Howdy, Precipitate compadres! I hope your May is getting off to a great start. Out in east Austin, the northern cardinals are hanging off tomato plants in the garden. The banana tree is sending up columns of electric green, and verbena is in full bloom. Here are our staff picks for the week. Enjoy!
Daniel’s Album of the Week:
The Future Sound of London’s (FSOL) album Lifeforms (1994) is a testament to the power of electronic music and to music as an art form. The album advances Brian Eno’s ambient theory, using studio treatments to modify sounds with the aims of creating audio environments for listeners to experience. Lifeforms one-ups Eno by fleshing out an entire world, one that is organic and mechanical, breathing and dead, experimental and conventional. A must-listen for all music aesthetes.
Caitlin’s Poetic Pick:
I recently read Alicia Ostriker’s The Nakedness of the Fathers: Biblical Visions and Revisions. Nakedness of the Fathers is an intricately woven narrative that includes Ostriker’s stories from her childhood, along with stories from the Old Testament, which have been “re-visioned” through a female voice. It’s not only voice that is interwoven, but form as verse almost always follows a narrative in every chapter. The chapter that most reflects my idea of how narratives can be transformed over time by voice is “The Wisdom of Solomon.” This chapter includes a re-visioning of King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba meeting, but it is Ostriker’s verse in “Sheba’s Proverbs” that reveals Ostriker’s impeccable attention to the writing of re-vision.
Cameron’s Nonfiction Technological Tract Treat:
As someone who spends a lot of it online—some of it by necessity, most of it not—Nicholas Carr’s book, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains , my current read, is scaring the bejesus out of me. Culling his argument from recent research in neuroscience, literacy history, sociology, and educational psychology, Carr makes a compelling case for how our hummingbird-like reading strategies on the web (dipping frantically from one article, twitter feed, or status update to the next) actually re-mold our very neurons, atrophying the grey matter responsible for deep, meditative reading. The increasingly-ubiquitous Web and its “ecosystem of interruption distractions” (to quote Cory Doctorow), have even been shown to dry up the deeper wells of the brain, the unconscious bits responsible for long-term, aha!-moment-in-the-shower, creative epiphanies. That’s the scoop.
So… is Carr a pudding-headed alarmist? Is your addiction to mainlining YouTube clips of lemurs short-circuiting your neural motherboard? After dwelling on all this research, is Carr going to pull a Kaczynski? Dunno. I’ll have to wait until the end of the book to find out. But this much is true: The Shallows just made the Pulitzer shortlist, so it’s clearly making waves.
Josh’s Album of the Week:
The new Island Brothers EP from Bonnie “Prince” Billy and The Cairo Gang is robust and replete with a transportive, muted trumpet solo and fine, fine singing. Plus, profits from the sales go to “facilitate and educate Haitian access to clean filtered water in these times of disaster and disease.”
Gwynne’s Novel Pick:
British Romantic poetry and speculative fiction have been two of my guilty pleasures for years, so it’s little wonder Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go has been on my reading list since its publication in 2005. Its dystopic mixture of pastoral and sublime offers an intriguing twist on John Keats‘ negative capability treatise. Fox Searchlight released a film adaptation of the novel last year, but I’d give the book a read before hitting up your local video store.