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.