James McWhorter and the English Language and Cave Wall

by Weston Cutter

 

           John McWhorter’s Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue is one of at least three books regarding the English language that I’ve read about recently (David Wolman’s and Roy Blount Jr.’s being the other two). Though I’ve only read one of the three (though Blount’s got a great review in the NYTimes this past weekend), McWhorter’s delightful, quick, rigorous look at English has got to be not just one of the best books on English to come out recently, but one of the best, period.

            One of the best aspects of Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue is that McWhorter’s such an ideal guide. He’s got the intellectual chops to dig deep and hard at the hoary, thorny academic issues, but the dude’s astoundingly fun to read: there’s not a dry passage in the whole book, and the whole time you get the feeling that McWhorter’s one of those people whose passionate curiosity doesn’t die off or calcify after x-number of hours spent researching that curiosity.

            The book, ultimately, is a study of how English grammar came to exist as we now know it, which means, of course, looking at other languages and how those languages organize nouns and verbs and etc. If this stuff sounds dull in description, it’s anything but in McWhorter’s hands: part of the book’s real fun is his guiding thesis regarding from what other languages English picked up the strange tics it has (he ‘blames’ Celtic and Welsh). More snazzy, though, is that, according to McWhorter, nobody’s cited all this stuff yet. I don’t have the energy to time to read other grammatical histories of English, so I’m happy to take him at his word.

            So, on the one hand, the thrill of the book’s just in finding out something that’s actually new about this language we all abuse daily. Cooler, though, is the meta-idea behind that: that there really is new stuff to be known about English. Coolest, though, is reading about it, through McWhorter’s words and ideas, and getting a sense of the overwhelming richness of stuff just as simple as language, as the words we keep trying to make do with. It’s a hell of a lot of fun, this book, and it’s got to be one of the easiest-to-read books on language I’ve ever read.

 

Cave Wall

 

            I don’t usually write about literary magazines here (the place for that stuff’s New Pages), but I got to meet the folks who run Cave Wall this week (Rhett Iseman Trull and her husband Jeff), and not only is R. I. Trull a dynamite poet whose work is some of the best in the Best New Poets 2008, but this magazine, Cave Wall, is really pretty hugely good. Really, really great, and still new enough to feel like a fresh and brilliant discovery, and you really just need to send them your money and buy a subscription and then you should go ahead and pat yrself on the back at how hip you are to new literary journals.

 

Best of 2008 Part II: Lykke Li

by Weston Cutter

Lykke Li’s Youth Novels

Download:

Dance Dance Dance

Everybody But Me

 

I’m woefully late to the Lykke Li party, and it’s shitty because she’s like one or two steps removed from lots of stuff I really like—for instance, here she is with El Perro Del Mar, singing back-up on “Somebody’s Baby”:

No, I’m not sure how to pronounce her name, but the details are:

• That her full name’s Li Lykke Timotej Zachrisson

• That she’s f’ing twenty-two years old

• That her debut album, Youth Novels, came out in May of this past year, and has to be one of the absolute best CDs that’s come out this year (and I’d actually argue strongly that hers is one of the strongest first albums in the past five or so years, easily).

 

The video above, with EPDMar and Lykke Li, was especially gratifying to find like two weeks back, because up until that point I’d been thinking this is so weird: Lykke Li’s like a musical cousin of EPDMar. She is: that’s actually the best way to describe Lykke Li’s music: it’s like El Perro Del Mar’s first album, except it’s sweeter (as in: more sugary, not necessarily nicer) by a factor of ten, and it’s also (somehow, simultaneously) more raggedy and rough-edged than El Perro Del Mar’s first album’s stuff.

 

Lykke Li’s voice is, hands-down, one of the finest instruments you’ll hear this year: it’s almost startlingly cutesy and innocent and also just vulnerable as hell. When I think back on her songs, in my head her voice breaks and wobbles much more than it actually does on her recordings, meaning, I guess, that she makes her stuff feel a ton more vulnerable than it actually is, on CD. Which, really, is a hell of a thing to do.

 

Part of it’s simply about lyrics, too. Take the song “Everybody But Me”: she starts the song “standing in the corner” thinking of whether or not to “go home, still sober,” or buy another glass of wine. The insularity’s just everywhere—you can see it, right? This pretty person who’s totally alone at a party—and the song continues, the chorus talking about how everyone’s dancing, drinking, laughing, and how the song’s protagonist keeps saying/singing that she doesn’t want to. The really cool thing, though, is that I, at least, can’t be sure that she doesn’t want to: I get the sense that, in fact, she’d love to dance and laugh and have fun, but just not right then, not at this party where there are

 

fellas, who got the look in their eye

they want to take me home without knowing my name…

 

It’s just dazzling stuff.

 

Here, just for fun, is one of the coolest artists of last year (Bon Iver) and one of the coolest from this year (Lykke Li) doing her song “Dance Dance Dance” together at some public fountain in LA:

 

 

That song, by the way, “Dance Dance Dance,” is the first song I hear from the album and it’s sick how cool the song is. I’ll say nothing: just download it and listen. It’s incredible. As is, really, the whole album. 

Krin Gabbard and Alex Beam and Books and Trumpets

by Weston Cutter

Hotter Than That by Krin Gabbard

 

            Oh man, this is a fine and cool book: here, in fact, is a book that should, if there’s any decency/justice, help establish something like Platonic ideals for books which, through an examination of a single object, illuminate a larger whole. Petroski does this, of course, and Kurlanski did this real significantly with Cod and Salt.

            Gabbard, though, is doing something (I think) slightly more mysterious and complex. Simple starting point: what is jazz? To paraphrase L.Armstrong: If you can answer that, clearly and in English, you don’t really know. And so instead of, say, Kurlanski clarifying the significance of salt in our day-to-day lives (plus cool old stories about how much it used to be worth, that it functions as the root word for salary, etc.), Gabbard doesn’t have such neat and solidly-edged things to pack his narrative into.

            Hotter Than That is the story/history of the trumpet, and jazz, and American culture (this is all there in the subtitle), but go ahead and even try to half-coherently define the second and third terms in that list (jazz, Am. culture): really, just try it. And so what Gabbard’s done so interestingly and amazingly well is work his historical story in a way that’s, I think, different from anything I’ve seen. Simplest put: to look at one item-the baseball, the bicycle, the four-stroke internal combustion engine-and craft a narrative around it is, in ways, a fixed, mathematical thing: baseball is one thing, bicycling another, and engines another.

            But jazz is nothing if not a messy and great and chaotic handful: it’s not simply or exclusively music, nor a movement, nor a style. It’s a whole, living, shifting thing. Gabbard shows how jazz, despite having only a few parameters, functions hugely the way it does because of trumpet, an instrument that was synonymous with empire and military and monarchy until the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when mostly black and mostly southern musicians picked up and radically changed not just what the brassy horn could do, but what it could mean.

            That, in fact, may be what Gabbard’s done best: he’s taken a resonant (in all meanings of the word) and rich thing and looked at both the thing itself and the thing’s gravitational tug/force on the larger culture. Gabbard’s inviting, welcoming style will suck you in and, seriously, by the end, you’ll believe, even if just a little bit at the edges, that American culture is what it is because of jazz, which is what it is because of the trumpet.

 

A Great Idea at the Time by Alex Beam

 

            It’s funny, I hadn’t thought of it, but these two books, back to back, create a real compellingly solid picture of American culture. On the one hand, there’s Gabbard and the re-claimed/re-imagined/reworked trumpet, that instrument of kings and grand announcements turned toward smaller, subtler workings; on the other hand, there’s Beam talking about a nebbish group of U of Chicago guys at mid-century taking real highbrow old canonical works and re-claiming those things for a middle class. Both these stories, fundamentally, commence when a group tugs something from the high/lowbrow’s spectrum’s end to its opposite end.

            But with Beam it’s the little blue books, the Great Books of the Western World, and the real interesting story here’s both how M. Adler and Co. hyped and sold to average middle-Americans the idea of Classic Scholarship, and how that idea so quickly devoured itself (the stats in this book are staggering: door-to-door sales of books in the 40′s were nutso, millions upon millions; the movement was basically dead a quarter century after its inception). Actually, not even devoured itself: a pretty good chunk of the echoing questions running underneath Beam’s really fun and interesting book are ones like well, Why should I read Cicero? When’m I really going to need to know arcane and derived-by-old-Greeks mathematical formulae? In a pretty basic way, The Great Books can be seen as something like diet food: stuff you buy with the intent of bettering yourself (and, therefore, stuff that’s almost universally fun in theory than in practice).

            But of course Beam’s book’s not just about books: it’s about knowledge, about ideas re: the canon, and the questions that this book’ll just about demand you ask (if to no one other than yourself) is, Okay, so what should we all read? What should the canon be? It’s always gonna be a fascinating question, and it’s never gonna have a good answer, and it’ll always be provocative and just asking it’ll get peoples’ heckles up, but Beam’s really approachable and fun and insightful book is the place where that question, at least in the American context, sort of has to start.

Best of 2008 Part 1: Throw Me The Statue

by Weston Cutter

(I, like everyone I know, just love year-end lists, but I always think the strict numeracy of the whole thing’s silly. A top-ten’s fine; numbering things from 10-1 seems nuts (unless it’s super-obvious: 1970, when Hundred Years of Solitude was translated and released; 1996, Infinite Jest; 1998, Birds of America; 2000, The Last Samurai; etc.). With that in mind: from now till the year’s end, I’ll be posting best-of-2008 stuff. Mostly bands (and, by and large, mostly bands that’ve released their debut disc this year). Obviously books. Movies? Doubtful, but who knows.)

 

Throw me the Statue’s Moonbeams

 

(I’d meant to put up songs to download here, but the songs I wanted to put up aren’t cleared for download. So, instead, here’s a video of one of the cleared-for-posting songs, and also one of the coolest songs on the disc, and also one of the coolest videos I’ve ever seen (the song’s called “About To Walk,” and there’s a version at Daytrottere here as well)

 

 

Throw Me the Statue crept up on me this year. At some point I downloaded “Your Girlfriend’s Car” and I remember listening to it (this must’ve been like April) and thinking hm, but getting neither really super invited-in nor super pushed-out. I do remember thinking that it was an almost obscenely weird song: little in the way of lyrics, and what lyrics there are either seemed associatively strange (meaning, I guess, the meaning was fuzzy), or just flat-out strange—for instance, the part from which the song takes its title:

 

There is nothing

Here I’d

Like to steal

from your girlfriend’s car.

 

The bit there’s a bunch of things, but more than anything else it’s just ridiculouly, evocatively weird. Download the song and listen to it: maybe stranger than that set of words is the fact that there’s no morality in them: it seems neither a good nor bad thing that this dude should want to steal things from this other person’s girlfriend’s car. The whole thing, at the time I heard it, struck me as interesting, but not enough to get seriously invested in.

 

Maybe some months passed: I’m not really sure. I know the next song by Throw Me the Statue I listened to was “This is How We Kiss,” which is much more direct (in certain ways) than “Your Girlfriend’s Car”: gone are the real obtruse lines, replaced by stuff like:

 

Little chance, Eddie Haskell,

tell again how you were born a rascal

they screen my calls at the charity chapel

I lost the keys to the friendship castle

 

Okay, so, hrm: not so much more sensical, actually (plus the first chorus has got “This is how we kiss,” and the second one’s got “This is how we missed,” [plus I should just say here that 'chorus' isn't the real term: the actual chorus is just a vowelly oh oh oh oh repeated]).

 

What’s for sure, though, is that “This is How We Kiss,” was the track that made me realize how much I absolutely dug the hell out of this band. Again: download the songs. These are folks who’ve picked up all the lo-fi/indie sounds you’d expect, but they’re just doing things much, much better than most other bands. I suppose the music-snob class would here say that the band’s somewhat indebted to Pavement, and perhaps they are, to a degree: I hear more of The Glands than Pavement, plus, more simply, Throw Me The Statue have pop-music chops that put most other ‘indie’ stuff to shame.

 

Idle hypothesis: the whole indie/lo-fi thing’s actually not too technically difficult (I played enough guitar to know that much, anyway), and so the thing that separates a band like Throw Me The Statue from other bands of this genre/ilk is that instead of just droning stuff and feedbacking amps and etc, they’ve got something like the spirits of B. Wilson and P. Westerberg animating some of their decisions. “Your Girlfriend’s Car”? Regardless of how weird the lyrics are, the song’s as compelling as it is because, musically, it feels about as inevitable as falling down a set of three stairs. Some of the moves may feel, at first listen, counterintuitive, but listen to the song a few times and you can feel how smart these guys are, musically.

 

And who are these guys? Scott Reitherman, apparently, a Seattle-ite (according to Wikipedia), and the band he’s helped shape around himself. Their album Moonbeams, for the record, was actually released on Reitherman’s Baskerville Hill label in 2007, and re-released this year by Secretely Canadian (which label has just been dynamite in the last while, putting stuff out by Catfish Haven, Damien Jurado, Bon Iver, etc.).

 

I don’t know much more about these guys, but I’m pretty sure that nothing else I’ve got to say about them’s worth as much as listening to the songs here, the last of which will be this: Earlier this year, Throw Me The Statue released this track (on Stereogum, but the track’s also part of a H. Lewis covers comp called Are You Still With Me?!, which should put to rest any question about how great and sharp and incredible their pop-instincts are. Say what you will about indie rock and everything else: I can think of maybe five bands whose cover of an old Huey Lewis and the News song would make me not just disinterestedly curious but thrilled and pleased and (admit it) pretty up for going back and listening to more old H. Lewis songs. Please: make sure your year-end round-up includes stuff by Throw Me The Statue.

Amazing Mr. Jeffrey Yang, Amazing Graywolf

by Weston Cutter

The temptation is to, right here, claim that Jeffrey Yang’s debut collection of poetry, An Aquarium, is the greatest book of poetry that’s been released this year, and what’s dicey is that, were it not such an absurdly rich year for poetry (B. Shaughnessy, JERICHO BROWN, Jorie Graham, C. D. Wright, Maureen McLane, Nick Laird, etc.), Mr. Yang’s just spellbindingly wonderful and beautiful and fun book of poetry would, hands-down, be the year’s best. As is, his An Aquarium is one of the top five or so collections of poetry, one of the top three debut collections of poems, and, from where I’m sitting, one of the most inviting, engaging, and world-encapsulating collections around.

            (Before we continue: my great small-publisher loves are, of course, Graywolf and New Directions. Mr. Jeffrey Yang is, no joke, the bridge between: his book’s published by Graywolf, and he works at New Directions. I feel a tremendous satisfaction at how things’ve overlapped.)

            The book’s just a sparkling and dazzling surge: starting with “Abalone” and going alphabetically to “Zooxanthellae” (with stops for things like “Rexroth” and “U.S.” and “[Time (Outside the Quincunx)]” and “Google” and “Intelligent Design”), the collection uses, as its frame, acquatic life. What’s funny, as you read, is that you realize how fascinating acquatic life actually is, and you may wonder why it is that there’s no great book/bestiary of underwater life.

            And the reason there still needs to be a great bestiary of underwater life is that Mr. Jeffrey Yang’s sights are set so, so much higher than on merely capturing the wild and darting life that lives in water: what he’s doing, through using an aquarium as a frame, is offering us a chance to see not fish-life, not just under-water-worlds, but to see everything—politics, ourselves, threats to planetary stability, emotions, etc. Don’t believe me? Here’s the first in the book, here’s “Abalone”:

 

Abalone Rumsen aulon

Aristotle auriform Costanoans

cultivated, Brueghel painted,

awabi Osahi dove for

on September 12, 425 A.D.

to please Emperor Ingyo but

was pulled up dead with one clutched in his hand.

Iridescent pearl, nebular swirl, meat all muscle

tastes like rubber. Its gonads a delicacy. Now

universities are funded to study its armor.

All earthly roads lead to war. But remember

haliotis are hemophiliacs—once cut

they bleed to death. Watch your heart.

 

In the first four lines there’s more of a mess of activity (that sounds negative, but I intend it as anything but) than you’ll find in most whole collections of poems, but J. Yang’s giving the reader that much verb, that much muchness, right from the start. From there into the lyric of what this poem’s actually doing/about (for the record: Abalone’s commonly called an ear shell; no, that’s not halitosis, but haliotis, which is the genus Abalone’s part of), J. Yang keeps just ferocious speed, into the past (line five), empire (six), sacrifice/fealty (seven), actual bio-physiology (eight and nine). Etc. The point is: Mr. Jeffrey Yang’s packing a level of movement and explosion into his poems that’s, I think, terribly rare—and, reading his book, you realize how huge the pleasure of motion is re: poetry.

            There’s no way to get at the full extent of this book’s greatness: I could (should, probably) go through every single poem in here and show example after example of the amazements this book (barely) contains. There are at least four languages used throughout, though probably more; p. 22 has one of the greatest movements of words I’ve seen ever, anywhere (it’s a little quintuplet of words, and I think they’re blurbed on the book’s back, but seriously: they’re like some magic, riddly koan); this book, somehow, in detailing (in cummings’ phrase) the intense fragility of the earth we’re living on, instills in the reader something like an emotional toughness, a newly-lit faith/desire/whatever to go out and be amazed at the life around. To be willing to say, okay, that’s a starfish, but maybe there’s more to a starfish than I knew.

            This book’ll leave you gasping; this review doesn’t come anywhere near to doing it justice. Graywolf has, for years, had all sorts of great stuff come out which gets noticed and tagged for year-end lists and awards (most recently: The End, which everyone should read, too: holy crap that thing’s good), and Mr. Jeffrey Yang’s An Aquarium is a perfect example of one of those books that you’ll, with luck, be hearing about all over the place, very soon.