Take Five: What is and what should never be
This leads to that in a week of the mind, with tech bros, Nick Cave, the Marginalian, Richard Hell, Benjamin Labatut and John Koethe. Then the mind shuts off for a romp with Led Zeppelin
“Take Five” is posted each Friday, and offers five things I spent some time with over the course of the previous week. No criticism, no in-depth analysis, just a few things I think you might be interested in checking out. When the spirit moves me, I’ll post other things at other times.
Everything is more interconnected than usual this week. I often feel as if the media I consume — music, books, articles, podcasts, movies, etc. — is engaged in a conversation that I am lucky enough to overhear, connecting dots as one thing informs the next. Those larger connections this week are, for lack of better terms, AI and the cosmos, with a dash of pop philosophy for good measure. I find myself on a precipice, not ready to fully immerse myself in the work of philosophers, but more and more eager to spark deeper thought through the nudge of artists who have made that leap.
Oh, and I throw in a bit of Led Zeppelin at the end for those would rather rock than think.
1. More Everything Forever and Nick Cave
As is usually the case for me as various things I read, or listen to, or watch enter into conversation with one another, an interview with Nick Cave perfectly dovetailed with the book More Everything Forever. In the book, which tells of how billionaires like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos are trying to create a utopian world where everyone can live forever (which sounds horrible, thank you), people like futurist Ray Kurzweil say things like that the Singularity “will affect everything. We're going to be able to meet the physical needs of all humans. We're going to expand our minds and exemplify these artistic qualities that we value.” But Cave is having none of it, and I agree. In an interview from August, when asked about AI, he notes that the tech bros talk of a world where the creative struggle is removed from the equation, allowing us to leap right to the end product. “This idea that we can just create songs without the need for artists and all the messy stuff that artists are and go straight to the product, is symptomatic of the way our world and our culture is unfolding,” he said, adding that it is the struggle that leads to the art. It's a consistent message from Cave, who wrote a Red Hand Files on the topic six years ago where he said of a song like “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” “What we are actually listening to is human limitation and the audacity to transcend it.”
2. The Marginalian by Maria Popova
That interview with Cave was conducted by Maria Popova, a Bulgarian essayist who maintains the website “The Marginalian.” She and her work were new to me, but immediately appealing. In Popova's words, it is “a record of my reading and reckoning with our search for meaning: sometimes through science and philosophy, sometimes through poetry and children’s books, always through the lens of wonder.” Sounds a lot like what I try to do here (without the children’s books), but perhaps a bit more thorough. Interestingly, her most recent post is about AI. Sounding a bit like Cave, she writes, “An AI may never be able to write a great poem — a truly original poem — because a poem is made not of language but of experience, and the defining aspect of human experience is the constant collision between our wishes and reality, the sharp violation of our expectations, the demolition of our plans.” With 18 years of archives, I have a lot to sift through, and it seems as if it will be worth the effort.
3. Richard Hell — What Just Happened
I just finished reading Richard Hell's What Just Happened, a sort of odds and sods collection with some pandemic-era poetry, a long (and oddly fascinating) essay about sleep, and a section titled "Chronicle" that offers 88 items drawn from his journals. The last of these felt very much like the Joe Brainard book, I Remember, that I read a couple of weeks ago. Sure enough, there is No. 23, where he writes, "snowy night in New York City. [it's not snowy nor nighttime but I'm reading Joe Brainard]." I'm not saying this is influenced by I Remember, but I'm not not saying so. He mentions Brainard again later, and it makes sense. The young Hell, the Kentucky transplant Richie Meyers, would of course have been influenced by the second wave of New York poets that included Brainard, a fellow polymath who sets out to master additional disciplines (for Brainard it was drawing, for Hell punk rock). Hell also turned me on to Bill Knott here, and his I Am Flying Into Myself has been a fruitful read thus far.1
Note: At my old blog, Things I’d Rather Be Doing, I ran a lengthy interview with Hell back in 2010 around the time he released Destiny Street Repaired, a reworking of his 1982 album, Destiny Street. I’ll post that here next week.
4. Benjamin Labatut — When We Cease to Understand the World
John Koethe — Cemeteries and Galaxies
Sometimes a recommendation hits at the perfect time, and such was the case with my friend Lyz Lenz's newsletter mention of Benjamín Labatut’s When We Cease to Understand the World. I remembered the book seeming too highbrow for me when it was making year-end lists in 2021, but hearing of someone I know reading and loving it made me seek it out now. It was available on Libby, and I actually read the entire thing on my phone in spare moments over the past couple of weeks. It’s a quick read full of ideas, a sort of non-fiction novel that explores the lives and theories of scientists and mathematicians as they grapple with the unintended consequences of their work. I recommend it, but won't spend time here trying to explain it, as the charm is in discovering the way it conveys weighty concepts and humanizes those behind them. It was another book I read at the same time that may stick with me just as long. Poet John Koethe is a philosophy professor by trade, so his poems usually tackle deep subjects, but in a way that makes them accessible. His latest collection, Cemeteries and Galaxies, seemed as if it was written while reading Labatut’s book, long poems with long lines full of contemplation of the universe in all its unknowable vastness. The title poem closes with:
As cemeteries are to individual lives, so galaxies are to individual stars, reminder
Of their insignificance, and not just because there're so many of them or because
They're far away, but because it's so difficult to make sense of anything
Beyond this moment—sitting at your desk and trying to write another
Poem about it, wondering whether anyone can really understand their life
Or a universe beyond the eternal present, which is where you are.
As he writes later in “SGR A*,”
We think we
understand the universe
the way we understand ourselves, but that’s just wishful
thinking: The truth is
That our grasp of both is partial, and our sense of what they are
is incomplete.
5. ‘Becoming Led Zeppelin’
First, a caveat: There are two gaping holes in this documentary2 in the form of the band's outright theft of songs written by Black blues singers and the deplorable treatment of women by some of the members. If you can look past that — and you are fully justified if you cannot — you’re left with a fascinating film about what led to the band’s formation and it’s explosive first two years in the studio and on the road. And yes, it’s interesting to see and hear this powerhouse quartet come together, but for me the real intrigue came from the historical context. Two of the band’s members — guitarist Jimmy Page and bassist John Paul Jones — came from the world of session musicians. They played on everything, from hits by the Rolling Stones and the Kinks to Shirley Bassey’s “Goldfinger” and beyond. To leave the security of this anonymous gig to pursue their own art and fame was seen as madness, but as pop and rock took off, it made perfect sense to these talented and ambitious players just out of their teens. And it made the band much more potent than its peers. As singer Robert Plant says here, “Jimmy and John Paul were really at the top of their game. They played on so many diverse pieces of music that there was nowhere they couldn’t find themselves comfortably going to. So that gave us a whole magnificent bunch of colors to play with.” Meanwhile, seeing live performances by the young band in venues that are quaint at best with sound systems that could barely handle its menacing roar is to be reminded of how different the business of entertainment has become.
This may be the most impactful poem I read all year.
When the parental warning at the top of the screen reads “some drug references and smoking,” you know you are not getting the full story about Led Zeppelin. I read Hammer of the Gods in high school (a well-thumbed copy of which sat in a drawer away from prying parental eyes next to an equally tattered copy of the Jim Morrison biography No One Here Gets Out Alive), and while it might contain exaggerated tales, it is surely a clearer picture of the band in all its debauched excess than this sanitized and band-approved tale of artistic and commercial pursuit.