As is evident from even a cursory examination of the post dates of this website, it’s been a while since I clicked digits on keyboard with the intention of creating or, as was the case this evening, put an actual pen to actual paper. And, as I’ve recently kvetched elsewhere about my lack of writing . . . → Read More: Presents]]> Tweet

As is evident from even a cursory examination of the post dates of this website, it’s been a while since I clicked digits on keyboard with the intention of creating or, as was the case this evening, put an actual pen to actual paper. And, as I’ve recently kvetched elsewhere about my lack of writing time and/or how far off-track I’ve come, I figured maybe it’d be best for me to publish something proving that cheap tequila, a darkened bar, and singing along to maudlin songs doesn’t necessarily mean one cannot or is not creating.

It ain’t much, but it’s 163 more words than I had last afternoon.

Some hearts are meticulously wrapped packages—thin, crisp-cornered, glistening green, adorned by crenellated red ribbon, and carefully positioned underneath the tree. And some lovers, well-intentioned but with such zeal, are greedy preteens bursting from bedrooms, descending steps three-by-three, only to leap the last five entirely, and land hard on the knees. They clip the crimson trimmings with teeth, shred that emerald paper ’til it resembles the rind of an orange devoured using only the mouth.

In such cases, the mind beholden to that heart is an anxious parent on the couch, clutching a cup of something once hot gone cold, quadriceps clenched, legs tucked under butt, patiently waiting to see if the delicate present once within has survived such enthusiastic exposition, or if sellotape and an explanation will be required for an attempt to reassemble that thing frangible and handmade which, no matter what, will never be the same, and would possibly have not been wanted by whatever lover in the first place.

Some of the best cautionary advice that could be given any writer—young or old, famous or obsucre—is to never forget that not every word you write will be worth preserving. Much of any writer’s output is . . . → Read More: Still Missing Flight Myself]]> Tweet

I’m pleased to announce that my collected poems are now available for purchase as Still Missing Flight Myself.

Some of the best cautionary advice that could be given any writer—young or old, famous or obsucre—is to never forget that not every word you write will be worth preserving. Much of any writer’s output is junk. Still Missing Flight Myself is the end result of, in some cases, more than a decade of winnowing and tinkering. What was originally a 600-poem body of work has been reduced to just these 51—and that’s all that remains of nearly two decades worth of writing poetry.

Exploring moments of both transcendent beauty and abject desolation, this collection provides succinct glimpses into the unspectacular, average lives that most Americans have lead and will always lead—the lives most of us will go to extraordinary lengths to pretend we are not living. The disposable existence of a manicurist suddenly realized; the unexceptional loneliness of a fatherless child who has become used to his predicament; the minor frustrations of listening to an unjacketed LP; or driving home drunk enough to no longer care about the ramifications of drunk driving: the poems here collected expose and inflate quotidian moments until each seems like the paradox it actually is—simultaneously singularly significant and utterly, ineluctably forgettable.

Now available as a softcover trade paperback in the bookstore.

http://sesquipedalism.com/shop

Where Poe’s arduous Arthur Gordon Pym is concerned, a completely satisfactory answer to a simple central question would push into proper position the tumblers of the complex combination lock its text has always seemed: is Pym constructed as a work of realism or as fantasy? It seems all critical analyses of . . . → Read More: Magical Realism’s More Complete Mimesis in “The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym”]]> Tweet

I.

Where Poe’s arduous Arthur Gordon Pym is concerned, a completely satisfactory answer to a simple central question would push into proper position the tumblers of the complex combination lock its text has always seemed: is Pym constructed as a work of realism or as fantasy? It seems all critical analyses of Pym are predicated upon an answer to this question, implicitly or explicitly addressed. Robert Carringer’s “Circumscription of Space,” a last attempt at a formalist explication, bluntly asserts that “the novel fails to execute the basic properties of the genre,” but Carringer fails to make clear precisely which genre the novel fails to be: is it a blemished example of Poe’s macabre but ultimately realistic work, or a palsied version of one of his fantastical jaunts? (513). A survey of critical literature reveals a startling dearth of consensus.

Some scholars call the novel a deeply flawed, desperate attempt at a saleable work of conventional realistic exploration fiction, the sort of seafaring romance contemporaneously popular, or at least a mean-spirited parody of such, intended to do nothing but make money and quietly insult a readership for whom Poe had little respect. Contrary to John Hussey’s belief that “even the hastiest of its readers can testify that Pym is not a straightforward, ‘realistic’ narrative,” writers such as L.M. Cecil have constructed naturalistic explanations for all its “decidedly fantastic, symbolic and allegoric” idiosyncrasies—from its intratextual contradictions to the alien fauna near Tsalal, and the looming specter rising from the pole’s albified ocean (Hussey 29). Other articles interpret the work as an anti-black tract informed by the Biblical Curse of Ham, or, creatively, as an American reinvention of the Arthurian legends, complete with wandering hero and white Lady of the Lake. A surprising number of scholars still insist the work is unfinished, or merely the first volume of what was intended to be a larger project.

None of these arguments is completely convincing. A complication of critical readings of Pym is that, when any given set of the novel’s curious circumstances are explained, another set becomes at best enigmatic, at worst downright impossible. Binary interpretations of Pym—where the supernatural is either “on” or “off”—are exceedingly problematic. My contention is that all monomaniacal critical explorations are doomed to internal contradiction and eventual self-defeat because the answer to that central question—realism or fantasy?—is that the novel was, in fact, constructed to be both, simultaneously. Pym is, like its Dirk Peters, a half-breed: a literary curiosity for which, in 1838, there was no name, but which has come to be called “magical realism.” Further, if read as such, a plausible explanation for the novel’s elusive ending appears.

II.

Jules Zanger understands this problem with binary interpretations of Pym and assumes the same central question as key to a comprehensive understanding of the novel. He asserts that a “perception of irresolution…stems from the apparent inconclusiveness of the last scene of the novel, which might be reduced to a question that is crucial to the scene: is the great white figure emerging from the mists real or supernatural?” (276). This essay will contend that the answer is, effectively, both. Zanger, however, chooses to answer neither; that the insoluble tension between mutually exclusive explanations of the novel’s events is purposive and actually what makes Pym remarkable. In other words, Zanger suggests that it is crucial to the work that one not answer that central question. To decide that Pym does/does not feature the genuinely supernatural/fantastic would result in a profoundly limiting, disappointing, and troublesome reading. “To answer that question…is to retroactively define the nature of the whole work. The text is composed of the matter of at least two distinctively different and antithetical genres…Any determination about that concluding scene immediately resolves the tension between these conflicting modes” (276). The problem with such resolution is that, whatever the answer, it would significantly diminish the worth or weight of half of the novel. Zanger is correct.

Pym certainly thrives on tension between natural and supernatural explanations of its climaxes, and the decision, for example, whether the white giant at the end of Pym’s portion of the narrative is a god welcoming him to the netherworld, or an enormous polar iceberg illuminated in such a way as to look human, has deleterious results for an understanding of the text in toto. “To choose a realistic interpretation of the ending is to relegate the fantastic elements of the novel to delusions born of madness and suffering, a supernatural reading of the conclusion devalues and subverts the scientific aspect of the text and insists on [rational empiricism’s] inadequacy as a mode of perceiving the world” (277). Either/or readings diminish the work.

This conundrum affected more than Poe’s novel; it was inherent in the prevailing thought paradigms of Poe’s age. Zanger explains, “[r]omantic writers were faced by the problem of finding devices which permitted the retention of imagination, fantastic, and thrilling elements in their work while satisfying an audience whose vision of possibility was increasingly limited by common sense, Common Sense Philosophy, materialism, and the new sciences” (277). Several solutions existed, he continues, which would allow an author to have his or her cake and eat it too: the Radcliffean model allowed the most fantastical tale to unfurl, so long as, by its end, all of its supernatural or surreal elements were explained to be the result of natural processes; the dream formula—famously executed in Dickens’ A Christmas Carol—also allowed a writer to create stories touched but not hobbled by supernatural elements; and the unreliable narrator—drug-addled, insane, or a sociopathic liar—allowed for a story which could be riddled with supernatural elements, yet contain sufficient hints of plausible deniability to escape being labeled as sentimental pulp. These alternatives, however, produce a tale which may be quickly dismissed as thinly veiled realism. As such, all are either/or readings, and are delimiting explorations of Pym.

Obviously, Poe wanted to avoid the dismissal of Pym as insubstantial sentimentality, which makes it seem certainly unlikely it was constructed as pure fantasy. Despite the occasional creative counterargument, it does seem that the novel was not intended as a straightforward, realistic narrative. So, that Poe chose none of the accepted methods to compose a text possessed of the best of both worlds is telling—especially as it was Poe himself who made the latter fashionable. Alternative readings are in short supply: if Pym is not straightforward realism nor unmoored fantasy, what is it? Lisa Gitelman proposes that “the novel narrative…asks to be true and false at the same time,” that “one measure of the complexity in Poe’s understanding of literary form is the extent to which Pym suggests a dialogue between voices of fiction and fact” (361). She is correct in her observations. And so it seems most likely that the answer Poe chose for the key question—realistic/fantastic, natural/supernatural—is both, not neither. As the era of magical realism was at least 100 years off, this solution to a contemporary difficulty of storytelling was revolutionary. “What the equivocation of Pym reveals,” John Eakin suggests, “is that Poe in pushing his hero to the limits of experience was pushing himself to the limits of fiction as well” (22).

If one accepts that Arthur Gordon Pym is a generically hybrid work, it follows then to wonder why Poe would feel so compelled to assemble such a complex monstrosity (he was, after all, quite capable of constructing entertaining and more profitable fictions). If, as Zanger concludes, “Poe’s intention…was to create precisely the enigmatic narrative that he left for us,” one is forced to ask why? To what end does Poe invoke magical realism?

III.

Poe’s decision to craft Pym so complexly is completely comprehensible if one takes into account that the text is quite concerned with the inherent “doubleness” of existence. Examples abound—Augustus’ warning note, impossibly scrawled on the non-blank back of a forged letter; the horror of mirrors; the text’s deliberately parallel structure; the black world and the white world adjacent, at the end of the earth. Poe’s oeuvre reveals him, as an author, to be an architect of tales which are fascinating and troubling for their treatment of this inherent dualism, a thing often best left out of sight and mind, for the sake of comfort. Nevertheless, it is unsurprising that his most ambitious endeavors, Pym and Eureka, confront the issue head-on.

In his satirical “How to Write a Blackwood Article,” Ms. Psyche Zenobia is advised to “[p]ut something in about the Supernal Oneness. Don’t say a syllable about the Infernal Twoness” (Poe 217). This is, of course, ironical, as Poe texts are notable for doppelgangers, duplicity, and other doublings. Though many of his texts’ protagonists pursue the grail of Supernal Oneness, it is the inevitable presence of this Infernal Twoness which confounds them, and makes binary readings of Pym, specifically, dunderheaded. Whether Pym is a realist work whose primary narrative voice is unreliable and deluded by long suffering at the hands of the brutally indifferent natural world, or a fantasy, with a hero confronted by concrete supernatural forces, seems a silly question if one undertakes even a cursory survey of Poe’s work, especially Pym, and notes that the bulk of it is “testimony to Poe’s certainty that the natural and supernatural were not always mutually exclusive” (Dameron 37). It is, then, absolutely apropos of his subject matter to read the “self-consciously ambivalent” Pym as a hybrid entity, possessed of a curious structure which allows it to explore reality’s Infernal Twoness (Weiner 49).

Previous critical notice has, of course, been taken of Pym’s doublings. Kennedy perspicaciously notes that “the doubleness of the text mirrors the doubleness of the world through which the narrator makes his way” (131). Pym’s tale is two-faced. To understand its two faces, one must first acknowledge what they are. The novel contains the prenominate dichotomic tension between natural and supernatural, but unless one actually believes in the supernatural—gods, demons, zombies, giants—the discursive conflict between such forces cannot be taken literally. Pym is not really about whether or not a white god sits in the ocean at the south pole.

It is my belief that the natural and supernatural in Poe’s novel are, so far as the characters are concerned, very real. Pym alludes to the solidity of the novel’s supernatural elements when he, momentarily overcome by emotion, says “now I found these fancies creating their own realities, and all imagined horrors crowding upon me in fact” (Poe 165). What is represented for the reader by these surreal elements is not actual conflict between real and fantastic, but between reality as it is sensed, and reality as it is perceived. All things are, in fact, two things: everything is simultaneously objective and subjective. This is the Infernal Twoness.

It is undeniable that the objective world, detected by the five senses, is often drastically different from one’s subjective experience of it. In his extraordinarily thorough exploration of the text, John Barth notes the “sundry contaminations of reality by irreality” in Pym, but is entirely unwilling to chalk them up to literal intrusions of a fantastic or supernatural world into the reader’s familiar, but then by implication incomplete, reality (229). Mark Canada’s “Flight into Fancy: Poe’s Discovery of the Right Brain” proposes an alternate explanation. “These references to the unreal and the surreal,” he states, “plant the idea that the basis for Pym’s story is not material reality but mental reality” (65). What Barth really notices are sundry contaminations of objective reality by the simultaneous subjectivity of it. Canada’s article takes things too far, suggesting that all of Pym’s events unfold only in the mind of Arthur Pym. But his basic premise is that Poe, with Pym, illustrates the incongruities between one’s sensation of reality, and one’s perception of reality. “[W]hile he may not have pinpointed its location in the skull, Poe conceived of [the right brain,] a mental region remote from ordinary consciousness and characterized by nonverbal forms of thought—specifically visual imagery, music, and emotion” (63). Poe’s novel is grounded in realism, a style perfectly suited for description of even the exotic parts of the physical world and documentation of the events which there transpire. Traditional realism, however, is an incomplete realism, as it fails completely to convey the equally significant details of that subjective reality which is, after all, the primary way humans experience the world. Thus, Barth is not out of line to say “I find The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym sometimes less credible in its more realistic stretches and more so in its less” (223).

While one may disagree with Canada’s ultimate conclusion, one must admit that the book thrives in the idiom of the right brain: inscrutable, pithy images; a breakdown of spoken/written language; distorted temporal perception; and mention is even made of music— the clatter of a falling knife, compared to the “richest melody,” saves mute Pym in the Grampus’ hold (Poe 34).

Not noted by Canada, is the fact that distorted temporal perception explains one of the book’s most derided inconsistencies: Pym’s suggestion that Augustus mentioned the music of the knife years later when Augustus is dead within a month. “The realm explored in Pym lacks not only ordinary language, but also ordinary time,” argues Canada (69). When Pym finds the watch left for him by Augustus run down, useless in telling ordinary time, he decides to “wind his watch again and hope to keep track of relative time” (69). Canada suggests that “[e]ven this apparent grasp of time is undercut, however, by Pym’s strange remark that Augustus, who he later reports died on August 1, spoke to him ‘years’ later” (69). Canada is again mistaken: Pym’s report does not undercut, it instead exemplifies the idea that he is hopelessly ensconced in perceptual time (as opposed to the “real” time kept by well-wound watches). The time between Pym’s disorienting ordeal in the cargo hold and Augustus’ death on the hulk may be thirty sunrises/sunsets. But that time—spent in hiding, fighting, starvation, thirst, terror, sleeplessness, fatigue, and the emotional turmoil concomitant with cannibalism—would no doubt feel much longer. This relative time is equally important in truthful conveyance of Pym’s experiences. Poe’s “Blackwood gives lucid instructions on how well-told stories are constructed: “Sensations are the great things, after all. Should you ever be drowned or hung, be sure and make a note of your sensations” (215). Thus, subjectively Pym did speak to Augustus years later; however, years later, only a month of objective time had passed.

Pym’s bifurcated nature is the result of a story driven by a need to convey a complete reality. So understood, much of it seems less mysterious and more sensible. The doubleness of the world through which Pym makes his way is one born out of psychic disharmony: the irksome cognitive dissonance that results from the fact that the world rarely is exactly as it seems to us, as it is perceived. Gitelman touches on the notion: “Psychic disharmony…is, of course, one of the trademarks of Poe’s characters…Pym’s psychic disharmony mirrors the disunity of the text he narrates” (356). Pym himself is aware of this disharmony and the fact that it will inevitably contaminate his text. In his preamble, he alludes to the difficulties imposed by the doubleness of his experiences. He frets over his ability to craft a text which will adequately convey the complete truth. “I feared I should not be able to write, from mere memory, a statement so minute and connected as to have the appearance of that truth that it would really possess” (Poe 2). This sentiment is well-demonstrated by the parallel adventures of the Ariel and the Tsalalian canoe: one striving for verisimilitude, the other ignoring the verisimilar in favor of truth.

Of those adventures, it could be fairly claimed that the former is written in the language of a pure realist, while the latter is magical realism, which Angel Flores laconically describes as “Romanticism and Realism…bound together in one afflatus” (110). This statement is not only true of magically real fiction, but of the human experience in general. What is romanticism besides making important the sentimental, making important perception? Human existence is the afflatus which binds together realism and romanticism, the left and right brain, the natural and the seemingly supernatural, sense and perception. Truly complete realism must be demonstrative of the fact that how things are and how they feel are often equally important.

Interestingly then, the problem in the case of Pym is not that its primary narrator is unreliable (often suggested), but that he is too reliable—he presents all facts, objective and subjective, even when they outright contradict each other. “In Pym,” Gitelman explains, “the character of the narrator is all that stands between the reader and ‘the facts,’ yet the narrator proves an ultimate frustration” (360). In many cases, however, sensory facts and perceptual facts differ wildly; magical realism is a tool perfectly suited to conveying the difficult truth of this Infernal Twoness. As in real life, it is sometimes difficult to distinguish which elements of a given experience are sensed (objectively real), and which are perceived (subjectively real). More importantly, magical realism challenges the commonly held proposition that the former is the more important, the more true. I believe that this is a truth Pym works desperately to convey.

IV.

Those who claim to be in the know have proposed dozens of potential sine quibus non of magical realism. Many of these definitions are outright contradictory, agreeing only that a magically real text seems realistic, excepting the inclusion of some surreal elements. Hypotheses vary, many focusing on geographic determinism (insisting such fiction can emerge only from Latin America or other postcolonial societies), others suggesting that magical realism must subvert a dominant paradigm’s ideology. Wendy Faris, in her essay “Scheherazade’s Children,” goes so far as to propose a fourteen criterion list of sine quibus non. Though treatises on the topic tend to be labyrinthine and complex, I believe magical realism can be quite simply defined.

Spoken/written language lends itself best to describing the left-brained, linear sensation of reality. Communicating the dimensions and appearance of a skyscraper is an act for which it is perfectly suited. Communicating the right-brained, emotional reaction of awe in the face of sublimity inspired by such a structure is less simply effected. The right-brain, it is commonly accepted, has no comprehension of traditional spoken/written language or linear time and, thus, it is exceedingly difficult to communicate its experience of existence. Nevertheless, that experience of existence is equally important and as real as the left-brain’s more communicable one—more immediate and visceral, it often seems more important. From the get-go, literature is working with one hand tied behind its back: it is not a series of immediate images, like a silent film; it is a written medium. Magical realism allows a writer to speak to the right-brain, to portray perceived, subjective reality, despite its handicapping reliance on words.

Though unabashedly realist fiction like Flaubert, George Eliot, or Ayn Rand may be perfectly reflective of our left-brain’s sensation of the world, magical realism accepts as equally relevant the right-brain’s perception of the world and, understanding its inherently difficult-to-communicate nature, it incarnates that intangible experience by cutting out the middlemen of metaphors: in a realist text, a character may fall from a great height and feel as if she were falling for an eternity; in a work of magical realism, that character may, in fact, continue to fall for all eternity. As Scott Simpkins suggests, “[r]eality is too subtle for realism to catch” (153). The laundry day ascension to heaven of Remedios the Beauty in One Hundred Years of Solitude is one of the most famous scenes in all magical realism. Gabriel García Márquez explains that Remedios “was modeled on a nymphomaniac who did not ascend to paradise on the wings of sheets being laundered but disappeared from her family more conventionally” (Columbus 400). The objective reality of the matter is probably closer to this: Remedios died quickly from a sexually transmitted disease while still young and beautiful. But to those close to her—who, in the novel, watch her ascension into the heavens—it may feel more like their loved one, swaddled in bed linens, has been snatched up by the afterworld before time could ravage her unbelievable beauty. There is a knee-jerk answer to which version of events is more “real.” But if one calmly considers his or her own memories, there will inevitably be found cases in which clearly remembered facts are, in reality, not eidetic recollections, but sometimes drastically altered versions of sensory data colored by one’s perception. If a traumatic event—a rape, perhaps—feels as if it took an hour, but objectively occurred in less than two minutes, which reality matters more? Magical realism asks this question.

The necessary and sufficient condition for a text to be considered magically real is that, while written in a realistic idiom, the work is a more complete mimesis: it levels the playing field between sensation and perception, incarnating and making equally primary that intangible but very real part of human experience so often ignored outright or dealt with clumsily by the metaphors and sometimes inadequate descriptions of traditionally realistic texts; magical realism is capable of confronting and conveying the Infernal Twoness. Luis Leal describes the magical realist as one who “cling[s] to reality…to prevent their myth from flying off, as in fairy tales, to supernatural realms” (120). Pym (unlike Eureka) does not “fly off,” but remains intriguing and perplexing, with one foot in both worlds.

V.

The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym makes plain a view that the ordinary language of realism is incapable of conveying perceived reality. It is commonly accepted that spoken/written language is a complete mystery to the right brain, and Poe’s Eureka makes equally plain both a belief that the truth of experience is essentially ineffable, and that the most important experience for men and women to understand is death. Cynthia Miecznikowski agrees that “both works seem to come to the same end: a realization of or confrontation with the limits of language, its inability to fully articulate our thoughts or to fully explain our experiences” (55). Confined by traditional realism, Poe was aware that he would be incapable of conveying complete truth—including the equally important subjective reality—about any experience.

Magical realism, however, with its modus operandi of “skipping the metaphor” and directly incarnating perceptions provides a way of communicating more directly with the right brain. Pym demonstrates an awareness of the power of images, especially in situations where “[m]ere words fail to deliver the writer to his end (or the reader to the ending)” (59). Canada agrees, noting that Pym specifically “is littered with references to the impotence of words” (68).

Beginning, significantly, after the rather limp escapade of the Ariel, Pym’s narrative develops a lamentatious refrain, bemoaning again and again the inadequacy of descriptive words. Referencing the sudden and inexplicable arrival of Tiger, Pym writes, “Had a thousand lives hung upon the movement of a limb or the utterance of a syllable, I could neither have stirred nor spoken” (Poe 21). In contemplation of his beloved canine companion’s possible madness, he ineffectually describes the situation by not describing it, as a “harrowing and yet indefinable horror” (30). When he first hears Augustus’ voice calling out to him, he explains that “so intense was the emotion excited within me by the sound, that I endeavored in vain to reply. My powers of speech totally failed…[h]ad a thousand worlds depended upon a syllable, I could not have spoken it” (33). Each of these moments is a purposively weak encapsulation of what was, in the world of the text, an extremely evocative experience, and it becomes clear through these constant linguistic lamentations that such experiences cannot be done any justice by the description of traditional realism.

Poe has more faith in images. In a sequence which comes off like a demonstration of the power and relevance of perceived reality and, thus, like a primer on the magically real tactic that will be employed throughout the rest of the story. Augustus, Pym, and Peters retake The Grampus by incarnating what should be and is usually invisible and intangible: the ghost of Rodgers. Kennedy marks the sequence as possessed of “a kind of oneiric validity” (130). This oneiric affect is hinted at when the number of mutineers multiplies inexplicably between paragraphs. “Peters informs Augustus of the size of the two warring factions…[i]n the next two paragraphs, Pym explains that Jones and the cook defect…while Augustus and Pym pledge to support Peters. Though logically we expect the new odds to be three against seven, Pym reports that [they were then three against nine]” (130). This “proliferation of voices” can certainly be read as a magically real flourish—as above, these disagreeing observations may be simultaneously true: the odds did, then, perceptually become three against nine, in the eyes of the desperate and virtually hopeless company hoping to retake the ship; it just happens that, speaking objectively, the nine men are really seven.

Pym’s company develops a scheme to retake the ship which depends heavily on the potency and immediacy of what, to the mutineers, would seem to be a magical image. Horrified by the sight of a possibly poisoned comrade, the mutineers are already on edge. Pym is dressed and made-up to resemble the grotesque corpse, and this surreal image is so effective that, upon catching his own reflection—upon seeing reality as it will be perceived, not as it is, Pym himself nearly collapses. “Peters then arranged my face, first rubbing it well over with white chalk, and afterward splotching it with blood, which he took from a cut in his finger” (Poe 63). Peters whips the mutineers into a state of further paranoia with cautionary words. It is not words, though, but the entrance of Pym dressed as the dead and disfigured Rogers—which is responsible for the scheme’s success. The image is so affecting that the treasonous leader “without uttering a syllable”—wordlessly—“fell back, stone dead, upon the cabin floor” (67). With this sequence Poe, in an idiom all his own, rather heavy-handedly reminds his readers of the clichéd, yet undeniably true, sentiment that a picture is worth a thousand words. He also foreshadows how “Pym” will continue the narrative once Poe’s portion is over.

VI.

The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym begins with the rather limply told tale of the Ariel—this first story told in a completely realistic idiom—and only gradually does the novel become a work of magical realism, as it draws closer to the pole. Miecznikowski agrees, saying, “Poe’s rhetoric…moves toward distancing both author and reader from the ordinary world as they (reader, writer, and text) ‘converge’ on an idea that the author cannot put into words but that he is nevertheless driven (to attempt) to disclose” (61). That idea, I believe, is the idea that the Ariel’s story deliberately fails to communicate. Following the retaking of the brig, which demonstrates the relative reality and effect of perception (it can kill), the survivors, adrift, experience the text’s first full-fledged instantiation of the magically real: the vision of the hideous, corpse-laden Dutch schooner.

It is, significantly, with this incident that Poe’s bemoaning of the inefficacy of words as descriptors ceases completely. Of the storm that wrecks the Grampus, another pseudo-description is offered. “The night was as dark as it could possibly be, and the horrible shrieking din and confusion which surrounded us it is useless to attempt describing” (Poe 72). The next morning, after the survivors are able to unlash each other from the masts, the reality of their situation becomes apparent: they are stranded without water, without food, without much hope of rescue, amidst a sea into which they could easily slip and drown. Common knowledge would have allowed them to understand that one can live about three minutes without air, three days without water, and three weeks without food. Surely, the marooned men begin to ponder what will become of them.

Poe could continue to convey these morose, upsetting musings in a traditionally realistic style by explaining that the survivors were “terrified beyond expression” or that “words could not express how hopeless we were, how certain we were that, if our craft were ever discovered, it would be found to be nothing more than a ghost ship littered with our corpses.” This, while true, is a mere left-brained description of facts. But to men virtually certain that this was their fate, their perception of reality would feel much more immediate than the emotion those words convey. A faithful rendition of their tale would have to effectively account for not only how things were, but how they felt.

It is to be remembered that Pym has told the reader that Poe, allegedly, completed as ghostwriter a portion of this manuscript and that, once into it, he—Pym—took over the narration. He says in the preface that “it will be unnecessary to point out where his portion ends and my own commences; the differences in point of style will be readily perceived” (3). This is commonly accepted as a sly joke; that is to say, if there is any element of Pym upon which critics have reached a consensus, it is that there is no difference in point of style. This is not necessarily true. When Pym sees the schooner, miles in the distance, he stands, “stretching out [his] arms in the direction of this vessel,” of course so full of ineffable emotion that he is “unable to articulate a syllable” (79). When the vessel comes close, but before the men can comprehend its reality, “there wafted over the ocean a stench, such as the whole world has no name for—no conception of—hellish—utterly suffocating—insufferable, inconceivable” (81). More of the same: the situation is so interesting that it is indescribable. Poe may as well, at this point, just be repeating the phrase, “You had to be there.”[1]

But with the arrival of the schooner, the narrative supplants any attempted and inevitably futile written description of Pym’s internal experience with a vivid oneiric image comprehensible to the right brain. The men are not just dwelling on their own likely fates, they are physically confronted by them. In a situation so extreme as theirs, their perception of the situation is indubitably as important and “real” as whatever “facts” there are which might be collected with the senses. More real at such a moment than the sight of the endless sea, would be the vision of oneself as carrion, upon which a “there sat a huge sea-gull busily gorging itself with the horrible flesh, its bill and talons deep buried, and its white plumage spattered all over with blood” (82). Pym’s vision of a face from which “the eyes were gone, and the whole flesh around the mouth, leaving the teeth utterly naked” would reflect, in its putrefied and lipless “smile which had cheered us on in hope,” the imprudence of such hope (82). With the image of the Dutch ship and its passengers, Pym’s narrative ceases to seem like a third-hand account. The novel ceases to feel like a poor relation of objective reality, often lacking in insight, and becomes laden with oneiric images of subjective reality—a more immediate and effective method of communicating the truth of the situation. It is with the schooner that the narrative becomes “a world which in itself is utterly desacralized, whose horrors, as [Poe] asserts in his Marginalia, are not mere projections of mind but ‘thoroughly substantial.’ And if one thing is clear…it is that this terrifying realm of physical nature can be confronted only by man’s frail, limited powers unaided by any supernatural assistance” (Hussey 24).

It is at this point I believe that Pym’s portion of the narrative begins. With the schooner, a tale is not related by a third party—the intratextual Poe—to the reader. The reader is confronted and provoked by the intangible, the magical incarnate; this permits the communication of a more complete realism in this scene which, for the characters, is “more intensely productive of emotion, as far more replete with the extremes first of delight and then of horror, than even any [later events]” (Poe 79). Instead of explaining that the situation is really inexplicable—essentially, that “you had to be there”—the oneiric image of the schooner allows the reader access to the subjective reality of the experience. The ship is “thoroughly substantial” within the text, but that does not mean it is not artifice employed by the narrator—at this point, no longer Poe, but Pym. So, in fact it is Pym who is the magical realist. Magical realism is his solution to his earlier question about how to compose a tale with the appearance of truth that it actually has.

After the passing of this ship, there is just a single statement about the unfortunate reality of linguistic fallibility. Of the cannibalization of Richard Parker, Pym says, “[s]uch things may be imagined, but words have no power to impress the mind with the exquisite horror of their reality” (94). As such, the next time the situation becomes dire, and the men resort to cannibalism, the words which would describe it are supplanted by surreality, and Augustus—whom I believe to be, objectively, eaten by Pym and Peters—is subjectively devoured instead by a school of sharks.

Though these sharks are nowhere near as spectacular as the image of the Dutch schooner, their behavior gives one pause. A number of critics have questioned their unlikely chase of the Grampus, and Carringer is positively outraged by both that and the images of Augustus’ putrefied body falling to bits and being fed to the frenzied pursuers. He calls the sequence not “Poe’s genuine rhetoric of terror,” but “that annoying hyperbolic style he frequently uses as a substitute” (510). The ordeal is hyperbolic for a reason: it is the incarnation of subjective reality.

The sharks first appear after the meat of Parker has run out, and it becomes clear that the survivors will, before long, be in dire straits. Other comestibles are soon exhausted (“This evening we ate the last of our olives, and found the water in our jug so putrid that we could not swallow it without the addition of wine. Determined to kill our tortoise…[and it] proved to be much smaller than we had supposed” (101). It would seem that the sailors would again have no choice but to draw lots. The idea must have occurred to Pym and Peters who have been giving the lion’s share of their stores to Augustus, in the slim hope that he be kept alive. This is when the sharks appear. “An excessively hot day, with no wind. An enormous shark kept close by the hulk during the whole of the forenoon” (101).

Instead of repeating the claim to ineffability made of the cannibalization of Parker—“ words have no power to impress the mind with the exquisite horror”—that horror is given corporeal form as bloodthirsty sharks. Long after the other food has been exhausted, Pym notes that “[w]e now saw clearly that Augustus could not be saved; that he was evidently dying” (102). Clearly his best friend, already doomed, should be the one to perish in order that he and Peters survive. It is unclear exactly when or precisely why Augustus expires, only that Pym and Peters “sat motionless by the corpse during the whole day, and never addressed each other except in a whisper. It was not until some time after dark that [they] took courage to get up and throw the body overboard….as Peters attempted to lift it, an entire leg came off in his grasp” (102). This speedy and queer putrefaction makes the situation yet more surreal.

If Parker had died that day, there is no logical reason that his leg would simply tear off due to decomposition; his blackened arm, possibly, but not his leg. The image, instead, calls to mind the plucking of a drumstick from a large bird. Immediately after Peters tears off a portion of Augustus, the suddenly somehow radiant body is ostensibly thrown into the sea where “the glare of phosphoric light with which it was surrounded plainly discovered to [Pym and Peters] seven or eight large sharks, the clashing of whose horrible teeth, as their prey was torn to pieces among them, might have been heard at the distance of a mile” (102). Objectively, Pym and Peters are eating Pym’s best friend. Subjectively, bloodthirsty sharks—dumb animals only doing what they must to survive—tear Augustus to pieces.

Equally queer is the behavior of the sharks after the death of Augustus. With no hope of rescue in sight, all that remains is for Pym and Peters to turn on each other. Thus, the sharks multiply and refuse to abandon the brig. “During the whole day…the hulk was now entirely besieged on all sides with sharks—no doubt the identical monsters who had devoured our poor companion on the evening before, and who were in momentary expectation of another similar feast” (103). The identical monsters, indeed. The sharks “never left…for a moment” and, during this time, Pym and Peters find they cannot sleep (104). This is unsurprising, as each is no longer certain the other will not soon slaughter and eat him.

Perhaps the most convincing detail that leads one to believe this sequence is the incarnation of subjective reality, not an objective description of events, is the disappearance of the sharks. When the boat capsizes, Peters and Pym suddenly find starvation no longer a concern as “the keel itself, [was] thickly covered with large barnacles, which proved to be excellent and highly nutritious food…which we could not have exhausted, using it moderately, in a month” (105). The supplied, the sharks mysteriously vanish. “Seeing no trace of sharks among the seaweed, we also ventured to bathe, and remained in the water for four or five hours, during which we experienced a very sensible diminution of our thirst” (106). Shortly thereafter, the survivors are rescued.

VIII.

Though the mutual primacy of both poles of such dichotomic pairs as real/fantastic, natural/supernatural, and sense/perception is, as emphasized later in Poe’s career, perhaps the “point” of Pym­—a text that could not conceivably be more representative of that Infernal Twoness—in the end, the narrative employs the artifice of magical realism to explore a recurrent theme of Poe’s fiction. O’Donnell, in his famous “From Earth to Ether” remarks that “Poe’s works are all variations on a single persistent theme” (85). He elaborates, suggesting that Poe plainly defines that theme as a young man “[H]ow characteristic,” he says, “how prophetic, that Poe, early in his career, has Hans Pfaall determine ‘to depart, yet live—to leave the world, yet continue to exist’” (85). For Poe, then, the ultimate goal of existence is to understand death—something that certainly cannot be done while alive. Close by, though, is to understand what it is like to be quite near death. Pym’s portion of the narrative is framed not only by queer editorial notes, but by two smaller adventures—the voyages of the Ariel and the Tsalalian canoe. The former is told through the pen of a realist, and flounders about in descriptions of objective details. The latter strives for the more complete mimesis allowed by magical realism.

Eakin writes that “Pym tastes the zenith and the nadir of sensation…when the two young men, intoxicated with drink and power, embark in a gale late at night; for the intensity of heightened consciousness, that ecstasy which man’s capacity to attain the ultimate reach of experience inspires, and the numbness of insensibility when this ‘mental energy’ gives way” (18). If this is true and, according to the details of the story, it certainly appears to be, then one is forced to wonder why the ordeal of the Ariel does not read as such.  Not once is the reader provoked to feel even the palest imitation of “the zenith and nadir of sensation.” Poe’s language in this introductory tale seems flaccid because it is deliberately weak.

The narrator explains a party has taken place and that Pym and his friend Augustus have retired for the night, drunk. The narrator vaguely approximates the inception of the excursion. “It might have been half an hour from the time of our getting in bed” (Poe 5). After Augustus proposes their mad freak, Pym recalls that “the words were no sooner out of his mouth than I felt a thrill of the greatest excitement and pleasure [and noticed] so glorious a breeze from the southwest. I never was so astonished in my life” (5). Carringer is quite correct when he remarks that “[i]ndeed, the opening of Arthur Gordon Pym sounds like anyone but Poe” (511). Poe’s writing, even ten pages on, is never so vacuous.

Even when the adventure begins to go awry, the language is dry and devoid of metaphor. It merely recounts facts. “I found that something had gone wrong,” Pym says, “and became seriously alarmed” (Poe 6). Both objectively true. Augustus reveals his intoxication and “the tone of these words…filled [Pym] with an indescribable feeling of dread” (6). “It is hardly possible to conceive the extremity of my terror,” he says (7). Pym loses consciousness just after he hears “a loud and long scream or yell, as if from the throats of a thousand demons, [that] seemed to pervade the whole atmosphere around and above the boat” (8). This metaphor sticks out in the otherwise drab narration, but is the best the opening chapter has to offer. Pym falls into the water and must be “resuscitated from a state bordering very nearly upon death,” about which the prose says almost nothing (12).

Once rescued by the Penguin Augustus recounts his near-death experience. “Upon his first attaining any degree of consciousness, he found himself beneath the [water], whirling round and round with inconceivable rapidity…in the greatest degree still clouded and confused…[a] feeling of vague terror and despair had taken entire possession of his faculties” (11). Knowing what within even a few pages Poe is capable of accomplishing with his prose using this very same narrator, this adventure—responsible for the excitation of Pym which prompts in him an obsession with the dangerous sea, and incites him to do something so radical as run away from home and stow away aboard the Grampus—comes off as exceptionally tame. By the end of the narrative, it would be unsurprising if readers had forgotten this incident completely. This is because Poe, in this opening, has not heeded his own advice: “Sensations are the great things, after all. Should you ever be drowned or hung, be sure and make a note of your sensations” (215). The tale of the Ariel lays bare the shortcomings of realism. The voyage of the Tsalalian canoe is a proper retelling of the Ariel adventure in the more suitable idiom of magical realism.

O’Donnell’s aforementioned article cites an extensive list of reflections between the events before and after the near-equatorial appearance of the “Jane Guy at the end of the central chapter, each event in the first half paralleling an event in the second half” (89). He posits a theory about the white giant at text’s end: “At the beginning, the characters set sail in a small boat; there is a wreck from which they are rescued,” and after a series of parallel events, the characters “sail in a small boat toward the pole; and—I assume Poe wants me to see—there is a wreck from which they are rescued, thus allowing Pym to get home” (89).

The similarities between the ventures give one pause. Recounting his escapade on the Ariel, Pym says only this of his proximity to death: “I was so utterly benumbed, too, in every limb, as to be nearly unconscious of sensation” (7). This sentence is yet another dry, objective recounting of what, subjectively, must have been a virtually apocalyptic episode. To be so close to death must have felt to Pym, perhaps, as if his world was about to disappear—to go blank. Which, as he travels toward the end of the earth (subjectively synonymous with the end of one’s life) is, in the idiom of magical realism, what actually happens.

The world surrounding the canoe has gradually albified as Pym and Peters sail helplessly southward. Pym explains that they have entered “a region of novelty and wonder,” the features of which are oneiric images which speak directly to the right brain. Whiteness has, throughout the novel, been closely associated with death[2]—and not capriciously, as whiteness is the hue of blankness, of cessation. It is, as Ricardou famously suggested, the color of the blank pages at the end of a story—the nothingness that comes after its end. This surreality delivers to the reader a much greater sense of dread, confusion, and trepidation than the simple recitation of facts in Pym’s recounting of the Ariel adventure. Echoing his sentiments before his earlier brush with death, Pym says, “I felt a numbness of body and mind—a dreaminess of sensation,” of the moments before his embrace by the white giant beyond the veil (173).  Poe, the realist, has told Pym’s near-death story and failed to communicate its truth; Pym, in this closing episode, works to capture a more complete mimesis.

Eventually, the entire world around Pym is blank. “A high range of light gray vapor appeared constantly in the southern horizon, flaring up occasionally in lofty streaks…having all the wild variations of the Aurora Borealis…and there was a perceptible alteration in [the ocean’s] color…being no longer transparent, but of a milky consistency and hue” (172-3). He is stymied by “[a] fine white powder, resembling ashes” that “fell over the canoe and over a large surface of the water” (173). And, as if those details were not enough to indicate both his proximity to death and how closely this experience echoes the wreck of the Ariel, the screams from the throats of a thousand demons are replaced by “[m]any gigantic and pallidly white birds [flying] continuously now from beyond the veil, and their scream was the eternal ‘Tekeli-li!’” Death. Famously, Pym’s portion of the narrative concludes with an especially oneiric vision of “a chasm [which] threw itself open to receive us. But there arose in our pathway a shrouded human figure, very far larger in its proportions than any dweller among men” (175). The answer to Zanger’s question—“is the great white figure emerging from the mists real or supernatural?—is both: objectively, no; subjectively, yes. But by this point in the novel, the reader has every reason to believe that both are simultaneously valid answers.

Incidentally, the white giant—the embrace of which ends Pym’s narrative, effectively killing him—and the Penguin—a collision with which ends Pym’s adventure on the Ariel, almost killing him share one other subtle connection: the word “[p]enguin…derives from the Welsh as ‘white head’” (Pierce 63). Poe’s indications seem clear: Pym’s last voyage is a more completely mimetic rewriting of his first.

The parallels between the two escapades are plain and it is self-evident which one better suits the aim of Pym, as he confessed in the preface, to convey a tale possessed of the appearance of truth that it actually has. Nowhere in the tale of the Ariel does the experiential reality of the situation seem accessible; but the tale of the Tsalalian canoe is told in such a way as to literally have the appearance of the situation’s truth: the complete truth of both situations is that Pym is coming close to death and, for him, the world is about to end—about to disappear. And in the latter adventure, which accounts for the Infernal Twoness, that is, in fact, precisely the way things appear.

WORKS CITED

Barth, John. “Still Farther South: Some Notes on Poe’s Pym.” Poe’s Pym: Critical Explorations.

Durham: Duke University Press, 1992. 217-230.

Canada, Mark. “Flight into Fancy: Poe’s Discovery of the Right Brain.” The Southern Literary

Journal 33.2 (2001): 62-79.

Carmichael, Thomas. “A Postmodern Genealogy: John Barth’s Sabbatical and The Narrative of

Arthur Gordon Pym.” University of Toronto Quarterly: A Canadian Journal of the

Humanities 60.3 (1991): 389-401.

Carringer, Robert L. “Circumscription of Space and the Form of Poe’s Arthur Gordon Pym.”

PMLA 89.3 (1974): 506-16.

Columbus, Claudette Kemper. “The Heir Must Die: One Hundred Years of Solitude as a Gothic

Novel.” Modern Fiction Studies, 32.3 (1986): 397-416

Dameron, J. Lasley. “Pym’s Polar Episode: Conclusion or Beginning?” Poe’s Pym: Critical

Explorations. Durham: Duke University Press, 1992. 33-43.

Eakin, Paul John. “Poe’s Sense of an Ending.” American Literature 45.1 (1973): 1-22.

Flores, Angel. “Magical Realism In Spanish American Fiction.” Magical Realism:

Theory, History, Community. Ed. Zamora and Faris. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995. 109-118.

Gitelman, Lisa. “Arthur Gordon Pym and the Novel Narrative of Edgar Allan Poe.” Nineteenth-

Century Literature 47.3 (1992): 349-61.

Hussey, John P. “‘Mr. Pym’ and ‘Mr. Poe’”: The Two Narrators of Arthur Gordon Pym.” South

Atlantic Bulletin 39.2 (1974): 22-32.

Kennedy, J. Gerald. “The Invisible Message: The Problem of Truth in Pym.” The Naiad Voice:

Essays on Poe’s Satiric Hoaxing, ed. Dennis W. Eddings. Port Washington: Associated

Faculty Press, 1983. 124-35.

Leal, Luis. “Magical Realism In Spanish American Fiction.” Magical Realism: Theory,

History, Community. Ed. Zamora and Faris. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995. 119-124.

Miecznikowski, Cynthia. “End(ing)s and Mean(ing)s in Pym and Eureka.” Studies in Short

Fiction 27.1 (1990): 55-64.

O’Donnell, Charles. “From Earth to Ether: Poe’s Flight into Space.” PMLA 77.1 (1962): 85-91.

Pierce, Carol. “Poe’s Reading of Myth: The White Vision of Arthur Gordon Pym.” Poe’s Pym:

Critical Explorations. Durham: Duke University Press, 1992. 57-74.

Poe, Edgar Allan. The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym and Related Tales. New York: Oxford

World’s Classics, 2008.

Rozenzweig, Paul. “Dust within the Rock: The Phantasm of Meaning in The Narrative of Arthur

Gordon Pym.” Studies in the Novel 14.2 (1982): 137-51.

Simpkins, Scott. “Sources of Magical Realism/ Supplements to Realism in Contemporary

Latin American Literature.” Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community. Ed. Zamora and Faris. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995. 145-161.

Weiner, Bruce I. “Novels, Tales, and Problems of Form in The Narrative of Arthur Gordon

Pym.” Poe’s Pym: Critical Explorations. Durham: Duke University Press, 1992. 44-56.

Zanger, Jules. “Poe’s Endless Voyage: The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym.” Papers on

Language & Literature: A Journal for Scholars and Critics. 22.3 (1986): 276-83.

I

When I was nine,

I spent my time

at school or on the bus,

keeping quiet. A soldier spy,

Jedi Knight, superhero—

someone struggling

to maintain a meek secret

identity. This narration,

a running monologue

rewrote everything,

a chrome remolding of

every tarnished event,

until some khaki-slacked

teacher called my . . . → Read More: Perspective on Time]]> Tweet

Perspective on Time

I

When I was nine,

I spent my time

at school or on the bus,

keeping quiet. A soldier spy,

Jedi Knight, superhero—

someone struggling

to maintain a meek secret

identity. This narration,

a running monologue

rewrote everything,

a chrome remolding of

every tarnished event,

until some khaki-slacked

teacher called my alter-

ego’s name. And I was

only me again.

II

If I swallowed enough

of the Ipecac, I just might

throw up that apple

seed. I would leave it

to rot, forgotten, in

a rust-colored, reeking puddle,

in the greenest city park,

underneath an ash tree. I

would climb that tree.

And if I never came

down, I could make it

always the tail end of

teenage summer: scratched

records, baseball, broken

curfew, cigarettes, and sex

forever.

III

Mathematic gravity

draws everything

down, even hope.

And people die

or don’t (whichever

is worse), hearts

are broken in

major metropoles

all over the globe,

every single second

of every single day. I

should relax: my sorrows

soon will sublimate, become

the littlest disappointments

lost in the confusion;

insignificant statistics.

IV.

Your own voice

will sound alien

to you. Your back

will ache. Your knees.

You will have to

shave your head.

Yesterday is a gift.

Today is a trial.

Tomorrow is a pox.

(2002)

Last year, I bought 41 new LPs and screened a few others. Virtually every artist on my list of favorites released an LP, yet six of . . . → Read More: 10 Best Records of 2011]]> Tweet

I know, I know: I’m rather late. Still, I beat the Grammys. But before it becomes as dangerously irrelevant, I present to you the Top 10 Albums of 2011.

Last year, I bought 41 new LPs and screened a few others. Virtually every artist on my list of favorites released an LP, yet six of this year’s ten best are from acts I’d never heard of back on January first—a simultaneously exciting and saddening fact.  This is because, by and large, it was the Year of “Meh.”  In virtually every case, albums released by past favorites were “alright.” There were a lot of 3.5/5-star records which, ceteris paribus, isn’t a bad haul. Before briefly discussing those, I’d like to laud copiously the few artists who in no way disappointed me.

Applause to Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross for their incredible and brilliantly effective score for Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, a record I disqualified from competition because, since it’s basically a gapless and queerly disquieting three-hour suite, it’s just too different a beast to be considered for such a list. And accolades also go to St. Vincent, whose spectacular Strange Mercy just missed making the list because record #10 just happened to more or less subvert my very expectations of “pop music.” But as for the rest of those “meh”-inducing records…

The Decemberists’ The King Is Dead wasn’t really a disappointment; in fact, it is an excellent record inspired by American folk. It’s still a bit of a let down, however. I know good artists evolve or die, but I dearly miss the Brit folk that used to fuel Meloy & Co. And since they did it so well, the mere existence of albums like Picaresque and Castaways & Cutouts& will always loom like a thundercloud over anything new they release.

The final Bright Eyes album was not as bad as it initially seemed. It was, in fact, better than Cassadaga. But that, unfortunately, is like saying “My migraine today is better than it was yesterday.” Iron & Wine followed up the 5-star, Desert Island Scenario-Worthy LP The Shepherd’s Dog by choosing not to try and follow its act. Kiss Each Other Clean is something Iron & Wine’s never done before  and, though not trying to follow his own sublime act was a smart move by Sam Beam, Kiss as a whole is merely “okay.” The great bits (first and last songs especially) are stupendous. The not great bits, “Big Burned Hand,” for instance, are lower nadirs than anything he’s previously put out.

Tune-Yards’ second record, while interesting and still idiosyncratic, really lacks the charm of its crudely assembled predecessor. Death Cab for Cutie truly followed through on their promise to produce something totally different—a promise almost all bands make at some point in their career, usually immediately before releasing something that sounds exactly like the rest of their oeuvre. Codes & Keys is very much Death Cab, but still quite different. That’s a good thing. But in the end, it’s no better or worse than Narrow Stairs—their least inspired record to date. Hell, even Atlas Sound—solo project of one of my favorite musicians and core member of my favorite band, Deerhunter—released what was just a “pretty good” LP. This is unfortunate, since his last record, 2009′s Logos, was impeccable, unflawed. There’s been a fork in Atlas Sound’s path for some time now: Should Cox turn his project into something friendlier to his more accessible, traditional folk tendencies, or continue to indulge in his warbling and curious sonic eccentricities (“Washington School”)? Parallax is a lovely record. But Cox took the road I’d've preferred he not take. And The Pains of Being Pure at Heart released a wonderful record, jam-packed with tracks that embody the very essence of everything I love about the band. They sounded familiar, natural the first time I heard them. Unfortunately, I was, for the most part, sick of what became too-damned-familiar songs about three weeks later. Regardless, I ended up with a stack of pretty decent records on which there are to be found some singular standout tracks—exciting, saddening, intriguing, fun stuff.

I also ended up with some clunkers. Virtually everything featuring prominent use of the unironic saxophone became grating by May, when it became plain that unironic saxophone was very much in vogue (though Kaputt is another pretty alright album, I’m looking at you, Destroyer). Let us not discuss Saul Williams’ Volcanic Sunlight—an LP which, like some of the above-discussed, certainly suffers from following a flawless record, but that also suffers from a major case of Now You Sound Generic syndrome. Also let us not discuss Bon Iver. At least not past me saying that 1) the record that will likely win the Grammy for Best LP was the most disappointing record I bought this year, and 2) Justin Vernon’s project has now joined The National and Arcade Fire as Bands Whom I Will Never Again Support Financially—all three acts duped me into purchasing three mediocre records and they are now, as they say in baseball, fucking out.

Now. On to the standouts.

10. James Blake—James Blake

Perhaps it’s because I stay miles away from anything that’s been described using the word “dubstep”—even if the only instantiation of that word is in the phrase “post-dubstep”—but, until I spun this LP, I had never heard anything like it. And that includes the rest of Blake’s oeuvre (the two EPs he released after this album and the one he released just before it are fair-to-middling at best). This whole record is singular in sounding like a rainy May afternoon scored by a drunk given Vicodin and valium.

James Blake‘s saddest moment (the “Lindisfarne” suite) sounds like a stoned phone call made to an ex-lover. Its centerpiece (a cover of Feist’s “Limit to Your Love” which kicks the crap out of the original) sounds, with its delicate piano punctuated by tense and wobbling bass, like the postcoital moments of semi-clarity that take place after one’s had ill-advised post-breakup alcohol-induced sex. Hell, its most energetic, aggressive moment (“To Care”) stillsounds stoned and drunk. This could be hideous (ever create something while drunk and then really look at it the next day?), but Blake pulls it off with aplomb.

For those of you who have no frame of reference for my stream of intoxication metaphors, the LP somehow recreates in sound the loveliness of the moments right before one falls asleep. When you’re conscious enough to know you’re pretty much unconscious. Free of the burden of being alive, but not dead, thus able to appreciate it. But despite the fact that it’s always lovely to feel that impending freedom from consciousness, “loveliness” is not at all a synonym for “happiness.” That moment on the cusp of sleep can be simultaneously beautiful and sad (“This bed is warm, but still feels empty without him/her”); it can be simultaneously beautiful and tense (“I have too much to do tomorrow, but for a while that won’t matter at all”). As I explained in my June write-up of the year’s 20 Best Tracks, there’s a scene in Charlie Kaufman’s Adaptation where a Native American, who may or may not be stoned, caresses the protagonist’s face and says, “I can see your sadness. It’s lovely.” Throughout this self-titled LP, I can hear Blake’s. And it is. Lovely.

For its innovation and, so far as I know, uniqueness (and I’m using the adjective “unique” correctly here; read the second from the bottom), this album should have placed higher on my list. Why didn’t it? Simply put, Blake’s lyrics are generally so nonsensical he makes the bulk of Beck’s Midnite Vultures sound positively lucid and many of the songs consist of a single phrase repeated (for a very good reason, but still).

Incidentally, in addition to being the Year of the Unironic Saxophone Solo, 2011 was the year of cover art either so appropriate it affects one’s perception of the album (like both physical albums and music videos used to do) or, conversely, cover art so fucking ugly I wish I were the kind of man who was Type-B enough to leave some of my mp3/AAC/FLAC files imageless (Man Man, The Pains of Being Pure at Heart). And the cover of James Blake pretty well sums up its sonic quality, its blurry, confused, blue mood. If maybe you’d like to feel the temperate haziness of one glass of red wine on a largely empty stomach, but still be able to responsibly operate machinery, this is the record for you.

9. Radiohead—The King of Limbs

The King of Limbs is radically different than it first appears. Where it feels unbearable, unmanageable, it is actually tightly managed. Where it feels beautiful and relaxed, it is dangerously unmoored. And all throughout, it’s definitely Radiohead being Radiohead, but the baby steps are what make this album remarkable. White noise. Absent melodies. Insistent bass. Limbs is not a sequel to In Rainbows, but it does, as I said, share its spirit of being art without pretense or condescension. Limbs looks flashier. At first, it sounds like it’s Kid A-defiant. It isn’t. It is nothing more or less than what happens when five open-minded and talented musicians come together and decide to do what they do best, but this time, they try to do it better—like any good artist should.

And here’s a psychotically in-depth review of the album. I tend to live for years at a time in between girlfriends. This is the sort of thing that can end up happening.

8. Cults—Cults

I only remembered this album when I was checking out other critics’ year-ending Best Of lists. When it was released, I’d meant to buy it but, overwhelmed by the other ten very anticipated new LPs by favorite artists to which I’d not yet listened, I held off and, eventually, completely forgot what I was supposed to eventually get around to. So it was mid-December before it crossed my path again and, although I really was intrigued and did want to give it a fair shake, at that point, I thought to myself, “Wonderful, another record I have to cram in before I compile my list.” This may sound like an odd sentiment coming from a man who claims to enjoy music, but it’s not easy for me to find the time to give every new LP five undistracted listens. Especially if I don’t have the will, because the record is tedious or worse. Five uninterrupted listens is several hours in which I’m doing nothing but checking out a record, and sometimes I can barely find the time to sleep. Regardless, I caved, and am obviously extraordinarily glad I did.

Cults is the most fun I’ve had with an album since Sleigh Bells’ Treats, and it is, in fact, far, far more fun than Treats. In fact, it might be a better LP. The album is pure pop, but it’s underscored by serious darkness. It’s black bubblegum. Someone (whom I would certainly credit if I could recall his or her name or where I read the sentiment) once said that the most powerful popular music is that which wraps something subversive in the prettiest package; the sort of music that slips something spectacular and unexpected into something that seems nonthreatening. Radiohead’s unbelievably bleak “No Surprises” comes to mind, as it sounds like something you’d play a baby to put it to sleep, when really it’s something you’d play while waiting in the running car for the garage to fill up with gas. Every song on Cults is epitomic of this idea. It sounds like a heavy-reverb update of 1950s prom and sock hop rock. Bouncy, familiar, safe. But lyrically, it’s the sort of thing that, while not terribly profound, would get that sock hop-ready teen sent to the counselor’s office if it were turned in to his or her high school teacher as a project. Also, it’s worth mentioning that the vocal samples that punctuate the album are all from cult leaders—the kind of people whose lives tend to end with mass murder.

When I received the record, I was worried that I’d be unable to find the time for five full listens in the few remaining days of 2011 (and I’m too neurotic to not finish my list before the year was out). As it turned out, I listened to it five times in a row. Not because I had to, but because I could. Cults is like meeting a new lover and, for that first month, wanting to spend every second together. Maybe it won’t lead to anything deep or profound, but for a bit, it will be the most fun you can remember having.

7. The Antlers—Burst Apart

Burst Apart is not a break-up record. I know break-up records, and love unashamedly their schizoid mournful/furious/desperate attitude. Much of the best music I own, now that I think of it, is essentially break-up music. But instead, The Antlers seem to have put together an excellent record to play during the Death Stage of a relationship. It’s an LP for denouement. A score for the waning days when both parties know what’s coming, what should come, but neither is courageous enough to make the first of the last moves.

Burst Apart covers the end stretch when you’re not experiencing intimacy; “Hounds” conveys this with either sarcasm or longing—it actually doesn’t matter. ”I want to speak for you/ as if I know what you’ll do.” It covers the days when you’re so out of love you’re borderline disgusted by your significant other—the days when sex, for either curative or palliative purposes, is out of the question. The plea to just call it quits already, “Parentheses,” says it well: “Close up your knees/ and I’ll close your parentheses.” It covers the sudden moment when you realize your affair is doomed to fail. The gorgeous and warped-sounding piano of “Corsicana” describes it well, with the tale of a couple who wake up too late to do anything about the fact that their house is on fire (excellent metaphor; true story.)

Instrumental “Tiptoe” is the sound of walking on eggshells to avoid yet another fight. The record’s opener, “I Don’t Want Love” is pretty plain about its rejection of connection. “Bruised down below/ I should have built better walls/ I should have slept in my clothes.” Seinfeld once analogized breaking up with a lover to tipping over a cola vending machine: “[B]reaking up is like knocking over a coke machine. You can’t do it in one push, you got to rock it back and forth a few times, and then it goes over.” “I Don’t Want Love” even sketches that—the actually-”mid”-and-not-really-”post”-breakup stretch. And “Every Night My Teeth Are Falling Out” gorgeously underscores the feeling of helplessness that’s perpetually present at the end of every lengthy tryst.

The Antlers’ Burst Apart is the most lyrically coherent and intelligently penned record of the year which, after the mind-explodingly gorgeous and epic Hospice, should come as a surprise to no one. And, if it’s worth anything to anyone, in a year of spectacular cover art (which I really believe affects one’s perception of the album, even if it’s just to tint the songs a certain color—in this case, jaundiced), the LP takes first place. Aesthetically pleasant and possessed of enough presence that I could write pages analyzing the image.

6. Blouse—Blouse

I would really like to be able to say something about this record that no one else is capable of saying. That’s the whole point of writing: To present your voice to the world, to contribute something to a conversation that would otherwise be uncontributable, since your voice—if not the contents of your thoughts—is indubitably unique. I’d've liked to give Blouse’s debut the sort of idiosyncratic review which could only come from me.  Unfortunately, Lindsay Zoladz summed up the spirit of the album better than I could have imagined. Actually, she metasums it up, invoking her own inspiring lines. And after doing so, I now better understand why my whole life I’ve been enamored by the use of detuned or broken instruments and, for the past few years, things that sound like they were recorded by holding a Memorex in a cassette deck in front of an AM radio’s speakers.

“I often return to this line from Simon Reynolds’ Retromania: “Unlike digital formats, analogue degrades through overuse: each listener kills the sound she loves.” There’s a certain comfort in that kind of reciprocity, and anyone who’s ever accidentally reset the listening history on their iTunes library and felt like they’d wiped a part of their identity clean is familiar with the digital world’s maddening indifference to our affection. With that observation, Reynolds hits on the unifying and fundamentally human allure of chillwave, lo-fi, smear-pop, and any other kind of contemporary music that makes a conscious choice in an Auto-Tuned world to sound less than pristine. It’s music trying to approximate the grubby, hopelessly destructive way we love books, records, and each other.”Yes. Thank you, Simon and Lindsay.

The best I can offer to follow that act is a recommendation of standout songs: ”Into Black,” “They Always Fly Away,” and “Videotapes.” Blouse is nostalgic without feeling contrived; it’s familiar without feeling derivative; it’s simultaneously old and new.

5. Neon Indian—Era Extraña

Someone once proposed to me the question, “What’s your favorite three-song sequence?” I stared blankly at that person or at least would have if we’d ever met. Instead, I stared blankly at his or her words on my monitor, pondering. My initial reply was simply, “What in the hell does that mean?” He or she went on to explain that, many of the best albums—even the ones that are great all the way from front to back—have certain core segments which make them excellent, which allow them to transcend other records and become not merely art, but awe-inspiring opuses. Most people take sequencing for granted but, having myself assembled a collection of short fiction, a smaller fiction collection (comprising completely different pieces) that functioned as my master’s thesis, and a forthcoming collection of poems, I can tell you it’s actually arduous and frequently a little heartbreaking. There’s no right answer, except there is. Sequencing something perfectly is like answering a Zen koan.

As I was on a Nine Inch Nails message board, the examples tended to be from Reznor’s records: “Ruiner,” “The Becoming,” and “I Do Not Want This” from 1994′s Downward Spiral was frequently cited; so was “The Fragile,” “Just Like You Imagined,” and “Even Deeper from 1999′s The Fragile. “Everything in Its Right Place,” “Kid A,” and “The National Anthem,” from Radiohead’s 2000 record, Kid A, was also popularly agreed upon. I’m sure you get the idea. This year, many records were excellently sequenced (Radiohead, The Weeknd, Reznor & Ross’ Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, Panda Bear, St. Vincent’s Strange Mercy, Tune-Yards’ Whokill), Era Extraña takes the blue ribbon for not only best overall of 2011, but it enters contention for Best Three-Song Sequence I’ve heard: “Polish Girl,” “The Blindside Kiss,” and “Hex Girlfriend.” It doesn’t hurt that they’re bookended by two separate instrumental numbers meant to segregate them from the rest of the record. It actually does hurt the record itself, however, that these three lead off what is an outstanding LP—but there is just no way to follow, with tracks 6-11, that opening act.

Extraña is a huge maturation from 2009′s still-Top-Ten-excellent Psychic Chasms. Without losing any of his idiosyncrasies, Palomo (another more or less one-man act) put together a polished and cleaner record that makes his debut sound like the best demo tape you’ve ever heard. Listening to it now, I sort of think to myself, “Man, when you give this guy a little funding it’s flat-out amazing what he can make happen.” Neon Indian did precisely what Merril Garbus failed to do with Tune-Yards’ second record. Palomo’s lyrics are better (some of them are actually quite delightful) and his sound is similarly distinctive, without feeling like you’re just falling for what’s begun to feel gimmicky (something that Sleigh Bells and The XX will struggle with in 2012). Extraña shows evolution along a well-defined trajectory, something that’s hard to do—after Picaresque, The Decemberists’ Crane Wife, Hazards of Love, and King Is Dead are successive sudden mutations that feel awkward and occasionally alienating, regardless of whether or not they’re “good.” Pretend Neon Indian records are mint chocolate ice cream with bright rainbow sprinkles. If you liked the flavor of a Neon Indian LP in 2009, and the taste of the different taste of the one-off “Sleep Paralysist” in 2010, then you’ll love 2011′s LP—it’s also a bowl mint chocolate ice cream with rainbow sprinkles, but made with a better recipe.

4. Washed Out—Within and Without

If it’s not already obvious, I’m a lyric man. When it comes to pop music, the words the singer sings will make or break an album for me—this is why Beck’s Sea Change seemingly inexplicably receives a higher rating from me than the not merely groundbreaking, but earth-shattering Odelay. Why I consider Siamese Dream quite inferior to Pisces Iscariot—one of rock music’s most highly regarded and coherent albums falters, in my opinion, before a collection of freakin’ B-sides. Having said this, it’s maybe worth a little more when I say that Within and Without is one of my favorite records of the year despite the fact that I almost never have any idea what the fuck Ernest Green (the man behind Washed Out) is saying.

As I said above, 2011 seems to have been the year of alternately brilliantly applicable cover art or cover art so ugly I started looking for duct tape to wrap around the album when it arrived in the mail. In the case of Washed Out, it’s the former. And the image to the left actually works well as a springboard to talking about the music it accompanies. The album sounds every bit as crisp and clean as those white, white sheets; it’s as smooth as the lovers’ skin and as relaxedly passionate as their embrace; it’s every bit as rumpled as the bed spread and as enigmatic as those faceless folks themselves. It’s also worth mentioning that the LP is sexy as hell, without feeling sleazy or pornographic (although that can also be great; see The Weeknd). Seriously: Fucking kudos to whoever listened to the record and then managed to precisely recreate the LP’s sound using only a camera.

Within and Without is certainly of the “chillwave” oeuvre that is currently being both butchered and defined by a dozen or more acts; the record sounds like what some people call “bedroom music” (despite the previous allusions to the content of the cover, I do not mean this in a sexual way; “bedroom music” is actually its own critical sub-genre), put together on a glowing silver Macbook instead of a shitty four-track recorder. (Guess I’m not incorrect, this image popped up when I googled “Washed Out.”) This is an interesting juxtaposition. While remaining intimate and simplistic in many ways, the record never sounds inscrutable (see: the entirely alright, samey-samey-sounding and critically overrated 2011 self-titled by Youth Lagoon) or affected (see: Sleep ∞ Over’s Forever). Simultaneously, it never ends up too slick—the kind of record that feels monolithic, like something with no pores into which one might sink; defined to the point of feeling too controlled to really be intriguing. It’s Cleopatra’s Needle, not the monolith from 2001.

Excellent all-around, there’s a part of me that was heartbroken when the vinyl didn’t arrive with a lyric sheet. But there’s a part of me that was relieved. A reviewer to whom, once again, I’d give credit if I could recall his or her name or where I read his or her essay, once said of My Bloody Valentine’s Loveless that it’s like an extraordinarily beautiful boy or girl seen across the room at a smoky party. Just like you’d want a closer look at this magnetic creature; that album’s sound makes you want something that’s exactly the same, but just a little more. But such a thing isn’t possible; if you get closer to that boy or girl, you start to see flaws, you begin to see things that were different or better in your head. Within and Without is similarly enigmatic. It sounds to me like “Canzonetta sull’aria,” from Marriage of Figaro, sounded to Morgan Freeman in The Shawshank Redemption: “I’d like to think they were singing about something so beautiful, it can’t be expressed in words, and makes your heart ache because of it.” Within and Without is an excellent record, and if I find a lyric sheet, I will read it. But there’s a piece of me that hopes I never do. Within and Without is already sort of perfect the way it is.

3. Cold Cave—Cherish the Light Years

In early 1995, the female lead from an opening band for Marilyn Manson (I don’t recall whom) took the tee shirt off of my back and signed it. I was sweat drenched, which had made my mascara run; black liner was smeared from wiping my eyes and my blackened lips had cracked and looked chappy. My dyed hair hung in clots. I wore combat boots and military-issue overboot gaiters, leather pants you could probably smell from the outside, and a fishnet shirt. I shivered while I waited for the return of my outer shell. When she passed it back, the singer, she kissed me gently on the lips and said, “You rock, kid.” The autograph read, “Back in the day, there was goth. I loved goth. I love you.” This was the age before Hot Topic so, admittedly, I was something of an anomaly. Listening through Cold Cave’s Cherish the Light Years, I felt the same way about the record as that singer claimed she did about me. And I missed my long hair, lipstick, and nose ring.

Once again, the album’s cover accurately portends what’s coming. The music is darkly sexy and the sort of sound implied by “goth” when the word was more associated with Joy Division than Slipknot. The LP combines the best of Depeche Mode, The Cure, Joy Division, and Pretty Hate Machine-era Nine Inch Nails. Synth notes turn sour; some tracks (opener “The Great Pan Is Dead” is the album’s most straightforward and raucous song) are aggressive and frenetic, but never not danceable, and all the while everything is shrouded by a veil of gloom. It’s a record on which 75% of the songs would thrill the guy you know who still wears mostly black and a wallet chain even though he’s aged way out of that being appropriate; and yet 75% of its songs would also please the twenty-something club-going young lady who just wants to put on something gaudy and go out to drink cosmos, and do some dancing with the girls.

Lyrics like “I feel guilty being alive/ when so many beautiful people have died”; “Forever haunted by the roads I know/ If not above, then I’ll see you below”; and “They said the meek shall inherit the earth/ oh, god, that seems like so much work” not only belie the idea that the gothiness of the act means it’s all style and no substance. They also make me positively miss the black vinyl and clove smoke my angst-ridden adolescence (not something that comes easy to me). Importantly, like Blouse above, the work isn’t purely derivative. Wesley Eisold (the soul of Cold Cave) has created something new here, though to do so he definitely strip-mined the past. But this record could not have been made in 1984. Nor could it have been made in ’94 or ’04. And it’s not for the angsty teenage version of me. No, Light Years is an album for adults, adults who have grown tired of living in the future (because, let’s face it: if you were between ten and fourteen years of age in 1990, iPhones at least sort of make you feel like you’re on Star Trek); it’s an LP for people weary of the false hope the computer/internet age keeps insisting is warranted. Thus, the digital instruments often sound flawed and the tone of every song is a sort of desperate disappointment.

But despite this inherent darkness, Light Years fights a decent fight with Cults as Most Fun Record of 2011. I don’t dance. I’ve never danced. But Cold Cave makes me wish I did.

2. The Weeknd—House of Balloons

At first, I believed this LP to be excellent simply because it was unexpected. It came from the farthest reaches of metaphorical left field. I’ve got a decently wide-ranging palate, and it’s still not the sort of thing I’d ever expect myself to buy. When explaining it to others, I’ve strung together the adjectives “syrupy,” “depraved,” “Canadian,” “lo-fi,” “indie,” and “R&B”—which is something, upon reflection, that I never expected I’d have to do. And so I naturally thought its appeal was rooted in novelty. It is not.

Sampling both Siouxsie & the Banshees and Beach House to great effect, the music itself is stellar; syrupy indeed and occasionally glitchy, but never without a groove. It stretches and echoes across minimalistic spaces—in some spaces, the record seems much more heavily influenced by ambient electronic acts than traditional R&B. Abel Tesfaye (the man behind the record) occasionally pitch-shifts his voice intelligently, until it is simply another instrument. With this soundscape, he affects a mood to appropriately accompany his lyrics—lyrics which are testament to the variegated grotesqueries that can accompany first-world ennui. 75% of pop music is about sex and drugs, sure, but in the case of House of Balloons, the feeling of postcoital sweatiness and a lightheaded, heavy-chested high cannot be divorced from the experience. The music feels like what the words which surf atop it describe. As I said several times above, I’m first and foremost a lyric man. But fascinatingly, I feel that I’d react in fundamentally the same fashion to an instrumental version of House of Balloons.

Describing James Blake, I provided a non-depravity-related metaphor for describing the record because, if you don’t know what feeling pleasantly high is like, you’ll have had no idea what I’m on about. House of Balloons requires no such secondary metaphor, because it doesn’t require the first. The lyrics are about overindulgence in sex and drugs and depravity, and the music unmistakably feels grimy, it feels like the kind of sex that might prompt postcoital shame (opener “High for This” boils down to “I know you don’t usually do drugs, but I’m going to fuck you in ways so intense and perverse that you’re probably going to want to get high beforehand as a precautionary measure”); it feels overindulgent and lonely in places (sometimes at the same time); and it feels desperate, insistent, and dizzy quite often. I’ve never stayed up for days on a cocktail of ecstasy and oxycontin while embroiled in what amounts to an orgy, a Bacchanal, but after hearing this record, I can’t help but feel like I have. That’s how effective Tesfaye is: after listening to House of Balloons, I feel pretty sure I can recall moments in my life that never actually happened. Impressive, to say the least.

One final note I feel suits the record well: I was blasting it after hours at my restaurant. I was alone; the lights were dim; I was sipping tequila. I may or may not have bothered with a glass; I was perhaps just clutching the bottle as I laid on my back—recumbent, half off the concrete surface of the bar. I was singing along to its seventh (and best) song, “Coming Down” (chorus “I always want you when I’m coming down” explored in detail here). A coworker came in and witnessed this; someone else slung her a drink and they stuck around a while, to the end of the record and, I believe, through its first few tracks as, after it ended, it began to repeat. Excepting to drink and sing, I never moved. The next day she came to me and said, “You were pretty messed up last night, huh?” I agreed. And then she said something I will never forget.

“You know, I always knew you were pretty depressed, even though you’re tons of fun to go out with. But until I heard you listening to that record, I never really understood how sad you must actually be.” Under all the depravity and often despicable overindulgence, there is an undeniable and immutable profound sadness. It wasn’t the booze; everyone I work with has seen me over-imbibe. And it wasn’t the sloppy, recumbent position; I’m sort of notorious for getting myself comfortable in odd places. It was the record I was playing, participating in, that conveyed to her some important truth about the core of my being, my not-so-secret-but-I-guess-more-intense-than-I-let-on malaise. That’s the experience of House of Balloons.

1. Panda Bear—Tomboy

2011′s only five-star record (though there were a few four-and-a-halfs) never takes a misstep. From the echoing choral vocals of sparse, simple opener “You Can Count on Me,” through the grating and pace-making intermission of “Drone,” all the way to the spacey denouement of “Benfica,” Tomboy is a work of pure decadence. Sacrificing only a bit of the richness of the layer cake that was 2007′s critically acclaimed Person Pitch, Noah Lennox manages to create a dense record with the skewed pop sensibilities of Animal Collective’s (his other project) also-lauded Merriweather Post Pavilion. Lennox made much, during the lead-up to Tomboy‘s release, of listening to Nirvana records and wanting to produce something simpler that his previous baroque work with the rhythm-driven tendencies found in a lot of rock and roll. It was ten or twenty listens in before I began to see just how, but this is that record. As such, Tomboy is one hell of an accomplishment.

Excellent lyrics are almost indecipherable in a number of cases—sometimes due to the stretching of syllables or the crunching of them—but Panda Bear’s signature Brian Wilson-like harmonies allow them to work as well as ambiance as they do when heard as more traditionally expositive text. But when one can catch them, they’re wonderful. “Is it the wise who know what wisdom is?” asks “Surfer’s Hymn,” as waves crash in the background, beneath what sound like mechanized wind chimes. “And when/ I slow/ it down/ it’s clear/ it’s how/ it’s what/ they don’t/ say that counts,” proclaims standout “Slow Motion.” The eerie somberness of “Scheherezade” makes the statement “I see it all the time/ though I might not desire./ But if I could do/ then what I would do/ to you” both romantic and discomfiting. In “Last Night at the Jetty,” Lennox addresses the person to whom he sings: “Didn’t we have a good time?/ I know we had a good time.” Later, he asks himself, “Didn’t I have a good time?” quickly following the question with “I know I had a good time.” The doubt, the self-deception in both statements is palpable and eminently relatable.

But the music, too, is unforgettable. Panda Bear managed to make that rock-influenced record without, for the most part, using anything that really resembles rock instruments. Drums are muted, usually; in the beginning of “Jetty,” they sound like a mashup of clapping hands and cannonfire. The piano of “Slow Motion” sounds like I’m about an hour into a decent LSD trip. And is that trembling sheet metal I hear in there? Is the bass of “Friendship Bracelet” a fuzzed out bass guitar? Is it an upright? Is it synthesized? I have no idea. But it’s wonderful. I had no idea under what genre I should file Panda Bear’s other records (for the convenience of easy location in my iTunes library, not because I think everything must fit into a neat little box). I’ve never really solved that problem. Tomboy isn’t as complex an affair as Person Pitch, or as abstruse and effort as Young Prayer. It’s not as synthpop as Merriweather Post Pavilion or any other traditionally synth-heavy record and I’ve never understood anyone who called Lennox’s Collective “freak folk.” It’s not really lo-fi or bedroom music and it’s not Neon Indian/Washed Out-brand chillwave. So what the hell is it? Tomboy manages to indeed be best described as an indie rock record without being much like any other indie rock record in my collection.

Douglas Adams once said of The Beatles, “The next exciting thing was that they kept on losing me. They would bring out a new album and for a few listenings it would leave me cold and confused. Then gradually it would begin to unravel itself in my mind. I would realize that the reason I was confused was that I was listening to something that was simply unlike anything that anybody had done before…The Beatles were now not just writing songs, they were inventing the very medium in which they were working.” While maybe that’s a bit of an overstatement regarding Tomboy, the sentiment is very much the same. I listened to this album seventy times (that’s not hyperbolic) in 2011 and I feel like I’m just finally getting a handle on it.

Earlier this year, Amoskeag Journal, out of New Hampshire, published my short story “[sic].” Recently, I had the good fortune to be deemed by their editors worthy of an interview and, should you so choose, you’ll be able to read that interview here, on January 8th—allegedly it will “go live” around noon.

If you . . . → Read More: Interview with Amoskeag]]> Tweet

Earlier this year, Amoskeag Journal, out of New Hampshire, published my short story “[sic].” Recently, I had the good fortune to be deemed by their editors worthy of an interview and, should you so choose, you’ll be able to read that interview here, on January 8th—allegedly it will “go live” around noon.

If you haven’t read it, in the story, a caregiver discovers a typographical error on his birth certificate, which allows him to develop a second self, capable of many things which he is not. If you’re curious, here’s a sample. Better yet, make me look good and buy the issue—I’ve read it cover to cover and it’s worth the measly $7 (which, in half the country, is cheaper than a pack of cigarettes).