My friend Megan is in a band. A rock band. We were also in marching band together in college so when she started saying stuff like "I have band rehearsal now," I'd snicker and advise her to be more specific. She took to declaring "I have rock band rehearsal now," which was way more awesome.
I also find myself in something of a rock band, and I would be remiss if I didn't include somewhere in this blog a mention. It's called Tyranny of Dave and is led by a guy named Dave Wechsler, who has been writing and performing his own music for years. I met him when he came to my undergrad campus to record an SAI recital in the spring of 2009; in return we recorded some background vocals and horn parts for his self-produced album, "The Decline of America: The Bush Years," released in May 2010. (Follow the link to download the album for free; we're on tracks two and four. You can also download ToD's 2007 album "Vacations.")
A year later Dave paid me a huge honor by asking me to sing and play trombone with him and his reassembled band. He also offered me a tambourine once and then quickly took it away and gave me an egg shaker instead. Smart man.
The full band played our first show together this past May, and then Dave and I played an acoustic set last Thursday. We're busy rehearsing and setting up more shows; if you want to be kept in the loop, "like" us on Facebook.
I wasn't expecting to like Virginia Woolf. I had some preconceptions, I guess. I mean, she is British. And that can only lead to trouble. Or maybe that movie with Nicole Kidman rubbed me the wrong way. (I haven't actually seen anything but the opening scene, where Virginia Woolf, played by Kidman, drowns herself in a river.) I don't know what my deal was, but as we readied ourselves to read eight of her essays in my English Prose Style class, I was setting myself up to not like her. I was prepared.
Wow, did I have my head up my ass.
Before I say any more, go here and read "Craftsmanship" (written in 1937, 2,900 words) and go here and read "Professions for Women" (written in 1931, 2,400 words). I'll wait.
For those of you too lazy to hit the jumps -- but really, especially if you've never read Virginia Woolf, spend 15 minutes of your day and read these pieces. Trust me on this one -- here are some excerpts from "Craftsmanship":
"No writer presumably wishes to impose his own miserable character, his own private secrets and vices upon the reader. But has any writer, who is not a typewriter, succeeded in being wholly impersonal? Always, inevitably, we know them as well as their books. such is the suggestive power of words that they will often make a bad book into a very lovable human being, and a good book into a man whom we can hardly tolerate in the room."
"Think what it would mean if you could teach, if you could learn, the art of writing. Why, every book, every newspaper would tell the truth, would create beauty. But there is, it would appear, some obstacle in the way, some hindrance to the teaching of words. For though at this moment at least a hundred professors are lecturing upon the literature of the past, at least a thousand critics are reviewing the literature of the present, and hundreds upon hundreds of young men and women are passing examinations in English literature with the utmost credit, still--do we write better, do we read better than we read and wrote four hundred years ago when we were unlectured, uncriticized, untaught?"
"...words do not live in the dictionary, they live in the mind. Look again at the dictionary. There beyond a doubt lie plays more splendid than Antony and Cleopatra; poems more lovely than the Ode to a Nightingale; novels beside which Pride and Prejudice or David Copperfield are the crude bunglings of amateurs. It is only a question of finding the right words and putting them in the right order."
I mean honestly, the woman is writing an essay about words. Just words. Stylistically there is so much going on here; the repetition that suggests she's rewriting, clarifying her ideas as she goes ("if you could teach, if you could learn" could almost have a "nay," in between the clauses) -- this is the major stylistic element Woolf employs that we talked about in class. We see her thought process as she goes, and gimmicks aren't needed to add emphasis; it's almost, in a sense, pure. She also can never seem to find exactly the right word, so she uses a bunch of them along with some asyndeton to give us a fuller picture: "unlectured, uncriticized, untaught." (In other essays, "it creates; it adorns; it enhances" and "a cat--a beautiful cat, a Persian cat." And so forth.) It's almost poetic, this apposition, this redefinition. Both of these stylistic techniques -- along with Woolf's characteristic interrupters and parenthetical asides -- have already made their way into my own writing, as evidenced by this very paragraph. It's amazing how quickly something like that clicks in the brain and adds itself to the standard cannon. It seems simple enough, but I'm continually surprised by how much you can learn about writing simply by reading a lot.
Plus, how could you not love a woman who makes a joke about a typewriter? That shit's hilarious.
And then there's the content of what she's saying -- that "words, English words" really do offer an infinite number of possibilities. The relative ease of the modern publishing process -- as opposed to 200 or 100 or even 50 years ago -- has created a completely different literary landscape. There's a lot of crap out there. And yet Woolf points out that it doesn't matter, because there is still so much greatness to come. Isn't that just a wonderful and refreshing idea? I'm going to get straight to work creating beautiful, never-before-seen prose!!
Or, you know, writing a blog post about not hating Virginia Woolf. I think we'd be friends. Maybe we'd like hang out and go to the movies and she'd be the kind of person who talks through the whole movie about all the elements they didn't consider when writing the script. Then I'd shush her and tell her that you know what, Sofia Coppola is doing the best she can, and anyway she's been nominated for an Oscar and so you should just calm down and enjoy the cinematic presentation. And then she'd sulk and be silent at dinner and she wouldn't call me. And then she'd drown herself in a river.
Wow, that hypothetical went downhill really quickly.
A somewhat unexpected side effect of working as a journalist is that you come to feel ownership over certain issues, especially those which you spend a lot of time researching and reporting on.
So I felt when I saw this news development, posted on Gizmodo this afternoon: a week from today Rock Band 3 drops, and it's made a huge advance in controller options: one controller features buttons that you play just like a regular guitar, and another is actually a guitar, with pressure sensors under the fingers so the game knows whether you hit the note. What this means is that Rock Band can actually market the idea that the game will teach you how to play a guitar (or at least how to follow along with certain songs).
Of course, being a former PC Mag intern, I was familiar with the idea, to the point where I immediately went and found this story, which I wrote in the spring of 2008. (Because of a PCMag.com redesign, the publish date says January 2009.) I wrote about how games like Guitar Hero have roused interest in rock music, but aren't doing anything to actually teach kids (or somewhat reclusive adults) how to play guitar. My theory was proven when I gave my stepdad with 20 years of experience playing guitar the game for Christmas: He could barely keep up with strumming along at the beginner level at first.
I mentioned in that article a product called Guitar Rising, which had won an award in 2007 and was being developed to be released as just what Rock Band has now: a game into which you can plug in an actual guitar. The Guitar Rising website doesn't seem to have been updated recently, so one can only wonder what happened to the "licensing talks" that were underway when I wrote the article more than two years ago.
This is a super cool development -- using video games to actually teach people a musical instrument is a whole new frontier -- but of course, there's always a flipside, though a minor one. The Gizmodo writer notes, "Harmonix, do you realize that you've got in your powers the ability to make kids learn the songs you want them to? Which is basically shaping the future of music? Use it well, my friends." Everyone will know the Billboard Top 100, but no one may know [insert obscure, largely unknown song that is actually a brilliant piece of music]. But that just may be my wannabe music snobishness talking.
Fun fact: Rock Band 3 will also add a keyboardist to the band. Now people get the chance to butcher those musical lines as well! Wonder if it'll be as effective as teaching drums and guitar now will be?
Some days you don't want to move. It has nothing to do with sadness, and only a little bit to do with fatigue. Movement just seems like a lot of effort.
I would like it noted that I did include an apostrophe in my spelling of "'Cats" in the copy that I turned in. The Daily editors are apparently not a fan of correct punctuation. Otherwise I'm honored that they ran my letter; I wrote it as a coping mechanism and in response to a friend's plea to flood the paper with letters in support of the team. Pull it together, guys. Let's go 'Cats, beat the Spartans!
My life fell apart this weekend, in a number of ways. Central to the implosion was the 'Cats' loss to Purdue. I'm not sure I've ever been so crushed by a football game. Throw in car trouble -- a fender bender and a leaking gas tank (unrelated) in the same day -- and a few other questionable decisions on my part, and you've got a whole lot of first-world problems. It's Monday morning and the figurative hangover hasn't even begun to lift. (Thankfully the actual hangover was cured with a quick trip to McDonald's. Another bad decision, but one I definitely do not regret.)
Here's to using Monday to shake off the blues and refocus. Maybe I can set an example for the 'Cats and we'll come back with an amazing victory over MSU at homecoming in two weeks. We are the perennial underdogs; maybe we're just more comfortable down here.
