SOUNDTRACK: THE ANGELUS-“The Young Birds” (2019).
Every once in a while I like to check in with Viking’s Choice on NPR’s All Songs Considered. Lars Gottrich specializes in all of the obscure music that you won’t hear on radio. For this month, he did a special focus on Patient Sounds. a small label based out of Illinois.
[UPDATE: At the end of 2019, Patient Sounds closed shop. I’m not sure if any of these songs are available outside of Bandcamp].
Lars had this to say about the label
Matthew Sage, who runs the label, knows that dynamic drone, jittery footwork, oddball drone-folk, hypnagogic guitar music and cosmic Americana can exist in the same space.
The second song of the week is by The Angelus. Lars describes the song:
Redemption often comes at the hands of something bigger than yourself, but as The Angelus’ soul-rattling doom-gaze reminds us, the love of young children will make you humble.
This song starts with crashing heavy chords–cymbals and loud guitars. But then it settles down to a groovy death riff. The surprise to me was when the singer began singing. He has a soft melodic voice which totally changes this from a heavy dark song into a kind of melodic slow heavy song. The chorus is surprisingly heavy and even ends on a kind of positive mood.
[READ: September 1, 2019] “Class Picture”
This story surprised me because it started
Robert Frost made his visit in November of 1960, just a week after the general election. It tells you something about our school that the prospect of his arrival cooked up more interest than the contest between Nixon and Kennedy.
If Nixon had been at their school, they would have glued his shoes to the floor.
This is quite a lengthy story and there are a lot of components. Wolff fleshes out this school very well. So well, in fact, that I could see this being developed into a novel [It is actually an excerpt from a novel]. Although for the purposes of this story, the plot is dealt with fully.
It also makes me wonder if such a school could actually exist. Certainly not in 2020, but even in 1960? Because this school exhibited pride in being a literary institution. Glamorous writers visited three times a year and the English masters carried themselves as if they were intimates of Hemingway. The teachers of other subjects (math, science) seemed to float around the fringe of the English masters’ circle.
The tradition at the school was that one boy would be chosen to meet the famous author who was coming next. This year it is Robert Frost. Each boy would submit an entry (in the case of Frost it would be poetry). The author himself would select the winner. And these meetings were a big deal to everyone on campus.
The narrator is very excited but he knows that his poems are subpar–he writes fiction. He was on the school’s literary magazine board so he was familiar with the other great writers in his class. There were three.
George Kellogg was a proficient writer of poetry, although the narrator found the boring.
Bill White was the narrator’s roommate. He’d written most of a novel already and his poems were impressive.
Jeff Purcell was the third. He was also on the literary magazine and was quick to dismiss others. Could that translate to his own writing?
The one detour from the poetry angle is about smoking. The school forbade smoking but a lot of boys did anyway. The narrator said he loved smoking. He smoked in storage closets and freezers, steam tunnels and bathrooms. He even went out for cross-country so he could smoke while running in the woods.
If you were caught smoking you were expelled. It happened every once in awhile. A person was sent home just before the Frost Poem deadline. This made the narrator quit smoking on campus.
The narrator wrote a poem for the occasion but he didn’t think it was good enough. So he decided to submit an older one on the off chance that Frost liked it.
I won’t spoil the winner, but Frost did come to the school and he read some of his poems aloud. During the Q&A that followed a master asked a question. Interestingly he misstated the title of the poem. He called it “Stopping in Woods” which Frost corrected instantly to “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” The master continued the question asking about iambic lines Frost says “Good for you, they must be teaching you boys something here.”
The boys all laughed and Frost seemed pleased–had he made a mistake about the master or had he known all along? The boys were surprised to learn later that Frost was quite funny.
The end of the story shows the winner of the contest questioning the value of his poem. He felt that Frost mis-read it and that perhaps he won for the wrong reasons. Should he blow off Robert Frost? Is he crazy?
I really enjoyed this piece and found myself thoroughly engaged. If this is part of a novel, I would be very curious to read it. Turns out it is an excerpt from the novel Old School.
I Just Read About That... 