“English is an immensely complicated language to get right,” writes Mark Forsyth, “and native speakers often have no idea of its strangeness.” In fact, he adds, it’s “largely made up of the rules we don’t know that we know.” For example:

You are utterly familiar with the rule of ablaut reduplication. You’ve been using it all your life. It’s just that you’ve never heard of it. But if somebody said the words “zag-zig” or “cross-criss” you would know, deep down in your loins, that they were breaking a sacred rule of language. You just wouldn’t know which one.

Speaking of loins, Forsyth explains how, when it comes to verse, rhythm is far more important than rhyme:

It’s the subtle difference when we record a record or present a present or tell a rebel to rebel. It’s a difference that is very hard for people to learn, and is the main reason that, in a strong French accent, there’s no difference between happiness and a penis.

His book, The Elements of Eloquence, would make a great gift for the word nerd in your life. Like, you know, me. I mean, I do have a birthday coming up.

posted by: Aaron Bragg  |  category: the writing life  |  make a comment

There’s a new podcast in town, and it’s (predictably) great.

The Album Years, hosted by Steven Wilson and Tim Bowness, takes it as a given that the album, as an art form, is worth taking seriously—something I’ve been arguing for years—and that its heyday began in the mid-1960s and ended some thirty-five years later with the new millennium.

The intent is for each episode to focus on a single year. The first takes a look at 1980, with discussion around not only the obvious (Peter Gabriel’s third solo release, David Bowie’s Scary Monsters, The Talking Heads’ Remain in Light) but also some lesser-known stuff like Peter Hamill’s A Black Box and Common One from Van Morrison. Episode 2, which I haven’t listened to yet, dives into 1973.

Something worth mentioning: While it’s true that albums no longer seem to capture the zeitgeist (but then, what does these days?), there are musicians who still take the format seriously—like, say, Steven Wilson. So all is not lost.

posted by: Aaron Bragg  |  category: random thoughts  |  make a comment

If you’ve been spending the pandemic sitting around the house in underwear you haven’t washed in a week, sculpting tiny figurines out of earwax and bellybutton lint, and eating Cheetos and Slim Jims for breakfast, then you probably shouldn’t watch Grey Gardens. Don’t get me wrong—it’s an amazing piece of filmmaking. It’s just, well…it might hit a little too close to home for you right now.

Instead, why not check out this free 90-minute documentary on the history of chairs from 1800 to today? No, really: It’s stylish and mod and German—just the sort of thing to pick you up out of the doldrums.

posted by: Aaron Bragg  |  category: random thoughts  |  make a comment

So I finally got around to watching Friday the 13th over the weekend. Yeah, I know it’s been out for forty years. Yeah, I understand it’s become something of a pop cultural touchstone. Yeah, I know I’m lame. In fact, the missus could hardly believe it.

“Wait,” she said, confusion furrowing her brow. “When you guys got together in high school and rented movies, what did you watch?”

Mostly Monty Python, it turns out, which I recognize makes me sound even lamer.

The thing is, Friday the 13th just…didn’t interest fourteen-year-old me. The entire horror genre was something I shrugged off, probably because my annoying older sister was so into it. (She had terrible taste in music, so I just assumed that translated to film.) The one exception was An American Werewolf in London—which I saw in the theater and love to this day—but for some reason, I never thought of it as horror.

Anyway.

Friday the 13th is…okay, I guess. The setting isn’t all that creepy and the characters are so one-dimensional I was actually looking forward to each one’s (hopefully) gruesome demise. But I gotta say, I wasn’t expecting the ending. That was a shocker.

The other thing I wasn’t expecting? Bill—the guy pinned to the door of the generator shed near the end of the movie—was played by Harry Crosby, son of Bing. Sure, it’s tenuous, but there’s a Spokane connection to one of the foundational films of the slasher genre.

Go figure.

posted by: Aaron Bragg  |  category: random thoughts  |  make a comment

A year ago, I wrote about Keith Jarrett on the occasion of his seventy-fourth birthday. I don’t want to make it an annual thing, but this piece by Chase Kuesel is worth reading this year, as it highlights the tension between capital-A Artists like Jarrett and our current “digital moment”:

The profundity of Keith Jarrett’s recorded output can be traced to exactly those musical values that are so unfit for digital parameterization. Part of the joy of listening to Jarrett is the experience of affixing yourself to the sinuous waves of his improvisations and tracing them as they unfold over time. While he has the ability to immediately transfix a listener—rapid lines, cacophonous sheets of sound, a physical orientation to the instrument that is at once athletic and sensual—it is secondary to the way he makes meaning over the course of a performance. His phrases move in broad, gestural strokes, forsaking the hypnotic verticality so prevalent in digitally-infused music. When you listen to Jarrett improvising, you don’t bob your head up and down or aggressively pulsate with your torso; you gently sway from side to side, following the curves of the performance as they unfold. To follow these curves is to experience a type of tumbling inevitability: his lines wrap in and around one another but with a perpetual sense of forward-motion, unfurling outwards with a dual sense of elaboration and exploration. In this way, there is something deeply satisfying about experiencing Jarrett’s playing in real-time. Devoid of clichés and predictability, the satisfaction of its logic can only be experienced simultaneous with its arrival. 

First, that there’s just straight-up baller writing. Second, Kuesel is right: Even with a recording of Jarrett, you need to commit—and there are so few people willing to do that these days, it seems. More’s the pity.

Anyway, last year I recommended The Köln Concert for Jarrett newbies; this year, why not go all in with his Sun Bear Concerts? After all, if you want “the experience of affixing yourself to the sinuous waves of his improvisations and tracing them as they unfold over time,” there’s no better place to start than six and a half hours’ worth of live improvisation.

posted by: Aaron Bragg  |  category: random thoughts  |  make a comment

There’s no shortage of obituaries on the late, great Little Richard—who died Saturday at 87—nor should there be for the man who was truly the King of Rock and Roll.

However…

May I suggest you skip all of them in favor of David Ramsey’s “Prayers for Richard” from about five years ago? It’s really all you need to read today.

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If you, like me, are digging ESPN’s The Last Dance, you may be interested to know that the network is planning to release three more documentaries.

“Here’s a thought,” writes David Mason. “Literary criticism ought to entertain as well as illuminate.”

A couple of New Yorker pieces of note: Adam Kirsch on Søren Kierkegaard, and, from the same issue, Anthony Gottlieb on Frank Ramsey.

“From above, the Konsen Plateau in eastern Hokkaido offers a remarkable sight: a massive grid that spreads across the rural landscape like a checkerboard.” NASA’s Earth Observatory has the details.

A fascinating—and lengthy—interview with “the incomparable” Jim O’Rourke.

posted by: Aaron Bragg  |  category: random thoughts  |  make a comment

FEEL LIKE A BIRD
May Swenson

feel like A Bird
understand
he has no hand

instead A Wing
close-lapped
mysterious thing

in sleeveless coat
he halves The Air
skipping there
like water-licked boat

lands on star-toes
finger-beak in
feather-pocket
finds no Coin

in neat head like
seed in A Quartered
Apple eyes join
sniping at opposites
stereoscope The Scene
Before

close to floor giddy
no arms to fling
A Third Sail
spreads for calm
his tail

hand better
than A Wing?
to gather A Heap
to count
to clasp A Mate?

or leap
lone-free and mount
on muffled shoulders
to span A Fate?

from Another Animal (1954)

posted by: Aaron Bragg  |  category: random thoughts  |  make a comment