Friday Playlist: Baby's First Playlist

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My ridiculously cute daughter

My wife and I recently had a baby girl (Alison, pictured above sporting a stylish baby towel).  Parenting, of course, has its challenges, but it also has its joys - and a big one for me these days has been sharing music with my daughter.  Music is a primary way that I communicate with the world (hence this blog), and my communications with her have been no exception.  When I'm not singing her improvised lyrics to lullabies (or making up new songs entirely), I've been playing her different songs from my library and noting her reaction to various things.  For example, Metallica seemed to make her gassy.  She liked Aimee Mann, but only the early stuff.  And she absolutely loves Spiritualized.

So I've compiled her very first playlist, comprising some of her favorites for chillout time, dance time, and sleepytime.  I hope you enjoy it as much as she does.
PS A friend of mine gave me the gift of 3 albums from Rockabye Baby, namely lullaby versions of songs by Queen, Radiohead, and Led Zeppelin.  Those are all awesome, and have the added bonus of lulling me to sleep, but I prefer to save those as secret weapons when I'm trying to conk her out, as opposed to just putting on music for her to chill to or dance with me to, etc.

1. Spiritualized - Ladies And Gentlemen We Are Floating In Space (Original Version)
   I first played this for Alison when she was only a few days old.  She had just finished eating and was in what baby experts call the "quiet alert state."  So I figured it would be a perfect time to play her some tunes.  I asked my wife what she thought a baby would like, and she said "Spiritualized?"  I said yes.  This is the original version of this song which includes lyrics from Elvis's "Can't Help Falling In Love" (the Presley estate made the band remove that portion of the song from this album's original release).  The lyrics to the whole thing are pretty perfect to sing to a new baby.  This is probably Alison's favorite song thus far (and one of my favorites, too).
2. Thievery Corporation - From Creation
   She wasn't too taken with other Thievery Corporation songs, but she really seemed to click with this one.  By "click," I mean she got quiet and stopped fussing and seemed to chill out a bit.  I assume she likes these guys because, like her parents, they're from DC.
3. K'naan - Fatima
   This song is actually kind of a downer, lyrically (it's about a young girl who was murdered, I think), but Alison really seemed to enjoy the rhythm, particularly in the chorus.  [Editor's note: I'm saying things like "seemed to," "appeared to," etc. a lot because when I asked her what she thought of all these songs, she gave me no answer, so I'm having to go on educated guesses here.]
4. Cat Power - Living Proof
   This is my favorite Cat Power song.  Alison definitely seemed to enjoy it, but I don't know if it was genuine or if she was just trying to please me because she knows it's my favorite.  Either way, she enjoyed being gently swayed in my arms to this song.  Who wouldn't?  Babies are supposed to like simple, repetitive melodies, and this one definitely fits the bill.
5. Yellow Ostrich - Mary
   She seemed pretty relaxed during this song, which seems to be about the singer's friend who's on drugs.  Alison overlooked the content and just focused on the soothing background, which definitely chilled her out.
6. The Snake The Cross The Crown - Cakewalk
   Alison definitely identified with this song's ethos of "I just want to do the things that I feel like doing, and I want to be rewarded for same."  Basically a baby's mantra.
7. The Beatles - Flying
   I've been told that when I was a wee tot, almost nothing would soothe my jangled nerves as much as when my parents would put the big headphones on me and throw on either a Beatles record or something classical.  Alison has a lot more Beatles to go (and classical, for that matter) but she seemed to take to this track - not a bad start.
8. Phish - Horn
   I first played her "Bouncing Around The Room" which I thought she'd love, but I guess it was a little too simplistic, even for her. But she loved "Horn," especially the intro/chorus. She says she's psyched to hear Trey's solos on some live versions when she's a little older.
9. Self - Uno Song
   I don't know a lot of Self songs after Subliminal Plastic Motives, but this one came up on shuffle the other week and she really dug dancing along to it.  And by "dancing" I mean "me waving her around in my arms."  Tapping out the beat on her back also seemed to help her burp, so hey - bonus.
10. Her Space Holiday - Sleepy California
    Despite this song being about the slow death of the singer's estrangement from his mother and the painful death of his grandmother, Alison really seemed to enjoy it.  She can be kind of dark that way.  Or she was sleepy, it's hard to tell sometimes.
11. The Postal Service - The District Sleeps Alone Tonight
    Another song that appeals to Alison because of her DC heritage.  Also because it's slow and soft and beautiful and has a cool beat.  And she likes when I sing along to it.
12. Jane's Addiction - Stop!
    The first time I played this for her, I bounced her up and down vigorously along with the music - taking her up really high on the downbeats, particularly during the intro and chorus.  My wife thought I was going to scramble Alison's brains, but Alison seemed genuinely happy.  And it's hard to tell if a baby's brains are scrambled anyway, they don't do all that much higher-level thinking at this phase.
13. U2 - Trip Through Your Wires
    U2 was another Amanda suggestion, and so far Alison has enjoyed most of what she heard.  This song seemed to be her favorite, meaning she fell asleep during it.  Right now her TTS (time to sleep) is a pretty indicator of how pleased she is with life overall.  Alison also seems to love "Ultraviolet (Light My Way)" but I'm not a huge fan of that song, so it didn't make the list.
14. Grateful Dead - Box of Rain
    I think Amanda suggested this album, too, and Alison seemed to love every track, so I picked this one because it's awesome. And she just fell asleep to it while I was writing this, so that's one in the "plus" column.
15. Radiohead - 4 Minute Warning
    I mentioned above the lullaby version of Radiohead CD a friend gave us - it got me thinking about Radiohead songs in general, and I had an inkling that this song might be lullaby-esque enough in its current state to work on a baby.  And I was right.  I ended up playing this about 10 times in a row one night as she gently drifted off to sleep in my arms.  [Editor's note: the fact that she woke up crying 10 minutes later has nothing to do with this song, that's apparently just how babies are sometimes.]

What do you think?  For those of you without kids, what would you put on a baby playlist?  If you have kids, what have you put on a baby playlist?  What worked?  What didn't?  Tell me in the comments.

Questions for poems from a language theorist in 1968

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Maybe David Bowie could be lured out of retirement to make the soundtrack?
One of my summer projects this year is to, well, I guess “reboot” is the closest word for it. I’m going back to the books that are way back in my reading history, those—for me—foundational texts. I’m wondering what I think of them now.


The one I’m currently reading is titled The Labyrinth of Language, written by Max Black. It was published in 1968 in the Britannica Perspective series. It’s an overview of language theory at the time.

Here’s something about poetry I find rather interesting:

“. . . to try to explain how a poet manages to display or exhibit a ‘meaning’ without making a literal truth-claim about that meaning—how [the poet] manages to ‘bracket’ the truth-claim in the interest of some more subtle, less explicit, ‘statement.’ This is perhaps the hardest unsolved problem in poetics.

Further complications would be introduced by the necessity of distinguishing within each dimension, . . . between the explicit and the implicit. And running athwart this already sufficiently complex scheme of analysis there is the distinction, constantly to be borne in mind, between what the words mean (conventionally express, conventionally evoke) and what the speaker means (expresses, evokes) by means of those words. . . .”

And now, a half quote, half paraphrase:

Questions for poems:

1.What does the explicit utterance “say” and in what modes of “saying”?

2.What does the same utterance “express”?

3.What kind of influence does it bring to bear upon the reader?

4.How much of all this is explicit, and how much, and in what ways, are these effects to be counted as merely suggested or implied?

5.How much is intended, how much merely revealed, without the speaker’s consent?

6.How far does all this come about as a matter of standard linguistic convention?

7.How much results from the distinctive contributions made by the speaker in the given context and setting?

What does the explicit utterance say, and in what modes of saying. I like the construction of that question. I think I’m going to try that one out next time I’m wanting to do that sort of thing with a poem. What does the same utterance express. Indeed.

So I’m almost done with this book. I wonder what’s next.

Lost Poets Project: 1

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He attended Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, and Princeton University.In the late 1890s he settled in Greenwich Village, in New York City, working as a librarian and becoming part of a circle of poets that included E. A. Robinson, William Vaughn Moody, and Robert Frost.Edmund Clarence Stedman helped him revise. He was the fiction editor at Cosmopolitan magazine, from 1905 to 1907.The verse plays, showing the influence of John Millington Synge, showed realistic portrayals of African Americans, and a revolt against their station in society.He was poetry editor of New Republic (1920–33), mentoring Louise Bogan.He also organized the National Survey of the Negro Theater (1939), for the Rockefeller Foundation.His papers are held at Princeton.He was awarded the Shelley Memorial Award and an Academy of American Poets' Fellowship. He wrote three books of poetry, three plays, a book of non-fiction, as well as an edited collection.  His work was included in Louis Untermeyer’s 1941 edition of Modern American Poetry and Jessie B. Rittenhouse’s 1917 edition of The Little Book of Modern Verse.He was a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets at the time of his death.

Who is Ridgely Torrence?

Or there was no sadness, just a simple fold in time.

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Cole Swensen has a new book out and I’m absolutely crazy about it. It’s titled Gravesend, after the town of that name in England. The book is an investigation of that, but also so much more about graves and endings and ghosts and her restless and nimble mind at work.


It’s broken into three sections, “Have You Ever Seen a Ghost?”, “How Did Gravesend Get Its Name?”, and “What Do You Think a Ghost Is?”

Each section has a short prose bit, a few pages long, culled from interviews Swensen conducted with people circling the questions that title each section. The rest of each section is poetry.

It’s one of the things I admire about Swensen’s work, her ability to inhabit a question, and to bring research and her thinking together to chip away at it with the suggestive power of art. It’s the contribution art makes to a subject, full of open spaces.

Anyway, here’s a bit from one of the prose sections, to give you a feel for the tone and voice:

“Ghosts? You’re writing a book on ghosts? This place is full of them. It’s the oldest pub on the river. They say Pocahontas died here. No, I mean here, in this pub, that’s what they say—and why not believe it? No, I’ve never seen a ghost, but I’ve heard one. I’ve been down here in the bar, and heard someone walking directly above me when I knew that no one could be up there. And bottles fly off the shelves sometimes, or chairs get up-ended. Everyone who works here has a different story; we all feel them.”

And here’s a poem:


Kent


In the grounds of Bayham Abbey in a garden designed by Repton
a procession of monks just about dusk or just after darkness has fallen
go walking.

Or there was no sadness, just a simple fold in time.

One must be for others a reason to live.

Often, it is said, the presence of a ghost is signaled by illogical cold.

Lord Halifax noted it when investigating “the Laughing Man of Wrotham,” who strode into his brother’s room and murdered him night after night

to the horror of the maid who, a century later, wedged a chair against the door and watched him disappear.

There is no cure

for anything, and that cough you have, Madam, once

there was a fire every Friday the 13th, and once there was a death
that seemed to deserve it, but that was an illusion. Once there was a
death, but that was illusory, too. And all over Kent, someone is still
heading up the stairs, lighting the way with a match.


Finally, here’s one more poem, that extends the theme a bit. I’m not able to post it here without messing up the form a bit, so I’m including a picture so you can get the feel for how the spaces work.




The Beginnings of the Modern Era


It wasn’t until the ghost story became a genre           that ghosts became strangers

denied as they were      by a Romantic flagrance so      stylized it found itself poised
to the tip of a letter opener           and the man holding it               in his hand

silhouetted      from the back      on a promontory      over a crevasse, which makes
his sister die of music      or the ghost is reduced         to an overpowering smell

of the sea      and only she can hear it:      what we’ve inherited      fletcher of tongues
thin in the wind who blinded by now      a ghost in fingers      is touching them empty

of all its burning      And we claim we never knew them living which gets lost in living
and thus the phaeton stopped to pick him up      and went on to plunge over the cliff

just as it had done in all its lost                         every night for the past fifty years
the ghost ship                  the phantom train                              the cathedral fear

and how right we are      to claim it isn’t ours      though it leaves them stranded
or we abandon      or we, a screw      in a door nailed shut.         It isn’t our fault

Last day to send a chapbook manuscript!

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OK, so yesterday was the postmark deadline, but I won't be back from vacation until the 21st, so if anyone still wants to send a chapbook submission to our scrappy little series, then feel free to do so this week. Hurry!



The Midwest Chapbook Series
GreenTower Press/The Laurel Review


Final Judge: Mary Biddinger

The contest is open to anyone who is living in, from, or closely associated with the Midwest, excluding close friends and former students of the editors or contest judge, as well as employees and students of Northwest Missouri State University.

Guidelines:


20-30 pages (typed, single-sided, one poem per page).



Individual poems may have been previously published. You may include an acknowledgements page if you wish, though one is not required.



Include two cover pages: one with title only, the other with name, address, email address, manuscript title, and a short note establishing your connection to the Midwest.



Your name should ONLY appear on the cover page, which the staff will keep on file. Manuscripts will be read blind.



Reading period opens February 1 and ends July 1, 2012.



$10.00 reading fee. Please make checks payable to GreenTower Press. Reading fee gets you a one-year subscription to The Laurel Review, starting with the summer issue.



The winning chapbook will be published in an edition of 300 copies. Winner will receive one hundred copies. Additional copies offered at 40% off the list price ($7.00) plus shipping and handling.



Winner also will be invited to give a reading at Northwest Missouri State University’s Visiting Writers series, which includes travel expenses paid and an honorarium of $250.00



All entries will be considered for publication in The Laurel Review.



Winner will be notified by email or telephone, and will be announced on our website (http://catpages.nwmissouri.edu/m/tlr/) in September, 2012.



If you’d like an acknowledgement of receipt send a SASP; please do not send a SASE.



Send entries to:

GreenTower Press
Midwest Chapbook Series
Northwest Missouri State University
Maryville, MO 64468

Questions may be addressed to the editors of The Laurel Review at: TLR@nwmissouri.edu

Recent chapbooks available from GreenTower Press:


Elizabeth Clark Wessel, Whither Weather

BLOOM, Rob Schlegel

Show Me Yours, Hadara bar-Nadav

Off the Fire Road, Greg Wrenn

Instructions for a Painting, Molly Brodak

ITINERARY, Reginald Shepherd

Anatomy of a Ghost, Rumit Pancholi

Grenade, Rebecca Hoogs

The BirdGirl Handbook, Amy Newman

The day was seized!

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Salute!
+
The future of physics just got exciting.
http://gizmodo.com/5923422/physicists-have-found-the-higgs-boson
Boom!

THE ONE THING THAT CAN SAVE AMERICA John Ashbery
 

Is anything central?Orchards flung out on the land,Urban forests, rustic plantations, knee-high hills?Are place names central?Elm Grove, Adcock Corner, Story Book Farm?As they concur with a rush at eye levelBeating themselves into eyes which have had enoughThank you, no more thank you.And they come on like scenery mingled with darknessThe damp plains, overgrown suburbs,Places of known civic pride, of civil obscurity.
 These are connected to my version of AmericaBut the juice is elsewhere.This morning as I walked out of your roomAfter breakfast crosshatched withBackward and forward glances, backward into light,Forward into unfamiliar light,Was it our doing, and was itThe material, the lumber of life, or of livesWe were measuring, counting?A mood soon to be forgottenIn crossed girders of light, cool downtown shadowIn this morning that has seized us again?
 I know that I braid too much on my ownSnapped-off perceptions of things as they come to me.They are private and always will be.Where then are the private turns of eventDestined to bloom later like golden chimesReleased over a city from a highest tower?The quirky things that happen to me, and I tell you,And you know instantly what I mean?What remote orchard reached by winding roadsHides them? Where are these roots?
 It is the lumps and trialsThat tell us whether we shall be knownAnd whether our fate can be exemplary, like a star.All the rest is waitingFor a letter that never arrives,Day after day, the exasperationUntil finally you have ripped it open not knowing what it is,The two envelope halves lying on a plate.The message was wise, and seeminglyDictated a long time ago, but its time has stillNot arrived, telling of danger, and the mostly limitedSteps that can be taken against dangerNow and in the future, in cool yards,In quiet small houses in the country,Our country, in fenced areas, in cool shady streets.

Todd McGowan: The Love of Antagonism in Le Mepris (Contempt)

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The Love of Antagonism in Le Mepris (Contempt)
by Todd McGowan
Acidemic



Certainly the most conspicuous dimension of Jean-Luc Godard's refusal of the Hollywood aesthetic is his departure from traditional narrative structure. Godard does not begin with exposition and then proceed to lay down a straightforward narrative arc. Instead, the exposition often lasts throughout the film, and the narrative circles back on itself rather than moving forward toward a clear resolution. As David Bordwell puts it in his analysis of Godard's deployment of narrative, Godard delays and distributes his exposition more than any other director. For Bordwell, Godard is a representative figure of art-film narration, a narration that he opposes to that of the classical Hollywood type. But Godard's distance from Hollywood should not be measured primarily by his attitude toward narrative. It is instead his insistence on depicting sexual antagonism in his early films that separates him not only from the Hollywood aesthetic but from most auteurs outside of Hollywood as well.

The fundamental form that contemporary ideology takes is the idea that the romantic union has the ability to resolve antagonism. Even as belief in social authorities wanes, the belief in the complementary partner who would resolve the subject's lack in a romantic union remains almost perfectly unassailed. The idea of the soulmate penetrates the most cynical veneer, and Hollywood plays an essential role in sustaining this idea. More than providing spectators with a sense of social stability and meaning through narrative, Hollywood cinema supplies them with the ideology of romance. Godard's early films represent a response to the predominance of this ideology.

One of the recurring ideas in the early films of Godard is their insistence on the antagonism that haunts every couple. This is evident in À Bout de Souffle (Breathless, 1960), Une Femme Est une Femme (A Woman Is a Woman, 1961), Bande à Part (Band of Outsiders, 1964), Alphaville (1965), and Pierrot le Fou (1965), among many others. In his films, desires never match up no matter how ideal a couple may seem. Le Mépris (Contempt, 1963) shows this disjunction of desire through the relationship between Paul (Michel Piccoli) and Camille Javal (Brigitte Bardot). The film depicts the deterioration of their marriage, and it reveals the roots of this deterioration in the interplay of their desires, desires that resist complementarity rather than facilitating it. Their relationship plays itself out against the backdrop of Paul's decision to work on rewriting the script for a film version of The Odyssey being directed by Fritz Lang (played by himself) and produced by American producer Jerry Prokosch (Jack Palance), who hires Paul to fix the film. Neither Paul nor Camille have a sense of what the other really wants, and this ignorance leaves them completely isolated as desiring subjects. And yet, at the same time, both believe that they do know what the other wants, and it is this shared belief that ultimately destroys their relationship. As Godard shows, it is the attempt to fill the emptiness of one's desire with an actual object that destroys romance, though this is precisely what cinema typically offers its spectators.

After the opening credit sequence (in which the credits are spoken rather than written), the film begins with Paul and Camille in bed together. Though this opening scene seems to show Paul and Camille experiencing a kind of happiness that they would subsequently lose, it already exposes the antagonism that exists between them. Here, even at this early point, their desires are completely at odds. At the precise moment that Paul believes he is giving Camille what she wants, he reveals to her that he fails utterly to love her in the way that she wants to be loved. Godard reveals this through their verbal interaction in the scene. Camille asks Paul a series of questions about his feelings toward the various parts of her body if he loves her shoulders, her breasts, her legs, and so on. Each time, Paul avows his love for the particular body part. After Paul responds affirmatively to all of the questions, Camille then asks him, Donc tu m'aimes totalement? [Then you love me totally?]. Paul answers, Je t'aime totalement, tendrement, tragiquement [I love you totally, tenderly, tragically]. Here, Paul seems to express total love for Camille - precisely what we would assume that she wants to hear. However, as Paul is speaking, Camille looks down away from his face, seemingly disappointed with this response. This show of disappointment stems from Paul's belief that she constitutes a whole that he can love totally.

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