybe more of us could ask like Mangum, "will she remember me 50 years later/ I wished I could save her in some sort of time machine." His album might just be a good start.