why all the living so strive to hush all the dead

 The song for January 5th is Going to Alaska. Have I heard this song before? This may seem premature, but I have skimmed ahead the names of the songs coming up, just to see how routine this refrain will be, and I can save us all some trouble: there is no song title I am confident I am familiar with until March!  (The thing about a prolific band is that they have a lot of songs!)


I've described several of these songs as being typical of the lo-fi early mountain goats sound, but I sort of want to go back and edit that claim, because this track has something that the other ones are distinctively lacking (but which i did reference in an earlier post): the characteristic John Darniellian approach to putting lyrics into meter with the music, which is to say, sometimes there are a sensible number of syllables per beat and other times you just sort of put a whole paragraph into half a measure.

Let's just contrast the lyrics of "Running Away with What Freud Said" with "Going to Alaska":


The lyrics for RAWWFS are pretty much spaced evenly and on the beat, perhaps cramped a little bit for the title line.  The annotations on that piece talked about Darnielle's efforts to write in a compressed, concise fashion, and I think that shows in the results for that song.  The lyrics for Going to Alaska are much more discursive.  We have basically full on prose sentences, even if they are poetically structured/arranged, and the simplicity of the musical structure is going to permit him to just sing this story into rhythm of the song, come hell or high water.  And I think it's this feature of Darnielle's music (where the lyrics are much like the stuff you plan to pack for your trip to Alaska, and the music is like the luggage you have available, and you're just going to have to make the one fit into the other, rather than, say, pack lighter, or get different luggage), that is really a familiar feature of so much of the Mountain Goats' music.

The annotations on Going to Alaska relate a story of how John bought a guitar and a glass slide from a basically unpatronized shop in a strip mall while he was working as a psychiatric nurse (and then composed this song, which uses his favorite chord progression).  There are fifty-five Mountain Goats songs in the "Going to ..." series (that is songs whose name is "Going to [place]").  The most (in)famous is Going to Georgia, which I am confident is going to appear in the book somewhere, so I will save talking about that for later. It is not surprising to me that Darnielle wrote so much, explicitly, about being places other than where he was. Having read his 33 1/3: Black Sabbath's Master of Reality, and getting his perspective (via...music criticism novella?) on the sort of drug rehab and mental health facility he was staffing during the early years of the Mountain Goats, it makes a lot of sense that his thoughts were drawn to thinking about, and writing about, being anywhere but there (of course, as we saw with the alpha couple, he also spent a lot of time on quasi- if not fully autobiographical subject matter, as well).

The song for today is One Winter at Alpha Point Privative.

What's that? Another track I had not previously heard? (I am sure we will eventually hit some songs I am familiar with! Probably!)


I don't mind the lo-fi sound, and this song is catchy. Nevertheless, would I have become a huge mountain goats fan during this era? Probably not.  There is a reason that The Sunset Tree is the album that caught my attention, and that All Hail West Texas is the part of the lo-fi era that has the most enduring appeal. But, this song is both catchy, and the point at which the lore in the annotations is starting to open up a bit more.

We learned earlier that songs with "alpha" in the title derive from an early attempt at poetry "Songs from the Alpha Privative", and unsurprisingly the annotations tell us that this song, which not only has "alpha" but "alpha privative" in the name, is confirmed to come from that set of poems. Darnielle tells us that the poems are derived from the enduring trauma of divorce (something he is autobiographically familiar with from his own childhood).  Intellectually, I know that divorce can be hard and traumatic; but I've generally always had the perspective that situations which end in divorce would, in general, be harder and more traumatic to persist as marriages full of strife and conflict, so I always find it odd to locate the trauma in the divorce itself. At any rate, the couple in this song appear in other songs, and they are referred to as the alpha couple (I don't think all the songs in which they occur have alpha in the title, as the couple from, e.g. No Children is the alpha couple

The other thing that sort of sticks with me about this song (and the structure of the book, tbh) is Darnielle's relationship to religion. To my reckoning, Darnielle is a Christian in a way similar to someone like Sufjan Stevens.  Both are artists whose music would be principally classified by the musical stylings (indie/folk rock, or what have you), but who take their religious views seriously and have a non-trivial number of songs that are explicitly and with specificity about and infused by their Christian faith. This is in contrast to "Christian Rock" where it is a major component of the categorization of the artist in general, and presumably virtually all of their music, and in contrast to artists who essentially don't bring any substantive religious content into their music. The structure of this book ("a book of days"), and the lyrics of this song ("can you feel the spirit moving? can you feel god's grace?") have me thinking about this in particular (even though this one line isn't on the level of, say Life of The World to Come, where every track is named for a bible verse).

Do I have a point by going into this?  I mean, I guess I don't know who is reading these posts, so partially i am giving context for folks who don't know about the mountain goats. But also, as I am reading, listening, and reflecting on the mountain goats every day for a year, I'm probably just going to digress about random aspects of the band and the music that jump out at me, and Darnielle's faith as well as his fascination with the historical/classical rituals and practices (an overlapping but distinct interest) is something that has been waiting to jump out at me (a very non-christian listener) since I pre-ordered the book.

Today's song is Wild Palm City

Another song I had not heard before ("are you even a real fan?" I hear the hypothetical haters ask).


I suspect the book is going to be very chronological, since the annotations talk about this song as being more or less the starting point for "The Mountain Goats" as such. I think there will be some days that I don't have much to say about the song or the annotations, and this is one of them. Perfectly cromulent song, perfectly fine annotations, but not much for me to reflect on. 

Libby is integrated pretty well with kobo (a recent issue with duplicate downloads notwithstanding), which makes the tagging feature in the Libby app quite appealing, because my biggest issue with library checkouts is that sometimes I get a book out and the mood does not strike me to read that book during the window in which I have the book out. This has made me a less avid user of library checkouts than I would like, because I return too many books unread.

ebooks at least are low effort to checkout, and easy to return. But it is exciting for me to be able to mark books as “looked promising, try again later” and also to have the whole array of which books I have checked out browsable via tags. 

The biggest downsides are that I can’t link my university library to it, as far as I can tell, and that audiobooks and magazines don’t lend to my kobo for what I assume are very silly rights related reasons. I can borrow them to my phone though, and there is no real situation where I want to audiobook and my kobo would be workable but the phone wouldn’t. The magazines is a drag though!

I suspect I have higher tolerance than most for books with unpleasant protagonists, provided the book recognizes that the protagonist sort of sucks. I have very low tolerance for books where the protagonist sucks and the book thinks the protagonist is A+ super amazing. Those grate on me and I really get very annoyed. But I think even a little acknowledgment that the protagonist has flaws can smooth things for me quite a bit.

Kaaro, the protagonist of Tade Thompson’s Rosewater, is not a particular pleasant or likable person. He has lots of moral failings, from casual sexism to a general lack of interest in others, a frustrating passivity with respect to the morality of how he is using his psychic powers for his main job (government interrogations) and/or freelance jobs (finding lost things, bank security, etc.). He is a bit better morally now than he was as a kid (stealing things he didn’t need just because his psychic powers helped him know where valuables were), but he between his own lack of moral direction and the forces taking advantage of his powers, he is not much improved, and certainly doing more consequential things than stealing a few hundred bucks or some jewelry.

I don’t think we are supposed to see Kaaro as admirable or flawless. I do think we are supposed to find some of his personality charming, which may or may not land, but the most interesting things going on in the story are probably about connection and isolation. Kaaro’s ability is to be connected to other people (via a ubiquitous network of microscopic alien fungus that permits mental and emotional information to be perceived by those who are sensitive like Kaaro). As is often the case with these sorts of stories, we see exploration of identity in relation to how one is delineated from others, how access to someone else’s mind can bring or undermine closeness, how a telepath’s respect for someone’s mental privacy is fundamental to respecting their personhood. While Kaaro is not a great person when it comes to responsible use of telepathy in general, I think the book does a nice job of exploring these familiar themes in an interesting way through this flawed protagonist.

Where the book really stood out for me (and overcame the unnecessary time jumps in narrative presenation) is the alien consciousness and world building for the setting. The Nigeria of 2066 in which the story is set, and the city of Rosewater (which I did enjoy seeing in the different time periods, just maybe not jumping back and forth between them so much), were great! Rich settings! The different forces at work (Wormwood, Section 45, the Political Dissidents, the swaths of people seeking healing), were all great parts of the setting and world!

This is the first Tade Thompson I’ve read; I’ll probably read more.