It’s been some time.

Nathanael and I were married on July 31, in Minneapolis, Minnesota, at Diamond Lake Lutheran Church. Fr. William C. Sisterman of The Anglican Church of St. Dunstan, St. Louis Park, Minnesota, presided. We used the Order for Matrimony from the 1662 Book of Common Prayer, and used the unabridged version of ‘The Lorica of St. Patrick’, and ‘Be Thou My Vision’ for congergational hymns. The reception was at the Fort Snelling Officers Club. The first song we danced to was Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds’ ‘No More Shall We Part’. I danced with my father to The Magnetic Fields ‘Nothing Matters When We’re Dancing’. After being stranded in Detroit, Michigan at the airpirt Westin for lack of identification, we honeymooned in Old Quebec City and stayed in a local hotel, a socialist hotel, another local hotel, and an old Victorian hotel across from an Ursuline convent. I was reading Merton’s Seven Storey Mountain at this time; it did quite a number on my head. There exists a picture of me trying to escape to the convent from the roof top of a Victorian hotel, but I doubt it shall ever get published. We did a lot of exploring the old city on foot, eating at various restaurants and pubs, went to a low mass in a cathedral (which was boggling) and bought some local art, a painting of nuns in the winter street, and a miniture etching of the Ursuline convent, a dark red vase, and an admirable black hat which I’ve since lost in a pub in Atlanta. We flew back to Mobile, Alabama, and drove down to Valparaiso, Florida, which exists in the middle of nowhere. ‘Exists’ might be too strong of a word. Valparaiso’s exsistence, I find, is nothing very definite.

We live in a two bedroom cottage that we’re renting from Nathanael’s step-grandmother. Nathanael works at Eglin Air Force base as a contract engineer, working on ‘defensive’ weapons of some sort, but that’s about all I’m allowed to know. Bi-monthly, in an attempt to keep him honest, I make him promise that he’s not doing anything violent and evil, and he gives his word. He started his masters a week ago at the University of Florida; we’re looking at moving in about five years: we’ve discovered I belong to the city and the cold. I’m a housewife and do the usual, along with reading, taking long walks by the bayou and incessantly debating in my head the whether to write, working on finishing Latin, drinking a fair amount of tea, and correcting the jail’s Bible study assignments to help the chaplin (which is something we’ve just begun). After Latin is done away with, I shall, I think, take a masters in medieval history, with an emphasis on the church. We attend Trinity Presbyterian Church, where N. has gone all his life, which is close enough to walk to some Sunday mornings when the weather is not too muggy and otherwise disheartening. I honestly cannot remember what denomination of which they are a part, but it’s something outrageously small.

Speaking of N., he shall be home soon and I ought to get lunch ready. Wedding photographs to come soon, tonight, I hope.

Other: Here is a collection of religious sonnets, Raised in a Barn 4, edited by Masha Poyurovsky, Jerah S. Kirby and Matthew Kirby. In other words, what J. Campbell described as “The great iamb versus the great I AM.”

List of Titles and Their Sources Which I Almost Swiped for This Blog

1. I am with You in Rockland (Ginsberg, Howl)
2. O starry-spangled shock of mercy the eternal war is here. (Ginsberg, Howl)
3. Subterranean Homesick Blues (Dylan)
4. Invitation to the Blues (Tom Waits)
5. Raise High the Roofbeam, Carpenters (Salinger)
6. The Rum Diary (Hunter. S. Thompson)
7. How to Disappear Completely (Radiohead)
8. Notes from the Underground (Dostoyevsky)
9. All Tomorrow’s Parties (Velvet Underground)
10. Famous Blue Raincoat (Leonard Cohen)
11. The Holy or the Broken Hallelujah (Cohen, Halllelujah)
12. My Dark Life (Elvis Costello)
13. Verse Chorus Verse (Nirvana)
14. About a Girl (Nirvana)
15. Endless Nameless (Nirvana)
16. A Candle to Light You Off to Bedlam (C. Churchill, The Skriker)
17. Paint it Black (Rolling Stones)
18. Desolation Angles (Kerouac)
19. The Art of Dying (George Harrison)
20. I Will Not Eat the Darkness (Over the Rhine)
21. The Deadly Theatre (Peter Brook)
22. The Holy Theater (Brook)
23. Till human voices wake us, and we drown (T.S. Eliot, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufock”)
24. The Muttering Retreats (T.S. Eliot, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufock”)
25. I Will Always Be the One in Need of a Palinode (Jetenderpaul)
26. The Phenomenological Rhetoric Of Summer Lingers On (Jetenderpaul)
27. Waltzing Matilda (Tom Waits)
28. You Said Irony was the Shackles of Youth (REM)
29. Queen of Eyes (The Soft Boys)
30. Day Sleeper (REM)
31. Letter from an Occupant (The New Pornographers)
32. Your Funeral, My Trial (Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds)
33. Earth Died Screaming (Tom Waits)

I think that is about it. There were probably more. I think I am likely settled on the title “Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas to Heaven” (Godspeed You Black Emperor!). However, I do quite fancy “Desolation Angels” (Kerouac). More succinct. As far as the book goes, it’s pretty good. I think Kerouac’s chief works are probably Dharma Bums and On the Road. However, I never managed to make it all the way through the book, as I absent mindedly forgot it at my parents’ cabin in Crosslake, Minnesota, and consequently had to begin another novel. One of the most intriguing things in the book is Kerouac’s perception of The Void. As was sometimes his habit he spent a summer alone on a lookout post somewhere in Yellowstone (I believe) keeping watch for fires. For days and days on end he looked out across the gulf at Desolation Peak and developed a perception of The Void; namely, an immutable, everlasting, all-encompassing presense, or reality, that sat there, and by Its existence mocked everything that the poor Kerouac was, his transient. fleeting existence and all. In someway his revelation (of sorts) of this ultimate concept (or Being) is somewhat reminiscent of Reformed Theology’s idea of God as I AM. Ah, it was probably just old Jack’s Buddhism kick.

This is the review I wrote some two years ago for Lift Your Skinny Fists for Bandoppler Radio (which is since defunct, yet soon to be reborn). My writing has since, I think, improved.

Godspeed You Black Emperor!
Lift Your Skinny Fists like Antennas to Heaven
Kranky, 2000
Sarah M. Jones

Welcome to the end of western civilisation, or the last 87 minutes and 27 seconds of it, anyway. Canadians Godspeed You Black Emperor! forcefully return with an infinitely expansive offering of epic proportions (literally) the two disc Lift Your Skinny Fists like Antennas to Heaven, the follow up to ’99’s Slow Riot for New Zero Kanada.

The four songs, best described as, perhaps, orchestral rock indoctrinated by space rock, start out slow and sparse and gradually brew into furious stormy crescendos, often fluctuating back downwards from a storm rent sky to a mere airy drone with complex arrangements of harrowing strings and guitars, rumbling drums, wobbly pianos, twinkling glockenspiels, and roving horns with an infusion of several indistinguishable instruments, and unnerving samples.

A jaded, restless Godspeed wanders across the continent in the dead of night, down vanishing deserted highways while on the periphery trains relentlessly thunder down worn-out tracks, static from the radio fuzes out of broken speakers, and muffled disembodied voices rattle across the airwaves of the “Cancer Towers on Holy Road Hi-way.” Eventually while pausing in the rain at a gas station, overhead speakers emit a corporate monotoned voice warning customers not to associate with any individuals not clad in the station’s uniforms — they’re lurking about and they’ll only do you harm. And on Godspeed rolls through ghostly cities of urban decay where an old man recalls the Coney Island of his youth and hauntingly contrasts it with today, dejectedly muttering “They don’t sleep anymore on the beach….”

The four songs, two on each disc, are finely wrought and average at just over twenty minutes in length, with sections of the songs bearing such foreboding denotations as “Terrible Canyons of Static,” “Atomic Clock,” “World Police and Friendly Fire,” “…The Buildings They are Sleeping Now,” “Edgy Swingset Acid,” She Dreamt She was a Bulldozer, She Dreamt She was Alone in an Empty Field,” and “Deathkamp Drone.”

The first track alone makes this record worth buying. If Sigur Ros is heaven, Godspeed You Black Emperor! is the Four Riders of the Apocalypse. The destruction of western civilization amidst the cacophony of postmodern paranoid apocalyptic musings never sounded so beautiful.

ordering info: www.brainwashed.com/kranky