The 15 Book Meme

As generated by Bleak Mouse, via Cowtown Pattie, 15 unforgettable books in no more than 15 minutes. There are some incredible oddballs here, I admit, but that's what the exercise produces. This isn't focused on books I enjoy so much as the ones that niggle at me whether I want them to or not:

The Bible (KJV), particularly The Revelation of St. John The Divine. More on the matter here and here. And I agree with this guy: if you can read, you should read The Bible.

The King With Six Friends by Jay Williams: chiefly for the unsettling illustrations by Imero Gobbato, whose current paintings can be sampled here. (A)
Moon Palace by Paul Auster: the necessary entwining of myth and lineage, the ineluctable cycles of madness and creativity, solitude and communion, joy and grief. (A)

Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy: still dealing with the dreams. (A)

On The Road by Jack Kerouac: a maddening book. (A)

Elektra: Assassin by Frank Miller & Bill Sienkewicsz: more here. (A)

Gilgamesh: primitive, brutish, viscerally emotional. (A)

Grendel by John Gardner: Gardner employs all five senses to tickle the cerebral cortex into submission. (A)

The Deptford Trilogy by Robertson Davies: Our saints and stories are serious business, but that's no reason for us to resort to sobriety. (A)

A Wrinkle In Time by Madeleine L'Engle: an adolescent girl learns how to love courageously in an alien locale that's eerily familiar. (A)

The Magician's Nephew by C.S. Lewis The most surreal and haunting of the Narnia books. (A)

Unassigned Territory by Kem Nunn. Nunn's Tapping The Source is more entertaining, and arguably better written, but Unassigned Territory meanders over material and attitudes and yearnings and behaviors in a way that echoes in the memory for a long, long time. (A, Review)

Blood Of The Lamb by Peter DeVries. No father should experience this; every father should read it. (A)

The Road Home by Jim Harrison. A gothic comedy. (A)

Kafka by r. crumb & David Zane Mairowitz A marriage of content and media that is as profoundly disturbing as anything rendered by Jack Chick. (A)

If you're willing, I tag you.

Late correction: Rob in Victoria reminded me of a significant work I somehow missed: John Crowley's Little, Big (A). It's the first title I look for when I walk into a used bookstore, because I'm in the habit of leaving copies behind whenever I stay in someone's guest bedroom. (Chalk it down to envy, brother: I can't see my way through to buying the Limited Edition.)

The Vinyl Restoration Project

Those, then, are the three vinyl rarities that come to my mind: what say we open the floor? Any titles/performers you'd like to see rescued from vinyl obscurity?

Burgess Shale Blues: My First And Final Choice

Last week I listened to an Ideas podcast as I drove around gathering groceries for the family. I was caught up in the tonal delivery, giving the immediate landscape only as much attention as public safety required while my brain fired back at this salvo of propositions with counter-propositions of its own. When I finally reached the parking lot, I shut off the car and sat in silence. The neurons in my brain were buzzing like a hive of bees, responding to an intruder from another colony. They were doing a fine job of dispatching with the foreigner ... except ....

What if I was wrong? What if my, for the most part traditional, approach to this problem was incapable of delivering me any further? It had worked to bring me to point X, but despite my best efforts it didn’t seem capable of delivering me to point Y. What if ...? And what now?

Flash back 20 years earlier, to my first summer of weddings. So many of my friends were getting married, I seriously considered purchasing a tux to save on the rentals. One wedding was held in a church near the small town I grew up in. To get from the city to the town, I rode shotgun in the decorated car with the groom’s brother at the wheel. We turned on the radio to see what was playing.

We weren’t up for the usual rock ‘n’ roll soundtrack, so we settled on jazz. The station we landed on was spinning something from the 60s; the drummer was heavy with his cymbals and the saxophonist followed his hazy intuitions up and down arpeggios punctuated by shrieks and squonks. Then out of this came a powerful preacher’s voice, speaking with an urgency and authority that had an angry edge to it:

“Let me show, in a figure, how far our nature is enlightened. Or unenlightened....”

Of course I had already read The Cave, from Plato’s Republic, and written the usual end-term essays on it. But this man’s clipped delivery made me realize I hadn’t heard it — not really. That was changing.

We floated above the prairie landscape as the preacher continued, urging and cajoling and insisting we turn and face and give due diligence to the prospect of our enlightenment, and not just for the sake of personal gratification, but for the enlightenment of our communities and our society.

The monologue and the music came to an end just as we coasted into the church parking lot. My friend and I sat there and stared at each other with open faces. What had just happened?

When Darko prompted me to consider what out-of-print stuff I’d like to see made available, Poitier Meets Plato was the first album that came to mind. Of course, it is a distinct possibility that the compelling performance I recall may not be especially moving to listen to today; what once sounded commanding might now ring as maudlin. Most of the blogosphere treats the album like a hip-cat novelty best reserved for a slow day on college radio. Still, I find it incredibly poignant to consider the time and the origins of this recording: a black American man, one of the precious few possessing enormous public stature, speaking out in 1963 about the responsibilities that come with enlightenment. I originally heard that performance some twenty years after it was recorded; twenty years later its message seems even more desperately pertinent.

Actually, I don’t much care if this performance remains nothing more than a pleasant memory for me. This is “Black History Month”: what I really want is to hear today’s black preacher read this work. Then when he’s done, I want to hear a white preacher take a crack at it. Then I want someone from Palestine, and Israel, and China read it to the rest of us, and do what Poitier did: make it their own, and sound like they bloody mean it.

This is not the hour for our species to speculate about the shadows on the wall. If we want our children and their children to survive and thrive, we have no option: we must do the discomfiting work of facing and remaining in light.

Burgess Shale Blues: Parchment Shamblejam

When it became apparent that my move to another province was “taking root” my parents held an enormous yard sale. My record collection, of course, was among the items up for grabs. The bulk of it was shoehorned into an enormous box and marked for five dollars.

A neighbourhood kid saw the garish rock ‘n’ roll album covers, then the price, and asked, “Do I get the whole box for five bucks?” My father assured him this was indeed the deal. “Cool!” The fin exchanged hands, and the kid hefted the box and made for home. Two lurching steps off the driveway, the kid stopped in his tracks and turned around. “Uh, hold on a sec: are these all Christian?”

My father tried not to smirk. “Oh, I don’t think they’re all Christian,” he said.

He was right. Queen’s The Game was in there, as was some early RUSH, Kenny Rogers’ Greatest Hits and an album by the Bronski Beat. The rest, however, were Christian in the extreme. The kid had just dropped five hard-won bucks on a box full of music where Kenny Rogers was one of the better acts.

My father did this with my blessing and best wishes. A quarter-century later, there are only a half-dozen albums I sometimes wish I’d kept. Of those six, only one qualifies as an unmitigated regret: Parchment Shamblejam.

My mother came home with the album, along with four others she’d bought for a buck apiece at a Christian bookstore clearance sale. Given the rudimentary cover design — three British hippie-types (Sue McClellan, John Pac, Keith Rycroft), gazing with droopy-lidded serenity back at the viewer — it was difficult to discern which of the two words was the band’s name, which was the album title, or if any such distinction should be made at all. “Shamblejam” captured perfectly the trio’s sense of musical play, and it became the only word we used for the group and the album.

In fact, the group’s name was Parchment, and Shamblejam (1975) was the only album to cross the Atlantic and surface on North American shores. It didn’t seem to fit any of the slots constructed by the burgeoning CCM industry; even today, after a quick Google, the people who talk about it refer to it as psychedelic-folk Jesus music, which is as close to pigeon-holing as this delightful album is going to receive. It opens with a mandolin-plucking, foot-stomping rendition of Washington Phillip’s "Denomination Blues," and moves on to fuzzy guitar blues licks and esoteric spiritual musings. One chorus ran, “Don’t let the morning come bringing the sun / I just want to live on in the night,” and it had a cheery delivery suggesting that somewhere between the queasy pleasure of indulgence and the knee-jerk impulse to repent was a larger truth that could set the (rather vaguely defined) situation aright.

Mark Allan Powell contends that Parchment’s occasional use of the sitar probably threw off the Christian bookstore set, who equated the “eastern” sound with the occult. If this was indeed the case, it also served to slip “The Speaker’s Corner” — opening track to Side 2 — completely under evangelical radar.

“Well, I walked along the river bend, deciding where to go / The city was too busy to be kind”

Singer Sue McClellan swings into the song with a light, airy vocal delivery that is at once innocent and unsettlingly sultry. A trombone slides into play, as does a tuba and a drummer fond of punctuating every alternate beat with a heavy bass drum or cymbal smash. Powell calls this “bluesy,” but he misses the mark by a wide country mile: this is old-fashioned bump-n-grind burlesque, complete with wolf-whistles and cat-calls.

I don’t have enough recall of the lyrics to comment on the content (what I seem to remember has a “’scuse me while I kiss this guy” quality, and for once the internet is unable to come to my rescue), but I love the aural juxtaposition of London's Speaker’s Corner, where hectoring and argument are wielded in an effort to sway public opinion, with the luscious enticement of a strip-tease. On that thematic level alone, this song works as the album’s centerpiece, seasoning its humor with a light ironic touch and an unabashed sensuality to win over the resistant listener (traits one doesn't often encounter in CCM).

The album closes with “Long As I Can See You,” a gentle Beatles-folky ballad, where the songwriter’s object of affection remains unnamed (for those unsure of the recipient, here’s a hint: it’s Jesus). The song fades with sounds of children at play, Big Ben tolling in the background and, finally, the sound of a crowd cheering at a football game. And for those who doubt sunshine can be heard, it's there, too. It’s a delightful pastiche, suggesting that the phenomena we love most in our all-too-brief lives are actually sacramental elements. It’s the perfect conclusion to an album that is wholly invitational and life-affirming, no matter what the listener’s persuasion might be.

Now where’s the CD?

Endnote: apparently Shamblejam in vinyl fetches upward of a hundred pounds, UK. £100!!! For an album my mother originally bought for a buck! Not, I gather, an unusual fate for early CCM rarities. I can only hope the poor sod who staggered away with my records is now a rich, rich man.

Burgess Shale Blues: The Moog Strikes Bach by Hans Wurman

My father came home from the city with this album in hand. He'd heard one or two samples from it on CBC radio, and thought we might get a kick out of it. It was called The Moog Strikes Bach ... To Say Nothing Of Chopin, Mozart, Rachmaninoff, Paganini and Prokofieff. It was music transcribed for and rendered by this contraption called a "Moog Synthesizer" and was performed and engineered by this hipster egghead named Hans Wurman.

Wurman at work.

I can't speak for the women in our family, but I don't believe the men ever tired of this record. To this day, I predominantly think of Chopin's "Black Key" Etude, Op. 10, No. 5, as a piece made for the synthesizer. It's curious to scroll through a few links turned up by Google: most people recall this record as a novelty spin-off of Wendy (née Walter) Carlos' Switched-On Bach (which I think we may have owned as well). Rather than getting into the tit-for-tat issue of which album is "superior," I'll comment on particularly notable aspects to both of these records.

Foremost of these is Their Era: These albums were released at the close of the 60s, when the chattering classes considered the synthesizer a "toy" used frivolously by pop acts hoping to inject a little spacey frisson to otherwise unremarkable ditties. It seems Bob Moog was especially anxious to elevate his invention into the fusty halls of respectability, and both these albums were greeted with a critical amusement that could almost be mistaken for approval.

I was one tyke who considered it "Mission: Accomplished!" First of all, both Wurman and Carlos treated their chosen composers with a bedrock of reverence. These weren't esquivel renderings, with profane little garnishes of "zoom-zoom, boink!" The performances were resolutely faithful: if it wasn't on the score, it wasn't on the record. Secondly, if the synthesizer was less an instrument than it was a toy ... aye carumba, but what a toy! In 1969, the Moog was not something a person could purchase at the local Steve's Music, never mind stow in the backseat of an Austin Mini. The black and white photos on these albums showed a roomful of cathodes and diodes and doodads, all hooked up to an enormous organ-style keyboard. The only way to achieve pianissimo and fortissimo and all the other inflections of character that the composer demanded was the volume knob.

Four tracks, unwieldy and physically demanding technology, technician performers with genuine musicality and enough mischief to foist their art before critics who were skeptical if not openly hostile ... revolutionary stuff, man. I just wish I could give it another spin.

Lost To The Vinyl Tar-Pits

Darko wonders if there aren't some musical performances I once enjoyed on vinyl, then for some reason or circumstance lost. Do I now hesitate to buy these performances in digital (CD, mp3) format? If so, why?

I don't hesitate enough, actually. There is ample evidence on my hard drive and in my back closet that the nostalgic impulse should be vigorously questioned before it is indulged. My recent purchase of the DVD boxed set of Star Trek: The Animated Series could definitely have stood a little more scrutiny. I figured $20 was an invitation for me to explore what could have been a pleasant childhood memory, if only our town had cable. What wound up happening, unfortunately, was a case of the bloom dropping off the rose. Sketchy story-lines, tediously bad animation ... oy vey. I don't want to think about how schnackered a person would have to be to enjoy such pallid entertainment. I had more fun with this series when I was vaguely considering its potential. The box should have remained closed.

Similarly, music. There are a few artists I've followed with fanatic, completist zeal who have rewarded me quite generously for my efforts. And there are a legion more whose most resonant insight is, "Deep down I'm really very shallow."

Summing up, the moral of the story is I could stand to develop a little more self-control and discretion when it comes to purchasing music. Fortunately for this thread, there are a few nostalgic grails that remain just beyond my reach: vinyl recordings that are sinking in the tar-pits as the Cambrian tide of technological evolution surges forward.* I call this exercise "The Burgess Shale Blues." Here, then, are three albums that, for one reason or another, have yet to be digitally rescued from total obscurity.

Number one
Number two
Number three

*Yes, I know my natural history. Please be kind and refrain from examining that metaphor too closely.

Seven Unlikely But True Things About Me

In response to DarkoV (whose seven actually make for entertaining and enlightening reading):

(1) When I was an 11-year-old slingshot-totin' boy, I nailed a redwing blackbird in midflight.

(2) Ten years later I repeated the stunt on a grouse (yum!), this time with a .22 rifle.

(3) My right (sighting) eye is near-sighted, my left (alignment) eye is far-sighted. In other words, these feats of marksmanship were the result of dumb luck — but you knew that already.

(4) I own a hunting bow.

(5) I haven't drilled so much as a paper target with it.

(6) Our countryside is lousy with deer.

(7) I've yet to taste a venison dish I could finish (if you think you have a winner recipe, go on and e-mail it to me). The only meat that tastes worse than deer is moose.

My tags: you (and I'm not naming names, because no-one bothered themselves the last time I did).