I Had a Wonderful Post to Make...

It was basically a long "reading" of Ballydowse's CD Out of the Fertile Crescent that pointed out a realization that I had come to the other day. Basically, the CD started out with 3 songs of protest against war, then went into three songs about marriage, then turned to discuss the concepts of longing and the struggle of the joys of Heaven for a couple of songs before ending with a magnificant saga of human cultures, human history and divine mercy. With an epilogue reminding us in America to wake up to the world of suffering around us that we are helping to bring to pass, ending: "pull the blankets over our head--it's we who are dead."

It was a brilliant essay, I thought, and a wonderful chance to talk about some of my favorite parts of Crescent, a CD which has arguably the most magnificant lyrics of any album I own. From:

"In Mosul where Jonah rests the sheep are waging war.
They dared to raise their eyes when the planes above them roared."

to lyrics not entirely original (quoting John Masefield's poem for much of it), but excellently used:

"I may go down to the seas again for the call of the running tide
Is a wild call and a clear call that's hardest to deny
I may go down to the seas again to the vagrant gypsy's life
To the gull's way and the whale's way
Where the wind's like a whetted knife
But I'll not go alone my love from this day on I swear
Whatever current lays below, you and I will share."

to original celebrations of the hope of Heaven:

"Exiled to finally breathe am I.
Doomed to actually see the sky
And the waters in all of their glory.
The best are the truest of stories.
The best are the truest of stories."

to the magnificient "Crescent" which I want to quote verbatim for its sublimity of thought, purpose, and language, but will instead offer two snippets:
"Four rivers flow past the beaks and the jaws.
Anarchy, Judgment, Mercy and Law
New cities rise upon history's dust. Cultures revolve between wonder and lust.
Guillotine blades release peasants and slaves. Peasants turn princes and chain them again.
The rivers flow on, they join and they grow,
Mixing life and death into all that we know."

"A future's on its way, my friend, where hate will be like gills
Gills that cannot breathe, my friend, in the sharp air of the hills.
We saw so clear the rights of all, the path was the mistake,
The vanguard is forgiveness, the light for which we ache."

So I sat down at my computer, with such magnificent reachings crammed within my head, and (more to the point) with a definite plan for how to get them out. Because I knew the structure of the CD, so I had a "story" to tell when talking about it, something interesting on which to hang my opinions of the lyrics as a whole and the structure of the CD and even (in a way) the message of the CD. (No work of narrative art worth its salt has a "message" or "moral" that can be fully explained in a sentence or even an article--else the art would be unnecessary! But it can, as in one of Chesterton's short stories, have "thirty-seven morals to this story, but one of them is that it is he who has really gone around the whole world who is anxious to come home.")

Then I read the lyrics to the second song, apparently for the first time. Now in my defense, lyrics of Ballydowse songs are hard to understand, because they're generally screamed in a drunken chorus (when not sung beautifully and passionately by a woman who has an excellent voice--but that's the minority). And they're so dense that I generally tend to try to tease meanings out of those songs whose meanings (in the dictionary sense) I do understand.

But it turns out that I was mistaken to think that they were protest lyrics (although, again, "drunken screaming!" I remind thee.) In fact, they are lyrics defending the oddly tetotling nature of the bend--but by means of that, the Christian view of a distant joy which we are but travelers towards.

"A joy that outdances the pagans. A taste for moon and sun.
Great board of wine and laughter when the watch of the night is done.
Sing of some pale Gallilean, greying the world with his breath.
This wraith is not my master; in fact we've never met."

So at least it's a good song.

But it did ruin the article I was going to write, based on the structure of the CD. Worse yet, I composed it in my head all day and then typed an hour on it before thinking to check even this most basic of facts. Then, I deleted the article in frustration, despite the fact that it had a lot of good discussion of the CD that could be worked into another article.

Finally, I just wrote this "review." Hope you enjoy it! Meanwhile, I believe I may launch a war of short duration against facts, since apparently they just get in the way.

Pattern Recognition

"It is pretty obvious that the debasement of the human mind caused by a constant flow of fraudulent advertising is no trivial thing. There is more than one way to conquer a country. . "
-Raymond Chandler


A lone man walks down dark city streets. He knows, intuitively, where the lines of power are, who "owns" the city, and how much corruption there is everywhere. Everyone is complicit; most struggle to be as human as possible. And the line between humanity and corruption, between honor and pragmatism, is never clear. Everyone blurs lines, but everyone hands their breaking points. Unlucky sobs stand for their convictions, for their women--and more often than not kill for it. But, walking in such a setting, that one man manages to make his way. "He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor. He talks as the man of his age talks, that is, with rude wit, a lively sense of the grotesque, a disgust for sham, and a contempt for pettiness."

The man, of course, is Raymond Chandler's Phillip Marlowe. He wasn't the first detective, and he certainly has links back to Sherlock Holmes, the father of detectives. But Chandler was perhaps the first to capture the sense of alienation, of corruption and sin and evil codified into urban power structures. It is not a coincidence that the first collection of comic books in the series entitled Sin City was named for Chandler's last full-length novel (The Hard Goodbye, now, from The Long Goodbye.)

Which brings us to William Gibson, the founder of cyberpunk, and his contemporarily-set novel, Pattern Recognition.

Like Raymond Chandler's Los Angeles, the world of Pattern Recognition (our world, but seen through Gibson's eyes) is one where dehumanizing sin has been accepted as an integral part of the power structure. The primary indicator of this is the nature of "contentless advertising," a sort of worldwide house of mist built on the fact that, as Sprite puts it, "image is everything." And of course, all that is built solidly on the greed of men and companies who cannot be trusted, on the immense flow of information that leaves no secrets safe yet bewilders the mind, and on the process of "branding" that seeks to exploit, market and sell even our very identities.

The protagonist, then, is an ideal update of the hard-boild detective: a hyperspecialized woman who is simultaneously capable of detecting the marketability of logos at a glance and severely allergic to "contentless advertising." And of course, following the noir formula she is drawn into a web of deception and lies, but of the sort that reflect, rather than hiding, the fundamental impersonality of modern life. In this case, she is searching for the creator of an internet-released film unlike anything ever seen, under the employ of an untrustworthy employer and feeling herself using some rather unethical means. All in a world where, due to a pace of change so great as to exceed our ability to imagine it. "We have no future because our present is too volatile. We have only risk management. The spinning of a given moment's scenarios. Pattern recognition."

But perhaps the brilliance of Gibson, like that of Chandler, is seen most in his use of style. I wouldn't have thought it when I read the first sentence ("Five hours' New York jet lag and Cayce Pollard wakes in Camden Town to the dire and ever-circling wolves of disruptd circadian rythm.") But somehow Gibson's agressively highbrow prose solidifies the more it is read, revealing a clarity and (surprisingly) a simplicity indicitive of a long and careful process of revision. I don't know that I will ever read a book that better captures the surreality inherent in a company credit card, or an internet-based friendship. Like Steinbeck, Gibson captures something of the tempo and rythm and poetry of modern life. It is certainly a different poetry than Steinbeck, a poetry specifically urbanite rather than rural, but it carries the same resonance of understanding and observant wisdom. For one thing, it is the first time I've seen an author successfully and beautifully deal with the World Trade Center bombings. For me, just that flashback scene in its poignancy, insecurity, and confusion is worth hundreds of dreary documentaries of the type that filled television on this year's September 11.

In any case, it is certainly as haunting and memorable book as I've read in some time. And that, for me, is one of the prime marks of good fiction--it sticks with you, like a good meal, and haunts your memory at the oddest times. And you realize you understand a bit more about the world, or at least see a bit more of its poetry and wonder.

It Has Arrived

It has arrived. A combination so bizarre, so surreal, so, in fact, English, that my wife and I were compelled to use our Best Buy gift card to order it. And now it is here.

"Very well," you might say, "but what could this most extrordinarily uncanny bit of merchandise be?" I hope you do, because I will now tell you.

Or, better yet, show you.









Yes, indeed, that is our friend Hugh Laurie. But where (and who) has he found himself in this image, where he is certainly not the good doctor Gregory House?

Yes, my friends. Through the magical powers of television and old acting jobs, I give you not House, M.D.--but Bertie Wooster. With, of course, the inimitable Jeeves.

I can't wait.

In the meantime, I found this article, in which Hugh discusses the wonderful powers of the Master. Hint: it works best if you imagine House reading it in his trademark embittered but self-satyrical snarl.