Thursday, February 05, 2004
(12:37 PM) | Adam Kotsko:
When you penetrate to the most high God
Last semester, I got into the habit of listening to as much of the album Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas to Heaven by Godspeed You Black Emperor! as I could on the way home from school. For at least half of the semester, that was the routine, but then I started diversifying in an effort to keep up with Robb's towering pop music erudition. Usually in the morning, I would turn my stereo back to Chicago Public Radio, so that I could hear one solid Bush quote to get me pissed off and keep me going at work.
In any case, I decided to revive that tradition last night, and this morning I just left it playing on my way to work, and now on my way back from lunch, too. I must declare that it is the best possible driving music. It lends an air of gravity and meaning to every move I make -- no matter what the mood of the music is at the moment, it is always somehow perfectly suited for what's going on as I drive. Beyond that, the huge and often sudden dynamic shifts of the music help to make sure that if I fall asleep behind the wheel (an increasing worry in my old age), it won't be for too long. I strongly suggest that everyone go out and beg, borrow, or steal that album and make it the soundtrack of your life.
My favorite part, the source for the title of this post, is a lengthy sermon by a cult leader, talking about a mystical ascent to God. In some ways, it sounds like pure Karl Barth, but then there's this bizarre edge -- sadly, an edge that wouldn't necessarily catch anyone's attention if it were a real sermon. I confess that the sermon is one of my favorite literary forms, simply because it's so easy to mimic. I could never deliver one, however, because I couldn't keep a straight face. Once, at a party at Ted Jennings', I mentioned that after reading Fear and Trembling at some point, I had vivid dreams about turning the materials therein into a sermon and preaching it in an actual church. Bill Brower looked at me inquisitively while making hand motions reminiscent of masturbation. I think that's just about right -- and not just for me.
[I'm trying to cut down on the use of dashes in my writing. It seems lazy to me to have a dash in every other sentence. That was one of Dr. Belcher's challenges to me in undergrad to improve my writing. I still haven't quite mastered it. In fact, I've been severely tempted to use dashes throughout this paragraph. I have also often thought that I overuse parentheses and that they might sometimes make my writing more difficult to follow than it needs to be. An occasional syntactical problem is using pronouns without clearly defined antecedents. I can't demonstrate it off-hand, but it usually takes place when I talk about someone's idea in one sentence, then begin the next sentence with "this": "this allows him to..." or "this leads him to say...." Professors don't like that. I get a lot of "vague"s out of that. And look: I just did it.]
