Friday, April 07, 2006

The Crunch

We're still three weeks from the end of the semester, & I feel very much in the crunch. For one thing, it's MFA thesis defense season around Our University, and a couple of folks on whose committees I sit are winding up their projects right now. A very excellent poetry defense out of the way earlier this week, but early next week there's a novel that has to be defended – which means that there's a novel I need to be able to ask intelligent questions about, & to have read carefully. Nothing wrong with fiction, mind you – I just resent how much longer the form tends to be.
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Weekly Random 10 (with lone classical movements deleted):

1) "Pop Tones," Public Image Ltd., Paris au Printemps
2) "Hard to be Human," Mekons, Heaven & Hell
3) "Heartbreak Hotel," John Cale, Slow Dazzle
4) "Healthy Colours III," Robert Fripp & Brian Eno, The Essential Fripp & Eno
5) "Notre Dame De L'Oubli (For Olivier Messiaen)," Naked City, Absinthe
6) "Midnight Jam," Joe Strummer & the Mescaleros, Streetcore
7) "Foreign Accents," Robert Wyatt, Cuckooland
8) "My Songbird," Emmylou Harris, Spyboy
9) "Sunday," Sonic Youth, A Thousand Leaves
10) "Orphan Train," Julie Miller, Broken Things

3 comments:

Amy said...

You should start off the defense, in perfect seriousness, by questioning the student's choice of line breaks. :-)

I used to love Sonic Youth, in their pre-Geffen days, before the music got all poppily noncacophonous and MTVy.

Mark Scroggins said...

Oh yes, before what they call their "ongoing corporate swim." I dunno -- I'm a big Big Star fan, which means pretty heavy power-pop, and there's plenty of cacophany on all the various side releases the Youths keep putting out every year.

John Latta said...

Mark,

Reading Stephen Wright's recent Amalgamation Polka, and earlier Meditations in Green, I am beginning to be nagged (again) by the dirty little thought that, in fact, fiction's got it all over poetry, that, after all, it is the "supreme" art. We shall have much to say about this.

Latta