Song

by W.H. Auden

     The chimney sweepers
Wash their faces and forget to wash the neck;
     The lighthouse keepers
Let the lamps go out and leave the ships to wreck;
     The prosperous baker
Leaves the rolls in hundreds in the oven to burn;
     The undertaker
Pins a small note on the coffin saying, “Wait till I return,
     I’ve got a date with Love.”

     And deep-sea divers
Cut their boots off and come bubbling to the top,
     And engine-drivers
Bring expresses in the tunnel to a stop;
     The village rector
Dashes down the side-aisle half-way through a psalm;
     The sanitary inspector
Runs off with the cover of the cesspool on his arm-
     To keep his date with Love.

This poem was read by Garrison Keillor (I would love to take his job when he retires) a few weeks ago for his The Writer’s Almanac radio spot. I did not have a chance to hear it that day, but I knew that something like this was bound to happen, so some months ago I subscribed Sarah to the mailing list for the show. Being the wonderful wife that she is, when one of these emails from Keillor is any good (which is more often than not), she forwards it to me. So, I read this gem and immediately thought - that sounds like a Nick Cave song. Googling Nick Cave and Auden shows that it might as well be. The second and third links on the page were the two that caught my eye.

Nick Cave’s Lecture on the Love Song, besides being cached on a site that can keep my attention for hours, is a fascinating revelation of Cave’s worldview, while his interview with Grant McLennan (an equally fascinating piece) tells a bit more of his early years.

Now, I know that Cave has been around long enough that his fans have already poured over anything I could possibly find about him. In fact, I think Sarah had read the lecture years ago. So, if this is old hat, I apologize. It was news to me.

GRAND RAPIDS, MICHIGAN — Calvin College now offers a class on Irish rock band U2.

”What they have to offer is a vision,” said Mark Mulder, who is teaching the U2 course during Calvin’s three-week interim semester. ”They’re saying there’s something wrong with the world. But at the same time, they offer a hope. The gospel message is embedded within.”
Mulder, who teaches sociology, sees the band bringing a Christian worldview to a ”very elaborate cultural critique.” In that critique, they share common ground with other rock bands such as Radiohead and movies such as ”The Matrix” trilogy, he said.
”If you listen hard enough, there are a lot of things going on in pop culture which really question the ordering of the world today, and offer a vision of what things could and should be like,” said Mulder.

Rob Mitchum of Pitchfork Media has an excellent Hunter S. Thompson tribute — making more sense of the man/event than most of the obituaries I’ve read and heard — who died Sunday night of a self-inflicted gunshot wound, somewhere around the time I happened to be lying in bed, looking sideways at our bookshelf, sleepily remembering that I need to read Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas groggily and fondly rememebering all the rum in Thompson’s The Rum Diary, sleepily excited that my husband had President’s Day off from work.

Few seem to have noticed that the absurdly exaggerated drug use of Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas is given a portrayal that is far from enticing, note-perfectly enacted by Terry Gilliam’s film of the book. To Thompson, his persona’s ingestion of drugs wasn’t a celebration of counterculture mind exploration, but a desperate self-inoculation against the increasingly diseased American atmosphere closing in on all sides. Fear & Loathing didn’t earn its place in American literature as a celebration of pharmaceutical joyriding, but rather as an obituary for the delusional promises of the 1960s–it’s a literary Altamont.

Linford Detweiler finally has a favourite Over the Rhine album.

I’ve been watching the spring/summer tour dates gradually appear and earnestly hoping that they move southeast. It’s been awhile.

Via Jeremy Huggins, A remarkable and tear-jerking article in GQ by John Jeremiah Sullivan on Jesus (the aesthete of weakness), rock’n'roll, Christian rock (’a musical genre, the only one I can think of, that has excellence-proofed itself’), Creation Fest, and a bunch of true-blue, quirky, redneck West Virginians on fire for Christ.

A must read.