Lewis Powell

 In a development that isn't entirely surprising to me, I had a few stumbles for daily updating part of the project, and then fell off of daily reading/posting pretty much entirely.

This is not an unfamiliar pattern for me (I do well with structure, but if the structure is too rigid, and I have enough misses, my brain just shuts off of wanting to follow the structure even a little bit).

The real barrier was posting, for me, because I often felt like I didn't have anything to say, which made some of the posts a chore, rather than just.a part of the routine. I'm planning to catch back up soon, and then continue reading the book day by day, but probably won't be posting about it (or at least, not in a daily post type of way).

 

We get a break from firearms related songs today, for a song that Darnielle talks about mostly in terms of it landing the "is it a poem or is it a song?" style of lyric writing he was aiming for at the time. I think it's a nice song, and you can definitely see some of the more poetic elements of the lyrics, as he describes them.

If you want a song featuring a cow, this is also a good choice for you.

 It would have been slightly more fitting if I had slacked off for one more day, as March 4th, 5th, and 6th are sort of related inclusions in the book (I've only heard the song for March 5th, previously). Each annotation is labeled "Firearms Suite, Song Number n".  (I've actually just glanced ahead and there is another one coming up, so I feel less bad about tackling two of them today and the others later).

The song for March 4th was: That Hippolytine Feeling.


Darnielle obviously has some feelings about his penchant for putting guns in songs when he was younger.  One doesn't need to read this book to know that, though.  He stopped performing the song live for a long stretch, and has spoken about his feelings on this a fair number of times.

The thing about Going to Georgia (sorry Hippolytine Feeling, we're not going to focus on you much in this post), is that it is a really good song, despite the issues with the song's narrative and it's protagonist.  I think I remember people having similar feelings about the film Hero, or more recently, film RRR, where one has ideological objections to the work, simultaneous with a recognition of its level of aesthetic quality.

What makes this somewhat surprising for this song in particular is that lots of Mountain Goats songs have morally concerning narrative elements.  So the real question is: why is this song one that Darnielle feels so strongly about?  It can't *just* be that it became hugely popular with the fans, as No Children fits that bill.  I think Darnielle feels like this song (unlike the songs that focus on the alpha couple), romanticize guns and related violent impulses in a way that is different from how, say, toxic behaviors are depicted and explored in the alpha couple songs, but not romanticized (though, when we do get to No Children, check out the stories about people asking him to play that at their wedding; some folks are romanticizing it nonetheless).

I think the popularity of the song compounded with Darnielle's ambivalence about how it romanticizes the protagonist, combined to make him hate the song (though his attitude seems to have warmed up a bit, as he has played it at a few recent concerts without demanding anyone in the audience pay him $60 to do so). 

Darnielle renders the lyrics as prose (most lyrics in the book have line breaks where you would expect, though he also did this for Song for Dana Plato), and I don't know what to make of that decision:
Anyway, Darnielle doesn't say much to address the above issues and ambivalences head on in these annotations. He talks a bit about the process of recording the song and then ends with an observation that the song's "perennial status as one of the most requested songs in the Mountain Goats catalog supports [his] longstanding claim that the people, while not actively demanding blood, would still like the occasional assurance that blood, should they need it, is certainly on the menu".  I think this comment deepens my confusion, rather than helping enlighten me, though, as the song does not seem to express bloodthirst to me, even if it takes unfortunate tropes/dangerous conceptions of love and romanticizes them (that hippolytine feeling seems a bit more in line with this commentary, but as far as I can tell it's a song that was never officially recorded/released, so it doesn't have the same longevity, fanbase, or, I imagine, emotional weight around expectations to perform it, as Going to Georgia does.

 THE TITLE OF THE BOOK IS A LIE!  THERE IS AN ENTRY FOR FEBRUARY 29th! 

That makes 366 songs!

It also means I am three days behind all of a sudden.

February 28th — Cold Milk Bottle
February 29th — Song for Roger Maris
March 1st — Cubs in Five

It's hard to express how little I care about sports. I once had a Canadian friend in grad school, Jen, with whom it was mutually understood that we just did not give a shit about sports, unlike most of the other people in grad school with us, who cared about whether USC made it to the Rose Bowl or about baseball or what have you.  The biggest betrayal came during the olympics one year when she walked into the grad lounge and said "Canada-US game was pretty exciting, huh?" and I was like "what game are you talking about?" as I was only vaguely aware of the olympics going on at the time, and she said "Canada beat the US in hockey 2-1" or something like that, and I said "Jen, I thought we agreed we don't care about sports" and she said the most Canadian thing I have ever heard in my life: "This isn't sports, it's hockey."  Anyway, these songs are nice, but that's in spite of two of them being about baseball.



The song for today is Pure Money


Darnielle's annotations are reflecting on how his career might have gone differently if he had focused on his keyboard/synthesizer compositions instead of his guitar compositions, and how he might likely have wound up a nurse in Hawaii, rather than thirty something years into a career as an indie rocker. And while I don't dislike this track, listening to it makes me think he's not wrong about what other paths would have been taken if he had been focused on keyboard only.

 Today's song is Heights


This isn't as discordant as Blood Royal was, but there is something that feels intentionally jarring about some of the music here.  I don't dislike the song, but it took a bit to get accustomed to that element of it.  Darnielle's annotations are entirely about his curiosity about the narrator, which is a return to a theme that I've noted many previous times in my notes. It's not just about the elliptical nature of his storytelling, but about the way in which these partial stories are presented as things he is merely glimpsing through a telescope or uncovering. There are determinate answers to all our questions about the narrator. There is a complete story there, and yet somehow, Darnielle only has fragmentary access to it. 

In some ways, it is easier for me to get my mind around the less appealing—and more dismissive—Mamet view of fiction, as propounded in an SF Gate interview:

M.L.: There's a scene in "Oleanna" in which the woman says "I never told anybody this" — and then gets interrupted by the phone ringing. What was she about to say?

MAMET: Aha! Well, we don't know, do we?

M.L.: Well, / don't know. You don't either?

MAMET: No.

M.L.: I thought, in my naive way, that you're supposed to know as you're writing the line —

MAMET: Nope. (Laughing) We never got that far. We in the audience have to believe that she's about to make an extraordinary confession. What that confession is we don't get to find out.

M.L.: But you don't know —

MAMET: The woman doesn't actually exist, Mick. She's a bunch of black scribbles on a blank page.

M.L.: But when you're thinking about it as you're writing the play you're not really thinking about scribbles on a blank page. You are thinking of some kind of person, I would think.

MAMET: No. Black scribbles on a white page, that's all it is.

So, like, for Mamet, there are no answers that aren't on the page, but that's because all there is is words on the page.  And I can get my head around that view, but I don't like that view.  For Darnielle, the words on the page are all we know about the characters and the story, but somehow those words succeeded at singling out a fully defined and realized character and world, that has (unknowable) answers to all the questions we might ask.  Which is a more appealing view of what happens, but also a much more perplexing one.

 Today we have a Song for Dana Plato


Something about this song's music is discordant to me, and ultimately, that was too distracting for me to enjoy the song.  It just really feels like the guitar is out of tune or something, but I assume this is an intentional choice Darnielle made.

Today we are Going to Port Washington


This is an uncharacteristically optimistic love song from Darnielle. He wrote it for friends who were supporters of the band, and it's just sort of a sweet, unmelancholy love song. Why am I marveling at that? Well, this reddit post sort of captures the reason pretty well:

 Today's song is Pure Gold






I enjoyed this song, but the thing that most caught my attention relates to the annotations.  "Don't touch the door" was taken from a readout on the Twilight Zone pinball machine. The annotations go into a bit of detail about the machine and Darnielle's time playing it, but what I think is most impressive to me about this track is how Darnielle took his affection for/fixation on that aspect of a Twilight Zone pinball machine and used it as a seed for lyrics to a song that is not about pinball at all.  In some cases, his songs have been directly about what inspired them, but here, we get a compelling partial narrative attached to this phrase that must have been stuck in his head for some time.

Today we are treated to Some Swedish Trees


I like this song a lot. The music reminds me a bit of the opening to Amy AKA Spent Gladiator, and the annotations return to Darnielle's meditations on his penchant for indirect narrative.  The lyrics here leave one with a lot of questions, if you focus on them as a narrative, but (as Darnielle notes), the tone is not one of intentional secret-keeping.  It is more like eavesdropping on bits of a story being told at a nearby table in a coffeeshop, and missing pieces as a result of only hearing the parts spoken loud enough to reach you.

 

We are in a stretch where the annotations are sort of short, and I often don't have a lot to say.  Today's annotations are about the approach to narrative structure for this album, but I feel like I'd mostly be repeating myself to include my thoughts on this.

This is a nice sombre song, though. And I am shocked still by how much Mountain Goats I haven't heard before.