"Chicago" in Chicago: Sufjan Stevens on the Carrie & Lowell Tour on my Birthday

"I fell in love again/All things go, all things go/Drove to Chicago/All things know, all things know..."

Every so often, some cosmic coincidences converge in your favor.  I had one yesterday, when--on my birthday no less--Sufjan Stevens came to Chicago and performed "Chicago" in Chicago.  It rarely gets more serendipitous than that.

So my lover and I fell in love again (all things go, all things go) and drove to Chicago (all things know, all things know).  I could not have better planned something that was gifted me by the Universe.

Yet even on the drive up from Iowa City, we ebbed with a quiet current of anxiety--simply put, what if he sucked?  Illinois and his mid-'00s zenith are now officially a decade old.  He's pushing 40 (official legacy-act age).  The album-a-year clip he maintained in his youth has now slowed to once every 5 years.  Was this once uber-prolific Indie-darling now slowing down, showing his years?

Also was the little matter of Carrie and Lowell, Mr. Stevens' new album that processes the recent death of his mother, with whom he's had a highly fraught relationship ever since she abandoned her young family in a bout of schizophrenia.  The melodies are gorgeous, the arrangements exquisite, and the lyrics free from even the barest hint of schmaltzy sentimentality that could cheapen the grief.  The reviews have been nothing short of rave.

Yet even as I listened to my pre-ordered copy every single day this month in prep for the concert, I had to confess--this was not vintage Stevens.  Clocking in at a mere 42 minutes, it is by far his shortest album proper since 2004's Seven Swans--which was itself just a quick breather between his sprawling epics Michigan and Illinois (back when we all thought he just might be serious about recording an album for all 50 states).  The fact that it took 3 years to get around to releasing this little quickie did not bespeak encouragingly for his latter-day output.

Carrie and Lowell is also an about-face from his last disc, the wild electronica experiments of 2010's The Age of Adz.  The stripped down, bare acoustic Carrie and Lowell is just the sort of so-called "back-to-basics" album that typically signals less a resurgence than a retreat and resignation--a sign that an artists' best days are behind them.

So deep down, I quietly feared: I got into Sufjan late; had I missed the Sufjan Stevens boat?  Were the orchestral productions of the Illinois tour and the multi-media events of The Age of Adz a thing of the past now?  Were we just on our way to some quiet acoustic show, a sort of glorified coffee-house corner performance by an aging singer settling into irrelevance? 

Short answer: No.

Longer answer: Wonderfully, gloriously no.

Longest answer: I was completely wrong about Carrie and Lowell. 

We all were.  There is nothing "stripped-down" or "back-to-basics" but about this disc whatsoever--it is as expansive and ambitious as anything he's ever done.  The ambient sounds that flank and flesh out the songs are not extraneous production effects or studio afterthoughts, no--they are crucial to the album's ethos, possibly even central.  For performing live, Stevens takes these ambient sounds and foregrounds them across the canvas of the theater with an accompanying light show that opens up the album to you in a manner you had never before contemplated; as Paul to the Corinthians, that which you had not been told you will you consider. 

Hanging above him and his backing band were a series of elongated hexagonal TV screens, set up like church windows, revealing even as they concealed, like religious faith.  Throughout the show, these screens silently broadcast haunting home-videos of childhood summers with his Mom in Eugene; breath-taking vistas of the Oregon coast; soft glows and abstract images, whatever the song called for.  The projections did in fact make the theater feel like a place of worship.

Does he have a far smaller backing-band now?  He doesn't need a bigger one anymore--he's now as wide and irreducible as Oregon (in a sense, he really did continue his 50 states project--Carrie and Lowell is the Oregon album).

Is a quiet acoustic album an awkward fit for a multi-media production?  Maybe, but Carrie and Lowell, again, isn't just some acoustic album.  When he sings in mantric repetition "We're all gonna die" at the end of "Fourth of July," the stage-lights sweep across the audience, reminding us individually and communally of the same.  And then there's the fade-out ambiance that closes out the album on "Blue Bucket of Gold"--on an ipod, all it signals to me is that it's time to start scrolling for the next album.

But Sufjan is wiser--and live, he does not permit the ambiance to fade out, but instead increases it, improvs on it, opens it up, unfolds it, makes a religious rave of it, reveals the power and the passion that was compressed within the ambience all along.  Here, the whisper becomes a scream; here, the bassist and drummer that were never present on the album break-out in wild ecstasy, as the disco-balls fill the hall with darkness and light, and you feel the majestic album closer in your body, you feel it in your soul, you are filled up.  This was how he finished the main set and sent the audience storming to its feet in thunderous applause.

This is not an effect that some young up-and-comer or aspiring artist can pull off, but only that which a consummate performer, an experienced artist at the height of his powers, knows how to do.  The day may still come when Sufjan Stevens announces his retreat from ambition, when he ceases to grow in his powers, but Carrie and Lowell, blessedly, ain't it.  William Gaddis wrote that every great work of art feels like it needed to exist, and this, this, feels like it needed to exist.

It was so fulfilling, so relieving, not just to merely know that Sufjan Stevens doesn't suck live, but that such beauty and sublimity can still be created in this world--that in our overproduced age where the record is almost always better than the performer, that such live experiences are still possible.  It was a religious experience, and I will never listen to Carrie and Lowell the same way again.

These concert tickets were my girlfriend's birthday present to me--but she thought she had bought the cheap tickets up in the balconies.  Imagine our surprise then when the ushers then took us near the front rows!  The Universe was intent on having me have a happy birthday.  I also had no idea that the Chicago Theater possessed some of the most gorgeous architecture this side of France--it was a delight just to look up and around, even before the opening act came on (Little Scream, whose coming album I'll have to check out later this year--I was briefly concerned that she would overshadow Sufjan!).

So unversed are we in the ways of Chicago, that we didn't even realize that this was the same Theater that we took photos in front of a year ago, when we first touristed-up Chi-town one freezing February--checking-off the Sears Tower, the Bean, the Art Institute, etc.  There was a pleasing sense of synchronicity and symmetry to us returning to this same theater once more without even meaning to, as though we were coming full circle.

Oh, and perhaps you might think that this show description is a sort of back-handed compliment to Sufjan's music--that he needs these multi-media installations to disguise what must be, after all, rather mediocre and sleepy songs.  I will have you know, then, that when he and his band came out for the encore, that there were no more light shows, nor TV screens, just some standard stage lights and some instruments, and he still had the audience eating out of the palm of his hand.

And the only louder applause he got than the end of "Blue Bucket of Gold" was when, with only basic instrumentation and standard lighting and while having the trumpeter also cover the strings on some crappy synthesizer, he finished the encore with "Chicago."  The place went wild.  And again (and I can't emphasize this enough), he performed it in Chicago!  The evening could not have ended more perfectly.  Happy Birthday to me.

And if you haven't given Carrie and Lowell a listen yet, then I don't know why you won't let yourself have nice things.

Non-Directive Writing Centers...

...are like Cross-Fit: looks impressive, but mostly ineffective.

I'm already falling out of the habit of sending my students to the Writing Center.  My international students especially come back from there with no greater understanding of English organization or grammar than when they first entered.  Look, guys, I understand that grammar is a "lower"-level concern, but that doesn't mean it's not a concern!

I can cover grammar principles all day in class with students, but lectures and workshops can only do so much--some students need one on one attention to learn most effectively, which I as an instructor logistically cannot give to every single one of them.  That is the great mission of the University Writing Center.  But if these Centers refuse to explain where the indefinite article goes, then who will?

Likewise, some American students just need to be nudged in the right direction, because that's how they learn best--but others need to be told explicitly what they are doing wrong, or they'll never know!  I can't tell you the number of times I've had a student actually straight-up thank me for telling them explicitly what's wrong with their paper and what to do instead, because they had no idea before, and they kept getting bad grades, but none of their other teachers would ever tell them why!  I'll be generous: doubtless these prior teachers took a hands-off, "non-directive" approach based off of some misbegotten idea that "non-directive" is intrinsically more "liberating" and/or "egalitarian," as opposed to just frustrating and unhelpful.

I say again: logistically, as an instructor, I can't meet with every single student and give them the individual help that they need--but the Writing Center can!  So when they don't, it's especially frustrating.

Even more frustrating: I worked at a Writing Center once myself, at Utah.  I'm well aware of the great internal debate in that field: Are we editors or mentors?  Do we show them what to do, or show them how to figure it out on their own?

False Binary.  The answer is both.  We strive to be friendly and egalitarian, yes, but above all else we strive to be helpful.  We try to teach a person to fish, not just give them the fish, yes--but teaching someone to fish still involves explicitly demonstrating how to bait the hook and fling the rod!  We don't fix their papers for them, of course--but we still explicitly show them how to!  Where on earth did we get it in our heads that leaving students to figure out how to write for themselves was a virtue?  They don't need to pay tuition to figure out something on their own!

My goodness, if a student has no idea how to use articles properly or conjugate correctly, then show them!  Good grammar is part of good writing--it's the last thing you worry about, but you still worry about it.  And if a certain paragraph would work better earlier in the paper than later, then point it out to them!   Part of being an effective Writing Tutor isn't just encouraging or "inspiring" them, but to actually do the hard work of rolling up your sleeves, reading through the students' papers, and teaching them how to write.

In Defense of Difficult Literature

On Valentines Day, I bet my girlfriend that if she read The Brothers Karamazov, then I would run a triathlon with her.  Now, I'd bought her a copy of Villette over a year earlier that she still hasn't finished, so naturally I assumed I would never run a triathlon.  She finished Ilyusha's funeral a week ago.  Crap.

Of course, as a classmate noted, it's a fair trade.  In both cases, muscles are being strenuously exercised.

Literally.

As Ben Marcus notes in his famed 2005 Harper's essay, "In the left temporal lobe of the brain...sits Wernicke's area, a tufted bundle of flesh responsible for language comprehension.  It gets its name from Carl Wernicke, a German neurologist who discovered in 1874 that damage to his region could cause an impairment of language comprehension.  Think of Wernicke's area as the reader's muscle...If we do not read, or do so only rarely, the reader's muscle is slack and out of practice..."

If, as Marcus claims, the Wernicke's area is a reading muscle, then it can atrophy and grow weak from disuse--but it can also be exercised and strengthened.  We sometimes speak of books "stretching" the mind, which not coincidentally is also how we often discuss muscles--because your mind is a muscle, too.

Now, one does not just jump into a Russian novel anymore than one just jumps into a triathlon.  When you start, you'll get a headache the same way your whole body aches when you start a new workout.  But with training and determination, you can complete both a triathlon and a long novel--and not just complete it, but feel a sense of exhilaration and mind-expanding sublimity at the end.  You'll feel healthier, too.

For you know how, when you work out, you actually start eating less greasy and sugary food, naturally, without having to be told to?  Because your body just doesn't crave that junk anymore.  Similarly, once you start reading difficult literature, and begin exercising and exhausting your Wernicke's area, you no longer feel like consuming the trite and simplistic--bumper stickers and billboards, TV talking heads and political stump speeches--all these your brain will naturally begin to reject as unhealthy, without you having to be told to.  You will be far less swayed by them, you won't be tempted by them, you will feel more free.

It's no surprise to me that the Humanities (particularly English) are constantly under attack--the last thing the powerful want is a populace that is no longer easily seduced by their slogans and jingles.  A well-read citizenry is harder to control.  So please, for your own health and well-being, pick up a long novel, one with unfamiliar words and complex sentences.  Workout your Wernicke's area.  Notice how much healthier you feel.

And if an inexperienced reader like my girlfriend can finish some Dostoyevski, then an out-of-shape grad student like myself can run a triathlon.  Now if you'll excuse me, I have a triathlon to train for.

This Is Not A Photograph

Oh hi!  So, a critical edition of Nephi Anderson's Dorian just came out on Peculiar Pages, and it contains (among other things) an essay I wrote a couple years ago! Anderson is kinda considered the grandfather of LDS fiction, and Dorian was his final, long-out-of-print novel, which is re-published now in the midst of a recent critical reconsideration of his contributions to Mormon letters.  It's a rather charming coming-of-age tale set in rural Utah near the turn of the 20th century--though as the various essays argue, there's far more going on here historically and sociologically than may first meet the eye.

The essay's title (and I'm kinda proud of it) is: "'This Is Not A Photograph': Nephi Anderson's Dorian as a Sort of LDS Sons and Lovers; Or, A Portrait of the Mormon Solipsist as a Young Man."  It takes a comparativist approach to Anderson, situating him among his Modernist contemporaries.  You should read it!  You can purchase the edition here.  (Or, if you just wanted to read my essay--spoilers and all--you could read that here, as well!)