The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach

Category: personal

Stuff about me (Bernard HP Gilroy), instead of or in addition to stuff about education.

  • Giving Up the Ghost (30 Days of Marc Cohn — Day 2)

    “Giving Up the Ghost”
    Join the Parada

    Appropriately, this is a very haunting melody.  It’s a ghost story, of course.  As is usual for Marc Cohn, it’s also an extended metaphor for a relationship in trouble.

    She gave me something I needed but now the feeling is gone
    And it’s high time I told her she’s gonna have to move on

    This is someone whose life has intertwined with his over the years.  They’ve gotten together, broken up, and fallen back together again.  She probably enters his life at the low points, when he’s looking for something familiar from his past, and even though he knows it’s going to end badly, he finds himself drawn over and over into her orbit.  This can wear hard on a person.  (There’s a nice and very subtle nod to superstitions that ghostly visitors can drain your vital energies away, using up your life trying to regain theirs.)

    From the eerie lake to the hills that shake
    I’ve been haunted on every coast

    This can be seen as brillant, once you recognize that Marc Cohn grew up in Cleveland (on Lake Erie) and spent formative time in California (the hills that shake).

    Last night she came in at the usual time
    Twelve is the number that the church bells did chime

    This couplet, on the other hand, is a real clunker.  It just falls flat.  It’s probably the reason this song  is so low on my top-30 list.

    Now I’m feeling much better
    But I’m still on the brink
    I just got a letter in vanishing ink

    It’s a really strong finish, lyrically, even though the song “fades to black” without a climax.  This is just impressive.  Clearly, even though he’s let her go, she isn’t letting go of him:  The resolution implied in the refrain is far from final.  And of course, associating letters from ghosts of your past with vanishing ink is tremendous.  It’s even better if you assume the letter was full of “I love you forever” and other endearments meant to win him back… because the vanishing ink makes clear that such sentiments are, despite the protestations, doomed to fade.

     

  • 2013

    I don’t do resolutions. But I do intend to write more regularly in the coming year.

  • Published in the Hun Review

    This is just a list of things I’ve managed to get published in the Hun Review, my school’s literary annual:

  • Tron: Legacy — soundtrack

    Being a geek of a certain age, I of course went out to see Tron: Legacy as soon as it opened in the theaters. And being a geek of a certain type, and having listened to Wendy Carlos‘ ethereal soundtrack to the original Tron, I also purchased the soundtrack to this one as soon as it was available. This was my first introduction to Daft Punk, whom (I must admit) I first even heard of when their role was announced to much rejoicing. On receipt of the CD (yes, I still buy physical goods from time to time), I learned that they had worked on the orchestration with Hans Zimmer, a composer whose other cinematic work I do know and enjoy.

    I say all this to make clear that I cannot evaluate the album as to its “Daft Punkness”. On my first listen through, I was underwhelmed. Wendy Carlos notwithstanding, I am not much of a fan of techno, and this album is certainly that. But having spent the cash I gave it a few good listens, and then I noticed that I was replaying the music in my head throughout the day. That’s just about the best recommendation you can give an album: it’s something you want to keep listening to. It evokes the movie (which I very much enjoyed) without being dogmatically tied to it. I’ve played these tracks for more than anything I’ve purchased in the past year or so.

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  • Marc Cohn at the Town Hall NYC : 2011 0108

    Last night, Annie and I attended a show by Marc Cohn with Suzanna Vega at the Town Hall NYC.

    Playlist

    • Ghost Train
    • Perfect Love
    • The Calling (Charlie Christian’s Tune)
    • Dance Back From the Grave
    • 29 Ways
    • Listening to Levon
    • My Sanctuary
    • Walking in Memphis
    • Into the Mystic
    • Only Living Boy in New York

    We stayed for most of Suzanne Vega’s act.  I don’t really know Ms. Vega’s work so I didn’t capture an accurate playlist and I can’t really comment on her performance.  I was reminded that for me (and I’ll apologize to any Vega fans out there), I like her songs on occasion but couldn’t really listen to a whole album of them.

    Marc Cohn’s portion of the show was everything I’d hoped for, though.  (It was a little short for him, but that’s the result of the double-billing.)  I was a bit taken aback by the realization that this month marks the 20th anniversary of the release of Marc Cohn, his debut.  He’s probably getting a little tired of reciting the story about Muriel at the Hollywood.  🙂  His band was excellent, including as always the amazing Shane Fontayne on guitar.  I found the playlist interesting, as there were some rarer bits (“My Santuary”, for example) and some missing favorites (such as my personal one, “Dig Down Deep”).  He played surprisingly few from what he jokingly calls his “Greatest Hits album, released first”.

    He did two from Listening Booth: 1970.  While I like the album well enough, I am less excited to hear other people’s songs than Cohn’s.  But he put a really nice spin on “Into the Mystic”.

    It’s been too long since I’d been to a Marc Cohn show — this past summer, it seemed like he would play a city only after I’d left it 🙂 — and it was a nice refresher.

  • Currently Reading: First Quater 2011

    • American Scripture by Pauline Maier
    • Consider Phlebas by Ian Banks
    • Assassination Vacation by Sarah Vowel

  • Sometimes the worst thing is saying, “I’m sorry”.

    So, last Saturday (Sep 11), a paper in Maine ran a story about the local celebrations at the end of Ramadan the day before.  It was a pretty innocuous piece, a typical fluff article about local culture.

    Then the Internet happened.

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  • My summer reading

    Just to put it in one place, here’s what I’ve read and what I hope to read this summer.

    Already Read

    • Neverwhere by Niel Gaiman
    • The Engineer Trilogy by K. J. Parker
      • Devices and Desires
      • Evil for Evil
      • The Escapement
    • To Engineer is Human by Henry Petroski (2010 0708)
    • Under Heaven by Guy Gavriel Kay (2010 0715)
    • Ghosts of Manhattan (2010 0720)
    • Metatropolis edited by John Scalzi (2010 0722)
    • Stardust by Neil Gaiman (2010 0724)
    • The City’s End: Two Centuries of Fantasies, Fears, and Premonitions of New York’s Destruction by Max Page (2010 0726)
    • Tron by Brian Daley (2010 0731)
    • 1453 by Roger Crowley
    • The Unincorporated Man by Dani Kollin & Eytan Kollin
    • Fragile Things by Neil Gaiman
    • The State of Jones: The Small Southern County that Seceded from the Confederacy by Sally Jenkins & John Stauffer
    • The Affinity Bridge by George Mann

    On the agenda

    • The Global Achievement Gap by Tony Wagner
    • The Book in the Renaissance by Andrew Pettegree

  • Quote of the Day

    From a post by Steve Benen over at Political Animal:

    In human history, it’s never been easier to get — and stay — well informed. Folks just have to take some responsibility. If they don’t, the result can be a dysfunctional democracy.

    It’s impolitic to say this but not all pastimes and passions are equal. And the next time you bemoan the state of the economy or your due taxes or your summons to jury duty or the latest idiocy out of Washington — just pause for a moment and think about how much time you spend reading gossip columns, or devouring “reality” TV, or watching one overgrown overdosed tribe of jocks beat up on a different overgrown overdosed tribe of jocks. Is it really true that you don’t have the time to keep informed?  Or is it that you just don’t want to invest that time?

    And if it’s the latter, do you really deserve the vote you’re accorded by virtue of your citizenship in an advanced democracy?

  • Review: Inception

    Inception
    a Christopher Nolan Film
    Arbitrary 5-Point rating: 5 out of 5

    Inception is a weird, ambitious, action-packed sci fi thriller-cum-heist flick.  It is, in its own way, as ambitious as The Matrix and suffers from the comparison only in that it didn’t come first.  Leonardo DiCaprio plays Tom Dom Cobb, a thief of a singular kind: He can enter the dreams of others and “extract” information they’re trying to keep secret.  On the run for (at first) unspecified horrible crimes, he parlays his skill into a lucrative, if high-risk, lifestyle.  But in the end all he really wants to do is get to go home again and pick up the shards of his former life, including two small children.

    More detail, and spoilers, to follow, but in short, this is a fantastic film that’s better than it has any right to be.  The pacing is superb, the acting is above-average, and the setting and technology are remarkably well fleshed out.  Although everyone draws comparisons to The Matrix, the real spiritual ancestor of this film is The Thirteenth Floor (which, ironically, came out at the same time as — and got lost in the glare of the hoopla of — The Matrix).

    Spoilers ho!
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