Category: Blog
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Intro to Cargocult
In the Second World War, Allied troops airdropped massive amounts of food, weaponry, and supplies onto the Melanesian islands as part of their island-hopping campaign in the Pacific. To the islanders, isolated from industrialization, the wealth and abundance of these drops were interpreted within a mystical, quasi-religious framework. When the war ended, and the airlifts dwindled…
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Metric Prose in Austen’s Emma
Rhetorician Fred Scott divides writing into what he dubs the “motative” and “nutative” styles. Nutative writing, as its name implies, has a rhythm which nods; it was, contemporaneous with Austen, synonymous with verse and poetry. Motative writing, meanwhile, moves: Scott describes it as having the rhythm of the tides, moving shore-ward with each successive rising…
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Memory of Lovers
One of my favorite pieces of Mark Richardson’s writing is his 2012 essay “I Wanna Live: Two Songs About Freedom” for the now-dead column Resonant Frequency. In it, he waxes eloquent on the two-chord song, especially Bowie’s “Heroes,” Cat Power’s “Nothin But Time,” and LCD Soundsystem’s “All My Friends”: [There] is something especially powerful about music with this harmonic…
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A Few Types of Literary Compression
“And I said to Mabel, I said, ‘computational aesthetics, super-short. Jürgen Schmidhuber’s Theory Jürgen Schmidhuber, an AI theorist and theoretical computer scientist, has proposed a computational account of aesthetic judgments. In his view, a stimulus is judged to be beautiful or attractive by a subject T to the extent that the stimulus is compressible for…
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“If It Sounds Bad It Is Bad”
One of the critical ideas I’ve found most interesting of late is a seeming contradiction: Just because it sounds like bad music doesn’t mean it is bad music. “Just because it reads like a bad novel doesn’t mean it’s a bad novel” is also sort of true, but a bit more complicated. The tenability of…
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How To Leave Town
“I don’t think it’s possible to make art that makes sense to people if you don’t spend some time doing normal things,” Car Seat Headrest’s Will Toledo wrote earlier this week in response to an anonymous Tumblr fan question (echoing David Foster Wallace’s now-infamous quote to David Lipsky about treasuring his “normal-guyness”). To both Wallace and Toledo’s work, establishing…
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Oh Boy: Christopher Owens, Headspace, and Artistic Irony
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about two songs in my record collection. One is Jimmie Rodgers’ “T.B. Blues,” considered by some musicologists (e.g. Hugh Barker and Yuval Taylor) to be one of the first popular autobiographical songs. Rodgers made a career out of singing songs about other people—miners, gamblers, gunslingers, jailbirds. But in 1931,…
Suspended Reason 