FIREWORKS

So in the spirit of retroactive blogging, here's my post about the Animal Collective song/video Fireworks.

In high school, I had two friends who I still love dearly to this day. back then however, they were more often than not complete dicks. One of their favorite things to be dicks about was music. They were staunch believers in Pitchfork's merit and held their tastes for lo-fi noise punk, and baroque-harmonic-folk-pop in fairly high esteem. Though sometimes I travelled in similar spheres, most of my favorite bands were strictly allocated to punk rock genres.

However, one song that they played over and over did resonate pretty strongly with me. It was by a decidedly weird electro-pop band of modest fame and tremendous Indie cred; Animal Collective. the song was Fireworks. To uphold my dignity, (or at least save myself the exposed shame of liking an electronica band) I kept my small   fling with the song a secret. I didn't buy it on itunes or, god forbid, go all out an get the band's cd. Instead I listened to the song every night on youtube over and over again, with the strange music video playing in the background as I mineswept. My fling turned into a passion and eventually grew to a throbbing love. I listened to the song so much I knew all the words. Then I listened to it so much that I could sing the strange looping doo-wops that Animal Collective presents as a breakdown (or verse or something I don't know music terms). Then I was found out.

My friend Andrew, one of the dicks, came over and saw the video open on my computer screen from the night before. I tried to exit out before he could bare witness to my horrible horrible habit, but he saw it and recognized the screen shot. I knew I was going to get the come-upance I deserved (to be fair I may have been a little dickish in my punk rock pretentions as well), but to my surprise Andrew held back. Instead he showed me a second song from the same album, For Reverand Green, and it was like seeing Fireworks' hot sister, who was a little bit less of my thing but still a total babe.

From then on I started letting down my walls of music little by little, and realized my friends may have been complete assholes, but they did have some fairly solid tatstes in music. I even learned to love lo-fi noise punk, which makes complete sense in retrospect. So thanks Fireworks, without you i might still be listening to that same Ramones six times every day for the rest of my life.

Delayed Comments

As a lot of my classmates probably just noticed, I retroactively commented on a bunch of their blog posts from earlier in the semester tonight/tomorrow morning. I did this because I was lazy early on. A procrastinator on almost everything possible in my life, I find myself doing things like this a lot. There are good and bad (mostly bad) things about this approach, but it does give me unique perspectives occasionally. This was definitely one of them.

This time I realized that I missed out. This is, as I can attest to from experience, one of the worst realizations after a considerable procrastination. Reading through everyone else's posts, I realized that I had been missing out, not only on some pretty awesome writing and interesting shit, but on a type of community that we definitely couldn't foster solely in the classroom. In the last two hours I learned way more about the people I'd been in class with for the past four months, or whatever it's been, than I had spending three hours a week in class with them.

Though I can go through and read the posts, and comment like there's no tomorrow, I'm not going to get the same thing as I would have if I had read them when they were posted, when i was supposed to. I'm pretty upset at this and it very well may have changed how I deal with class blogs in the future.

I started this year with a plethora of blogs for my classes and found them incredibly cumbersome. I hate the internet for what it's done to school. It hass let me honestly never be free of it, which is kind of an ironic curse since I don't actually have internet where I live. After reading all the blog posts for this class however, I think there is some benefit to having it. It lets us build something we probably couldn't do otherwise and share really interesting things that may or may not have a place in the classroom.

So I'll see if my ways really have been changed but, as for right now, I'm a staunch believer in the worth of this thing.

Abbey Rocks with "Desert Solitaire"

Self-imposed isolation is Edward Abbey’s prescribed method for getting to the potential heart (he himself questions if there is one) of nature. Alone in the vast highland desert of Utah’s Arches National Monument, surrounded by harsh, dry rock and life spread thin, Abbey documents his time as a park ranger. However, this book does not deplore the desert as a wasteland, a biome of outcasts and miscreants, the dangerous wily cousins of more pleasing climates, instead Abbey paints the desert as unique and full, if not packed, of beautiful life and austere landscapes. He does so with an intense sincerity that so often makes the reader feel a little uneasy, perhaps even voyeuristic, as if looking too closely at a man alone with the one thing that truly bestirs his inner being to its fullest. This is quickly forgotten in light of Abbey’s encompassing prose that captures in impressive depth what it’s like to be immersed in the rugged beauty of America’s driest places.

                Abbey, alone in the desert for the majority of two full seasons of park work clearly has the time to, if nothing else, observe, and that he does with a keen eye and crisp, descriptive, but flowing language. “The various forms of chalcedony…are strewn freely over the dismal clay hills along Salt Creek. Here you will find tiny crystals of garnet embedded in a matrix of mica schist—almandite or ‘common garnet’.” Abbey covers everything from in depth biology and botany to geology and astronomy with surprising ease, flowing in and out of technical knowledge with the deftness of a man who knows without question the land on which he lives. It is in these sections that Abbey seems the most at ease. The pages slide together in an easy blend of information and narration, and the peace of mind Abbey must feel, alone in his element, is obvious.

                Between these sections, indeed sometimes bleeding into them, is Abbey’s social theory, his cantankerous, albeit well-founded and thoroughly rational, ideals about nature and America. Abbey’s dogma, his source of inspiration other than nature itself, seems to be that human beings, specifically American capitalists, are endangering what could be called “wilderness” like never before. While these pages are filled with malice and some surprisingly unsettling ideas (Abbey says he would rather kill a man than a snake), they are clear and cutting. Abbey shows nature as it appears to be in America; shrinking, slowly becoming another Disneyland, something kept alive for the sake of tourists in cars. This contrast between Abbey’s absolute love of the desert is powerful and complete, showing both his own character and that of the America of the late 60’s.

                Desert Solitaire is a true testament to nature, and to the uniqueness of finding oneself absolutely alone in it. Abbey weaves his way through the complexities of American culture and the problems of capitalism. What he ends up with is a book about the loneliness of being human, and the solace of forgetting it.  

Review Reviews

                The New York Times review definitely seems more focused on putting the book into a context that fits within its own magazine’s previous reviews and maybe even the author’s specific reviews. It also focused a lot on comparing different aspects of recent nonfiction works (not only the relative merit of authors but also of magazines). However, once that was over and the reviewer had situated the book, the focus seemed to be much more about the content of the book and what the author was actually doing within the page. This was definitely different than most of the NPR review, NPR only gave a hint about the content of the book itself, deciding to focus mostly on praise for the author and the merit of his work in general. The New York Times also spent much more time on the author’s history and how that factored into his work. This could be accounted for by the fact that most people reading a New York Times book review are looking for slightly more description, more of a complete story, than those reading something on NPR or Amazon. This shows the range of each of these reviews. A review on NPR is more like an endorsement most of the times because, in general, NPR only reviews books that they think are worth reading. The New York Times however, (I just read a review of Jonathon Franzen’s Freedom from the Times that definitely proves this) can use the review as a sounding board for more of a general opinion piece about the state of modern writing and how the book actually fits into it. Amazon is different than both of these reviewers in that it is completely based on whether or not the person reading it should buy the book. Also, because other people can decide how “helpful” these reviews are, it is more of a public opinion, rather than individuals who may or may not reflect what is accepted in a larger context.

Dog Parks

I love dogs. They make me really happy and I think, almost without exception, that they're all pretty damn cute. 

EXCEPTION:

I'm honestly sorry for spreading that image, especially since it would be pretty pessimistic to only give you the negative side to dog cuteness SO...

Regardless of cuteness, I do love being around dogs which is why it's weird that I've never been to a dog park before today. However, after going I can honestly say that I will frequent them as much as possible now. Being there was like having all the shit I hate in the world melt out of me and having it replaced solely by giggles. 

Here are the top five things I saw (I was there for 20 minutes and I have more than 5 things I loved!):

1. Feeling like there was something crawling on my toes, then freaking out thinking it was some terrifying and disgusting beetle-type insect, and realizing it was actually a wiener dog licking me.

2. Seeing an adorable little girl hug an adorable puppy that was roughly the same size as her.

3. Turning around and seeing a herd of flat-faced, bug-eyed pugs running at me. I actually coined the term Puggle as describing a group of pugs at that point. 

4. Seeing one of those pugs be so confused by a little girl (same one from #2), that he stood about 8 feet from her and barked and looked around at the rest of his Puggle wondering why no one else was freaking out at this tiny tiny human. 

5. Seeing the dog's owners talking and laughing and basically being nice to complete strangers. 

The only problem is that I don't actually own a dog and (though this may be a specific rule to this dog park) unfortunately you're not allowed in if you don't have one with you.  

 

North Carolina Memoir

Here's a link to the "video" of my memoir. It's actually just an audio story with one picture so I could find a way to get it online.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9VfovBL1uEo&feature=youtu.be

10 Ways Steve Almond Slayed me With Humor in 12 Pages

1.Lies

 First off the title of this post is a lie. I will not be outlining 10 different ways that Steve Almond used humor in his story. I'm hoping the minor comedic value it has will overshadow any disappointment. In fact you;re probably happy it won't be ten sections long, it would be a bit of a stretch to finish that and would make this whole thing arduous to read. 

2. Something Real

 OK so even though this whole list thing may not be completely accurate, in the actual story it does have a fairly significant function. The sections are all pretty much the same in terms of content structure: first he is scared and confused about how he should act, then he acts in what could be a proper or improper manner, then he thinks he kills his baby, then he's somewhat reassured that he hasn't. If the story was one straight block of these instances without a break, it would be way too oppressively similar paragraph after paragraph. By breaking it up, and adding a descriptive title to each section-head, he makes this more episodic and thus funnier because it's easy to see how each one is essentially the same, without him seeing it. I think that's some form of irony, maybe dramatic, is dramatic irony funny? Who am I to judge.

3.Apology

 So I know that itself (point 2) is fairly long and block-like, probably boring too. I'm sorry for deceiving you into thinking that this numbered section thing would be any better than a regular post. 

4. Self-Deprecation

I'm sure Steve Almond is not a completely incompetent person. He does do a pretty good job of making us (as readers (I guess I'm making the assumption that I'm not the only one)) believe that he is somewhat of an idiot, a caring, genuinely terrified, neurotic idiot but still kind of an idiot. This is not only funny, but makes the story much more endearing too. He gets us on his side and lets everyone feel the fear and anxiety he does, grounding the humor in reality so its not just a farce or whatever.

5. Self-Defecation

Another title pun, this one equally as shitty (hahaha) as the first. He puts poop jokes in the story. Everyone likes poop jokes. Simple as that.

6. Not much More

His personal experiences melded well with what seemed like the actual events. He put the brief perspectives of his wife and the nurses to counter him as an unreliable narrator. This way we could see the whole picture in a true lens (from both perspectives).

7. That's it

Only got to 7. Still pretty good though.