I do not love Arrested Development. More to come...

Resurrection and Wrestling

Happy Easter, everyone. Although the following song is actually probably more fitting for Palm Sunday, I am posting it today. This is a song of human betrayal and weakness, the faithfulness of God, and God's pursuit of humans ("Got me in a sleeperhold"). Anyone who knows more about wrestling than I do (which is most everyone) and wants to elaborate on the use of the metaphor, have at it!

Please go to this page and click on the last song, "Sleeperhold," by Dolorean.
Here are the beautiful lyrics to read along--I have put a few of my favorite lines in bold:

"Sleeperhold" by Dolorean
I was there I heard the crackling of the palms
He came upstairs and had the curtains drawn
This is my body
Keep your stomachs full
This is my blood
Let's get drunk on soul

Got me in a sleeperhold
And you won't let me go
Blessed are those who have no clothes
For sunlight is their fashion
And blessed is he who sleeps on the streets
But his roof is sheltering sky
And blessed be the broken one
For whom grace daily unfolds

Got me in a sleeperhold
And you won't let me go

I was dropped down on a dirt brown field
I watched the sun rise over me
I wanted the heavens to open like a saloon door
But all I heard was a cock crow
What have I done? I cried inside
And my spine turned ice cold

Got me in a sleeperhold
And you won't let me go

I'm tapping out
I'm tapping out
I'm tapping out
Cause it's all too beautiful

I'm blacking out
I'm blacking out
I'm blacking out
But I don't want to go
I'm blacking out
But I don't want to go

**Thanks to Jeremy Huggins to introducing me to this song a few years ago.

Interpretations of the Mystery AND Physicality of Easter: Updike and Holbein

My good friend Bill Rice is visiting this weekend for Easter break. His girlfriend, Anna, sent him the following Easter poem by John Updike. We were stunned. Amazed. Came close to tears on the reading of it. Updike is a man very concerned with the physical world--we can see this in his fiction which is often both sacred and profane. In this poem, he reminds us of the real life physicality that is also part of the Mystery of Easter. After reading this, Bill said that the poem reminded him of Hans Holbein the Younger's painting The Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb. I don't know what to really say about the terrifying beauty of this poem and this painting. But great comfort and beauty is mixed in with the ugliness, terror, pain.

SEVEN STANZAS AT EASTER
by John Updike

Make no mistake: if he rose at all
It was as His body;
If the cell’s dissolution did not reverse, the molecule reknit,
The amino acids rekindle,
The Church will fall.

It was not as the flowers,
Each soft spring recurrent;
It was not as His Spirit in the mouths and fuddled eyes of the
Eleven apostles;
It was as His flesh; ours.

The same hinged thumbs and toes
The same valved heart
That—pierced—died, withered, paused, and then regathered
Out of enduring Might
New strength to enclose.

Let us not mock God with metaphor,
Analogy, sidestepping, transcendence,
Making of the event a parable, a sign painted in the faded
Credulity of earlier ages:
Let us walk through the door.

The stone is rolled back, not papier-mache,
Not a stone in a story,
But the vast rock of materiality that in the slow grinding of
Time will eclipse for each of us
The wide light of day.

And if we have an angel at the tomb,
Make it a real angel,
Weighty with Max Planck’s quanta, vivid with hair, opaque in
The dawn light, robed in real linen
Spun on a definite loom.

Let us not seek to make it less monstrous,
For our own convenience, our own sense of beauty,
Lest, awakened in one unthinkable hour, we are embarrassed
By the miracle,
And crushed by remonstrance.

A Good Song is Hard to Find: Sufjan, Flannery, and the Violence of Being Human

Hi folks. Sorry for the looong absence from this blog--cross country move and new job will do that to you. I am planning on postin more soon, but for now, here is an article about Sufjan Stevens that I have just written for Catpult Magazine. Hope you enjoy it. By the way, if you aren't familiar with Catapult, make sure to check it out! Great magazine/online discussion. I am gearing up for Calvin College's Festival of Faith and Music , so will hopefully be blogging about that soon.

Kerouac the Pilgrim

I wrote my undergrad dissertation (oh so many years ago)on Jack Kerouac, but haven't revisited his works in all those years. While writing an article, I just skimmed through some of the underlined portions of select Keruoac novels. I have always found this section from The Dharma Bums amazing. It lacks Kerouac's typical rollicking, flavorful style but the content/context are amazing. These comments from the novel's protagonist resonate with Kerouac's own movement from Buddhism back to Catholicism:
"But the night would come and with it the mountain moon and the lake would be moonlaned and I'd go out and sit in the grass and meditate facing west, wishing there were a personal God in all this impersonal matter."

The Death of the Author: Goodbye to David Foster Wallace

How sad I was to hear that 46 year old brilliant novelist/ essayist/ creative writing professor David Foster Wallace was found dead this Friday night. I actually really don't know what to say about this, about the tragedy. That's all I can say. It is tragic on many, many levels--spiritual, intellectual; public, private.
So I will just say a few words about my limited, underdeveloped, yet very appreciative relationship with Wallace's mind and writing. I cannot claim to be one of the many brave souls who made it through Wallace's gargantuan, spiraling novel Infinite Jest, but I will do it one day.

I can say that I have a great appreciation for Wallace's talent as a poignant, humorous, ever-relevant essayist. I especially appreciate his extended critique of the dangers of the continual, contemporary usage of irony that is found in the essay "E Unibus Pluram: Television and US Fiction" from A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again.
Here is a brief excerpt:
"Irony, entertaining as it is, serves an almost exclusively negative function. It’s critical and destructive, a ground-clearing…But irony’s singularly unuseful when it comes to constructing anything to replace the hypocrisies it debunks".

This very Coupland-esque critique of our overdependence on irony to not only critique, but construct a way of relating, perhaps even build something of a phantasmic "worldview" shanty, is why I chose Wallace as a voice within my dissertation. He was really onto something with these critiques--headed towards something real, vibrant, amazing. Something true. The New York Times Obituary calls Wallace a "Postmodern" author, and of course, this word has perhaps no meaning. But it seems clear to me that Wallace was dissatisfied with the constructed ironies of some of his fellow authors--it seems that he was looking for something beyond that. He did not label this possibility of a non-ironic reality, but his distrust of irony itself was decidedly (dare I say) moral. Is it more postmodern to be ironic, or is it more postmodern to question irony? As Wallace points out, irony has become an hegemonic institution itself--he sees its operation on a public level. Coupland sees its operation on a private level as a "protective teflon coating" preventing us from actually getting to know one another. But I am curious to know what Wallace thought this irony was preventing us from doing? His thoughts about the dangers of irony are so similar to Coupland's, yet unlike Couplad, he does not explain the underlying reasons for his distress (Coupland's are a desire for community and, at times, faith in God). I know I am rambling, but as I reflect upon Wallace's writings. I can't help but want to wander around his mind (and maybe even his heart) and understand a bit more of the process that brought him to these beautiful moments of perhaps incomplete clarity. But, of course, I can't. And out of respect for him, I probably should not even entertain the thought for now. Perhaps I should just be quiet and leave you with some of his own words, an interview that will perhaps encourage you to go read more about and by him.

Excellent New Music: Presenting BOMBADIL!

Guess what? I have found yet ANOTHER North Carolina band that I love,love,love. The endearingly nerdily named Bombadil (the good kind of nerds--Tolkien nerds)are from Durham/Chapel Hill and met during a Duke semester abroad in Bolivia (I think!). Their music is hard to describe--which in my books, is a very good thing. Eclectic, fun, full of energy and creativity. I can hear some influences: Bolivian traditional music, the Beatles (and the rest of the Britpop 60's for that matter), Irish music, postpunk antifolks avantegarde yada yada yada. You really just have to listen, and you have to realize that each song is quite different from the other. I have seen these guys live twice now, and what a treat it has been! It is rare to go see a band whose music you do not know and not get bored. The first time I saw these guys (having not owned any of their music) I was super sad when they left the stage. They have amazing stage energy, love playing music, and don't take themselves too seriously (you can get a sense of this from watching the video posted below). Although they are amazingly talented (which is obvious as you watch them scurry from instrument to instrument on stage) yet really, really nice, humble guys. These are the kind of musicians that I not only enjoy listening to, but want to support by buying their stuff, going to their shows, and encouraging others to do so.
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Enough of my rambling--check out two of their tunes and let me know what you think:
"Julian of Norwich" Mp3"Smile When You Kiss" Mp3
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My absolute favorite tune is "Jellybean Wine" but I can't find a (legal) mp3 online, so please check it out on their Myspace Page.

If you like what you hear, then be sure to go to Ramseur Records (Avett Brothers, etc.) and buy their album!! **After investigating, it seems easier to go to their site directly and buy their awesome album, "A Buzz, A Buzz".
I actually JUST found out that Bombadil were Paste Magazine's ARTIST OF THE WEEK a while back. Yay!
And if that is not enough to convince you (good grief--what's wrong with you!), then here is a photo of a band member brushing his teeth with a cat: