Sometimes I read with music, especially if I'm reading in a public place, like a train, a coffee shop, or in the gym. Most of the time the music has to be all instrumental or the lyrics have to be in a language I don't know. However, with certain pop music, I've listened to it so much that it ceases to be a distraction and becomes like a sound blanket that keeps more distracting noise at bay. While most of the time, the music fades into the background, now and then there's a moment when a lyric surfaces in my consciousness in a synchronicity with what I'm reading. This will make the music into a kind of commentary on the book, at least in my brain's private meaning system. I started sharing these little moments on Facebook about two years ago. One of my friends has always enjoyed them and suggested that I pull them together somewhere. So here we go. Part one.
This first post is kind of a cheat. The quote from Jameson and the comment on music were not originally in the same post, but for the uninitiated, it helps to give an actual quote from Jameson to see why this reading/listening mix struck me.
From October, 2013...
Like a meal that goes better with a good wine, sometimes a good book needs to be paired with music, especially if you tend to read in a loud public place. I've found recently that Fred Jameson's Archaeologies of the Future is enhanced by listening to Animal Collective's Centipede Hz & Merriweather Post Pavilion.
"The more successful the historiographic construction - the conviction that everything is of a piece...the stronger this case is made intellectually, the more inevitable is our entry into a Parmenidean realm in which some eternal system reigns around us like a noon beyond time only faintly perfumed with the odor of heated plants and informed by the echo of cicadas and the distant an incomprehensible memory of death" ...Fred Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future
From January 2014:
Monday morning re-reading....getting ready to teach the 2nd half of Ruthie Wilson Gilmore's Golden Gulag tomorrow night. I've asked students to bring in pop culture sources related to issues covered in the readings each week and do presentations about their connections (and disconnections) from what they read. Hmm...no students volunteered this week. What if I go first and bring this one in?
Saturday afternoon reading..a surprise synchronicity. Just as I read from excerpt of 1932 German anarchist pamphlet : "Calling the police against National Socialist terror misses the mark, because the police force is riddled itself with swastika bearers," Killer Mike's "DDFH" rolled out of the speaker with that first line "Cops in the Ghetto they move like the Gestapo".
February 2014:
another unexpected reading/music synchronicity. While reading Steve Macek's chapter from his excellent book, Urban Nightmares on how television news represents urban "pathology" to "Middle-American" suburban audiences, I hear Arcade Fire wonder, "Is anyone as cruel as a normal person?"
Later that month....
I can't post any surprising musical/reading juxtaposition today because I don't believe that any music really captures the experience of reading a set of departmental by-laws for the 15th time or so in an effort to imagine every possible abuse of power that might be inadvertently enabled. Perhaps I spoke too soon. The Fleet Foxes just said "Ah...."
March 2014:
honest, totally random. Wilhelm Reich gives a whole new level of political significance to this song (Sat reading/music coincidences):
Music/Theory pairing : Willhelm Reich "What is Class Consciousness?" On the revolutionary/reactionary potential of youth's desire for dancehalls & Kurt Vile "Too Hard" : i will promise to do my very best for my God and My country...i'm only human...I will promise not to party ....too hard.
April 2014:
Saturday morning reading/ music coincidence. I was reading a description of memorial for teenagers who died of drug overdoses or were murdered in South Boston in Michael Patrick McDonald's All Souls when Michael Stipe's voice came from the cafe speakers singing "Everybody Hurts". Tell me about it. <Tears.>
May 2014:
Accidental Pop music + Cultural Studies reading part whatever. Kaganovsky, "Maidenform: Masculinity as Masquerade" in Mad Men, Mad World: "we watch Betty, Joan and Peggy get ready for their day....Betty and Joan both dress in front of the mirror, focusing our attention not only on their double enframing but also on their relationship to the spectacular image. Each in her own way, Betty and Joan perform ideal femininity for the gaze of the other, and their relationship to their image is mediated through the mirror, in which like Jacques Lacan's infans (or infanta) they see an ideal I reflected back at them." Soundtrack: Arcade Fire, Reflektor. chorus: Just a reflection, of a reflection Of a reflection, of a reflection, of a reflection Will I see you on the other side? (Just a reflektor) We all got things to hide (Just a reflektor)
Foals, "Providence" first heard yesterday at Shaky Knees music festival, goes perfectly with all that Animal Studies reading I'm catching up in preparation for next year's American Studies scholarship class.
later that month:
Ian Kershaw's biography of Hitler is really well accompanied by the collection "Greatest Songs of the American Yiddish Theater". Guess who's still here? HA! ( I couldn't find a video version, but here is a good live performance of a Yiddish theatrical song)
June 2014
Saturday morning reading and listening....vacation! Donna Tartt's The Goldfinch with its NYC high culture landscape - film forum, crooked art thieves and antiques dealers, private school dope addicts,etc. + this
and back to work with
Saturday afternoon reading and soundtrack. Erich Fromm,Escape From Freedom and the song "Weak and the Strong" with apologies to any fans of Kidd Kidd, the lyric fits: "All the weak shall perish/And may the strong go hard"
Reading the news about the World Cup in Brazil with
October 2014:
Sunday afternoon reading and music: Lucinda Williams sings "you can talk all the trash you want/ I know the truth even if you don't" accompanying Avery Gordon's comments about Sabina Spielrein and psychoanalytic transference.from Ghostly Matters
November 2014:
music/reading synchronicity late edition. : On an elliptical machine in a hotel gym a couple of weeks ago, I was reading Wharton's The House of Mirth, that section when Lily Bart shows up at her friend Gerty's apartment late at night. There was Karen O in my ear singing ." You're a zero/ what's your name? No one's gonna ask you/ better find out where they want you go to go/ try to hit the spot/ get to know it in the dark/ get to know Whether you're crying, crying, crying - oh! / Can you climb, climb, climb.... higher?"
December 2014: (This one's no accident)
Maria Damon....Thursday morning reading and listening,"Imp/penetrable Archive" in your Postliterary America , and this photo-montage to out-takes and final recording of "Be My Baby" with possible best line "Shut Up It's Christmas"
and, Maria Damon second note, because it's the one you said readers needed to listen to, "River Deep, Mountain High" with your line "The Wall of Sound is an instance of diasporic excess, an instance in which the creator cannot bear to leave anything out, cannot let anything that has ever happened be lost for history, which in this case is acknowledged through the sonorous temporality that is part cacophany, part melodious unification of effect..."
Later than month..
I don't know who, but I think someone can make a connection between Jose David Saldivar's Trans-Americanity and the Beatles' "Magical Mystery Tour",
Comments:
well, now the "The Fool on the Hill" takes an oppositional position to western rationality.
just as I'm reading about the "displaced situation of the writer in the capitalist city" George Harrison is lamenting the fact that his friends have "lost their way"...
I think that "I am the Walrus" has many heretofore unheeded connections with theoretical works that attempt to complicate the way we understand the modern subject. ( I am he as you are he as you are me and we are all together)
I can't tell if this is the Beatles according to Donna Haraway, Donna Haraway according to the Beatles. Either way: I love it.
I don't know about Haraway, but perhaps Saldivar will see the connetion I am finding between a couple of sentences on the "contradictory implications" of "uneven development" (34-35) and "Hello, Goodbye"
See also Carol Gilligan's monograph on Your Mother's Ways of Knowing.
While not a Beatles fan (I know, I know), this is my fave critical theory book inspired by/about them , by the great historical of German fascism...turns out it's all about birth order (it's the book Object Choice by Klaus Theleweit.)
Dec. 25th. still reading Jose David Saldivar, and inspired to celebrate Xmas morning with El Vez and Thee Midniters.
Dec. 31, 2014
End of the year reading and listening. Ethan Blue, Doing Time in the Depression and Ace Johnson "Rabbit in the Garden"
This first post is kind of a cheat. The quote from Jameson and the comment on music were not originally in the same post, but for the uninitiated, it helps to give an actual quote from Jameson to see why this reading/listening mix struck me.
From October, 2013...
Like a meal that goes better with a good wine, sometimes a good book needs to be paired with music, especially if you tend to read in a loud public place. I've found recently that Fred Jameson's Archaeologies of the Future is enhanced by listening to Animal Collective's Centipede Hz & Merriweather Post Pavilion.
"The more successful the historiographic construction - the conviction that everything is of a piece...the stronger this case is made intellectually, the more inevitable is our entry into a Parmenidean realm in which some eternal system reigns around us like a noon beyond time only faintly perfumed with the odor of heated plants and informed by the echo of cicadas and the distant an incomprehensible memory of death" ...Fred Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future
From January 2014:
Monday morning re-reading....getting ready to teach the 2nd half of Ruthie Wilson Gilmore's Golden Gulag tomorrow night. I've asked students to bring in pop culture sources related to issues covered in the readings each week and do presentations about their connections (and disconnections) from what they read. Hmm...no students volunteered this week. What if I go first and bring this one in?
Saturday afternoon reading..a surprise synchronicity. Just as I read from excerpt of 1932 German anarchist pamphlet : "Calling the police against National Socialist terror misses the mark, because the police force is riddled itself with swastika bearers," Killer Mike's "DDFH" rolled out of the speaker with that first line "Cops in the Ghetto they move like the Gestapo".
February 2014:
another unexpected reading/music synchronicity. While reading Steve Macek's chapter from his excellent book, Urban Nightmares on how television news represents urban "pathology" to "Middle-American" suburban audiences, I hear Arcade Fire wonder, "Is anyone as cruel as a normal person?"
Later that month....
I can't post any surprising musical/reading juxtaposition today because I don't believe that any music really captures the experience of reading a set of departmental by-laws for the 15th time or so in an effort to imagine every possible abuse of power that might be inadvertently enabled. Perhaps I spoke too soon. The Fleet Foxes just said "Ah...."
March 2014:
honest, totally random. Wilhelm Reich gives a whole new level of political significance to this song (Sat reading/music coincidences):
Music/Theory pairing : Willhelm Reich "What is Class Consciousness?" On the revolutionary/reactionary potential of youth's desire for dancehalls & Kurt Vile "Too Hard" : i will promise to do my very best for my God and My country...i'm only human...I will promise not to party ....too hard.
April 2014:
Saturday morning reading/ music coincidence. I was reading a description of memorial for teenagers who died of drug overdoses or were murdered in South Boston in Michael Patrick McDonald's All Souls when Michael Stipe's voice came from the cafe speakers singing "Everybody Hurts". Tell me about it. <Tears.>
May 2014:
Accidental Pop music + Cultural Studies reading part whatever. Kaganovsky, "Maidenform: Masculinity as Masquerade" in Mad Men, Mad World: "we watch Betty, Joan and Peggy get ready for their day....Betty and Joan both dress in front of the mirror, focusing our attention not only on their double enframing but also on their relationship to the spectacular image. Each in her own way, Betty and Joan perform ideal femininity for the gaze of the other, and their relationship to their image is mediated through the mirror, in which like Jacques Lacan's infans (or infanta) they see an ideal I reflected back at them." Soundtrack: Arcade Fire, Reflektor. chorus: Just a reflection, of a reflection Of a reflection, of a reflection, of a reflection Will I see you on the other side? (Just a reflektor) We all got things to hide (Just a reflektor)
Foals, "Providence" first heard yesterday at Shaky Knees music festival, goes perfectly with all that Animal Studies reading I'm catching up in preparation for next year's American Studies scholarship class.
later that month:
Ian Kershaw's biography of Hitler is really well accompanied by the collection "Greatest Songs of the American Yiddish Theater". Guess who's still here? HA! ( I couldn't find a video version, but here is a good live performance of a Yiddish theatrical song)
June 2014
Saturday morning reading and listening....vacation! Donna Tartt's The Goldfinch with its NYC high culture landscape - film forum, crooked art thieves and antiques dealers, private school dope addicts,etc. + this
Saturday afternoon reading and soundtrack. Erich Fromm,Escape From Freedom and the song "Weak and the Strong" with apologies to any fans of Kidd Kidd, the lyric fits: "All the weak shall perish/And may the strong go hard"
Reading the news about the World Cup in Brazil with
October 2014:
Sunday afternoon reading and music: Lucinda Williams sings "you can talk all the trash you want/ I know the truth even if you don't" accompanying Avery Gordon's comments about Sabina Spielrein and psychoanalytic transference.from Ghostly Matters
music/reading synchronicity late edition. : On an elliptical machine in a hotel gym a couple of weeks ago, I was reading Wharton's The House of Mirth, that section when Lily Bart shows up at her friend Gerty's apartment late at night. There was Karen O in my ear singing ." You're a zero/ what's your name? No one's gonna ask you/ better find out where they want you go to go/ try to hit the spot/ get to know it in the dark/ get to know Whether you're crying, crying, crying - oh! / Can you climb, climb, climb.... higher?"
December 2014: (This one's no accident)
Later than month..
I don't know who, but I think someone can make a connection between Jose David Saldivar's Trans-Americanity and the Beatles' "Magical Mystery Tour",
Comments:
well, now the "The Fool on the Hill" takes an oppositional position to western rationality.
just as I'm reading about the "displaced situation of the writer in the capitalist city" George Harrison is lamenting the fact that his friends have "lost their way"...
I think that "I am the Walrus" has many heretofore unheeded connections with theoretical works that attempt to complicate the way we understand the modern subject. ( I am he as you are he as you are me and we are all together)
I can't tell if this is the Beatles according to Donna Haraway, Donna Haraway according to the Beatles. Either way: I love it.
I don't know about Haraway, but perhaps Saldivar will see the connetion I am finding between a couple of sentences on the "contradictory implications" of "uneven development" (34-35) and "Hello, Goodbye"
See also Carol Gilligan's monograph on Your Mother's Ways of Knowing.
While not a Beatles fan (I know, I know), this is my fave critical theory book inspired by/about them , by the great historical of German fascism...turns out it's all about birth order (it's the book Object Choice by Klaus Theleweit.)
Dec. 31, 2014
End of the year reading and listening. Ethan Blue, Doing Time in the Depression and Ace Johnson "Rabbit in the Garden"
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