I Just Read About That…

SOUNDTRACK: THE FLAMING LIPS-The Terror (2013).

After the distortion heavy and heaviness of At War with the Mystics and Embryonic (to say nothing of their other experimental releases), I wasn’t sure what to expect from an album called The Terror.  Yet with a title like that the album is far more invested in psychological terror than in pummeling you with scary noises and music.  The album is more unsettling and spooky with existential dread.

Wayne Coyne has always been a pretty optimistic guy–weird, sure, dealing with feelings of dread, sure, but never so dark and insular.  But I learned that before recording this album and most likely as an impetus to record it,  Coyne separated from his partner of 25 years, Michelle, and Lips multi-instrumentalist Steven Drozd temporarily relapsed into addiction.

In an interview, Drozd says the album is like a crisis of life confidence.  He also says that the uniformity in sonic style was intentional: “Instead of writing songs and then figuring out sounds, we’d write the other way around: create sounds then make songs out of those sounds.”

So the vocals are quite low in the mix, and there is not a lot of “music” in the album.  Rather there are layers of sounds–swishing synths, spiraling noises, percussion effects that seems to almost cover up the vocals, giving it a very claustrophobic effect.  “Look… The Sun Rising” opens the disc.  It is primarily percussion with some noisy sounds and really sharp piercing guitars (that play noisy counterpoint to the soothing chorus of Oh Oh Ohs).  And yet after all of that noise and chaos, the very lovely “Be Free, A Way” surfaces as a quiet introspective song.  There are gentle keyboard notes (not unlike on Yoshimi) that propel this song along.  “Try to Explain” is a pretty song with some unusual sound effects swirling around it (The Lips can’t so straight up pretty, right?).  And yet lyrically, this song, along with the rest, is very dark indeed.

“You Lust” is a 13 minute (!) invocation about various forms of lust.  It opens with the couplet: “You’ve got a lot of nerve/A lot of nerve to fuck with me.”  The middle of the song is a kind of Pink Floydian keyboard workout.  It’s a  lengthy jam that’s kind of samey, but I’ll bet if you can really sit (with headphones) and close your eyes and focus it’s pretty intense.  After about ten minutes of that repetitive claustrophobia, some lightening occurs with sprinkled keyboard notes.

“The Terror” is primarily in Coyne’s falsetto, and it seems gentle until the mechanized noises come bursting forth.  “You Are Alone” is the shortest thing here, under 4 minutes of squeaking noises.  And again, a lovely melody despite the title.  I feel like this song summarizes the album pretty well.  In it, Coyne sings “I’m not alone” while a deeper voice replies, “you are alone.”  Whose voice will ultimately win?

  “Butterfly, How Long It Takes to Die” returns to that abrasive guitar of the earlier tracks, but the main body of this 7 minute song is just bass, keening keyboards and Coyne’s whispered voice.  There’s a recurring synth line that is magical and/or creepy depending on your frame of mind.  It, along with many of the other songs, have a kind of coda that links the songs.  This one is mostly just choral voices, but it twists the ends of the songs in a different direction. “Turning Violent” is a quiet track, in which Coyne sounds nearly defeated until the second half of the song grows louder and more animated with layers of vocals.  The disc ends with “Always There…In Our Hearts” which seems to offer some hope…maybe.  There’s signs of uplift in the melody, and when the drums kick in at the end, it seems to propel the song into a more intense frame of mind.

And lyrically, despite all of the darkness that is always there in our hearts, there is a light peeking out: “always therein our hearts a joy of life that overwhelms.”

Although most reviewers find this album unremittingly bleak, I find the music to be beautiful in an aching sort of way–a beautiful way to deal with pain (better than getting the same tattoo as Miley Cyrus, anyway).

[READ: October 31, 2014] The Kraus Project

The title page of this book read: The Kraus Project: Essays by Karl Kraus translated and annotated by Jonathan Franzen with assistance and additional notes from Paul Reitter and Daniel Kehlmann.

So just what is this thing anyhow?  Well Karl Kraus was a German writer (1874-1936) whose main contributions to letters were some essays and a newsletter Die Fackel (The Torch).  The authors compare the newspaper (favorably) to a blog (while also complaining about what blogs have done to letters).  He started Die Fackel in 1899 and he continued to direct, publish, and write it until his death.  He used the paper to launch attacks on hypocrisy, psychoanalysis, corruption of the Habsburg empire, nationalism of the pan-German movement, laissez-faire economic policies, and numerous other subjects.  For the first ten or so years, Kraus was the editor, accepting contributions from around the German speaking word.  But in 1911, he became the sole contributor to the newsletter.

He also wrote many essays (he did not care much for fiction), including the two main ones that compression this book: “Heine and the Consequences” (1910) and “Nestroy and Posterity” (1912).  The book also includes two follow up essays: “Afterword to Heine and the Consequences” and “Between Two Strains of Life: Final Word to Heine and the Consequences” (1917) and a poem: “Let No One Ask…” (1934).

The essays themselves are quite brief.  Despite the first coming in at 135 pages, note that the left pages are all in German (so reduce 135 by half), nearly all of the English pages are filled with footnotes (reduce by half again) and some of the footnotes run for several pages.  So the essay could be said to be about 25-30 pages.

The same is true for all of the pages in the book.  The left sides are in German (except the footnotes) and most pages are split in half because of the footnotes.  Which means that Franzen and friends write far more than Kraus did.  Ultimately, this book is actually three things: It is a collection of Kraus’ essays with Franzen’s fine translation; it is an explication of Kraus’ attitude and about life in Germany during Kraus’ life and finally it is an insight into Franzen as a young man living in Germany and why Kraus was so appealing to him.

The first part: Kraus’ essays.

In “Heine and the Consequences,” Kraus’ basic point is that Heinrich Heine was a hugely popular but rather kind of silly writer who spent most of his time writing sub par nonsense.  There’s a whole bit about how he traveled and wrote about what he saw.  he was a casual writer rather than a deep thinker interested in the profound.  Beyond criticizing just Heine, he also criticizes the culture at large for finding such joy in Heine, rather than in more substantial works of letters.

Kraus was an aphoristic writer and many of his sentences are quite powerful (Franzen also says Kraus is very hard to translate).  There’s a line in the essay about audiences tolerating wit as long as they get guffaws as well, and that seems to sum up his point here–that depth of meaning and quality of writing should be more important than jokes and fluff.

In “Nestroy and Posterity,” rather than taking down a popular writer, he tries to buoy support for a writer who he deemed to be excellent but who received very little fame (Nestroy).  He goes on to praise the quality of Nestroy’s work especially in contrast to Heine.

“Afterword to Heine and the Consequences” was a piece that he originally meant as a forward to a reprint of the original essay.  In in which he complains about the lack of readers that his Heine essay gathered.  And since nobody read his essay it proved the point of the essay–that people only want fluff.  [It is apparently untrue that nobody read it, it was widely purchased and reprinted several times].

“Between Two Strains of Life: Final Word to Heine and the Consequences” basically says that “Heine” did better than he originally complained.

“Let No One Ask…” was his response to the rise of Hitler.  He had been accused of not saying anything about Hitler (when he was so quick to criticize so much else) but this poem suggests that he found words insufficient when dealing with something as powerfully odious as Hitler.  To write scathing criticism of Hitler would be to put him on par with people like Heine, and that would have been barbaric.

I am assuming that Franzen’s translation is good.  It seems good and Franzen says he was very careful and received a lot of help from others as well.

The “second part” contains the commentary.

Franzen says right off the bat that these essays are hard to translate.  In fact he tried to do it once a long long time ago when he was living in Germany, but he found he was very unsuccessful–Kraus’ work is turgid and deliberately difficult, especially for a 22 year old.  He recently took another stab at it.  Franzen is self-deprecating about the quality of his translation (which he describes as amateurish).  Despite that I was able to read and understand what Kraus was saying (with some help from the footnotes).

So the footnotes.  There are hundreds.  Most of the notes are by Franzen, although there are extensive and sizable ones from Reitter and Kehlmann, both of whom are knowledgeable about Kraus and Germany.  Franzen does “argue” with them sometimes, even disagreeing somewhat about a point or two.

Primarily, though, Franzen’s and Reitter’s notes give contextual analysis for what Kraus writes.  Reitter is very knowledgeable about that period in German history and offers a lot of detailed information about what Kraus was dealing with and writing about.   Their information is scholarly and thorough.

More interestingly, Franzen likens Kraus’ attitude to his own about contemporary society.  He talks about how much Kraus would have disdained blogs or the obnoxious headlines of cable news and online news pages.  He talks about Kraus complaining about the rise of technology not as a resource but as something that is taking over.

Their analysis of Heine is really helpful (and easier to understand than what Kraus says in his elliptical way).  They are thorough in looking into what Kraus is upset about (and also at pointing out when perhaps he has gone too far).  But they also know about Heine: acknowledging his popularity (thousands of his poems were set to music by some of Germany’s most famous composers) but also seeing why Kraus was dismayed by his popularity.  Franzen compares Heine to Hemingway in a shocking (but not inaccurate assessment of Hemingway’s weaknesses).

The Nestroy article was published on the fiftieth anniversary of Nestroy’s death.  Kraus felt that Nestroy was a real talent.  This essay helped to revive his popularity.  This essay has more talk about culture in general, with Franzen latching on to the aphorism: “culture can’t catch its breath.”  Franzen also really emphasizes how much is lost in translation because of the clever wordplay Kraus used in German that simply doesn’t work the same way in English.

There’s also a very funny sequence in which Kraus basically says that he and Nestroy are of very similar minds, and they would have written the same types of things too.  So, he suggests: “If I’m not writing plays like Nestroy did it’s because I live in more urgently bad times” (171).

Of the two essays, I enjoyed the Heine a bit more (Franzen says that the Nestroy essay is denser prose), but I enjoyed the commentary a lot more for this one.

Reitter notes in “Afterword” that the pamphlet’s readership wasn’t as bad as he’s making it out to have been…”Readers quickly went through the first two editions.”  Kraus seems to be accentuating the negative to the point of stretching the truth.

In “Between Two Strains” they say that he has gone from understating his readership to overstating it.  But the main thrust of this essay seems to be that Kraus is changing his mind about a lot of things but he is going to try and justify it in a way that seems like he has been consistent all along.  As Franzen puts it: “I seem to be taking back what I said, but I’m not really taking it back, because I was even more right than you knew!”

Kehlmann and Reitter discuss Kraus a bit.

Kehlmann:

Kraus’ most alienating quality for me, at least, was his absolute refusal ever to admit that he’d changed his mind.  There are lots of subjects on which he has completely different views before the war and after, or in the late 1920s.  But he can never admit it.  Instead he heaps mockery and scorn on anybody who talks about his changing opinions (298)

Reitter says he’ s mixed about this aspect of Kraus:

Moral certitude is so much a part of his voice that it’s hard to even to imagine an apology-issuing Kraus–he’d be a fundamentally different writer  … [besides] what kind of wrathful prophet goes around retracting his statements and expressing remorse? (299)

As for the poem”Let No One Ask…”, it is Kehlmann’s essay that talks about this poem, rating it very highly “perhaps not the best but certainly one of the most important short poems of the twentieth century.”   He summarizes “If it’s even possible for silence to be rendered in words, Kraus succeeds in doing it here” (315).

The “final” part of the book (which is mixed in with other footnotes and not a separate part at all) is all about Franzen.  I know that many people dislike Franzen because he tends to talk about himself a lot.  But I find him to be an interesting and intelligent person with a balance of self-deprecation and rage.  Even if I don’t agree with him on every point, I find his attitude well-thought-out and even appealing, if sometimes stubbornly over the top (which is what Kraus was like too).

We see Franzen when he was a young college student receiving a Fulbright scholarship to Germany (Germany offered many more than other countries which is why he applied there).  His girlfriend, V, failed to get a scholarship, so she stayed home in NYC.  And they wrote letters to each other all the time.  Full of all kinds of pretentiousness.  Franzen is not afraid to admit that he was a pretentious kid and cringes at some of the stuff he reprints.   The letters are just fantastic, as Franzen believes that he will be a huge and Important Writer and will make a ton of money as the new Pynchon and that he needs these letters for posterity (so he made carbons of all of them).  The intensity about Pynchon is very funny (if you think that kind of things is funny, of course).

I really enjoyed hearing about what it was like to be in Berlin during the Reagan years (when Reagan was quite despised by students).  His life there was pretty bleak, and he nearly drove himself mad with cigarettes and typing.   He talks about what it was like to be engaged to a woman and yet not really want to be engaged and to think of lame excuses for not telling his parents about her.  (Improbably, they did get married and were together for 12 years).

The best connection in the book is the way Franzen related to Kraus as a twenty year old with firm convictions (see Kraus never apologizing).  Kraus was so confident in his rightness, that Franzen was utterly persuaded.  He talks about their similar background of being a privileged writer.  And how they share the same feelings of distaste for their own culture.  And yet he’s also reluctant to be as brash as Kraus was (now that he’s older especially: “I, too, often make moral arguments about art, but on my better days I’m suspicious of them, because I’m aware of the envy, the powerlessness and self-pity, that lurks behind them.”  And yet he’s also not afraid to bash Fox News, Amazon Facebook and Twitter.  [I wrote about this a bit while looking at the excerpt from this essay ]

And thus there’s his perceived hatred of technology.  He explains that he doesn’t hate technology–he has been writing on a computer for decades–but that he hates the love of technology.  His beef about Twitter (that got him called a Luddite) was not about the technology itself, but about the adoration and worship of it to the detriment of so much else.  He is not a Luddite, just kind of a curmudgeon.  He offers lots of examples of technology gone haywire–things that many of us take for granted as just the way it is (awful AOL News headlines that conflate real news with nonsense, or my favorite: the way all TV news anchors use the same gravitas for every story they report on–making it seem as if the death of a person is as meaningful as a celebrity baby’s birth).  He wants us to rebel against us losing our humanity at the expense of technology.

Franzen also details his struggles academically and socially in Germany and how he was more determined than every to become a writer.  And that Kraus was something of an inspiration for him.

I really enjoyed the whole book, both for introducing me to these writers, but also for Franzen’s personal take on the essays.

Incidentally, Franzen also praises some (then) current novels for excelling in an age when Amazon-published and faux-rated books are the norm (his rant against Amazon is pretty intense and a little shrill).  Anyhow, these books are  Rachel Kushner’s The Flamethrowers (this is the second good review of this that I’ve read), Adam Haslett’s You Are Not a Stranger Here, Sarah Shun-lien Bynum’s Ms. Hempel Chronicles, Clancy Martin’s How to Sell and Ben Lerner’s Leaving the Atocha Station (which deals comically with Fulbright anxiety).  And for those who keep track of the Franzen/David Foster Wallace thread, I’m quite certain that this reference is to him: “nobody is funnier than depressives. Not only that, but the more depressive they are the funnier they are–up to a point. My friend who committed suicide was the funniest friend I ever had” (269).  I also love that in his first (never finished) novel, long before he ever heard of DFW, he had a character called Wallace Wallace Wallace.