ok. if that last post brought to you a terrific weight of sadness, here is something that may restore to you the joy of your salvation.
while on the topic of summer reading and following my prompt burst of exuberance, in regard to one david foster wallace, (a brief confession: in all actuality, i’d be quite hesitant in my recommending the rightful reading of infinite jest to a great number of associates, as it is a tome whose investment many would find best spent elsewhere – unless you plainly obtain pleasure from lexicological discovery and brief literary excursions into game theory and trigonometry, in which case, your speculation of time and currency will be suitably satisfied.) i now feel the need to offer recompense for the potentially misleading and unquestionably preceding post and adamantly insist upon your immediate purchase of a book whose pages will fly beneath the fingers and leave a most decidedly pleasing grin upon the face. the book i’d most highly recommend from my summer reading is “body piercing saved my life: inside the phenomenon of christian rock” written by one andrew beaujon. andrew beaujon is/was/is a contributing senior writer for spin magazine which, according to their website, purports both “music for life” and “reaching cool, trend setting young adults.” here, observe diagram: andrew has also written for a number of other periodicals of significance such as the washington post, the washington city paper, the guardian, and salon. the book, which released in april, is a very fair look, by a self professed “outsider,” into not only this genre of music but also the “christian” subculture that this genre flourishes within. it is rare that you have the occasion of someone taking such time and effort to peek in on you, to see what exactly it is you are up to, and then to offer what it is that they have justly observed. at some point during the writing of his book andrew called to ask me a number of provoking questions that i in turn attempted to the best of my ability to provide answers to. there appears a fantastic index in the back of the book that, when i first saw a copy, i turned to. i browsed for my name. sure enough, there it was. i turned to the first page number listed. here is my first appearance in the book: “when stryper came along i was like, ‘holy crap!’” and it only gets better. and so i say that you simply must go immediately to your local book store or amazon.com and pick one of these things up. i’d loan you my copy but right now another friend of mine has it. i promise you, you will be both pleased and provoked. pleased – that someone took the time and presented the current scene so fairly with insightfulness, humor and humility. provoked – to think about the culture we breath in and out so readily with little thought and much assumption. but most importantly, andrew rarely wears bandanas on his head. here, observe the following: you can check out some of andrew’s spin features and music reviews here.
for immediate purchase and to retain my friendship (as it will ensure that we have things in common for days on end… ): body piercing saved my life: inside the phenomenon of christian rock this summer i’ve been reading this book “infinite jest” by david foster wallace. i’ve read many of wallace’s essays in the past and really enjoy his writing, but this book – that sort of put him on the map as a youthful-intelligent-writer-to-be-watched, eventually leading to a MacArthur Fellowship – is incredibly dense and has been sitting on the floor beside my bed for two years. i had just finished up the bulk of writing for “everybody wants to go to heaven…” and finally picked it from the floor thinking it a perfect diversion and suitable companion for the many plane flights this summer. it has been. today i came across a speech given by wallace at a symposium sponsored by the PEN American Center in New York City to celebrate the publication of a new translation of kafka’s “The Castle”. toward the end of the speech i came across what i found to be one of the basic tenets of the re-articulation of christian faith that we’ve been attempting over the past number of years, particularly the portion referencing the “horrific struggle”. as well, it gave great insight into much of infinite jest’s thematic intent. i’ve included it here for your inspection: “And it is this, I think, that makes Kafka’s wit inaccessible to children whom our culture has trained to see jokes as entertainment and entertainment as reassurance. It’s not that students don’t ‘get’ Kafka’s humor but that we’ve taught them to see humor as something you get — the same way we’ve taught them that a self is something you just have. No wonder they cannot appreciate the really central Kafka joke — that the horrific struggle to establish a human self results in a self whose humanity is inseparable from that horrific struggle. That our endless and impossible journey toward home is in fact our home. It’s hard to put into words up at the blackboard, believe me. You can tell them that maybe it’s good they don’t ‘get] Kafka. You can ask them to imagine his art as a kind of door. To envision us readers coming up and pounding on this door, pounding and pounding, not just wanting admission but needing it, we don’t know what it is but we can feel it, this total desperation to enter, pounding and pushing and kicking, etc. That, finally, the door opens…and it opens outward: we’ve been inside what we wanted all along. _Das ist komisch_.” but then i must show you this: [photo appearing on the back cover of my summer reading - “infinite jest”.]
i am wondering what color the bandana is and whether it matches or compliments the turtleneck. |
Crowder Blog archiveAn archive of Crowder's blog posts, 2004-present. Posts come from the following blogs:
emprise34.xanga.com (2004-October 2009) davidcrowderblog.com (October 2009-2010) crowdermusic.com/correspondence (2012-2015) Archives
March 2018
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