THE LADY:
If every man that now pines with want
Had but a moderate and beseeming share
Of that which lewdly-pamper’d Luxury
Now heaps upon som few with vast excess,
Natures full blessings would be well dispenc’t
In unsuperfluous even proportion,
And she no whit encomber’d with her store,
And then the giver would be better thank’t,
His praise due paid, for swinish gluttony
Ne’re looks to Heav’n amidst his gorgeous feast,
But with besotted base ingratitude
Crams, and blasphemes his feeder. (ll.767-78)

A timely couple of lines about the nature of excess. The virtuous Lady, captured by the debauched Comus, derides her captor for his luxurious living. I can’t help but think of Goldman Sachs here, of the growing divide in this country between the have’s and the have-not’s, and what all of that excess does to those that have. It’s a rare moment of true Miltonic populism.

The accusation which the Lady levels against Comus is not just that he eats too much, drinks too much, parties too much, but that engaging in that excessive consumption keeps his eyes turned downward. It seems a cliché at this point, but the man immersed in luxury can’t see beyond the boundaries of his own consumption — he’s bound up in what he has and what he wants. I’m secularizing the passage a bit, since the “feeder” Milton alludes to is divine, the god who permits Comus to have more than his share, but I think the general sentiment — that of self-obsessive, self-blinded over-consumption — still works without it.

The Envy Corps
“Rhinemaidens”
I Will Write You Love Letters If You Tell Me To
Self-released, 2006

Back at the start of my first year in Madison, Ms. Bridges — who is much, much cooler than me (or anybody else I know) — gave me a couple of albums. One was Beartrap Island by Division Day. Another was Lanzafame by Tap Tap. And the last one was an EP by a band that has become my favorite disappearing act. I hadn’t heard a thing about The Envy Corps before that and, except for googling them just now, I haven’t heard a thing about them afterwards, and I like to think that I keep an ear to the ground, music-wise. Are the Envy Corps a one-hit wonder, then? Well, it certainly seems that way.

But what a one-hit wonder. I Will Write You Love Letters If You Tell Me To is catchy from the get-go, thanks to its eminently listenable lead track. The rest of the EP — which at seven tracks is almost an album unto itself — is pretty solid but lacks the magnificent hookiness of “Rhinemaidens.” There’s nothing terribly groundbreaking about the track, when you get down to it. It follows the indie pop-rock playbook: the slow build then sudden-upshift intro; the usual verse-chorus-verse-chorus modulations; the swell in intensity just past the midpoint of the song; that kind of stuff. The lyrics are passable, maybe even touching, but certainly not profound, and they’re sung in a voice that almost tips over into that annoying nasal pitch to which some middling indie rock troubadours fall prey.

But what it offers is a near flawless execution of that playbook. It’s a song that moves, that carries you along in the effortless sweep of its melodies. For me, it’s a particularly satisfying piece of music: it makes no great demands but offers something simple and deep, a little kernel of, I don’t know, joy or contentment. It’s one of those songs that just shimmers from the very first listen, and that’s a particularly rare bird. It’s polished without being vacuous, elegant without being overwrought. But judge for yourself.

[Embedding has been disabled, it seems, so head over to YouTube using this.]

Well, back to the grind…

As far as I’m concerned, this has been a pretty great year for new music. Andrew Bird put out another, well, phenomenal album (Noble Beast), 4AD cobbled together one of the best compilation albums I’ve ever laid my hands on (Dark Was The Night), Amadou & Mariam cranked out a ballin’ afro-pop album (Welcome to Mali), Coldplay released a legitimately good remix album (Prospekt’s March), and a couple of perennial favorites (Metric, Sunset Rubdown, My Morning Jacket, et. al.) put another notch in their respective musical belts. Oh, and did I mention that Phoenix kicked the collective musical establishment in the face? Because Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix did just that. If you don’t have that album, your life is about two shades drabber than mine.

But that’s all stuff from, like, months ago. It’s good news but it’s old news. No, I’m here to tell you about the new stuff I gots. First off: The Antlers. I’d seen them floating around for a while and — I don’t know how — I had convinced myself that I didn’t like them. (I think I thought they were noise pop or black metal or something like that.) For the record, I did the same thing with Fleet Foxes. Anyways. The Antlers’ album Hospice is not noise pop or black metal. It’s beautiful, fragile, touching-your-heart-with-its-thumb music. There are tracks on this album that put a knot in my chest the same way Bon Iver’s For Emma often does. Granted, I’m in an existentially delicate state these days, but there’s something deep and genuine in this album.

On a different note, there’s The XX. Or, The xx. Or, xx. I don’t know. But their album — a kind of stripped-down, lo-fi version of Matt & Kim, I’d say — has its fair share of quirky, compelling cuts, the kind of tracks that get you bouncing along with the music without really realizing that you’re doing it. For whatever reason, I find it hard to talk about this album. But give it a listen. Don’t let the disaffected indie-ness of the video throw you off.

And, since I have to get back to writing my paper for Mike, I’ll cut this short and just mention Florence and the Machine (Lungs), Girls (Album), and Wild Beasts (Two Dancers). Oh, and the opening track to The Veils’ Sun Gangs, “Sit Down by the Fire.” I think the rest of the tracks head in some dubious directions, but this one’s a keeper.

Alright. I’m out. Godspeed, world.

Reading-wise, I had two pretty epic failures this semester. I bitched out on Dave Eggers’ incredible (but also incredibly heavy) What is the What after reading through the first 150 pages, not in the least because it had the net effect of keeping me up rather than helping me drift into sleep. The problem is that the story is (a) outlandishly compelling, (b) horrific, and (c) provocative (on an emotional and intellectual level). So I’m leaving that off until I get some vacation time to put it away, i.e. Christmas. My other failure is on the other end of the spectrum. I bought a massive — and, it would turn out, massively dull — academic biography of Shakespeare that just beat me, pure and simple. I won’t name names here, but Lord, it was tedious. And Shakespeare’s life and times were not a particularly tedious affair. Eric promises that Bill Bryson’s short bio is one of the best he’s read, so I’ll give it a spin, I think.

But in the last week, I found a perfect book to occupy my time until I buy the remaining Murakami novels I want: The Complete Stories of Edgar Allen Poe. Bam!

My grad school delight in Poe actually began a couple semesters back, when I taught “Ligeia” and “The Cask of Amontillado” in a lit class. Though I got really awful, awful papers on those stories from my students, the stories themselves are, well, just awesome. You end up asking yourself an essentially absurd question while reading Poe: What just really happened? It’s fiction, so, yeah, none of it really happened. And, to a certain degree, it doesn’t really matter what really happened. But those moments of uncertainty, perched between the rational and magical, between the psychological and the supernatural, lay bare something inside you. Did that guy see his dead wife? Was his sister actually dead? Can he actually still hear the guy he walled up in there? Reading these stories, I always get the feeling that I’m being subjected to a Rorschach test, that by playing into a desire for certainty I’d also be tipping my hand, so to speak. That’s just what I’m moving away from, though. If anything, my reading habits in the last couple years have pushed me into a state of sustained uncertainty. (For instance, as I tell my students this semester, Shakespeare is more interested in stirring things up than letting them settle.)

Poe has clicked some things into place, thinking-wise. It’s occurred to me that the strand linking together my preferred bedtime books — Eco, Borges, and Murakami, in particular — is the uncanny. Or, I guess, the uncanny as a sort of gateway into architektonike (self-knowledge). For each of these authors, the moment of strangeness and estrangement is inevitably a moment of profound revelation. Like staring into the Aleph in the eponymous Borges story, the moment you look into something that defies all reason is also the moment when you turn inward, when your lens of the world is forced back on itself. All of Murakami’s characters seem to passively agree with just that impulse — bizarre spirit journeys and talking cats and succubus-like apparitions pepper his work — and it inevitably stretches out onto the reader himself.

And in a roundabout way, this is the sense I get from Poe’s stories. In particular, I’ve been mulling over “The Gold-Bug.” Trying my best not to spoil it for anyone, I’ll just say that the kernel of the story is about how people can seem insane until you discover the method to what they’re trying to do. There’s just a perfect moment in the story — a paragraph, really — where you see the narrator swinging from “Holy shit, this guy is insane” to “Holy shit, this guy is a genius.” It’s actually a reversal of the usual polarity of Poe’s stories: we start out with the uncanny or disturbing and get moved back to a rational mode of understanding the world. But there’s the same essential truth, I think.

And this at last gets me to my point: I’m pretty sure that’s the swing I’m looking to make every time I write a term paper. So much of my research feels like madness and, within that, there’s a little nugget of crystallized reason that is trying to claw its way out. The logic of “The Gold-Bug” is that you need to be patient with madness, that you need to just kind of go along and see what happens, even when you’re following some half-baked Southerner and a freed slave armed with a scythe through the woods in the middle of the night. It’s a story about oblique thinking (and about how our assumptions can often blind us to the possibility and the promise of oblique thinking). Because what emerges out of oblique thinking — or at least what seems like oblique thinking — is often something fantastic. So, right now, I’m following my madness through the forest.

From “On Providence,” Seneca [ca. 50 c.e.]

Let every time, every place teach you how easy it is to reject the claims of Nature and to throw her gift back in her face; in the very midst of altars and the customary rites of sacrifice, as you make your prayers for life, acquaint yourself fully with death. The fatted bodies of bulls fall from a slight wound, and creatures of great strength are felled by a blow from one man’s hand; a thin blade severs the sutures of the neck, and when that joint which links head and neck has been cut, all that great mass collapses.

The soul does not lie hidden in a deep recess, no knife at all is needed to root it out; no wound must be planted deep to search for the vital parts: death is close at hand. I have set no definite place for these mortal blows: anywhere you wish, the way lies open. That very thing which is called dying, the soul’s departure from the body, is so brief that its swiftness cannot be perceived: whether a knot strangles your throat, or water stops you breathing, or you fall to the hard ground below and it crushes your skull, or flame you inhale cuts off the process of breathing: whatever it is, your end comes fast. Are you not blushing with shame? For so long you have dreaded what happens in a moment!

From Act II, Scene ii, ll.212-16, in The Comedy of Errors, William Shakespeare [1592/4]

ANTIPHOLUS OF SYRACUSE [aside]:
Am I in earth, in heaven, or in hell?
Sleeping or waking? Mad or well advised?
Known unto these, and to myself disguised!
I’ll say as they say, and persever so,
And in this mist at all adventures go.

Aside from that, though, I’m still chugging along. During Week 4, I spent a lot more time in the actual SERF. In these waning weeks of summer, it’s been getting progressively emptier and emptier, to the point that during my Friday workout I was the only one on the basketball courts and only one of two people in the fitness room. (That’s all changing as I write this, though, since all the [expletive] students are returning to their drunken mating grounds this very week.) I thought it best to take full advantage of the space while I had it. And I think I did. Last week was all in-building workouts, most of which lasted in excess of one and a half hours.

I’ve cut back on playing soccer over at Reynold’s Park, too. Now that I’m in considerably better shape than Week 1, I’ve found I don’t get quite the workout I want by just juggling a soccer ball and doing some random fitness exercises (push-ups, sit-ups, et. al.). And it’s started getting a bit dull. And I’ve had a number of unpleasant experiences while doing so. Week 3 was capped off by a trip to the soccer fields that included a pair of overweight middle-schoolers taunting me. Two girls walked by the fields and told me to “Do a rainbow kick.” I can, in fact, do a rainbow kick, but I do not indulge the whims of bitchy teenagers. When I did not oblige these two young women, in spite of their charms, they walked around the building and crouched behind the adjoining tennis courts, where they proceeded to mannishly yell “You suck” at me while I was juggling. I didn’t respond, and they stepped it up to yelling “You suck dick.” I had the passing thought of walking over to them and just reaming them out, but I held back and went all Gandhi on them, continuing to juggle my soccer ball whilst not even batting an eye. And they eventually shut their traps. (Lord, what a reminder that I need to send my future kids to boarding school from ages 11 to 17.) I was happy with my solution, but in a perfect world they would have both been struck in their respective heads by large chunks of decommissioned satellites falling from the sky. Where’s divine/scientific intervention when you need it?

This coming on the heels of the previous week’s run-in with the Soccer Dudes, I’m not especially keen on heading back to that field by myself. And I’ve been really content with the progress I’m making both in my jump-shot (hooray, basketball!) and my circuit training (hooray, not getting winded walking to campus at a brisk pace!) back at the SERF. I’ve finally hit a point where I feel like I have decent muscle tone, and now I’m beginning to ramp up the amount of weight I’m throwing around on the Fitness Room’s awkward weight machines. Moreover, my SERF-related depression is pretty much gone — I’ve made my peace with the industrial architecture and the over-taxed workout rooms and the preening meatheads — and, nine times out of ten, I leave the building feeling way, way better than when I walked in.

But the countdown is on. Five more days and I’m done (with this phase, at least). I’m already beginning to plan what my semester workout schedule might look like — perhaps with even a cardio class in the mix? — and, more importantly, what Wii games we’ll buy. Unfortunately, as far as the reward goes, I’ve made myself a corollary rule: no Wii until my incomplete is done. (I’m hoping to buckle down and knock this thing off something in the next week, but it just keeps spiraling outwards.) I’m something of a gym acolyte now, I do believe, and I hope that belief will stick with me as the madness that is this year gets underway. Vamos a ver, I guess…

From “The Introduction” in Leviathan, Thomas Hobbes [1651]

“But there is another saying not of late understood, by which they might learn truly to read one another, if they would take the pains; and that is, Nosce teipsum, Read thy self: which was not meant, as it is now used, to countenance, either the barbarous state of men in power, towards their inferiors; or to encourage men of low degree, to a sawcie behaviour towards their betters; But to teach us, that for the similitude of the thoughts, and Passions of one man, to the thoughts, and Passions of another, whosoever looketh into himself, and considereth what he doth, when he does think, opine, reason, hope, feare, &c, and upon what grounds; he shall thereby read and know, what are the thoughts, and Passions of all other men, upon the like occasions. I say the similitude of Passions, which are the same in all men, desire, feare, hope, &c; not the similitude of the objects of the Passions, which are the things desired, feared, hoped, &c: for these the constitution individuall, and particular education do so vary, and they are so easie to be kept from our knolwedge, that the characters of mans heart, blotted and confounded as they are, with dissembling, lying, counterfeiting, and erroneous doctrines, are legible onely to him that searcheth hearts. And though by mens actions wee do discover their designe sometimes; yet to do it without comparing them with our own, and distinguishing all circumstances, by which the case may come to be altered, is to decypher without a key, and be for the most part deceived, by too much trust, or by too much diffidence; as he that reads, is himself a good or evil man.”

Wednesday was less pleasant. I showed up later in the afternoon and kicked the ball around for a while before a group of young-20′s dudes (there’s no better word to describe them) showed up and began to creep into my part of the field. A pretty nice guy asked me to practice with them, and I politely turned him down, explaining that, A) I’m missing a ligament and a good chunk of cartilage in one knee, and B) I don’t have health insurance. He wished me the best and went back to shanking balls five feet left of the post. But just five minutes later, another (less-than-nice) guy told me to “come help out.” Not being entirely sure what that entailed, I also turned him down with a jovial “Maybe next time, dude.” He did not take kindly to this and proceeded to yell at me across the field about how the dudes in question were “renting” the field and — here’s the kicker — that I needed to “Play or pay.” I stopped, stared at him for a second, and then turned my back on him and resumed juggling, to which he only replied, “Hey, go faster, Pele.” Clearly, my Gandhi-like calm in the face of the conflict unnerved him, leaving him with the option of yelling some idiotic quip at me from fifty feet away.

I bring this up because these kinds of exchange, both polite and less-than-polite, keep happening at the gym as well. As I mentioned in my previous post, I generally start my SERF workout by shooting hoops for the first 20 minutes. Almost without fail, somebody asks me to play one-on-one or “run game” or whatever with them, and I turn them down. At first, I explained the whole screwed-up knee scenario, but lately I’ve just shifted to saying, “I’m on my way out. Sorry, dude.” (The “Sorry, dude” is what really sells it.) Most times, that works just fine, but every now and again I’ll get a pushy dude like my friend from the soccer field. My favorite came last Friday, when I was shooting on the only open court in the whole gym:

19-year-old Frat Guy: Hey. Hey. (Waving from across the court.) You wanna ball?
Me: Thanks, but I can’t. I’ve got a bad knee.
Fratguy: What?
Me: I’m rehabbing a bad knee. I don’t have any cartilage in it. So I can’t play.
Fratguy: (Confused look.) Really?
Me: Yeah. Really.
Fratguy: Come on.We just need one more. Come on.
Me: Maybe next time. (Turns around; resumes shooting basketball.)
Fratguy: (Turns around. Yelling to similar frat-friends.) He said he can’t play. Yeah, I don’t know.

(I moved courts at that point — mostly because Fratguy and Friends had enough for a full-court game and I thought it polite to leave it  to them — and ended up in a side gym with a bunch of Korean exchange students hurling the ball at the hoop. Oh, the ignominy of being cast out of the sporting community!)

Back when I was nineteen and my knee was recently gimpy, those kinds of moments used to upset me a lot, usually enough to keep me from going back for a couple days until me and my over-developed sensitivity got over it. But by this point, after years of begging off those pick-up games and shoot-arounds, I’m beginning to see the humor in it. I still appreciate being asked — it still means that I’m still part of that population of sporty dudes, even if only by appearance — and I’m beginning to re-orient myself around what I can do, as opposed to what I can’t. That, in and of itself, is a pretty big shift in my worldview, one that I hope will help me stay on this whole going-to-the-gym horse.

The only other big development this week is in my actual workout. Using some of the websites from my last post as stepping-stones, I’ve started doing circuit workouts. And they’re brutal. The general guidelines: start out with some kind of heavy cardio — essentially sprinting — that gets your heart rate up, then do a series of oppositional exercises in quick succession. Repeat. So, for example, I’ll play some basketball and stretch out, then head into the SERF’s basement fitness room. Once there, I’ll do three solid minutes of flat-out sprinting on a stationary bike (which, in my current state of disrepair, has me at near-puke after the first two minutes). After that, I move to doing bicep curls (arms), then quad lifts (legs), then chest flies (chest), then tricep pulls (back to arms), a set of leg presses (legs), and finally a set of push-ups (chest) and sit-ups. I take a short rest, typically doing some more stretching and trying not to black out, and then repeat the cycle.

I should point out that I have yet to make it all the way through the third cycle. Granted, I’ve only been doing this in earnest for my last three gym days, but I hope that this will continue to get better. Wish me luck!

Links about circuit training for the curious:

Fitness Advisor Page (complete with links to possible exercises and how to do them)

Random Sports Coach (comprehensive list of circuit exercises)