Here's a wonderful advertisement from Womrath's bookstore, intended to convince us that READING about stuff is more exciting that actually EXPERIENCING it. They make a strong case for the joy of delightful puns and alliteration, at least...
Ankles aweigh! All abored the SS. VAN DINE...sailing to darkest Boop-a-Doop...land of mystery and philovances. Star-drenched daze. Sunkist knights. Drone of dramaturgic dromedaries...drowse of drastic dhuhinkies. Lots of good fellahs. Oil-burning cannibals...ready to take pot-luck with missionaries. Pooh yourself! More fun to stay home...
The advertisement mentions fiction, travel, biography, and history, so I suppose the dense wordplay is meant to evoke all those things: the mystery books of Philo Vance, the "darkest Africa" travel literature, Hollywood biographies, and...whatever "dhuhinkies" are.
For the past six weeks or so I have been engaged in a Cooverthon...that is, I've been re-reading all of Robert Coover's books* in chronological order in an attempt to get a sense of his development and his themes.
Doing this same thing with John Barth a few years ago pretty much destroyed my enjoyment of his work, so I'm aware that this is a dangerous and stupid thing to repeat with another of my favourite authors. One reason I'm doing this is to prove to myself that I didn't sell John Barth short; that other authors CAN stand up to such a rigorous and exhausting re-reading without becoming repetitive.
In some ways, Coover has an edge on Barth because his fiction is so unabashedly repetitive to begin with. My impression after years of fandom has been that -- following "The Public Burning" -- Coover used the same structure over and over again in all subsequent books: a protagonist is stuck inside a nightmarish (and usually genre-specific) environment from which he cannot escape, and as the book progresses the environment becomes increasingly horrifying.
That assumption was incorrect. Coover has been dabbling with that "nightmare" structure since his 1969 collection "Pricksongs & Descants," and while the structure DOES become a regular background feature of most of his subsequent novels, those novels ALSO contain many other novel elements: distinctive characters, bizarre authorial quirks, new types of focus.
We'll see if that impression continues to hold as I make my way through "Pinocchio in Venice" (1991) for the third time. Halfway through "Gerald's Party" (1986) my enthusiasm flagged a bit -- particularly discouraging because it has always been and still remains my favourite Coover novel by far -- but that's to be expected: most of Coovers books are INTENDED to exhaust you ("Gerald's Party" more than most).
I wish I'd rigorously blogged the earlier novels while I was reading them (and I wish I could guarantee that I'll continue to blog them as they come), but here are some scattered impressions:
Coover has dabbled occasionally with theatre, but his plays are underwhelming. Having just read "A Theological Position" (1972) for the first time, my belief that Coover is not a great playwright is further reinforced.
The real joy of "The Public Burning" (1977) is Coover's characterization of Richard Nixon: insecure, self-centered, nervous, awkwardly outgoing. Much of the book is just Richard Nixon endlessly pontificating in his head, and this is some of Coover's best writing. He's masterful at distinctive and consistent characterization (see "Gerald's Party" for the extremes of this), and it's easy to lose sight of that with all the experimental flim-flammery going on.
On the other side of this, however, is "Whatever Happened to Gloomy Gus of the Chicago Bears" (1987), whose Jewish socialist sculptor is Coover's biggest failure: he never comes to life.
"You Must Remember This" (the concluding short story in his "A Night at the Movies" collection) is, I think, his crown jewel. Although "The Babysitter" and "The Magic Poker" tend to be his most anthologized stories (probably because they're early works and -- more importantly -- do not have extended scenes of outrageously graphic sex), "You Must Remember This" sums up everything Coover does well. A close second is "Charlie in the House of Rue," also in the same collection. If you only read one Coover short story, pick one of those.
And now, a list of common Robert Coover themes.
Women with big hips and butts. This obsession tends to taper off eventually, but it begins right there in 1966 with the introduction of the wonderful nurse "Happy Bottom."
Cartoon/vaudeville mime routines. This again is more a feature of his early work, and again begins with "Happy Bottom."
Bawdy songs.
Vicious, fickle audiences.
The protagonist is trapped inside an environment which he cannot escape, and the environment degrades over time. The landscape is usually disconnected -- doors never lead to predictable places -- and often chronology is confused as well.
As a continuation of the nightmare environment, the protagonist usually suffers most when he is feeling proud or confident.
In addition, the protagonist is constantly being punished for failing to follow rules, through no conscious fault of his own.
Sometimes the environment and protagonist are part of an obvious genre.
A large cast of couples who screw around with each other.
Scatology. People tend to poop their pants.
Puns.
Extremely dense, impenetrable, high-brow concepts introduced in tiny snippets within the most banal of events, with the result that the concepts themselves seem banal. This starts happening during Coover's middle period.
Sex with strangers.
* ...with the exception of independently-published pieces, which are difficult and expensive to find.
Italians conspire and shush politics with their wife-birds, bedraggled, bluntly confused. They are Europe's ambassadors to this crass continent of progress and cannibalism; we are the ones who fall the fastest, but our huge gravity will pull them down with us, all those staring dark-eyed peasants and pilgrims and artists. They would declare us guilty if we believed in their gods but their quaint piety is antichrist to our admittedly divided forces.
"You have broken the rules and wandered too far from us!" they scream at the back-ends of our boats, and we respond: "Denial of your beloved elder statesmen! They are too fat on food that took them too long to cook and eat! We, here, eat only the quick things, which we have invented ourselves, the burgers, the beans! Our fat is made of proteins alien to your history, and therefore we are brand new men and women!"
It's really an advertisement for a cruise (eg. if you notice your husband getting stressed, take him on a cruise), but you'd be excused for seeing something more sinister.
(The New Yorker, November 15, 1930, when everybody was running off to warmer climes, the French and Germans were rumbling about war, and backgammon was the game of choice)
I'm working toward the first Lemurian Congress album, tentatively (but with much certainty) entitled "A Storm Targets Your Childhood Home." A few rough mixes are already up on my SoundCloud account, and here's the newest, "Deep Wide Open" (with another great picture by Patrick):
I'm calling these "rough mixes" because they are unmastered, and because the mixes themselves still need some work...I've decided to do the final mixes when I've finalized everything that is going on the album, because I discovered with the Pico and Alvarado EP that remixing (and then mastering) everything in sequence was a great way to unify the songs (this may be less of an issue for those who have settled into a good production method).
I'll spare you the postmortem on this particular song, except to say it's my first real use of Five12's "Numerology 3" plugin. "Numerology 3" is a real amazing creature, but every method of applying it to a song results in some type of problem: either you can't record the MIDI, or you can't use third-party plugins with it, or you suffer sync problems. Each method will allow you to do SOME of those things, but you can't do all of them at once.
Our city is a sinkhole, falling under the weight of industry and families and new steel buildings. Our gravity pulls us so deep that we can only fill our skies with smog...it has to go somewhere! We want it gone but it won't go away!
Two city's worth of blacktop and pollution broils us in our clothes. We have sore shoulders from hugging the shady spots, and when those places reach critical mass, we fight or we retreat to our fridges. The sun has made us needy, every citizen is a gatekeeper of boats, curtains, private routes to heaven. Instead of love we have our own burning weight; we will not be tricked into embraces which only make us sweat. Sweet nothings are lost in the whir of fans and patio stereos. There is no room in our brains for sex or tipsiness when everything about us is pain.
Flowers are entirely Canadian on Canada Day; nobody in any other nation has these yellow flowers pollinated by RGB finches who wear spotless feather-robes! We've owned these flowers since we arrived in this country. Before that they were untamed and savage...their water came from streams bounded by beavers and soil and sparse human excrement. But then we came in ships with our rats, and we imposed order on savagery, and today these flowers bloom in coordination with us, fed by nutrients and liquids that we have previously inspected (or at least touched gently with smokestacks), and when these flowers bloom for us they shout "CANADA DAY!"
The EP that Kevin Cogliano and I have been working on (as "Pico and Alvarado") is available for download from Bandcamp! It's $2 for 25 minutes, and if you think you've already heard most of the songs, I've got news for you: they've been thoroughly remixed and remastered. Plus there's an extended remix in the style of the typical '80s twelve-inch dance mix...I think you'll like it!
Oh, and about those figures on the cover...they are -- you guessed it -- Pico and Alvarado themselves. Knit-vixens Annissa and Lydia have spent the last two months destroying their fingers to make those things. I wish we could give you a free pair with every album because they're terrific!
I'm going through a furious stage of musical experimentation: techniques, tricks, plugins, the world of digital audio is a huge one and I've only just scratched the surface.
Hopefully all future experiments turn out as well as "Big King Thief!"
This song was, from beginning to end, a test of iZotope's "pHATmatik PRO" plugin. I created five separate instances of it, and mutilated five bars of a George Clinton song, and the inevitable result was something that just CRIED funky.
But before we get to that, here's a quick evaluation of pHATmatik PRO: like many of iZotope's acquisitions from other software companies, it's buggy and dated and wonderful. The GUI obviously hasn't been touched since 2002 and the simple movement of MIDI items can result in all your samples being transposed in pitch. It's also easy to find yourself with sample-clicks that cannot be easily removed; the volume envelopes and the filters are coarse and clumsy, which highlights a basic shortcoming of the plugin: it's for extreme sample mangling, not for subtle effects.
Also, WARNING: pHATmatik is NOT fully compatible with Logic 8. You can't drag MIDI information out of the plugin and into Logic (though you can drag the MIDI to your desktop and import it from there), and -- more damning -- you cannot instantiate a multi-output pHATmatik under any circumstances, which is TERRIBLE and is not mentioned ANYWHERE on the iZotope site. You need to create a multi-instance in a version of Logic 7, then save it as a channel strip which you can use in Logic 8.
If you don't have a copy of Logic 7 around, here's a multi pHATmatik channel strip I made myself...it allows the plugin to actually live up to its "Pro" name!
All that said, you can hear the results in this song. Other than a simple Ultrabeat kick/snare and some recurring iDrum hats (and cowbell!), the spectacular beats are all courtesy of pHATmatik. It's an amazing plugin...it just needs to be updated (or price-reduced to compensate for the migraines it might cause).
Here's the "Big King Thief" project (click for a larger version):
So what else is going on in the song? Some string machine from the awesome Loomer String, a Moog-style bassline from IKMultimedia's SampleMoog (a patch I find myself using over and over in these songs), a lead and a pulse from Logic's own ES1 and ES2, a funky bassline that is really a funk piano run through CamelPhat and a bass amp, a bit of Nusofting's daHornet for the deliberately sparse bridge...
...and a lot of samples (including an oboe) that I'll leave for trivia buffs to figure out. I can't get over my love of tremolo!
This was also the first time I've worked really strategically with compression. I put sidechain compression across the pads to allow the samples to cut through, and also used a tip from a recent copy of Computer Music: a copy of Audio Damage's free RoughRider compressor on an effects send, with all the drums sent to it...it dramatically increased the "sludgy" sound of the beat (though maybe too much?)
Then I was ready to mix it and master it...and everything went to hell. All sort of melodic conflicts started showing up in the second verse, and in desperation I began shuffling bits and pieces around until I was hopelessly confused. I eventually tracked the problem down to my IKMultimedia SampleTank plugin, which had deauthorized itself FOR THE SECOND TIME and was behaving in mono mode, playing only the highest note in every chord. I've spent a week with their tech support and they still haven't resolved the issue, but I worked around the problem by recreating the patch in SampleMoog.
Next I started noticing the sample clicks...funny how you don't hear these things until they're so integrated in the song that you can't really fix them. Many of them were due to truncated samples in pHATmatik PRO, but the others -- which you can hear in the garbled speech during the bridge -- are actually from a soft ambient noise in the sample itself which turns into a harsh click when sent through a tremolo effect. By rearranging the tremolo a bit I managed to minimize it, but it's still there...I decided it was minor enough to not worry about.
Some light mastering, some agonizing, a photograph of a lusty dwarf by Patrick, and the song was done! "Big King Thief," not suitable for 17th Century workplaces.
I've spent over a month reading Thomas Pynchon's massive novel "Against the Day." I have lugged it from home, to work, to lunch counter, with little regard to the damage it was causing to my shoulder. I've gotten lost in it and become frustrated with it, I've gone back and forth to reread parts that I'd missed, I've visited Wikipedia to learn about Iceland Spar and the quaternions, I have struggled to stay awake and I have struggled to put it down, and I have thought "I am spending far too much effort on this goddamn book."
Now that I've finished it, I can sum it up by saying...well, it's certainly "Pynchonesque," and it's as complicated and annoying as everybody says it is -- an endless parade of major characters, diversions into dozens of apparently unrelated topics, too much movement from place to place, no real thread to hold it all together -- but it also has a greater proportion of Pynchon-gentleness and enlightenment than I've come to expect. The payoffs -- oblique as they can be -- are so bittersweet and human that you don't mind the coldly scientific obsessions so much.
Unfortunately, these "human" moments are all bundled together during the last 150 pages, and the more interesting and clear-headed moments are in the first 500. The 400 middle pages are somewhat tiresome, when you realize that MORE subplots are being introduced, one of which -- the onset of the first world war -- is a non-stop machine-gun of politics, places, and personages. It's simply too much to handle after the mathematics, strikebreaking, and empire-busting that you've already been through. The characters start to seem like bits of leaves thrown into world events and just blowing around, to Venice and back, to Venice and back, to Venice and back again.
All these criticisms could perhaps be applied to "Gravity's Rainbow," and I'm not sure if my less enthusiastic reception of "Against the Day" is due to the fact that Pynchon "already did it once before," or that "Against the Day" feels like a "Gravity's Rainbow" in which everything -- the paranoia, the dark-mystery-which-cannot-be-comprehended, the sexual escapades, the slapstick -- has been duplicated several times over to fill out an excessive page length, with all these things happening to multiple characters in sequence instead of just to Tyrone Slothrop.
Basically, my impression is that "Against the Day" is five or six novels that Pynchon started writing years ago, all subsequently linked together by unions, WWI, the drift from Victorianism to modernism, explosions, light, and the Tunguska event.
But that's not necessarily a bad thing. "Against the Day" is FULL of wonderful detail and characterization, and -- as I said earlier -- there's a growing gentleness to Pynchon's writing that is absolutely welcome. Whereas "Gravity's Rainbow" culminated in uncertainty and confusion, the characters in "Against the Day" seem to find comfort in companionship, children, and purpose, and the novel doesn't judge them; they did wild things and struggled for noble causes when they were young, and now they're settled down and are raising their children and getting a bit mellower. And that's pretty much The End.
When I was wallowing through 400 Pages of People Just Running Around Europe, I felt like I was reading a really crappy book. Now that I've finished it, however, I look forward to reading it again someday, so I can get a feel for what REALLY matters in the novel: the little moments like Cyprian's trajectory from hedonist to (I won't spoil it for you), the complex interweaving of the Webb and Rideout families, and -- floating high above it all -- the aging airship children who are struggling to find meaning when the "Boys Adventure Story" days are gone.
