AudioShocker

I went to a barbeque over the weekend, during which, when we weren’t busy remembering Michael Jackson, the main activity between and amongst the (veggie)burger chomping and beer swilling was the typical-for-the-new-millennium activity of a group of people sitting around and listening to someone’s iPod on shuffle and having mini-conversations centered around each song as it came up. I don’t think it’s been particularly well documented here on Culturology, but (surprise, surprise) I’ve been pretty vehemently anti-iPod since its emergence into my awareness some time in 2005 (I don’t really know when the thing first got popular, but I don’t recall noticing it before working for a living in Boston). (Some weeks when I sit here trying to think up what to write (when there isn’t something obvious to touch on), I get pretty self-conscious; similar to the way in which I try not to write just “reviews” of whatever movie I saw over the weekend, I also don’t like to feel like I’m just being a hater. But so much stuff sucks–what am I supposed to do?)

I wouldn’t say so at the time–it’s entertaining enough, and I like talking about music, etc, don’t get me wrong–but there’s something inane about the iPod listening-conversation game. (And it should also be mentioned that this particular iPod behavioral pattern is still way better than the let’s-constantly-tweak-the-playlist-and-fuck-around-so-we-never-even-hear-a-complete-song game. This particular play list was all hip-hop, which is fine too, and brought up the usual kind of conversations about hip-hop that you’d expect a bunch of 25-35 year old white graduate students to have:

+ Does Jay-Z suck or not? (Jay-Z does not suck; he was probably the last rapper to get famous based on his being a great rapper, as opposed to other, more malevolent forces in the universe. Also, Jay-Z is a better rapper than common.)

+ What MF Doom album is the best? Does it belong in the pantheon of great rap albums of all time? (Operation Doomsday, yes, yes it does.)

+ Def Jux? (Fuck no.)

+ Is it time yet for ’90s nostalgia? (This split the group more decisively, with the under-30s leaning away from it and the over-30s embracing it. Further evidence of the strange demographic no-man’s land of being 26-29 years old. Though, and this is outside of hip-hop, obviously, I have been having a strange tendency to feel like listening to Mogwai and Low and Dirty Three, etc. recently, which could be considered a kind of 90s nostalgia in its own right.)

+ Oh man, is this [insert next track on iPod playlist] track fresh or what? (Yes, it’s fresh.)

and so on and so forth.

Again, I can’t really get all that worked about such a thing. Surely the random play list thing solves many of the modern party-givers life’s problems. And maybe it’s just a fault I have to get so self-conscious about such activities. And DJ-ing, as a notion, at least in clubs and music venues is still alive and well (despire the iPodification of contemporary radio (ClearChannel radio being basically iPod shuffles of the seven most-payolaed songs of the week). And I’m sure I’ve still got a few random CDs at the bottom of a box somewhere that say something obnoxious like “Party Mix” (’cause you know, I was always hosting those bomb-ass music parties, back in my day), which is only one step better. In this context, perhaps the best thing about being the age that I am is that I am just barely old enough to have made mix tapes (several of which I still have), and to have that tape-making culture backed up by having bought actual tapes of music at the music store. Those mix-tapes were just that much more carefully made than mix CDs, which are still better than random play list shuffles.

Though, I do wonder if I’m just being a curmudgeon and an unabashed atavist. One can pretty much pick any period of time and find huge swaths of the extant culture complaining about whatever the newest media technology was (except for maybe movable type, since it promoted a level of propaganda theretofore unavailable to the theocracies of that time). I’d like to think of myself as modern, and forward-thinking, but dagnabbit why do I feel like such and old man about this stuff?

Culturology Summer of Booklove Bookclub #3: Toby Barlow’s Sharp Teeth

This is moved up a week, as per Neal’s request, so hopefully you’ve all had time to read it by now. I’m expecting big things from Neal on this one too, comments-wise. It read pretty fast for me. A good-enough, if somewhat familiar, narrative, paired with the usual werewolf’s-eye-view of what it’s like to be a werewolf. And it claims to be an epic poem in free verse, which provides the central gimmick of the book (yes, its a gimmick–I was not at all surprised to read in the author’s bio blurb that he works in advertising; I agree that the concept of an epic poem about werewolves in Los Angeles is completely awesome).

But the book is not a poem. Just because you take your prose and chop it up into lines that look more or less like contemporary international free verse does not mean that suddenly you’ve written a poem. Any one who reads poetry regularly (as I do), will recognize the not-a-poemness of Sharp Teeth, the main characteristic of which is a general lack of concern for the line, and how it might work as a structural, especially sonic unit. It seems that Barlow’s main concern in chopping up his sentences into poem-looking lines was to make it clear that it isn’t prose.

It does work occasionally though, in terms of using the line to control the pacing in rapid-fire sequences or to rattle off quick lists of various things. But when it doesn’t work, the passages clunk around (perhaps only from a poetic perspective; the average reader might not notice the clunkiness if they’re not more used to reading refined verse) and the language gets boggy, boring and plain and not even the not-prose layout can’t save it. Which is too bad, because most of my disagreement with the book is at this poetic level; I thought the characters and the story were fine, and its plotted well enough (if straightforwardly). There is a level of paranoia and conspiracy that is alluded to but never fully paid off, which is also a disappointment, but if I imagine a “general” reader who doesn’t know anything about poetry–and most people everywhere (except maybe in Ireland) know very little about poetry–enjoying this book quite a bit. It does verge a bit on becoming a Young Adult novel as well, but that probably comes with the territory with a book about how good it feels to become part of a pack.

If you’ve read this and want to know what a real Novel in Verse is like, pick up Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red which is an absolutely amazing example of what a modern poet might do to craft herself an epic poem, or novel in verse.

(Culturology, and therefore the book club, will be taking a vacation for most of July, so there aren’t any more advance-warning deadlines for books until Michael Chabon’s Gentlemen of the Road to be read by the first Monday of August.)