Twitter

Tying the blog to my incipient Twitter account, which I guess is kind of like going fully public online. I expect to keep lurking in the shadowed alleys of Facebook avoiders. Even online communities have their margins and outliers.

Twitter: @allistelling

Georgia Tech bathrooms smell refreshingly like Necco wafers sometimes. How?

Ha Ha Tonka cancels solo tour dates after Mar. 3

It's not bad news, except for those of us who will miss them (read: me and some other Atlantans on Mar. 5). According to their manager, the folk-rockers have signed on to play on a different tour that will give them more exposure. More on who you can catch with Ha Ha Tonka as details are released.

Surfer Blood at Criminal Records, Atlanta, Feb. 19

Unfortunately we missed the actual show at the Drunken Unicorn. You can watch video clips below for the following songs (or pieces of songs) at the mini-show inside Criminal Records, Little 5 Points:

Floating Vibes
Swim
Twin Peaks
Take it Easy

Surfer Blood seemed young, fresh, and charmingly unprepared for the kind of attention that the media machine is throwing at them. Their percussionist has the most interesting and developed stage presence, but you can't tell much from a short, free record store show. I will pay attention to their next effort because I still can't get a couple of their guitar hooks out of my head.

You can see clips from other shows I've seen in the past year on my YouTube channel, here.

Surfer Blood washes into Atlanta this Friday

Surfer Blood, from West Palm Beach, FL, is touring behind their debut album Astro Coast, released last month. They will be playing the cozy Drunken Unicorn in Atlanta this Friday, Feb. 19.

Surfer Blood has filled an interesting niche in my music diet for the last couple of weeks. Though they garner comparisons to Weezer or Built to Spill, they scratch the itch left by Ambulance LTD, whose first LP several years ago left me dazed and satisfied for months. They build nicely layered, thick, sound walls and smart concise hooks. They have passed our immediacy test, remaining equally interesting to me and my three children (whose musical tastes are diverse). Check out their single "Swim" here; everyone writing about them calls it anthemic, and I can't disagree. My favorite track, however, is "Floating Vibes" because it's rich in surf punk reverberations. Pitchfork's review of the album is here.

Next week's music post will more than likely about Nneka's "Concrete Jungle," released two weeks ago. With comparisons to Tracy Chapman, Lauryn Hill, and Neneh Cherry, I just could not resist pulling it down from Emusic today. Here is a New York Times review of a recent performance.

Snow in Atlanta . . .

. . . is like a fish that needs a bicycle. Or something.

Doc Chey's opens in Grant Park today!

Peace, love, and noodles for all!

Madeline, Ha Ha Tonka, and some musico-literary analysis on the way

Madeline - WonderRoot, Atlanta - this Sunday, Feb 7

Madeline Adams and the White Flag Band are touring behind a new EP. Madeline herself has several solo albums and has been performing live music since she was 15. She hails from Athens, GA, and builds sweet folk melodies with intimate and sometimes serrated lyrics. I have made vigilant attempts to feminize my music catalog over the last three years. She is ranks in the top three, next to Thao and Kimya Dawson. I am excited to see her this weekend.

Ha Ha Tonka - The Star Bar, Atlanta - March 5

These guys are an eclectic mix I have been digesting and re-chewing for months. I grabbed their first album off of Emusic just because of the cover art, the title (Buckle in the Bible Belt) and 2 of the 30-second track previews. Since then, my oldest son and I have become strong fans. Their newest album, Novel Sounds of the Nouveau South, is richer and more mature than the first. The band's songs are powerfully literary; they construct the rare experience of a unified aesthetic product. As the concert grows closer, I plan to post  short pieces of scholarly reflection on a handful of the newer songs, maybe one per day for a week.

For anyone who needs an introduction, Ha Ha Tonka have live sessions you can listen to on Daytrotter and HearYa. The narrative of their time in the HearYa studio and Woody's excitement about introducing his son to the band struck chords with me.

When you least expect it . . .

. . . the carpet-raptor may strike. Ouch!

At the end of kid-times this week, we have lots of things to remember: roller-hockey gear inauguration, KNEX dinosaur set exploration, Pop-Pop's 4 hour wooden owl project, peer-tutor success, sloppy joes, Astro-Boy, reading together at night, earlier bedtimes, chocolate-covered pretzels, awaiting Doc Chey's openingin the 'hood, and the Avett Brothers (again).

Rise and shine wood-chuck chuckers . . .

. . . put on your booties, 'cause it's cooooold out there.

You want a prediction about the weather? You're asking the wrong Phil. It's going to be cold. It's going to be gray. And it's going to last you for the rest of your life.

Just a quick blog tribute to one of the 3 best comedy movies of all time. Where do you see yourself in five years?

Snow mountain and my dad's rapier wit

Here's what you find at Snow Mountain, all of which is machine-fabricated, for $25/person:

Snow Mountain is really a way for Stone Mountain, Georgia to make money when it's cold. Today, my Dad said, "You know what that is," gesturing to the Stone Mountain carving:

"It's the biggest second place trophy in the world." Sharp, that one.

J.D. Salinger's passing and cultural shadows

J.D. Salinger has passed away, and the New York Times obit is here.

What I have read on Salinger over the years makes him out to sound like a rather ornery person to deal with, raising the issue that art does not necessarily inform character. Of course, the harder someone tries to stay away from public attention sometimes, the more ways culture finds to tell the seediest stories.

Who, other than Salinger, gives English teachers more of an in-class rush than the analytical moment in Catcher when we can break down the meanings of Holden Caulfield's name during the rye field dream sequence? I have done it several times, and, though it's cheap thrills, it always gives me chill bumps.

Here's a quick brainstormed list of figures, actual and fictional, who bear the stamp of Salinger's influence:

Thomas Pynchon - Reclusive novelist
Cormac McCarthy - Nearly reclusive novelist, reforming a bit as of late
Max Fischer - Prep school flunky, hypocrite barometer, and genius in Rushmore
William Forrester - Reclusive fictional novelist  in Finding Forrester

Help me make a more comprehensive list. Who else?

The Lovely Bones . . . review on the way!

AiD 3: Partial Faiths provides more than a partial boost

Adventures in Dissertating, Ep. 3:
In my rodeo-roundup of library books today to fuel the completion of my introductory chapter on (Augustine, Kenneth Burke, sermons in American novels, Greek and Roman rhetoric, and postmodernism) a bunch of stuff, I came across this gem of a book from 2007:

Partial Faiths: Postsecular Fiction in the Age of Pynchon and Morrison, by John A. McClure.

Is it is the most promising academic treatment of some of my subject matter  since The Rites of Identity (which marries the work of Ralph Ellison with the theory of Kenneth Burke). After a cursory and breathless read of the introduction, I am excited about McClure's use of and constant redefinition of postsecularism. Here are some sharp excerpts:

"These novelists [Morrison, Erdrich, and DeLillo, to name a few], whom critics often relegate to separate domains within conemporary fiction, are all thinking in the narrative mode about postsecular movements and possibilities that the theorists and sociologists treat more abstractly. All of them tell stories about new forms of religiously inflected seeing and being. And in each case, the forms of faith they invent, study, and affirm are dramatically partial and open-ended. Tey do not provide, or even aspire to provide, any full "mapping" of the reenchanged cosmos. They do not promise anything like full redemption" (ix).

And . . .
"Certain features are constant across the field of postsecular texts. The partial conversions of postsecular fiction do not deliver those who experience them from worldliness into well-ordered systems of religious belief. Instead, they tend to strand those who experience tem in the ideologically mixed and confusing middle zones of the conventional conversion narrative, zones through which the conventional protagonist passes with all possible haste, on his way to a domain of secure religious dwelling. And yet the postsecular characters depoisted in thse zones do not seem particularly uncomfortable there nor particularly impatient to move on to some more fully elaborated form of belief and practice. In a similar manner, the break with secular versions of the real does not lead the postsecular narrative to the triumphant reapprearce of  well-mapped, familiar, religious cosmos, as it often does in conventional narratives of conversion . . . One does not sense, in spite of the dramatic instability of the worlds thus defined, that either the novelists or their characters are anxious to 'straighten things out.'" (4).

And finally . . .
"I want to sketch out a map of the broader postsecular movements with which [postsecular fiction] is engaged. These movements -- including the explosve growth of fundamentalism and the pneumatic forms of organized religious practice, 'New Age' experiments in alternative spiritualities, and the turn toward religion in certain philosophical circles -- all reflect a strong but selective disenchantment with secular values and modes of being and a determination to invent alternatives. The novelists whose work I explore share this disenchantment and determination: they seek at once to evaluate the culturally dominant modes of postsecular innovation and to develop their own religiously inflected alternatives to secularism. With what specific practical and theoretical projects, then, are contemporary postecular novelists in conversation?" (7).

What projects, indeed. How about a rebuilding of the ethos and formalized structure of the Christian sermon to create newly charged postsecular sermons that continue the tendency of American novels toward the "sermonic urge",  evident in the fiction of Ellison, Updike, Morrison, Erdrich, and McCarthy? Thank you, Mr. McClure.

By the way, you know you're an egg-headed geek when language like this has the effect on you that Indiana Jones did, when you were a kid. Sheesh.

AiD 2.5: Fresh meat for the research machine . . .

. . . but they're so pretty, so maybe I won't eat them.

Music Monday: Hear Ya and Daytrotter are indie radio

I grew up, like most people older than 22 or so, learning about new music by listening to a 20th century device called the radio. Radio in the car, radio at home. They even, at one point, made a radio that you could carry around and listen to in privacy; it was called a Walkman. I remember that in elementary school, Casey Kassem was my guide to what was popular.

Later on, in high school, I wanted to listen to what was important so I went backwards to The Beatles, The Clash, Paul Simon, Bob Marley, The Rolling Stones, and Run DMC. I left the radio behind; now my choices were fueled by word of mouth and album reviews.

In college, I settled on the rubric that I have kept, in various forms, ever since: "what is new and fresh that I can eventually see live?"

The music-blog-cum-studios Hear Ya and Daytrotter have become, if not how I always hear about new music, at least the way that I am introduced to new sounds. I never read blogs before I started a blog. Now I regularly digest bands by listening to the streaming MP3s or downloads these sites offer. If I like it, I buy it, somewhere, because I am still picky and guilty about listening to something more than a couple of times for free. Finally, writers on both Hear Ya and Daytrotter have mentioned the joy of introducing their children to the music they love, a passion that I share.

Hear Ya is a well-styled blog because it is streamlined, has a consistent editorial voice, and demonstrates impeccable taste (mine, by the way, fails on at least two of these accounts). The work of the site is compiled by several writers in different cities and one studio (in Chicago) where bands who have garnered Hear Ya favor are invited to play. The most enjoyable part of keeping with Hear Ya, for me, is that the main writer, Oz, poses interesting questions on the music he's spotlighting. Good music writing can seem like a close cousin of thorough literary criticism with a more populist edge, and Oz's writing in particular achieves this quality. He and Hear Ya have introduced me, in the last six months, to the Avett Brothers, Surfer Blood, and Justin Townes Earle, while supporting already-interests in the Rural Alberta Advantage, Port O'Brien, and Ha Ha Tonka.  Also, Oz just moved to A-town, so we may even bump into each other at a show.

Here is a link to Hear Ya's top 25 albums of last year. It's quite a list.

Daytrotter's site has a more academic and aesthetic feel, though it's also a blog/studio collaboration where musicians are invited to come play songs that are then posted on the site. The band art on Daytrotter is beautifully consistent, florid, and iconic. One day, I want Daytrotter original paintings in my house of my favorite bands. "This is the Daytrotter Room," I will say, nonchalantly, as my guests gawk at the beauty and significance of the images and sounds there collected. Sometimes I enjoy the Kerouac-ian introductions the site gives the bands; sometimes they are a bit wordy. But Daytrotter promises to "contribute to the musical landscape, not just toss it around like a used book or a stolen pick-up line," and I will keep paying attention to the bands it chooses and the music they make there because it's always rich.

Kudos to Daytrotter for engaging, some months back, my open-heared love of Thao and the Get Down Stay Down. Here's a link to her session last year and here's a link to the Rural Alberta Advantage's session.

Twitter, Cicero's advice for Obama, language wars, and Patti Smith's "Augustinian" memoir

Twitter isn't something I take interest in, except to review what massive volumes of people are tweeting about in order to take the pulse of trends and news. I have never received one; I have never sent one.

Today's article in Forbes on political oratory, Obama's Afghanistan speech, and the rhetorical genius of Cicero may be the first piece of writing that ever made me interested in Twitter. Author Trevor Butterworth does not praise Twitter's functionality but suggests that, even in the sound-bytten Twitter-age, we can continue to attend to style, arrangement, and diction. Amen.

Butterworth's pulse rises when he chastises journalist and writing guru William Zinnser's claim that the Latin root words of English are the "bad guys" and the Anglo-Saxon ones are the "good guys." Butterworth writes that "This, to use an apt Latinism, is illiterate," and proceeds to school Zinnser in his folly.

As a sidenote, I have not read Zinnser's piece in its entirety yet, but it looks plenty interesting. You can find it here. How can we not pay attention to people picking fights about language? I am expecting that most writing teachers, or college instructors in general, would be plenty curious to read an article titled "Writing Good English" published in The American Scholar, whether they agreed with it or not.

What gem-like properties we may find in this essai in Forbes on what Cicero may teach us about speeches and tweets . . . 118 characters -- my first (imaginary) tweet. Super.

Also, rock-n-roller Patti Smith's memoir of her young adulthood with artist Robert Mapplethorpe looks delicious, as reviewed on the Barnes & Noble website, here. The book is called Just Kids, and, according to reviewer James Parker, describes "two strange Catholic children, quite un-at-home in the world, treating each other with heroic tenderness, heroic generosity."

Smith was interviewed on Terri Gross's show last night, and her description of Mapplethorpe as a young guy was beautiful. Smith's 46 minute interview on Fresh Air and a fetching picture of her are available here.

Tower Tuesday: The adjunct caste system

 This article, from The Chronicle of Higher Ed, discusses the evolution of the economic and academic tier system inside higher education. One's economic stability (or instability) as an individual, it argues, contributes to whether one has free time and funds to go to conferences that, ultimately, make one a better professor. Adjuncts who are trying to break into full-time faculty positions may be economically prevented from attending conferences, even ones at which they can interview for the faculty jobs they so highly prize, by the fact that their pay is so low.

One of the comments on the article reads this way:
"Looks like we have reached a tipping point, finally. It wasn't too long ago that Mr. Croxall's paper would have been considered career suicide. Admin would have viewed him as a petulant whiner. "Take it or leave it" would be the official response. He would have been ignored or shunned by his peers (other contingent faculty), who had hope still that things would get better, at least for them. The appalling statistics can no longer be ignored. Folks have been silent too long--universities can no longer claim to be forwarding social justice when contributing to increased social injustice for the majority of its faculty."

As someone who has taught as an adjunct and a GTA for the better part of six years, I can attest to the economically abysmal conditions that exist for higher ed teachers who can't break into full-time faculty positions. The systemic answer is: "You chose this for yourself -- with all of that schooling, you could have been a lawyer or a doctor." And that's true.  There is a difference, though, between hitting the top of the economic food chain and finding yourself, in a professional sense, at the bottom.

Admittedly, the increasing difficulty new PhDs are having finding their first job has contributed to my less than rational malaise about completing my dissertation. I don't know whether that's just personal reflection or a trend felt by others.

Adieu, one day, to the Regents' Exam?

The Board of Regents of Georgia's public university system will now allow universities to petition to opt-out of the Regent's Exam. To petition successfully, a university will have to show the BOR it has an alternative measuring standard in place. The Regents' Exam is a reading comprehension and essay test that has been in place in Georgia since 1972 and that most folks at GSU have been wanting to give the boot for years.

Read the formal BOR announcement here.
Read the AJC article here.

When/if it happens at Georgia State, will it be good riddance? Will its erasure create new problems?

Puzzling . . .

. . . why is the coolest thing at the Imagine It Children's Museum this tile pattern on the bathroom floor? A) It's really quiet in there. B) No unchaperoned kids are throwing sand at you. C) All of the above. D) I'm old.

I thought I was taking my kids to the dentist . . .

. . . but the Yanni, the flower arrangement, and the hushed conversation convinced me I'm in a funeral home.

The Black Keys' mutant music; Vampire Weekend and the uncertainty of immediate gratification

This should be a Music Monday, but I missed the mark. Better late this week than delaying another week. Next Monday, I can be more on top of Tune Mountain.

I have slowly digesting all of The Black Keys' albums, but I really like them. I can close my eyes and remember all of the reasons, as a high school student just opening up to new genres, why I loved Robert Cray, B.B. King, and Robert Johnson. Maybe these guys have the same experience. Maybe The Black Keys are a mutant lab generation of Kurt Cobain crossed with John Lee Hooker.

Both Spoon and Vampire Weekend released albums this week, and Spoon's went up as streaming free downloads on NPR's site before the official release. Vampire Weekend did the same thing on its MySpace site. Now, I know that Radiohead kind of lead this online free/pre/release rampage with In Rainbows, and I know that streaming something is different from giving it away, but I am still not sure how I feel about. Here are a few quick thoughts.

As a consumer, I feel like I have too much freedom. Yes, I said too much. I know it's strange. I am thinking of the medival-sounding article I put up several months ago from the former Duran Duran member, lamenting the old days when the release of an album or appearance of a band meant something exclusive, something you really had to get stirred up for. Now, bands I have enjoyed in the past release relatively hyped albums, and I just feel . . . eh. I will get to soon. I will listen to that album for free at some point this week  . . . or next . . . if I like it, maybe I will download it. Maybe I will borrow it from someone else.

Now there are still artists for whom I will stand in line to shell out duckets sight unseen for an album or a show (if the duckets exist). The Decemberists, M. Ward, (recently promoted), The Avett Brothers, Thao, the Rural Alberta Advantage, Mos Def . . . um, David, Byrne, Paul Simon, and Tracy Chapman (yes, I am old). But beyond that, the second tier just stays interesting. Like a set of clothes that can just be changed.

Is there less magical mystery to music that is quickly and freely delivered? If so, does that make me the most underground capitalist ever. Yikes!

All is Telling on the interwebs

Sometimes I feel like I am juggling too many balls with the blog, that I need to scale back because, as a whole it's not that enjoyable. It's too much jigsaw.

Then again, I like jigsaw!

HearYa is a music blog I have been following for several months. Its main editor Oz linked to my review of the Avett Brothers show because he is also a big fan. I should definitely show you his; you can read it here. Honestly, it's a much better review -- more thorough and with more background about the band. Great job, Oz. Here is a link to his discussion of whether the Avetts have become "mainstream" and how feels about it.

DIYFather, to which I sometimes contribute my parenting articles, posted my review of Where the Wild Things Are from two months ago. You can see the review on DIYFather here. Their site is also advertising a new website geared for the single parents called iSingleParent.com. I have not had time yet to check it out, but plan to.

I hope to get back to Music Mondays tomorrow, perhaps with some lines about The Black Keys, who have recently earned my curiosity. I will start (Ivory) Tower Tuesdays with an article from the Chronicle about the abysmal state of affairs for adjunct profs in the humanities.

AiD, Ep. 2; Fr. Mapple, the sermonic urge, and so-called postmodernism

Adventures in Dissertating, Episode 2:

Yesterday and today's writing took me from the Augustine-Kenneth Burke section of my introduction, through a brief introduction to sermons in American fiction and postmodern theory. This week, I am fleshing out the cannonical American fiction sermon section, spending time with Moby Dick, The Sound and the Fury, Huck Finn, and The Scarlet Letter. Please, webpals: feel free to jump in to suggest important novels with sermons that you think I may be missing (prior to 1950, at this point)!

I am working steadily on the right language to describe the boundary-moments I am most interested in: how Augustine drags rhetoric into the Christian sphere; how Christianity transitions from illegal minority sect to the empire's religion . . . and compare them to . . .  how traditional fictional sermons in American novels changed after the (arbitrarily drawn, at this point) 1950 boundary of postmodern thought, and why studying these changes are worth any academic energy at all. They, of course, are important; it's just the justification part that is tricky so far. Maybe mostly because I have not written the example chapters yet to arrive at my conclusion.

The last day of writing has been spirited but different. Yesterday day was thorough, included lots of citation and opening books. Last night/this morning has been machine-gun typing with lots of mental notes, like: I'll look that up later, I know where it is. I think I started to see, for a short time, where I was going more clearly, so I had to get there before the end of the weekend.

AiD 1.5 or Chew small bites thoroughly

Adventures in Dissertating, Ep. 1.5

After my first diss. discussion meeting, some reflections to remember:

1. I can assume that my readers don't know a ton about the history of sermons or their history in American novels. Explain it; don't assume it.

2. Break things into pieces. If my introduction should be 10 pages (on the weird magic formating I use to trick myself), then 3 to Augustine, 3 to Burke, and 3 for American fiction might be useful.

3. If chewing into the introduction does not work right now, pull back and start in on one my novel chapters. If I do this, I would pick McCarthy or Updike.

4. Having a meeting forces a bit more writing.

Completing Augustine and transitioning to Burke, first draft style, in the next day or two.

Music Monday: The Avett Brothers in Atlanta, 1/1/10

The Avett Brothers played Atlanta's Fabulous Fox Theater on Jan 1, and sad I was thinking I would miss it. These guys are a fraternal fusion of bluegrass and punk rock, but I fell for their music too late. Their first Atlanta Fox show sold out quickly and tickets were pricey. But then, we won 15th row tickets. Sweet joy.

Sally Ford and Langhorn Slim opened -- curious and interesting, respectively -- and then the curtain went down. Since we are used to playing beer bottle soccer at the usual venues where we take in shows, this was strange. When it finally went up, the Avett Brothers were chewing into their first tune, pumping their variously-sized stringed instruments, bathed in red. A Decemberists-looking pirate ship backdrop hung behind them.

Both Seth and Scott Avett define an animated on-stage presence that punctuates their folksy roots music. Seth's lanky frame, long hair, and goatee channel a kind of Dave Grohl-ishness and Scott's full-bodied singing appears elastic.

The Avetts' voices were slightly more gravelly than expected, but it WAS New Year's Eve the night before. Their harmonies were still consistently resonant. Scott's masculine twang and Seth's smoother, higher sound complement each other perfectly on their records, and the same vocal chemistry was present live.

The majority of the band's songs came from its last two albums -- last summer's I and Love and You and 2007's Emotionalism. You forget, listening to the Avett's toe-tapping, pretty tunes that they have the power to explode live. Particularly "A Caroline Jubilee" and "Kick Drum Heart."

However, the brothers' best songwriting happens on songs that are neither foot stompers or slow ballads. Songs like "Shame," "A Perfect Space," and "January Wedding" were delivered beautifully and simply with strong crowd participation. Another emotionally beautiful song, "If I Get Murdered in the City" silenced the entire theater with its evocative final verse, and prompted riotous applause at its conclusion.

Sometimes the show wasn't terribly precise, with tunings and organized crowd-sing-alongs sometimes dragging on a bit long. The delivery of "I and Love and You" was cliched, though it's a satisfyingly complex song. But the Avetts are amazing songwriters, singers, and multi-instrumentalists, and they put on an exhilarating show. Seth told the crowd, close to the concert's close, that he expected to see "each and every" one of us at every Avett show this year. I can think of worse ways to spend 2010.

Adventures in dissertating: a skeleton, St. Augustine, and intersections

First, a welcome back to you (or to me). As the snow globe flurries have settled from Christmas and New Year's, I dug my plow into some dissertation writing this week. I drew lots of diagrams on a paper napkin on Jan. 1 in a revised explanation of my topic. The napkin has operated as a mental outline over the last couple of days as I have planned out the composition of my first chapter. So, welcome to one of the first posts from the dissertation adventure trail of 2010 . . .

In building a lens through which to examine the uses of sermons in American fiction, we must pay attention to several things: ancient rhetoric, the history of the Christian sermon, the development of the sermon in the U.S., the use of sermons in canonical American literature, and, finally, what those sermons have looked like since 1950. This serves as a rough chronological "skeletal" system for a study of post-1950 sermons in novels.

The theoretical system requires attention to cultural, historical, and linguistic boundaries and the motivations and results for crossing these boundaries. Boundaries to consider are between ancient pagan societies and early Christian ones; between 19th century Christian culture in the U.S. and 20th century secular, academic culture; between modernist American novels and so-called postmodernist American novels; between Cicero and Augustine; between Huck Finn and Invisible Man; between critical theory and theology.

Last tidbits from today: Augustine is my focus; reminded of the importance of Giles Gunn and Adolf von Harnack; new word today . . . hierophant.