Let me start by saying that a newsletter isn’t a dignified place to start beef, and that beyond furnishing me with an obvious set-up for a playful subtitle, the established music journalist Matt Mitchell has nothing to fear from me.1 My last post spoke extensively about the subjective quality of listeners’ judgements, which should, of course, mean that I’m at perfect peace with Full Force Galesburg ranking last in a numbered list of the Mountain Goats’ studio albums – that a set of songs I find as indelible as any John Darnielle has ever recorded could strike another writer as ‘fine but forgettable,’ the equivalent of ‘a compilation hastily thrown together’ rather than a unified vision.
As the album cover seems to wryly recognise, listeners by this point might feasibly have come to expect another ‘sixteen songs about people whose good intentions are having exactly the outcome you might have predicted if you weren’t such a damned optimist.’ The cover does, however, badge the songs themselves as ‘new,’ which wasn’t the case on Sweden, or Nothing for Juice, where much of the material was still composed during Darnielle’s productive Pitzer College days. This perhaps indicates something about their origins. As his new girlfriend Lalitree continued her studies into grad school, John followed, moving away from the West Coast, first to Chicago and then to Grinnell, Iowa. When they got there, according to the Des Moines Register,
Lalitree worked in Ames as a lab tech testing water and later helped map the soybean genome. Darnielle, meanwhile, worked on call at the adolescent mental health center at Mary Greeley Medical Center. Looking for steadier employment, he signed on at a grain elevator where one of his duties was to climb giant soybean piles to level off the crown and prevent heat buildup that would rot the grain.2
This was a very different lifestyle to Darnielle’s upbringing: one which he told an audience on his first visit to Durham, where he would eventually live, was ‘quiet and good,’ centred on the twin benefits of ‘plenty of sleep’ and ‘plenty of corn.’ The Coroner’s Gambit, he told the Iowa State Dailyaround the time of its release, was his ‘best album by a country mile,’ precisely because ‘I am not surrounded by any scene at all. I was working free of any constraints that are imposed on you by being involved in a scene. When you’re working here, it’s just you and your thoughts — nobody else cares.’
Perhaps the songs Darnielle was working on for the record preceding this, in the spring and summer of 1997, weren’t coming from quite such a settled place of rural tranquility: some of them were still recorded in California, with Bob Durkee and Peter Hughes, and some still further afield in New Zealand, home to Graeme Jefferies, who played electric guitar on Nothing for Juice. Here there are further small but significant expansions to the sonic palette, in the form of vivid swashes of violin from Alastair Galbraith (Now I have everything I need.) If the spartan room I described in my post on ‘No, I Can’t’ could be seen as a representative world for an early Mountain Goats narrator to inhabit, the room into which ‘soft yellow light’ spills in Ontario, California, towards the end of this first decade of recording is starting to seem a little better furnished, with ‘my favourite records, my favourite books.’ A different kind of life is coming together.
It’s also around this time that Darnielle suggests he had started to feel that he ‘wrote so many made up stories’ that he could ‘bury the real songs.’ And on this album we can start to see a version of this real couple, ‘young in [their] love and not yet married,’ but ‘heading a little ways west and digging in for a long life together.’ ‘Twin Human Highway Flares,’ as John wrote for eMusic , features two people who
look a lot like me and the woman who would later become my wife, driving from Chicago to northern Iowa on a summer day. Only I don’t think that ever happened. I know we never had any ‘50s road movie conversations like the one that opens the song. We weren’t, at the point in time when this song would have had to’ve taken place for it to be true, using overnight bags. We had suitcases. And there wasn’t enough backstory between us for buildings to appear as ‘monument[s] of desperation.’
The liner notes offer another version, or ‘vision,’ as John puts it, ‘of the two of us crossing the parking lot toward the blazing room off the interstate half an hour past Iowa over on the other side of the Mississippi’ – which has the advantage of being in the same direction as the song. The Regency Inn in Geneseo comes closest to fitting the bill, for what it’s worth, which is not a lot, because it didn’t happen. It’s two stories, and two stars. The nearest watersource is more of a creek than a river.
The point, in any case, is not to make the listener think of a specific motel, but to summon an image, to give something like the impression of temporarily tuning in while someone else is ‘dreaming in blood-red colour.’ I think I personally love Full Force Galesburg so much for the same reason I’ve always bristled when someone describes Darnielle’s body of work as ‘story-songs.’ While his characters might foreground their literal direction of travel, for the most part ‘story’ in Mountain Goats songs tends by design to be provisional, ambiguous, resistant to paraphrase. What elements of narrative we can reassemble come from the images, streaming past what Darnielle in ‘Raja Vocative’ called ‘the unstoppable camera of my mind’s eye,’ and it seems to me that there are more of them on this album than ever, spilling out of the speakers in great giddy floods.
Some are small, slow and careful: a packet of seeds in the mail; ‘plums boiled down to pulp, / Drying on a screen’; ‘darkness climbing up the ladders to the house / Rung by agonising rung.’ Some have an extravagant intensity, but in ‘Twin Human Highway Flares’ Darnielle grounds his grandiose promises – ‘On the day I forget you / I hope my heart explodes’ – on an intimate physical scale. Look close enough at the person you love, the song seems to say, and the smallest object of attention can blaze with light: ‘Sunset spilling through your earrings all over your body.’
If Full Force Galesburg belongs to a high romantic period in Darnielle’s writing, he nonetheless rejects conceptions of love as a universally ‘benign, comfortable force.’ He points instead to its meaning for ‘the Greeks,’ who believed ‘love can eat a path through everything’ and ‘destroy a lot of things on the way to its own objective, which is just its expression of itself.’ I take John’s classical reference to mean something like these lines from a choral ode in Antigone: ‘Love, the plunderer laying waste the rich … not even the deathless gods can flee your onset, / nothing human born for a day – / whoever feels your grip is driven mad.’3
We can watch this happening in ‘Masher,’ whose narrator is on the trail of a lover who seems to have partially merged into the natural world: ‘Hair hanging down in the leaves / Neck tilted back to make a rainbow.’ In response, our protagonist sounds happy enough to part company with civilisation, here represented by ‘the things I used to hold on to,’ ‘the ways I knew around the local roads,’ and some kind of confinement that isn’t ‘jail, exactly.’ Leaving behind eloquence – a quality which has been defined as ‘the principal goal and instrument of humanist education’ – the singer throws himself into what David Berman called ‘the wild silence’: ‘I was losing control of the language again.’ That definition comes from an essay by Aaron Kelly and David Salter on Hamlet’s ‘What a piece of work is a man,’ but in the place of the Danish prince’s disgust, ‘Masher’ greets the prospect of going feral with joy and a jaunty guitar figure.4 The arrangement here seems to ring out as a kind of pastoral induction to a good green world: a quality brought out especially well by Evan Diem’s cover below.
I didn’t expect to be writing about Shakespeare this week, but I didn’t expect to hear this couplet added on to the end of the 1997 Durham live performance of ‘Then The Letting Go,’ either: ‘This you’ll perceive which makes your love more strong / To love that well which you will leave before too long.’ This is almost, but not quite, the end of ‘Sonnet 73’: the pronouns and the expression are slightly modified, John seemingly translating on the fly to make sure a modern audience can still immediately recognise the idea of seizing love with both hands in the face of the fate which will eventually claim us all.
Though some of its songs present the uprooting force of love in less positive terms than the autobiographical narrator of ‘Twin Human Highway Flares,’ the album as a whole makes an inarguable case for its power. As in Tallahassee, many of its desperate bids for connection are taking place at the edge of something, between people who have ‘nowhere else to go,’ who have followed each other ‘all the way down.’ Dogs ‘howl as though the world were ending’; political dissidents keep each other warm in a ‘hidden room’ before Soviet security forces break the doors in; the phrase itself only appears in the closer, ‘It’s All Here in Brownsville,’ but you’d be hard-pressed to point to a song here where it wasn’t ‘all coming apart again.’ As such, much of the album seems to demonstrate what happens when the ‘two distinctly religious modes’ of Darnielle’s songwriting identified in Joel Heng Hartse’s recent review of Dark in Here operate ‘in tandem’: ‘the enchanted and the apocalyptic.’
For me, these songs evoke the ‘strong and equivocal emotion’ which literary critics have explored, in various guises, under the banner of ‘the sublime.’ William Cronon has described how Romantic authors understood certain places on earth as offering you ‘more chance than elsewhere to glimpse the face of God… on the mountaintop, in the chasm, in the waterfall, in the thunder-cloud, in the rainbow, in the sunset.’5 High in the cottonwood? Jean-François Lyotard, meanwhile, saw the sublime in the clash between the fact that ‘we can conceive the infinitely great, the infinitely powerful, but every presentation of an object destined to “make visible” this absolute greatness or power appears to us painfully inadequate.’6
Describing it as ‘that elusive encounter with overwhelming height, power, or limits,’ Sarah Hibberd and Miranda Stanyon have noted that as it unfolds in time and performance, music is particularly well-placed to ‘stage the sublime as encounter and event.’7 They go on to ask whether, ‘if words themselves fall short of inexpressibly great subjects – the limitlessness of divine power, the indeterminacy of the void’ and so on, ‘then does music paradoxically trump other forms of expression in representing the unrepresentable?’ The reference points here are 18th- and 19th-century classical music, but for my money Hibberd and Stanyon’s questions apply well enough to a singer striving to communicate impossibly capacious images: armies lining up ‘along the country’s length’; two young lovers feeling ‘an unquenchable thirst in our throats’; the Mexican border blazing with ‘unfathomable heat’; the sun falling out of the sky.
We’ve been here in Darnielle’s work before, of course – perhaps most notably in ‘the impossibly large office of the death-dealing physician’ – but Full Force Galesburg makes consistently clear what’s at stake when ‘sublimity flashing forth at the right moment scatters everything before it like a thunderbolt.’ These are the words of the 1st century Roman author Longinus, describing a force which threatens to ‘overpower’ not only the audience but also the orator, leading, as Peter Bolla interprets the passage, to a ‘loss of [the] power of human agency.’ You can say all of that – or you can gasp out ‘In a high room’; ‘Just then the gleam in your eye’; ‘This morning I know who you are.’8
Speaking to Electric Lit in 2014, Darnielle describes his practice as a writer as seeking to capture ‘the mood of a movement toward a moment.’ Referring to his vision of that Illinois parking lot seventeen years earlier, John’s liner notes to Full Force Galesburg characterise the album as a series of songs ‘about what made that moment either possible or inevitable, depending on how you look at it.’ ‘How you look’ places much of the onus of interpretation on the listener, which feels right for an approach to narrative – partially derived from authors of so-called ‘weird fiction’ like Robert Aickman – where images work by accumulation, creating the mood without explaining the moment. The goal of Darnielle’s early style, as he explained it to Joseph Fink, was at once to ‘drown the listener in images that would stick with them forever’ and to ‘resis[t] spelling anything out outright.’ Songs written for the first few tapes aimed ‘to make something big and emotional happen, without you getting enough information to say what happened. But still you’d be so loaded with detail that you couldn’t accuse me as a writer of withholding detail – you’re being, in fact, covered in detail.’
At this point in the newsletter, I’m seven years into my childhood, and I still feel like I’ve barely given you enough to see it. I can never remember as clearly as I want to; family members have helped me assemble a skeleton chronology, but it’s hard to be precise about what happened in what order, hard to give a period of time that, for me, has mostly slid out of view, the structure and shape of a story. 1997 does represent a significant break in the text – that September, me and four classmates who were performing well for our age group skipped a year of school, going straight from Year 2 into Year 4. We were told this had something to do with classroom capacity, which on reflection is quite a flimsy reason to unmoor a child from the normal milestones of development, and I’m not totally sure how I feel about it. But here does seem like a sensible time to draw a line, to take stock of the fact that I’ve already eaten up a quarter of my own biography without being certain yet what it’s taught me or how much I have to show for it.
In practical terms, it means I’m going to take a month’s hiatus from the newsletter, to catch up on some background reading, move house, and actually have a summer. Before that, though, I’m going to take a leaf out of John’s book – resist the temptations of narrative, and drown you in images. Feel free to check out now, and join me again on 6th September, if it’s starting to feel like there’s no sign of land. But for what it’s worth, this is where I’m coming from.
*
Nettles and dock-leaves, badgers and moths. Gloopy green algae covering the stream by the mill. Beneath the throaty, looping call of a wood pigeon, sycamore seedpods are twirling slowly to the ground.
A tapir in the zoo has a flexible proboscis, and I’m running back from the fence to tell my family it has a flexible proboscis – a Dorling-Kindersley animal atlas come to life.
I’m in London, transfixed by a museum exhibit on the extinction of the quagga. I’m in a fake Japanese convenience store, rattling and shaking in a simulation of the Kobe earthquake, and I love it. The escalators in the Pepsi Trocadero are gigantic. The food in the Rainforest Café, I’m given to understand, is expensive. We bring home a stress ball in the shape of a tree-frog.
When I draw cartoons, I copy the shapes of the eyes from the Beano, something in my left-handed brain flipping the characters the wrong way round. Lunchtime sessions in the quiet library, trying to correct my spidery scrawl. The nubbly rubber of anthromorphic pencil grips.
In my grandma’s kitchen, we’re making fudge. The smell of butter and vanilla. Crumbling in sugar and working the putty by hand, cutting it soft and feeling it come out of the fridge chilled and solid. And all the other cheap desserts of the 90s: watching jelly inflate from paper-thin strips into spongy blocks, red, juicy and sweet. Angel Delight – powder in a packet, then cool and billowing on the tongue – and the impossible saccharine glide of a Crusha milkshake.
Her bedroom: the fitted wardrobe with its sliding glass panels, the headboard and curtains plush and pastelly. And the books piling up on the white chests of drawers – history, geology, church architecture – the interests of a retired autodidact who left school at fifteen and who is determined now to live the life she wants.
His: a boxy TV for arguing with the teatime news. Books here, too: mostly war and James Herriott. And the man himself capering through the kitchen, getting gleefully in the way and asking ‘Shall I go?’ My granddad has the sort of compulsive, Bruce Forsyth patter you might expect from a travelling salesman of frozen duck products: scraps of songs and tongue-twisters and quotations from anthologies of famous quotations. Chunks of poetry too, most likely learnt by rote in the ‘40s and remembered half a century later.He met John Betjeman in Smithfield Market once, and never got over the way he pronounced ‘Austin Reed.’
East Fife 4, Forfar 5.
My old man’s a dustman, he wears a dustman’s hat.
Then out spake brave Horatius, the Captain of the Gate.
One day I lie down on the floor of his study and pretend to be dead. I couldn’t tell you why. ‘Study’ now seems a grand word for it: it has a leather swivel-chair and a dark wood desk, where presumably he deals with accounts and admin; it’s where the Yellow Pages is kept. I don’t know how old I am, or how convincingly I’ve stopped my breathing – all I know is that I’ve kept up the performance for a little too long, that it isn’t funny, that my grandma’s responses are those of someone genuinely worried about a child they love. This house has a wooden balcony which I have a memory, which must be a dream, of falling over, my body spinning cleanly around it with the control of a gymnast before tumbling to the distant floor. There are figurines on the landing windowsill: glazed ceramics of Japanese fishermen.
What did Della wear, boy? What did Della wear?
You have hissed my mystery lectures and tasted a whole worm.
The curfew tolls the knell of passing day.
Over the years I spend a lot of time hurtling up castle staircases and roaming up and down the lines of stallholders temporarily encamped on the grounds of big estates: people selling wax jackets and jars of jam and curry paste that you’re allowed to taste, in moderation, with a disposable plastic spoon. God knows what volume of these ends up in landfill at the end of each weekend. At the Deepings Showground I meet Wolf from the ITV gameshow Gladiators. I try my hand at fishing at Althorp Park, and whip the line over my shoulder behind me so carelessly that the instructor is visibly unsettled. A phalanx of Roman soldiers called the Ermine Street Guard crests a ridge at Kirby Hall, Northamptonshire: they bang their shields on the grass with a fearsome thud and assemble into a tortoise formation.
25 years later, I’m reading some of the performers’ reminiscences on a public Facebook page. There are playful inter-period rivalries, and jokes about driving tanks through farmers’ fields and winding up safety stewards. There are posts from a British man who spent his honeymoon weekend pretending to be part of the Confederate cavalry. As he comments on one of his own photos, ‘we were all young back then.’
Milk for hedgehogs. Weddings of uncles I haven’t seen since. Melted chocolate on the seats of a Skoda Octavia. A white coil of dogshit baking on an August pavement.
My father on a weekend afternoon, coming home from the Red Lion and falling asleep, and me creeping into the bedroom and trying to prise his eyelids open. Halfway up the stairs, a picture of the Sacred Heart: the only thing he has left from his grandmother’s flat in Dublin. The upstairs hallway is a gallery of sentimental paintings of labradors. We foster a Weimaraner called Odin. He gets into a fight with one of our own dogs, and then he doesn’t live here any more.
My teenage half-sister, who has never lived here, who no longer lives with her mum either, sitting beside me on a beach in Kent.
‘To be is to do’ – Jean-Paul Sartre. ‘Do be do be do’ – Frank Sinatra.
Take but degree away, untune that string, / And hark what discord follows!
They’re coming to take me away / Ho ho, hee hee, ha ha
Here’s a picture with both of the men in my life. Something – a barbeque, I think – is burning in the background, smoke streaming out in the direction of my neighbours’ duck house. At some point, someone came in through our back gate and stole our garden furniture. This must be either before it was taken, or after it was returned. We were not the only victims – eventually our table and chairs were found in a field, along with pieces belonging to other families, a kind of makeshift clubhouse, to which I evidently wasn’t invited.
Funnybones. Sabrina. Otis the Aardvark. The giddy footing of a cattle grid. A pair of Hunter wellies I won in a raffle. A shark’s tooth coming in the post. Morrison’s frozen chicken enchiladas. The people I love. The people I almost love. Light beckoning. Wind whistling. Hey hey, hey hey. Day breaking. River rolling. Hey, hey. La la la la la.
This week, Richard is getting into Garth Marengi’s Darkplace.
And you know what they say – the couple that works with soybeans together, can enjoy bein’ together.
Sophocles, Antigone. The Theban Plays. Translated by Robert Fagles, with introductions and notes by Bernard Knox. Penguin, 1984. p.101.
Aaron Kelly and David Salter, ‘“The Time Is Out of Joint”: Withnail and I and Historical Melancholia.’ In J. R. Keller & L. Stratyner (eds.), Almost Shakespeare: Reinventing His Works for Cinema and Television. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 2004, pp. 99-112.
William Cronon, ‘The Trouble with Wilderness; Or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature. Environmental History, 1.1, 1996: p.7-28.
Jean-Francois Lyotard, translated by Geoff Bennington, and Brian Massumi. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. University of Minnesota Press, 1984.
Sarah Hibberd and Miranda Stanyon, Music and the Sonorous Sublime in European Culture, 1680–1880. Cambridge University Press, 2020.
Peter de Bolla, The Discourse of the Sublime: Readings in History, Aesthetics and the Subject. Oxford: Blackwell, 1989.
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