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I am sort of annoyed that this book wasted such a good premise.

Archeologists discover a strange jade-like rock, and it gives off weird radiation, and some folks die. The government hushes it up and takes the rock off to secretly study it in a facility in rural-ish Michigan. One night, the facility where the thing is being studied explodes with light, and the facility, including the nearby town as well as everything else within a sizable but not too sizable radius, has disappeared and been replaced by old growth forest. Of course, we follow the town/facility to wherever it went, which is another world? Dimension? Anyway, it's another earth, whose history is quite a bit different from ours. North America is under a the rule of some sort of Theocratic rule, that government is at war with Spain, and the appearance of this town is a challenge to the government's religious outlook.

WHAT A PREMISE!

And there are moments that attend to interesting details. The town isn't swapped with another town, so it lacks power for some time. It's far away from cities/settlements, and so it takes some time for them to even make contact with locals. But Wilson doesn't wind up doing *doing* anything with this stuff. Characters speculate on what the historical point of divergence is, and idly guess about what major events did or didn't happen in this new universe, but nothing really comes of it. We don't really see the protagonists use their (somewhat superior) technological knowledge much (nor do we see them hampered much by not knowing how the technology they rely on works). We fast forward past some of the more interesting parts of the plot so that we can get to the "action movie heroics" parts of the story.

Can you imagine how good the world-building could have been in a book with this premise? Characters decide to emigrate from this town and try to integrate into this new world, and we don't get any real insight into their mindset or discussion about them other than that they hadn't been from that town and had simply been visiting when the town got ripped into the new world, so they didn't have friends and family in the town. I don't know about any of you, but if I was visiting Peoria, and it got zapped to Percei Omicron VIII, maybe I would decide to stick around Peoria, maybe i would decide to go explore the alien world, but I think there would be a lot to explore in why I made that decision beyond "well, he's not from Peoria." Are they planning to convert? Are they good at following orders from the (brutal) enforcers of Church Law in this government? Do they speak French?

Anyway, I wound up reading this book because after I finished The Last Astronaut, Kobo sent me an email with books I might like, and, in fairness to Kobo, the synopsis was a rock solid recommendation for me. But I think I gave the book a generous 2.5 stars.

Today's song: Quetzalcoatl Comes Through

Watch on YouTube

I listened to the wrong version for a while (it wasn't bad), I've written before about how Darnielle is a Christian musician, and he is, for sure, but just as he is fascinated with Classical Antiquity, and loves to sing about Roman and Greek mythology, he has other fascinations (a lot of them are just being a huge history fan in general, which comes through with this song being inspired by a book about Aztec history that he was reading, but later we'll see that his enthusiasm for regional pro-wrestling or Magic: The Gathering also get their share of space in his corpus). Anyway, I think part of the appeal he brings is just his general enthusiasm. Darnielle has genuine passion for things that comes across vividly. The other part is that he brings a perspective. Whether it is the tragedy of the alpha couple's eternally traumatically dissolving yet somehow fixed orbiting of each other, or that riff on Auden's take on Bruegel's Icarus, the wedding of his enthusiasm for whatever he turns his attention to and the point he wants to get across about it is really the heart of why the songs resonate with so many people.

This is one of the better tracks we've hit so far, I think.

Current Music: Quetzalcoatl Comes Through — The Mountain Goats

Today's Song: "Thanks for the Dress"

Watch on YouTube

The first version I loaded up on youtube had weird sound artifacts at the start, but then I found a different version, which also had them, and I guess that's just how it is supposed to be. The annotations describe how it is inspired by and drawn from the Euripedes play Medea, and how Darnielle can't really get back into the mindset he had when he wrote it. I'm sure there is a lot to say about it as a piece of musical experimentation, but it just really isn't for me.

Current Music: Thanks For The Dress — The Mountain Goats

Today’s song is Going to Japan.

Watch on YouTube

It’s a catchy number with a twangier guitar than I am used to on mountain goats songs. I like how it speeds up as it goes. I like how it feels very mountain goats but also has a distinctive vibe. It really feels like this track combines a lot of the things Darnielle talked about in the last 18 days of discussing his songwriting.

Current Music: Going to Japan — The Mountain Goats

Today's song is Billy The Kid's Dream Of The Magic Shoes

Watch on YouTube

In some of the earlier annotations, Darnielle talked about his early reluctance to print lyrics on album sleeves. The annotations for this song are really about that reluctance, and his (continued?) conflict about whether lyrics live in the performance or whether they can be written down. There is a bit in Plato's Phaedrus that examines similar themes about rhetoric and writing, but I think a lot of it is mooted by the extensive work done by his fan-base to document things irrespective of what has been written on album sleeves.

More interesting is the way the title of the song provides necessary context for the song. This was, in some ways, also true for "Song for Cleomenes", and not especially true for "The Last Day of Jimi Hendrix's Life". The former has no internal explicit reference to Cleomenes, but you can sort of figure out who he is in the song if you know a bit about the history (or look it up), and the latter just includes the title entirely in the song. This song, however, is contextualized by the title. If you don't know have the information that it is about Billy the Kid, it's just not the same song. I haven't really reflected on how common this is a theme for his songs in general, but I guess I'll be keeping an eye out moving forward.

This is a nice simple song, but it does feel like we are starting to hear some of the Mountain Goats I am more familiar with, which is nice.

Current Music: Billy The Kid's Dream of The Magic Shoes - The Mountain Goats

I wanted more books about people exploring dangerous and mysterious alien spaceships! And I found some! This one was well written, and an engaging read, but I did wind up feeling like it answered too many questions and wrapped things up too neatly for good cosmic horror. I want them to end with me having some degree of feeling unsettled and pondering things.

This has more explicit gore/body-horror than Ship of Fools did, in case anyone is seeking/avoiding such things.

i would give this 4 stars

Today's song: Fresh Cherries in Trinidad

Watch on YouTube

I did not enjoy listening to this song! I think maybe a version without the ding ding ding duh duh duh ding ding of the casio keyboard would be good, but I was not a fan of this version.

The titular Trinidad turns out to be a town in California.

Current Music: Fresh Cherries in Trinidad — The Mountain Goats

Today we have Song for Mark and Joel:

Watch on YouTube

The annotations on this song are, or at least feel, a bit inside baseball. That's not, like, inappropriate. They explain how this song's chord structure is based on something the titular Mark and Joel do in one of their songs (Fortune Came Today) for their band Wckr Spgt, and so he used the chorus ("trouble came by") and the title to allude to Wckr Spgt. But it's written more for people who are in the know than for those who are not. In the last annotation, Darnielle talked about how he liked that song because the narrator "withholds more than he shares", and so, I guess it is fitting that this annotation tells us some very specific details about the origin of this song, and him relating the homage to Mark and Joel, while hinting at all the stories not being told.

I did also listen to that Wckr Spgt song. Wckr Spgt is not for me. One thing I do find interesting is the music that John Darnielle likes that I don't. Darnielle is a big fan of metal, and that has not really been my genre. He wrote a book of epistolary novel music criticism about Black Sabbath, and he was a guest expert on Judge John Hodgman's podcast one time for a dispute about heavy metal. (Nothing against metal! My ~~girlfriend~~ fiancée is a big metal fan. I'm sure there is metal I would like, to be honest, but it feels like it is in the "few and far between" category, rather than the "pop on any old playlist".)

Anyway, I'm not sure how much of my awareness of this is related to just the sheer breadth of the musical styles that Darnielle appreciates (I can't actually imagine a general category of music he would shut down carte blanche), but I don't think it is just that, because he has strong identification with his roots in metal fandom, or his Wckr Spgt (dadaist punk?) influences/time-in-that-band. And I am not sure what to make of the fact that he mostly doesn't make music like that when he is making music, even though that's the music he has such fondness for.

Current Music: Song for Mark and Joel — The Mountain Goats

The song for today is Going to Norwalk:

Watch on YouTube

There was a period shortly after I got into the Mountain Goats when I basically didn't listen to anything else (I don't have too much to say about this song in particular or about the annotations today, so I guess I am just going to tell a story about me and my journey with the Mountain Goats, instead).

And during this period, I was hanging out with my brother, which is not super usual, because after college he and I have never lived particularly close to each other, so we see each other at holidays or for particular visits. He must have been visiting me, because I wouldn't have been in charge of the music when visiting him. Anyway, he was not enthused with my constant choice of Mountain Goats as the soundtrack in the car, and even though he had really not heard that much of it, he had an uncanny knack for imitating the cadence of Darnielle's singing, and for making up lyrics that were 100% not Darnielle-esque lyrics but which were annoyingly near enough to be very good "dismissive joke version of Darnielle lyrics."*

Anyway, this song reminded me of the time my brother did that so many times in one visit that I was like "ok fine, we can listen to something else, but that's not what this sounds like" and he said "Lew" (he is one of three people who calls me Lew), "that is exactly what it sounds like."

*To simulate this effect, you basically have to imagine someone talking about random things from their day, mixed with a sort of pastiche impression of Bob Dylan patter from Subterranean Homesick Blues, but, and I have to stress this, being very good at doing it on the fly.

Current Music: Going to Norwalk — The Mountain Goats

Today's song is "The Last Day of Jimi Hendrix's Life"

Watch on YouTube

A few days ago, I stopped putting the names of the individual songs for each day in the tags for the posts, because I remembered

ambyr mentioning there is an upper bound on how many tags dreamwidth will let you have, and I wasn't sure I wanted to use up 365 of them on individual Mountain Goats songs.

a painting, by brueghel, of icarus having fallen into the ocean, with a ploughman, a shephard and some others seemingly ignoring his plight. the shephard is gazing up at the sky.

Brueghel's Landscape with the Fall of Icarus

The annotations on this piece include a reproduction of text of Auden's poem "Museé de Beaux Arts", and Darnielle's reflections on how his song is a response to that poem. I'm fairly sure I've encountered the poem before, but I didn't really remember much about it. It's worth reading—that's the opposite of a hot take, to be sure—but in the context of this song, in particular.

They never forgot

That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course

Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot

Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse

Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.

The "they" here is the old masters, who Auden is praising for recognizing that intense suffering (or ecstasy) happens alongside the everyday goings-on of the rest of the world. Did I quote this passage because it says "dogs go on with their doggy life"? Yes. Of course I did. Darnielle's song removes the comparison between subjects (Icarus's suffering vs. the normalcy of the ploughman's day) to juxtapose the same contrast within a single subject. The elements of Jimi Hendrix's last day (in the song) are unremarkable: a hot shower a cold glass of water. This is contrasted with the unstated tragedy of his death.*

Okay, so, moving song, interesting reflections on where it came from. The annotation also mentions his father, which is somewhat rare to see him talk about (compared to his very frequent and unpleasant memories of his stepfather).

Apart from what I've just discussed above, I found myself thinking a lot about the album "Transcendental Youth" (which, push come to shove, is probably my favorite Mountain Goats album). Here's John Darnielle performing a track from that album, talking about and singing "Harlem Roulette" off of Transcendental Youth, and if you watch this video, you'll see why the connection lit up in my brain:

Watch on YouTube

*There is a word that is not the word "synoptic" and not the word "enthymeme" but is in the neighborhood of one of those, for the literary device of not talking about/describing the details of his death in order to make it a focal point of comparison, but I spent about 10 minutes trying to remember the word I was looking for and I cannot, and it is going to drive me nuts.

Current Music: The Last Day of Jimi Hendrix's Life — The Mountain Goats

Today we have Song for Cleomenes

Watch on YouTube

This song sort of illustrates what I meant when I said that the minimalism and talking-then-singing can come together for a good effect. Were I doing this in like weekly batches instead of daily, I would have just compared these two tracks directly, instead of saying some stuff about how it didn't work so well two days ago, gesturing at sort of very different things going on in Tom Waits and Bright Eyes, and then, two days later, pointing to this as an example of what I meant. And it's off the same EP as the other one, so it isn't some later evolution; it's just a hit, rather than a miss.

The other thing that is going on here is appreciating Darnielle's fascination with Classics. The annotations mention that he wrote this while taking classes in English and Classical Studies, and apart from autobiographical themes, faith and travel, I think his affection for history and classics is probably one of the other things that comes through most clearly in his work.

Two other brief reflections at this juncture: 1) I find it increasingly odd that Darnielle suggested the book could be tackled in any order. It is, so far, very much a chronological memoir of the development of the writing style and approach to the Mountain Goats, and while the entries don't explicitly reference each other, the material is clearly building up over time. 2) Every time I load up a youtube video to listen to the song for that day, the comments have people referencing the "book club" of all the folks who are likewise going through the book day by day and reading each entry as prescribed by the dates associated in the book, but none of them are really discussing the book or its contents with each other (even if their comments do engage with material from the book). They are not really a book club in the sense of conversing about the book, even if there is a "club" relating to the book that they could all be said to belong to.

Current Music: Song for Cleomenes — The Mountain Goats

The song for today is "New Star Song"

Watch on YouTube

I don't think I have much to say about this song or the annotation, today. It's a pleasant enough song, and the annotation mentions the song is largely autobiographical about a short trip Darnielle took to go visit some friends (but "the freezing person up in Canada is an invention"). I think in order for me to keep up the year long marathon of posting, I need to allow myself days where I just say "yeah, this is a fine song, and that was an nice brief story about it's origins" so that I don't find myself resentful/avoidant of the task I've given myself.

Current Music: New Star Song — The Mountain Goats

Today's song is Seeing Daylight

Watch on YouTube

Sometimes Darnielle is able to make this sort of minimalism work for him. And you can see why, even with a track like this where, frankly, it doesn't come together. The chorus has a haunting beauty to it, when he switches from what sounds more like spoken word poetry into something that more resembles a song, and the repetition in the last few lines: before the final chorus:

And your voice on the other end
And the impossibility of your voice on the other end
And the impossible echo inside

That bit right there starts to bring more, lyrically, than when it was just prosaic observations about an ordinary afternoon.

As the song started, I almost hoped we were going to get a soup recipe, in the form of a song, but it transitioned away from the soup. Anyway, this song doesn't quite work for me, but it's not unpleasant or anything. What I am reminded of in two different directions are "What's He Building?" by Tom Waits, which is my core association for the gravelly voiced spoken-rather-than-sung minimalist piece, and, though I am less clear on why listening to this track put me in mind of it, "Don't Know When But a Day is Gonna Come" by Bright Eyes. I think maybe because it is also somewhat minimalist but manages to build in a way that helps it come together quite successfully (it actually boils in a way that this Mountain Goats song doesn't).

Current Music: Seeing Daylight — The Mountain Goats

In one of the anthologies we read for the book club, there was a story that came from a shared fantasy world (if I understood correctly, multiple writers wrote stories in the same setting).

I find lots of different versions of collaborative creative projects interesting, and having a shared setting that lots of people are free to write in is no exception. The idea I've been turning over in my head is a sort of two-stage process where stage one is for a small group of folks to collaboratively do some structured world-building on a discord server.

For example, if it is a sci fi world, with multiple alien races, each person is figuring out some stuff about one species of alien and how things went for them at some major interstellar summit in the setting's history, etc. Something less rule-driven than an RPG but with a bit of structure to it. And then after some history and major figures and what not of this setting are set down, we write up some stuff that reflects the "core" of the world/setting and lay that out, and then stage two is for people (the same people or new people) to write stories set in this world (probably later than the events that were established, but who knows).

This is the current state of development of this idea, and I basically am wondering if anyone has suggestions/advice/desire to participate in something this.

January 9th's song is Solomon Revisited Revisited (a song whose title was apparently wrong on the tape sleeve, per the annotations, and thus also on the youtube video):

Watch on YouTube

The annotations for this song include a poem by a polish poet (Miron Białoszewski) which Darnielle explains as informing the poetics of Mountain Goats writing. This song really dovetails perfectly with him relating the influence of this poem, which I will reproduce here (Darnielle includes the full text, but I found it online here):

And Even, Even If They Take My Stove Away…

My Inexhaustible Ode to Joy

I have a stove
similar to a triumphal arch!

They take away my stove
similar to a triumphal arch!!

Give me back my stove
similar to a triumphal arch!!!

They took it away.
What remains is

a grey
naked
hole.

And this is enough for me;
grey naked hole
grey naked hole.
greynakedhole.

I don't know that too much needs to be said, listening to even just this one song, and looking at this poem, you can see how there was clear influence.

The other thing that is striking about this song is the thematic element of music as refuge. Two different tracks on Sunset Tree have this as an explicit element:

Dance Music
alright I'm on johnson avenue in san luis obispo
and I'm five years old or six maybe.
and indications there's something wrong with our new house
trip down the wire twice daily
I'm in the living room watching the watergate hearings
while my step father yells at my mother.
launches a glass across the room, straight at her head
and I dash upstairs to take cover.
lean in close to my little record player on the floor.
so this is what the volume knob's for.

I listen to dance music.
dance music

[song continues]

Hast Thou Considered The Tetrapod

you are sleeping off your demons
when I come home.
spittle bubbling on your lips,
fine white foam

I am young and I am good.
it's a hot southern california day.
if I wake you up, there will be hell to pay.

and alone in my room,
I am the last of a lost civilization.
and I vanish into the dark
and rise above my station. rise above my station.

but I do wake you up, and when I do
you blaze down the hall and you scream.
I'm in my room with the headphones on
deep in the dream chamber.
and then I'm awake and I'm guarding my face,
hoping you don't break my stereo.
because it's the one thing that I couldn't live without
and so I think about that and then I sorta black out.

held under these smothering waves
by your strong and thick veined hand,
but one of these days I'm going to wriggle up on dry land.

I am sure if I went through I could find less explicit references as well (or other equally clear references that aren't just the first two that jump to my head). Best Ever Death Metal Band Out of Denton, for example, also falls under this thematic umbrella (I'll stop reproducing lyrics here, but you get the idea). So, this song (which is perfectly good as far as this stretch of early Goats goes), is both structurally and thematically, a sort of interesting keystone sort of piece.

Current Music: Solomon Revisited Revisited — The Mountain Goats

I picked this up after reading Rosewater, and I think I’m in a position to say that I generally expect I will like Tade Thompson’s writing, but that Rosewater was more my thing than Far From the Light of Heaven wound up being.

The characters got slightly shorter shrift here, and there was less conveyance of the world-building than I would have liked (I suspect that the world is thoroughly built, from Thompson’s end, I just wanted to have better breadcrumbs of, say, what the lambers were, and the intergalactic politics, etc.). The story is simultaneously trying to be a locked room mystery on this space ship, and paint the world of intergalactic politics where there are wormhole bridges and a couple of nascent colonies, and it can't serve both masters at the same time.

Thompson apparently really likes to bounce around perspectives when writing (in Rosewater it was jumping back and forth in time, here it is switching who we are focused on) and I think it would serve the story well to ratchet that tendency back a bit. I noted in my review of The Loop that I don’t particularly value gore; it is good that I am not bothered by it, though, as Thompson does not shy away from gore in his writing.

I liked the character Shell, I liked the character Fin. I liked Servo from what we met of him, but would have appreciated more depth. I wasn’t a huge fan of Joké, who was written a bit too much as a sort of manic pixie dream girl (imo).

Overall, though, I found it a pretty engaging book and found myself eager to finish it.

To conclude what people in the youtube comments have dubbed the "Dairy Trilogy", today's song is "Ice Cream, Cobra Man":

Watch on YouTube

This song seems like a sort of foreshadowing of the EP Darnielle did with John Vanderslice: Moon Colony Bloodbath. There is also foreshadowing here of the seeds of his novel Wolf in White Van. In other words, the cryptic and eerie and somewhat voyeuristic perspective of the narrator is one that he returns to not infrequently.

This track is interesting in charting themes that emerged early and recur in Mountain Goats/John Darnielle work, but it doesn't hit me with the same level of grabbiness that yesterday's track did. No real thoughts on the annotations today (which principally concern his attitude about the relationship between lyrics, poetry and prose and how they are written/recorded; maybe I'll have more thoughts about them as they sit with me and percolate).

Current Music: Ice Cream, Cobra Man — The Mountain Goats

On the app I am using to track my reading I gave this book 4 stars but I think it is more like 5 stars for the concept, 2 stars for the ending, and somewhere between for lots of the other elements.

A generation ship has been traveling for so long it has lost track of its mission and its history. It had a giant cathedral at the center of the ship, such that the ship must have been designed around this enormous cathedral, but there was some uprising on the ship hundreds of years ago and lots of history and navigation data was lost so it’s unclear what the ship is supposed to be doing.

The ship stops at a planet that is emitting some sort of radio signal, and they check for signs of life. It is the remains of a colony. They find buildings, bones, but no survivors. In one building, they find a basement area chock full of what appear to be ritually massacred corpses. They decide they should leave. However, they leave in the direction of a giant mysterious derelict alien spacecraft! Which they then explore! And people start to die in accidents, or go mad.

“Cosmic Horror Canticle for Leibowitz” is, it turns out, something I will jump at. I read this in a day. I don’t think it stuck the landing, but I can point to it and say “I will gladly read more books that are doing this!” It was atmospheric and tense and more books should have people on generation ships making awful decisions about continuing to explore extremely dangerous alien spacecrafts!

If you know of more books in or adjacent to this genre: do not hesitate to recommend them to me!

Today's song is "Pure Milk" (I see what you did there, John)

Watch on YouTube

This is a weird song. I'm not sure I can explain what makes it weird, after all, if you listened to the last six songs, its not like any of those are "normal" songs. But even by that metric: this song is weird. John is singing in a weird way, the lyrics have this conspiratorial tone (you, the listener are being invited to participate in some crime with the narrator). I definitely like this one among the most of the ones I've encountered so far through the book (second place probably goes to Going to Alaska).

The annotations are mostly about Darnielle liking this song, and his own relationship to not knowing the narrative details that are unstated in the song, and his own lingering curiosity about the answers. I guess The Author is Dead.

Current Music: Pure Milk — The Mountain Goats

Today's song is the Cow Song!

Watch on YouTube

This is a song about cows, or really, about John Darnielle's affection for cows. It is not a deep or complex song. The annotations back me up on this, revealing that he picked a pre-programmed rhythm on the casio keyboard and wrote the song because he saw some cows one day (and that most of the time if the song has animas in the name or is about an animal, it was inspired by seeing an animal and thinking "gosh someone should write a song about that animal"—this is probably not the origin of "Up the Wolves" or "Hast Thou Considered the Tetrapod", but seems plausible for "Weekend in Western Illinois").

Cows: What's not to like? (on the other hand: I don't have a ton to say about this song or the annotation. It's fun, but it doesn't inspire a ton of deep reflection from me.)

Current Music: The Cow Song — The Mountain Goats

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