 |
| Nick Cave |
The introduction of John Doran's review "Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds Reissues: The First Four Are Dead Good" for The Quietus:
"Murder. We're all attracted to it in one way or another and Nick Cave is certainly no exception. John Doran revels in the first four Bad Seeds reissues.
It is Sunday afternoon, preferably before the war. The 'life-partner' is already asleep in the armchair, and the children have been sent out to play next to the burnt-out car at the end of the estate. You put your feet up on the futon, turn on your Power Book and log on to the net. Cracked parsnips on a raft of sky-blushed polenta, or free-range squid with quince marmalade, followed up by gluten free sorbet and driven home, as it were, by a cup of mahogany-brown, fair-trade tea, have put you in just the right mood. In these blissful circumstances, what is it that you want to hear about?
Naturally, about a murder. But what kind of murder? If one examines the murders which have given the greatest amount of pleasure to the music listening public, one finds a fairly strong family resemblance running through the greater number of them. We don't want to hear about the actual reality of murder. You know, like that guy from down the road, who got stabbed to death outside the launderette after asking some youths to stop throwing stones at him. Or that fellow who came in from the pub pissed and beat his kids to death with a golf club. No, we want to hear about more intellectually and morally nourishing slayings. Biblical brothers, lovestruck ladies dressed in black, thunder-faced cowboys hell-bent on revenge, drunken preachers. Girls that you love so much, you have to stove their heads in with a rock. That kind of thing.
And some would say, now that Johnny Cash is dead, well, Nick Cave's your man, isn't he?"
Click here for the full review.
Click here for an example of the music of Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds.
Click here for an example of the music of Johnny Cash.
Fun Fact: Nick Cave and Warren Ellis (members of Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds) wrote and preformed the soundtrack for The Road film. Nick Cave also wrote the screenplay for the film The Proposition. The Proposition was directed by John Hillcoat (the director of The Road) and stars Guy Guy Pearce. Guy Pearce plays the man the little boy encounters at the end of The Road.
 |
| DFW and his famous bandanna. Fun Fact: David Foster Wallace taught at ISU. |
An excerpt from David Foster Wallace's "Consider the Lobster," a piece for Gourmet magazine concerning the writer's visit to the Maine Lobster Fest:
...
“So then here is a question that’s all but unavoidable at the World’s Largest Lobster Cooker, and may arise in kitchens across the U.S.: Is it all right to boil a sentient creature alive just for our gustatory pleasure? A related set of concerns: Is the previous question irksomely PC or sentimental? What does “all right” even mean in this context? Is it all just a matter of individual choice?”
…
“The more important point here, though, is that the whole animal-cruelty-and-eating issue is not just complex, it’s also uncomfortable. It is, at any rate, uncomfortable for me, and for just about everyone I know who enjoys a variety of foods and yet does not want to see herself as cruel or unfeeling. As far as I can tell, my own main way of dealing with this conflict has been to avoid thinking about the whole unpleasant thing. I should add that it appears to me unlikely that many readers of gourmet wish to think hard about it, either, or to be queried about the morality of their eating habits in the pages of a culinary monthly. Since, however, the assigned subject of this article is what it was like to attend the 2003 MLF [Maine Lobster Fest], and thus to spend several days in the midst of a great mass of Americans all eating lobster, and thus to be more or less impelled to think hard about lobster and the experience of buying and eating lobster, it turns out that there is no honest way to avoid certain moral questions.
There are several reasons for this. For one thing, it’s not just that lobsters get boiled alive, it’s that you do it yourself—or at least it’s done specifically for you, on-site.13 As mentioned, the World’s Largest Lobster Cooker, which is highlighted as an attraction in the Festival’s program, is right out there on the MLF’s north grounds for everyone to see. Try to imagine a Nebraska Beef Festival14 at which part of the festivities is watching trucks pull up and the live cattle get driven down the ramp and slaughtered right there on the World’s Largest Killing Floor or something—there’s no way.
The intimacy of the whole thing is maximized at home, which of course is where most lobster gets prepared and eaten (although note already the semiconscious euphemism “prepared,” which in the case of lobsters really means killing them right there in our kitchens). The basic scenario is that we come in from the store and make our little preparations like getting the kettle filled and boiling, and then we lift the lobsters out of the bag or whatever retail container they came home in …whereupon some uncomfortable things start to happen. However stuporous the lobster is from the trip home, for instance, it tends to come alarmingly to life when placed in boiling water. If you’re tilting it from a container into the steaming kettle, the lobster will sometimes try to cling to the container’s sides or even to hook its claws over the kettle’s rim like a person trying to keep from going over the edge of a roof. And worse is when the lobster’s fully immersed. Even if you cover the kettle and turn away, you can usually hear the cover rattling and clanking as the lobster tries to push it off. Or the creature’s claws scraping the sides of the kettle as it thrashes around. The lobster, in other words, behaves very much as you or I would behave if we were plunged into boiling water (with the obvious exception of screaming).15 A blunter way to say this is that the lobster acts as if it’s in terrible pain, causing some cooks to leave the kitchen altogether and to take one of those little lightweight plastic oven timers with them into another room and wait until the whole process is over.”
…
“In any event, at the Festival, standing by the bubbling tanks outside the World’s Largest Lobster Cooker, watching the fresh-caught lobsters pile over one another, wave their hobbled claws impotently, huddle in the rear corners, or scrabble frantically back from the glass as you approach, it is difficult not to sense that they’re unhappy, or frightened, even if it’s some rudimentary version of these feelings …and, again, why does rudimentariness even enter into it? Why is a primitive, inarticulate form of suffering less urgent or uncomfortable for the person who’s helping to inflict it by paying for the food it results in? I’m not trying to give you a PETA-like screed here—at least I don’t think so. I’m trying, rather, to work out and articulate some of the troubling questions that arise amid all the laughter and saltation and community pride of the Maine Lobster Festival. The truth is that if you, the Festival attendee, permit yourself to think that lobsters can suffer and would rather not, the MLF can begin to take on aspects of something like a Roman circus or medieval torture-fest.”
Click here for the full article.Click here for a David Foster Wallace biography.
 |
"The fire moved quickly through the house, a one-story wood-frame structure in a working-class neighborhood of Corsicana, in northeast Texas. Flames spread along the walls, bursting through doorways, blistering paint and tiles and furniture. Smoke pressed against the ceiling, then banked downward, seeping into each room and through crevices in the windows, staining the morning sky.
Buffie Barbee, who was eleven years old and lived two houses down, was playing in her back yard when she smelled the smoke. She ran inside and told her mother, Diane, and they hurried up the street; that’s when they saw the smoldering house and Cameron Todd Willingham standing on the front porch, wearing only a pair of jeans, his chest blackened with soot, his hair and eyelids singed. He was screaming, “My babies are burning up!” His children—Karmon and Kameron, who were one-year-old twin girls, and two-year-old Amber—were trapped inside.
Willingham told the Barbees to call the Fire Department, and while Diane raced down the street to get help he found a stick and broke the children’s bedroom window. Fire lashed through the hole. He broke another window; flames burst through it, too, and he retreated into the yard, kneeling in front of the house. A neighbor later told police that Willingham intermittently cried, “My babies!” then fell silent, as if he had “blocked the fire out of his mind.”
Diane Barbee, returning to the scene, could feel intense heat radiating off the house. Moments later, the five windows of the children’s room exploded and flames “blew out,” as Barbee put it. Within minutes, the first firemen had arrived, and Willingham approached them, shouting that his children were in their bedroom, where the flames were thickest. A fireman sent word over his radio for rescue teams to “step on it.”
More men showed up, uncoiling hoses and aiming water at the blaze. One fireman, who had an air tank strapped to his back and a mask covering his face, slipped through a window but was hit by water from a hose and had to retreat. He then charged through the front door, into a swirl of smoke and fire. Heading down the main corridor, he reached the kitchen, where he saw a refrigerator blocking the back door.
Todd Willingham, looking on, appeared to grow more hysterical, and a police chaplain named George Monaghan led him to the back of a fire truck and tried to calm him down. Willingham explained that his wife, Stacy, had gone out earlier that morning, and that he had been jolted from sleep by Amber screaming, “Daddy! Daddy!”
“My little girl was trying to wake me up and tell me about the fire,” he said, adding, “I couldn’t get my babies out.”
Click here for the full article.
With your small groups:-Annotate the writing. Note anything that stands out. Please note any examples of figurative language, literary devices, rhetorical appeals, etc. (I want to see what you know.)
-What does the writer of your piece do stylistically and rhetorically? Talk about style and form.
-Do you expect "nonfiction" to look like your excerpt? Is the writers approach to "nonfiction" unique? Why?
-Do you like this piece? Does it work for you?
End of class:
In your composition notebooks, write a short "nonfiction" piece that emulates one of these styles. Tell me which piece you are attempting to recreate. Feel free to write about whatever your heart desires. Here are some prompts you could work with:
- Discuss one glaring social issue. Why is it a problem? How should it be remedied?
- Describe a person who has had a large impact on your life but is no longer in contact with you. Why is this person important? Where did they go? Do you miss this person?
- Review a recent film, television show, video game, or book.
- Tell a story from your childhood.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: only a member of this blog may post a comment.