Conspicuous Cultural Consumption in Context--an end of the year list

I've done lists before, and since 2011 is actually over, I am going to do a top ten list of the best cultural artifacts I consumed last year. We don't know if they will be considered art or artifacts in the future, but this list counts as my vote for the former. I order these from most recent, and I try to explain the context in which I consumed the culture, hopefully making sense of the choice.


1. Nicholas Szczepanik's Please Stop Loving Me: I've had this album for a few months, and last week while in Seattle for an interview, I woke up at 4:00 in the morning unable to adjust to pacific time. I had the interview in a few hours, so I didn't want to distract my mind with tv or my book, so I decided to do menial chores--ironing, making the bed, stretching, sitting, laying down, looking--while listening to some music. I only had my laptop, so I put on Szczepanik's album, which consists of a single piece of music that runs over 40 minutes, building chords on top of slight feedback, most likely recorded in a cathedral. It is remarkable, probably my favorite album of the year, like Brian Eno's Apollo perfected to 40 minutes, and it is even better at 5:00 in the morning in a small Seattle hotel room. 


2. Stewart O'Nan, Wish You Were Here: This novel was my Donkey gift after a hint to the donkey that O'Nan was a writer I wanted to know more about since I had heard him discuss his new book on Terry Gross earlier in the year. His new book Emily, Alone, which I am reading now, is about an 80-year-old widow and her daily routines. Doesn't sound like much, but it is incredibly powerful. Wish You Were Here is a 2002 book that actually introduces us to the character of Emily--the whole book, and it is pretty big, is about a one-week family reunion up at a lake house in Lake Chatauqua in New York, and Emily is the already-widowed matriarch. The book has no plot, and each section follows the perspective of each member of the family as they experience the reunion. Having had two major family reunions this year, one even on a lake in the Yoopers, there were many things to identify as eerily accurate, but what I found most moving in the novel is the way its characters are so real. I'd venture to say this is the most mimetically precise novel I have ever read, drawing its characters in a manner that is so careful that I couldn't put it down, involved completely in what I considered a third family reunion. Because the novel so sympathetically portrays this family with all their angers, resentments, petty arguments, angst, and all, I was expecting a melodrama at the beginning, but instead a got a non-sentimental description of how relationships matter, if only because relationship means a certain proximity, which produces beauty. There really is a lot to write about this novel, but let me suggest that this is the novel that Franzen's recent novels would like to be--more thematic because of its subtlety, more sympathetic to its humans, more careful with the nuances of its relationships. There is no climax in the novel, just the end of the reunion, but when I finished the book, I felt as if I were the one standing on the front door, ambivalently saying goodbye to the family leaving in their van, wondering why my kids weren't ready to go yet, and heartbroken that there is only so much to say to one another.


3. Terence Malick, The Tree of Life: It is only appropriate that I continue the discussion of Wish You Were Here with Malick's masterpiece, a work of cinema that I think ought to have a place in our temple ceremonies--it hits all the same notes and does it with a great degree of formal skill. I watched Tree of Life on a Saturday morning in my room while my kids were running around and distracting me. It is not a movie that allows for this kind of viewing, but the nature of my own kids' distractions just seemed so appropriate, so I didn't care. It is as big and ambitious as O'Nan's Wish You Were Here is subtle and implied, but they both spoke to the same impulse: family is the cosmos, so we better learn it now. I texted my friend Craig, a huge Malick fan, after I watched it to tell him how much I enjoyed it, and he texted back with "cinema as vigil." Good description, and if I could duplicate my experience watching it with my kids running around on a Saturday morning, I'd pursue that as a pastime in heaven.


4. Sigur Ros, Inni: I have already discussed this in this blog, but I went to the Englert theater in downtown Iowa City to watch this documentary, and I was transfixed from beginning to end.

5. The Psalms: I have been researching the Psalms for a major piece of writing I am doing, and so I decided to go back and read them, all 150, from beginning to end in one sitting. I had a facsimile of the 1560 Geneva Bible in my office, the same bible that would have been read by some of my favorite poets and theologians in late 16th-century England, so I decided to read them out of there. Reading the Psalms, in my new little office in the main library, was one of the most profound experiences I have ever had--they are repetitive, sure, but in their repetition there is a cadence that creeps up and starts to pacify the soul. I am a romantic, so reading the sixteenth-century type and the marginal notes by a bunch of Calvin's followers was great in itself, but the actual psalms astounded me with a poetic and spiritual power that I was not quite prepared for.

6. Apparat, "Black Water" from The Devil's Walk: I was riding my bike to school, crossing the bridge over Riverside drive and the Iowa River while it was raining barely enough to notice. Sometimes this just happens, which is why ipods might have been the best invention for satisfying emotions since charity.

8. Woody Allen, Midnight in Paris: I had been alone for two weeks--the rest of my family on vacation while I took my summer seminar, and I was missing them, particularly Kathryn. To conclude my time alone, I went to Panera and got some bread and butter to go, bought a ticket to Midnight in Paris, and watched it with my baguette and butter packets. What with anticipating the return of my family the next day, it was the most pleasant pop culture experience of 2011.





7. The PowerPoint chapter in Jennifer Egan's A Visit from the Goon Squad: This whole book is fantastic, an interlaced set of stories that goes all over the late twentieth and pretty far into the twenty-first centuries, but the chapter in which the sister of an autistic boy explains her brother's love of musical pauses through a slide show of Power Point might be the most surprising narrative move I read all year. Besides, I read this book just before my seminar on narrative was going to start in the summer, so I was primed for storytelling innovation. This chapter ought to be canonized and taught in freshman English.

9. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, "The Cross of Snow" and Robert Frost, "Never Again Would Birds' Songs Be the Same": A happy serendipity, two students in my class presented on each of these two sonnets on the same day, so our class was able to discuss what monogamous love means in the world, and the profound effect of loss. If you get a chance, look up each poem--they are both on the internet--and read them together. You'll love your lover much more after you do.

10. Brian Selznick, The Invention of Hugo Cabret: I already discussed reading this with my kids in a previous post, so I don't need to again, but I can't stress enough that enchantment is always the point. Of everything.