Lost Between the Notes: My Top 10 Album Reviews, Part 4

I have got to find the river
Bergamot and vetiver
Run through my head and fall away
Leave the road and memorize
This life that pass before my eyes
Nothing is going my way — “Find the River,” R.E.M.

***

Twenty-eight years have passed since R.E.M. gave us an album that is drenched in beauty, sadness, exultation and mystery. These words could surely be used to describe multiple R.E.M. albums “Life’s Rich Pageant,” “Out of Time,” “Monster,” “New Adventures in Hi-Fi” but rarely does an album, any album, reach the emotional heights of “Automatic for the People” in the potent culmination of all of these elements coming together to form one of the seminal albums in rock history.

“Drive,” which opens the album with a simple picking of a Dm chord, reminds me, from a songwriting standpoint, of “Losing My Religion.” Both songs don’t seem to have much of a chorus or any sharp delineation between sections, yet somehow, both songs flow seamlessly in their own way to create a hypnotic, endless loop kind of feel. As the first single for the album, “Drive,” was a bust, and without a recognizable chorus or much of a hook, that’s not surprising. But as one of a great many R.E.M. songs that are challenging, both lyrically and musically, it has a certain power as it unfolds from the single arpeggio to the soaring strings and Peter Buck’s droning distortion near the end to Michael Stipe’s often inexplicable, yet metaphoric and moving lyrics. Almost as if Stipe is speaking about the band or himself, refusing to be put into a creative box, he tells us at the end, “Hey kids, rock and roll, nobody tells you where to go, baby.”

The next song is one of the emotional high points for me in all of R.E.M.’s discography. This album has several of those markers, which is why it’s number four in this list, and it very well could be number one, as there isn’t much distance between my top five.

“Try Not To Breathe” was especially poignant to me because it seems to relate the end-of-life thoughts of an old person who wants to go out on their own terms.

I will try not to breathe
This decision is mine
I have lived a full life
And these are the eyes that I want you to remember

I lived most of my adult life with chronic obstructive lung disease before receiving a double lung transplant, and even as a 20-something, I sometimes felt brittle and ancient, like my better days were far behind me. COPD is a slow-progressing condition such that, while you might not see much of a degradation in breathing capacity over the course of a few months or a year, the years begin to pile up, and one can tell a distinct different between what was possible from an exertion standpoint as a teenager versus what one could do 10 or 20 years later. COPD is a merciless, exhausting disease, and after awhile, the emotional weariness of struggling for breath every day begins to take a toll. On some days, I wanted to give up. Some nights, I wished to go to sleep and not to wake up. Without a transplant, there was no way out and no escape. I was drowning to death.

“Try Not To Breathe,” then, speaks to me of these thoughts: of wanting to die, of wanting to be remembered as a person who loved life, as a person who still loved life but simply couldn’t continue under the weight of immense suffering and personal anguish. Yet, in this beautiful and poetically vivid song, the character does not seem sad. He or she is almost triumphant, as if they are reclaiming their freedom and wanting to be liberated from a fate that threatens to rob them of joy. I was diagnosed with COPD as a teenager, but I did not breathe well all through my childhood, and by my early 20s, I had almost enough, and my joy for life was being eroded, painfully, day-by-day. I don’t want to dwell on my health here, and I don’t actually like talking about it, but this is a personal list and many of the songs that I have and will talk about, quite literally got me through some of the darkest days of my life. “Try Not To Breathe” is one of them.

Members of R.E.M. and producer Scott Litt must have known that, after a heavy song like “Try Not To Breathe,” listeners might need an emotional breather and a little levity. Decades hence, many of us still have no idea what “The Sidewinder Sleeps Tonite” is about, but the lilting music and Stipe’s almost indecipherable lyrics and the chorus line, “Call me when you try to wake her up,” provided a freewheeling pick-me-up fans needed in the same vein as “Stand” and “Shiny Happy People” with references to Doctor Seuss, Nescafe, instant soup, black-eyed peas and a candy bar. If the previous song dealt with the potential loss of joy that comes with contemplating one’s own mortality, “The Sidewinder Sleeps Tonite” helps us reclaim the joy and the childlike perspective of youth.

Andrezej Lukowski, with Drowned In Sound, suggested that if “Everybody Hurts,” the album’s fourth, had not been so popular, whether “Automatic” “might have ended up viewed as a sort of bleaker, hipper, tangent to ‘Out of Time,’ a ‘Nebraska’ (Bruce Springsteen) or ‘On the Beach’ (Neil Young) if you will.” Lukowski calls the song “atypical” for R.E.M. it certainly is a departure from the dark and weighty, almost Southern Gothic, lyrics on old age and death in “Try Not To Breathe,” “Sweetness Follows” and “Find the River” but “Everybody Hurts” is keeping with the album’s emotionally piercing material, except that in this song we get a message of solidarity and shared pain.

After a beautiful musical interlude (“New Orleans Instrumental No. 1”), which are typical on many R.E.M. albums, comes one of many songs on this record that manage to be both bleak and beautiful. One line summarizes the whole song.

We were altogether, lost in our little lives.

The message of “Sweetness Follows” seems to be a simple one: to appreciate friends and loved ones now before they are gone, and it’s too late.

Almost every album has a musical hinterland, where the songs get a little more experimental and less accessible. Some might say that the following three songs, “Monty Got a Raw Deal,” “Ignoreland” and “Star Me Kitten,” reach this territory on “Automatic.” I don’t think there is a bad song here. They aren’t as personally meaningful to me, but they are still must-listens, especially “Ignoreland,” which features Michael Stipe almost seething with rage about the conservative political landscape in America, especially the Reagan years.

These bastards stole their power
From the victims of the Us v Them years
Wrecking all things virtuous and true
The undermining social democratic downhill slide into abysmal
Lost lamb off the precipice into the trickle down runoff pool
They hypnotized the summer, ninteen-seventy-nine
Marched into the capital brooding duplicitous
Wicked and able, media-ready
Heartless, and labeled
Super US citizen, super achiever
Mega ultra power dosing, relax
Defense, defense, defense, defense

This is Stipe at his most acerbic. The melodic flow of lyrics, how he sings the words and how they stream together, along with the driving music from Peter Buck, Mike Mills and Bill Berry, is a remarkable feat of songwriting.

The closing three songs on “Automatic” offer more stunning examples of song-craftsmanship. So much has been said about “Man on the Moon,” Stipe’s homage to Andy Kaufman, that I will move along, except to say that the song has one of the strongest hooks in R.E.M.’s entire catalog.

As I was preparing to write this, I struggled with how to adequately describe my feelings about “Nightswimming,” and I haven’t come up with many answers. I don’t just listen to “Nightswimming.” I am transported into the song by the stark imagery, by the sense of longing for an experience that’s so innocent and childlike that it makes you cry. I press play and wake up, as if in a dream, into the aesthetic of the song. I look around in the dark of night. I sense the blackness all around me. I sense the void. I feel the warm summer air on my skin. I see the moon reflecting off the water as it gently laps the shore. I see a single, empty pier. I see a girl. I see her, and I see myself. We’re naked and unafraid. We feel devious and free in the stillness of night. We get in the lake and plunge the depths. The cool of the water envelopes our bodies. Gravity holds no sway here. We’re suspended. The night takes us in, and we feel alive with nature, with ourselves and with the world locked in a moment.

Nightswimming, remembering that night
September’s coming soon
I’m pining for the moon
And what if there were two
Side by side in orbit
Around the fairest sun?

Nightswimming deserves a quiet night.

The last song on the album, “Find the River,” seems to revisit themes of old age and mortality, and the imagery juxtaposes the beauty and steadfast permanence of nature with the uncertainty of human existence as we all approach the water’s edge and peer into the center of nothingness. As the song suggests, when we’re young, we feel as if we’re almost invincible and old age seems like “light years” away, but as the decades peel away, we become increasingly aware of our own vulnerability and impermanence. We search for meaning and truth. We search for beauty. We search for love. We search for joy, and we search for fulfillment. And yes, we search for the everlasting. For many of us, nature is the closest that we will ever get, and somehow, in its majesty and wonder, it’s enough.

Lost Between the Notes: My Top Album Reviews, Part 3

In a little while, I’ll be gone – Radiohead, “How To Disappear Completely”

Sadly, I can’t recall my initial reaction to Radiohead’s stunning critique and deconstruction of modernity, “Kid A,” from 2000. I just remember thinking that whatever this was, I needed to hear more of it, and so I enthusiastically gobbled up the band’s followup record, “Amnesiac,” upon its release a year later. I was working at a Clemson University souvenir shop called Mr. Knickerbocker at the time and told a fellow employee as I was opening the CD package something to the effect of, “I expect to be amazed at what I was about to hear” in light of the greatness that was “Kid A,” greatness of which I hope to elucidate in this post. Amnesiac continued the artistic and musical themes of “Kid A,” but it was the latter that captured my imagination and my heart.

I came to appreciate and adore Radiohead’s musical innovation and lyrical power fairly late in the game. Somehow I missed a lot of the hype surrounding the band’s first single, “Creep,” and its first record, “Pablo Honey” (1993). I also largely missed out on the band’s 1995 release, “The Bends,” and didn’t listen until sometime in the late 1990s after a friend recommended it. And even when I listened, I was on the fence about whether I actually liked most of it or not. I was a big fan of “Fake Plastic Trees,” but the rest of the album took some time for me to process. It grew on me by slow degrees. In fact, Radiohead’s DVD release, “7 Television Commercials” (1998), which was a collection of music videos from “The Bends” and the band’s next album, “OK Computer” (1997), had a lot to do with me getting into the band in more than just a casual way. The video for “Paranoid Android,” much like the song, was a wild and frantic ride, while the production for “Fake Plastic Trees,” all bright and colorful juxtaposed against the rather dull backdrop of a grocery store or retail outlet, punctuated a statement about the often artificial and superficial nature of society and culture.

But it was the video for “No Surprises” that spoke to me in ways that I hadn’t experienced before that point with Radiohead.

“Twinkle” is more of a visual word, but the opening guitar riff twinkles with the same beauty as the opening flashes of light reveal that Thom Yorke is inside a glass chamber or helmet that is slowly filling with water, which could symbolize the opening lines:

A heart that’s full up like a landfill

A job that slowly kills you

Bruises that won’t heal

As the song continues, the singer is sinking literally and figuratively under the weight of life until he makes the fateful decision:

I’ll take the quiet life

A handshake with carbon monoxide

With no alarms and no surprises

No alarms and no surprises

Silent

And finally, there is a moment of release at the end when he rises out of the water and relishes the sight of a “pretty house” and “such a pretty garden.” Watching this video was one of the most touching and inspiring moments of my early adulthood such that I could write an entire essay on this song alone, but the point is that this particular video symbolized for me the sense of existential dread that I was beginning to feel about life — trapped in this world and this life, surrounded by peril and knowing full well that there was only way out of the world, as Dave Matthews wrote. The feeling was made stronger by the fact that I was suffering from severe chronic obstructive pulmonary disease at the time and, however much I felt isolated and alone in my social life, I was even more depressed by my health situation. I couldn’t walk very far without getting tired, and I felt physically trapped by my circumstances. In a word, I was drowning, and no one could stop my slow march toward the grave. So, in this video, in just three minutes, Radiohead summarized for me, in a very personal way, my own struggle and hopeful liberation from certain annihilation. (After living with breathing problems for all of my childhood and most of my adult life, that liberation finally came in the form of a lung transplant three years ago.)

In any case, this is the backdrop for which I arrived at “Kid A” in the early 2000s. I listened to “Kid A” three times all the way through to prepare to write this piece because, number one, it’s a joy to let the pulsating beats and rhythms wash over me again and again, but number two, I wanted to listen for things that I might have missed before or open myself up to any new revelations about the music.

I chose “Kid A” for this list over “OK Computer” because, while the latter certainly has more than a few sublime songs, among them “Exit Music (For a Film),” “Let Down,” “Karma Police,” “Lucky” and the aforementioned, “Paranoid Android,” “Kid A’s” aesthetic and artistic direction spoke to me in the ways that few albums have. First, consider the artwork, which was created by the band’s longtime artist, Stanley Dunwood. The darkened and almost sinister looking background beyond the snowcapped mountains. The erupting volcanos. The rough-hewn lines and jagged edges. The void and barren landscape. The viewer brought almost to eye-level with the mountain peaks, as if floating in suspended animation as the artwork trails off in an ocean of white space and fractured lines.

This approach echoes that of the music, and generally, listeners get a sense that modernity itself is fractured, and the songs, awash with drum machines, synths, sparse guitar and Thom Yorke’s sometimes confident and buoyant, sometimes barely audible falsetto drowned out in a wail of noise, is all part of the plan.

Everything in its right place.

This album holds the position of number three on my list because first, it represents elements of my own existential philosophy, which I more or less adopted as a student at Lander (Greenwood, S.C.) and Clemson University (Clemson, S.C.) after studying the works of Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Albert Camus and others. For more on Radiohead’s tie to philosophy, see The Pennds: An Academic Approach to Radiohead:

Here is how it goes: In OK Computer, we stare into an impending and growing nihilistic despondency. In Kid A and Amnesiac, we are submerged in it. In Hail to the Thief, we are lamenting over it and losing faith. In In Rainbows, we accept it and trudge forward nonetheless. This is the story of a band that grew up and got comfortable, as much as they could, living in a world in which they felt they did not belong.

That leads me to the second reason why “Kid A” holds such a revered position with me. “Kid A” is about not belonging. It’s about losing one’s individuality and identity in a world consumed by consumerism, by popular culture, by all of the trappings of modernity. It’s about being drowned out in the claptrap. It’s about feeling invisible and the erasure of self. And it’s about disappearing completely.

The combination of the tracks, “Everything In Its Right Place;” “The National Anthem” with its blaring cacophonous wonder; “How To Disappear Completely,” with a swirl of strings and falsetto; “Optimistic;” “Idioteque;” “Morning Bell” and “Motion Picture Soundtrack” present a relatively cohesive and bleak musical aesthetic of one who is lost in the modern collective, never to be found.

Finally, I come to the album’s final song, “Motion Picture Soundtrack,” a devastating — devastating — song, with the accompanying video, that never fails to send chills up and down my spine.

The speaker in the song, presumably Thom Yorke or a character of his creation, is addressing his unrequited love and describing how desperate he is for her:

Red wine and sleeping pills

Help me get back to your arms

Cheap sex and sad films

Help me get where I belong

She interjects and says, “I think you’re crazy, maybe” and in the beginning of the video for the song, the words, “I’d really like to help you,” are etched into the sky, as if to suggest that the subject of this guy’s affections really cares for him but nonetheless sees how desperate he has become and must stay away. The music video for the song, which I watched over and over ad infinitum in my Mr. Knickerbocker days, pans through the bleak “Kid A” artwork landscape as if it was a real place. The camera then changes to a wintry scene in which a person is laying in the snow and another person, presumably the subject of the speaker’s forlorn desires, is gingerly walking away from the dying man as frozen precipitation cascades down.

Thus, the one thing that matters above all other more cerebral concerns — philosophy or statements about societal status or individuality — is love, but even in that, the speaker feels lost, alone, isolated and abandoned. What “Kid A” lacks in comfort or optimism — despite a song that is actually titled “Optimistic” — it makes up for in emotion, power and a coherent aesthetic. This album, and knowing that others have struggled with feeling small, alienated and lost by circumstances or by the culture, has helped me through many a dark day and because of that, “Kid A” will always hold a treasured place in my heart.

Lost Between the Notes: My Top 10 Album Reviews, Part 2

If we both stand with absent eyes / And think about the oceans, watch ’em dry / We can see far to the other side / It’s you and I forever, we don’t have to hide — Hum, “Little Dipper”

***

My friend and I were on the phone one Sunday night in 1995 watching MTV’s “120 Minutes” when we saw a guy behind a guitar who looked a little like myself eyeglasses, messy and slightly wavy hair, an unkempt button up shirt with a white T-shirt underneath. He was softly playing a clean electric guitar, singing the words, “She thinks she missed the train to Mars. She’s out back counting stars.” He repeated the line, but on the second time through, a thunderous crunch rained down on the word “stars,” and the distortion sustained for several seconds before fading out as ocean waves peel back from the coast. A few more bars of clean guitar before lift-off. And then, a riotous introductory drum beat cascading into a guitar riff so divine that it managed to take the listener on a journey from the depths to the heights of harmony and sound, all in the span of 4 seconds. My eyes widened. My pulse quickened. My heart, like the music, soared. My voice rose in pitch, and in a rare moment of sheer delight, I let out a Beavis-worthy screech of “Yes!”

Such was my introduction to Hum, a band that did not have a lot of commercial success and only made four albums, one of which, “You’d Prefer an Astronaut,” is pretty much the only one that is remembered, and it’s barely remembered at that. But the band, along with The Smashing Pumpkins, came to represent in my mind the best of what alternative rock and roll could be thoughtful, poetic and lyrically challenging and musically majestic. I loved the music of “Stars,” the dynamic range and the confluence of Matt Talbott’s mellow voice with the circling distortion and drums, but it was the imagery of the song that really captured my imagination as a teenager:

I thought she’d be there holding daisies, she always waits for me
She thinks she missed the train to Mars, she’s out back counting stars
I found her out back sitting naked looking up and looking dead
A crumpled yellow piece of paper, with seven nines and tens

That paints a picture in my mind of a girl sitting in the backyard under the stars scribbling something, perhaps an indecipherable something, on a yellow legal pad. I don’t know, and still don’t know, what it meant to me then or what it means to me now, but I do know that it’s a stark and enduring image. Lyrics such as these, spacey, full of mystery and breathed to life somewhere in the cosmos, punctuate the entirety of “You’d Prefer an Astronaut” and much of Hum’s library, including the 1998 follow-up “Downward Is Heavenward.”

Sam Blum, with the AV Club, called Hum’s music “an adventure in exploring musical opposites:”

It could be thunderous and unrelenting, but restrained, measured, and mopey at the same time. The music could be melancholic and boisterous, but still downtrodden and catchy. Combining all of these disparate moods made the band purveyors of something bold and even genius. 

“You’d Prefer an Astronaut is only nine songs long. Normally, I would balk at a full album that is only nine tracks, but these songs cover a lot of ground musically and lyrically, running the gamut from emo-like, quiet and subdued on tracks like “The Very Old Man” and “Songs Of Farewell and Departure,” to scorchers like “The Pod” and “I’d Like Your Hair Long.”

The first song on the album, “Little Dipper,” sets the tone for a kind of space odyssey on which Hum is about to take listeners. Underneath the heavily distorted main guitar, a second guitar drones and undulates with a pulsing, hypnotic quality that lays the bedrock for Talbott’s matching drone on vocals until the end, when his voice fades with the line, “We won’t let them take you; we won’t let you die” before terminating in a swell of distortion and leading seamlessly into the wild, cosmic ride of “The Pod.”

The album’s fourth track, “Suicide Machine,” is a rich panoply of sound, of clean guitars and later, near the end of the song, heavy distortion, and bracing lyrics that tell a sad tale of loss and regret:

Sleep comes to no one else like we have falling through the ground,
Fulfilling promises of endless summer nights, I’m losing ground, you’re losing sound
Somewhere through a thousand blues a dragonfly descends with just a whisper,
“I’m lonelier than God”
And all my wishes spin the fishes in the air and every one
A different shade of you

And to the left where up is down now stands a zebra
Made of shapes of me, and silver and the sun
So bring no guilt with you up above the flat line
Let’s just hit the sky exploding into one

The eighth track, “I Hate It Too,” offers some of the clearest lyrics on the record. “I need you to give me meaning. I need you to share the view.” The song begins with Talbott’s voice and clean guitar before exploding into a wave of feedback and crashing down into heavy distortion.

The ninth track, “Songs Of Farewell and Departure,” is, without question, musically, the prettiest song on the album and one of the sweetest sentiments you are likely to hear from an alternative band or any other band:

A love song to everyone I know. Arms wide open. Here we go.

The song, like the whole album, is grounded in human emotion and poetic sentiment, but musically, it soars with feedback and harmonies that seem to pierce the night sky and was an appropriate way to end an album that was meant to transport listeners, and probably Talbott himself, to another dimension; for music alone has the power to take us places that few art forms can.

I hope this has conveyed the breadth of my appreciation and love of this album and why, of the hundreds of albums that I could have chosen for this list, it is No. 2 in my all time top albums list. “You’d Prefer an Astronaut” captured my imagination and my young teenage heart with its poetry, with its other-worldliness and with its rich musical landscapes. I hope you also come to enjoy it as much as I do. Give it a spin.

Here we go.

Lost Between the Notes: My Top 10 Album Reviews, Part 1

Before you run away from me / Before you’re lost between the notes
The beat goes round and round / The beat goes round and round — Radiohead, “Jigsaw Falling Into Place”

***

I’m taking a little break today from more serious topics to start a series in which I review my top 10 influential albums of all time. I selected these albums based on emotional impact on me personally and quality of songs from top to bottom and not necessarily commercial success. I also limited the list to one album per artist. I don’t normally get too biographical here, but I thought this series would be a good exercise — number one, to give a renewed, close listen these albums again and perhaps, pick out elements that I might have missed before either lyrically or musically, and number two, to openly reckon with my own musical past about what these songs and albums have meant to me over the years or what they still mean to me. As such, some of these entries will feel more like traditional reviews of classic albums, while others will have a more personal bent. At the very least, I hope it makes for some interesting reading. And away we go …

Top 10 albums with five honorable mentions:

  1. Counting Crows: “August and Everything After”
  2. Hum, “You’d Prefer an Astronaut”
  3. Radiohead: “Kid A”
  4. R.E.M.: “Automatic for the People”
  5. Smashing Pumpkins: “Siamese Dream”
  6. +Live+: “Throwing Copper”
  7. Death Cab for Cutie: “Plans”
  8. Our Lady Peace: “Happiness Is Not a Fish That You Can Catch”
  9. The Beatles: “Magical Mystery Tour”
  10. Pearl Jam: “Vs.”

And the best of the rest:

  • Tool: “Lateralus”
  • Alanis Morisette: “Jagged Little Pill”
  • Hootie and the Blowfish: “Cracked Rearview”
  • The Cranberries: “No Need To Argue”
  • Bush, “Sixteen Stone”

“August and Everything After

It’s hard to overstate how much of an impact Counting Crows’ breakout debut album had on my life as a teenager. If, as a younger boy in middle school or junior high, The Beatles introduced me to rock and roll music and unlocked in me an emotional side unlike anything I had experienced up to that point, Counting Crows broke me open and helped me lay bare feelings that I either didn’t know I had or didn’t know how to access. I don’t remember ever crying while listening to a song before “August and Everything After” came along, but even today, when I get a fresh listen to songs like “Anna Begins,” “Sullivan Street” or “Raining In Baltimore,” the emotional weight of the lyrics, combined with the music and the vocals of lead singer Adam Duritz, not just singing the lyrics, but feeling and embodying the lyrics and sounding almost desperate at times in his delivery, often makes me tear up all over again.

Casual music fans will certainly know the high-water tracks “Mr. Jones” and “Round Here.” Indeed, it was on the strength of “Round Here,” a quintessential Counting Crows song with a poetic and vulnerable style of songwriting, and particular the band’s performance of it on “The Late Show with David Letterman” that really jump-started their popularity when fans realized that the band, and Adam’s singing style, reached an emotional depth that only a select number of bands actually achieve.

At the time, I was coming off an interest in 1980s and early 90s country music, oldies rock and roll, Billy Joel and other videos I saw on VH1. I discovered “August and Everything After” at a crucial and impressionable time in my life, and needless to say, the album struck a chord with me because before that point, I had never come across a band or songwriter that touched me to the same depths that Duritz’s songwriting touched me. His songs seemed to get at the core of who I was and what I was struggling with in the mid-1990s, and as I grew up with the band into adulthood and matured with the band, the lyrics remained poignant as I looked back and remembered the well-worn feelings of isolation or longing or despair that troubled me as a youth, and often still trouble me.

Drawn to the emotion of Counting Crows’ music, the band, along with others like R.E.M., The Beatles and Pearl Jam, inspired me to write my own poetry or music, but more than that, the imagery of Duritz’s lyrics, even today, is perhaps responsible for my preference, some 25 years later, for the color gray or for bleak and cloudy winter days.

Tyler Clark, with Consequence of Sound, described Duritz’s various gloomy images on “August” as melancholy snow globes:

In the scenes Counting Crows conjure, the season is a perpetual state of almost-winter, the weather overcast, the time of day always slightly later than it responsibly should be. Within these melancholy snow globes, Duritz grapples with woes both private and interpersonal, lit here and there by a bedroom lamp, a neon beer sign, the dome light of a car speeding all by itself down a long, dark road. 

“August” was the second or third CD I ever owned, and I also had the cassette version for playing in the car and in the Walkman. My obsession with this band and with this album ran deep. I don’t entirely remember the content, but I once gave a school presentation on the symbolic nature of the song, “Rain King.” I remember taking the album along on at least one or two summer trips with my family and either “forcing” my parents to play it over the car speakers — they were actually kind enough to play it for me and endure my new foray into alternative rock and roll music — or listening to the album through my headphones and not so quietly singing along.

And as a lasting testament to the inspiration I drew from Counting Crows, I had taken a Sharpie and wrote the line, “In August and Everything After, I’m After Everything,” on the back of my backpack in the same font style as the album cover above. The line came from a song that wasn’t on the album and was subsequently recorded and released in January of last year, but some of the lyrical fragments were visible on the album cover, and they spoke to me, namely, the line I wrote on the backpack, “I stumbled into Washington Square,” “I’m sorry” and “You look into her eyes, and it’s more than your (heart will allow) …” I couldn’t read the rest of the line in parenthesis, but these spoke to me about regret, longing and not knowing which direction to take or whether to take any direction at all. The actual line, “In August and Everything After, I’m After Everything” meant a lot to me personally because I was a shy or reserved child and struggled, not only to meet friends, but to meet girls, and the lyric suggested a kind of pessimistic hopefulness that things might be different once school started and new opportunities to meet people would abound, in contrast to the often lonely summer months when meeting new people was less likely. Duritz was born on Aug. 1, so for him the meaning of the line may have been more literal, but for me, it was the symbolic hope of a new start, a new start that, admittedly, I didn’t quite believe in.

But I nonetheless hoped.

I’ll go through a few of the songs that had the most impact on me as a teenager. The emotional depth and weight of these selected songs, along with my opinion that the album, as a cohesive piece of art, is strong from top to bottom, is the reason why it gets No. 1 billing on this list.

Round Here

Step out the front door like a ghost
Into the fog where no one notices the
Contrast of white on white.
And in between the moon and you the angels
Get a better view of the crumbling
Difference between wrong and right

The first track of the album, “Round Here,” opens with about 20 seconds of feedback leading into the main guitar riff that sets the tone for a song that seems to be about a person who is grappling with newfound freedom and doesn’t know which direction life is going to take, as was certainly the case for me as a teenager and into my early- to- mid-20s. That person may be living on their own and away from authority figures for the first time, and thus is able to do whatever they want (“We’re never sent to bed early and nobody stays up late”) or newly separated from a partner or both. In either case, the introductory lyrics suggest a narrator who doesn’t know how to find their place in the world.

It’s difficult for me to pinpoint exactly what this song means to me in concrete terms. Like many of these songs, there isn’t a particular person or memory that comes to mind when I listen to “Round Here” today, but it’s more like a feeling, the feeling of teenage angst, the feeling of being locked inside a set of rules under someone else’s roof, the longing for liberation and the bittersweet release of finally feeling free under a vacant sky, yet weighed down by loneliness, indecision and aimlessness or depression. When I’m in the car by myself and there is no one to hear or see me, and thus no self-consciousness, I can sometimes tap into raw emotion, put myself inside the lyrics of this song, wandering through the fog and trying to find my way in life, singing these lines near the end of the song:

Round here she’s always on my mind
Round here, hey man, I got lots of time
Round here we’re never sent to bed early and nobody makes us wait

then, as the swirling feelings of sadness, malcontent and anger mix and build, I sometimes find myself virtually screaming this climax:

Round here we stay up very, very, very late (!)

Perfect Blue Buildings

Just down the street from your hotel, baby
I stay at home with my disease
And ain’t this position familiar, darling
Well, all monkeys do what they see
Help me stay awake, I’m falling …

Adam has said this song is about insomnia, but I have always personalized this track, and particularly the lyrics, “I stay at home with my disease,” to reflect the breathing problems that I dealt with most of my adult life before I received a double lung transplant in February 2017. Over time, chronic breathing problems (“I stay at home with my disease”) breaks your will and in your worst moments, makes you want to stop participating in life (“There’s a dead man trying to get out”). Couple that with social problems — having trouble making new friends or meeting people and the depression that comes with it — and sometimes, you just want to stay inside and be left alone with your “disease,” and you come to prefer the dream world (“Asleep in perfect blue buildings/Beside the green apple sea”), what life could be when you close your eyes, to what life actually is.

Anna Begins

Other than the emotions associated with losing a love or feeling the loss of a love that only existed in the imagination or dreamworld, I, again, don’t have a specific memory or idea associated with “Anna Begins,” but it’s one of four or five songs on this record, along with “Round Here,” “Sullivan Street,” “Time and Time Again” and “Raining in Baltimore” that routinely summon strong feelings in me with each new listen. One thing I have always appreciated about Counting Crows is their ability to take the listener on an emotional journey in their songs, and this song has a buildup into the final chorus that sometimes brings tears and sometimes just makes me sing at the top of my lungs with Adam, feeling the pain of loss and longing and regret alongside the character in the song.

In “Anna Begins,” it seems that Anna and the speaker are exchanging doubts about whether the relationship will work or whether they’re even “ready for this sort of thing.” At first, “when kindness falls like rain,” Anna changes her mind. Later in the song, Anna changes his mind, and he reflects on how he loves even the little things about her (“Every time she sneezes I think it’s love, and oh lord, I’m not ready for this sort of thing”),” but despite this, he holds onto his doubts. Near the end of the song, when he finally decides he is ready for a relationship with her, it’s too late, and she’s gone:

Her kindness bangs a gong
It’s moving me along and Anna begins to fade away
It’s chasing me away
She disappears and
Oh Lord, I’m not ready for this sort of thing

Time and Time Again

I wanted so badly
Somebody other than me
Staring back at me
But you were gone

This is a wasteland of a song — lonely and barren — that comforted me in some of the moments that I have felt most alone. Like so many times traveling in the car by myself on the open road either going back and forth to Boston or South Carolina, listening to this song, I could imagine myself “traveling on a freeway beneath this graveyard western sky” heading deep into the desert outside California with nothing but the sky and the setting sun as a backdrop. This reminds me of another Counting Crows song called “John Appleseed’s Lament,” where the speaker in the song personifies the sky as a girlfriend or partner that keeps him company in the absence of others:

I call the wind Maria because I do not know her face
I call the endless sky Amelia
Because she stays with me from place to place
I call the sun my love Emmanuelle
Because she cradled me in her embrace

Sullivan Street

This one speaks to me of regret in love and loss and the eventuality of knowing that a relationship, sooner or later, is going to end (“Pretty soon now, I won’t come around”) and the ensuing loneliness and despair that will follow. When the first D chord hits whenever I fire up this song, it’s like my heart begins preparing for the emotions that are about to come flooding forth in the next four minutes. In the first verse, he is thinking about driving her home and already describing the relationship or memories of the relationship as “shadows,” and in the second verse, the couple has already broken up, and she is pretending not to know him. He is pretending not to care. By the third verse, he’s describing himself as “just another rider (or lover) burned to the ground.” While I can certainly relate to the experience of driving a girl home all the while doubting that the relationship is going to last, the song’s overall aesthetic — Adam’s voice, combined with the music and lyrics — brings up deep emotions almost every time I listen.

Raining In Baltimore

This is a simple and sad song about missing someone who is far away, and the solo instrument and Adam’s pained voice add to the effect. As I understand it, the speaker is in Baltimore and his love is 3,500 miles away across the country, and he is probably not going to see her again (“What would you change if you could?”).

Nonetheless, he is feeling utterly alone without her. He needs a phone call. A raincoat. A big love. A plane ride. A sunburn. He can’t get any answers or any change; except for the rain and missing her, everything else is the same.

A Murder of One

During Counting Crows’ This Desert Life tour, I got to see Counting Crows in Toledo, Ohio. I lived in South Carolina at the time, and being obsessed with the band as I was and since Toledo was one of the closest places they were coming to where I lived that summer, I took a road trip by myself. The concert was at the Toledo Park Zoo ampitheater. During that particular tour, Adam usually screamed “Step right up!” at the beginning of “A Murder of One,” which was a cue for people in the audience to jump up and down while the rest of the introduction was played before the opening verse. Already having had my fill of beer and under normal circumstances, I probably wouldn’t have budged, but on this night, I, along with couple thousand strangers, started bouncing together in sync, as if there was no longer any real world in which to return, as if we, alone — myself, my fellow Counting Crows fans and the band — experienced life as a singular entity under that dark globe of moonlight and stars. It was one of my more memorable concert experiences.

Jim Farber has said that “August and Everything After” painted a

fully credible portrait of a young man struggling to accept himself, to find some way to be comfortable in his own skin.

And perhaps that explains, more than anything, why I took to the album and the band so much. In 1993 when the album was released, I was in transition, not just musically, but emotionally and as a person. I wasn’t very attuned to my own emotions. I didn’t have great self-esteem, and I had trouble meeting people, especially girls. I didn’t know who I wanted to be, and I was unsure of where I was headed. I didn’t know how I felt about life or that it was even OK to have feelings or to express them as a boy. Even if I sometimes felt alone in life, I somehow felt less alone when I hit play on the album with the knowledge that someone else, somewhere, had experienced similar feelings. In “August” and in Duritz’ lyrics, I found that it was acceptable to have and express deep emotional feelings. Like I suppose many others have in my situation, as impressionable teenagers just beginning to dabble in a new world, a newly discovered amalgamation of poetry and song, I found a kind of kindred spirit in Duritz and the work of Counting Crows, and I found a voice, even if it was someone else’s, in music and meaning that would inspire me to create my own for decades to come.

In August and everything after, I was after everything.

The knife-edge: Personal note

To the dumb question “Why me?” the cosmos barely bothers to return the reply: “Why not?”
— Christopher Hitchens, “Mortality”

***

Thus, convinced of the wholly human origin of all that is human, a blind man eager to see who knows that the night has no end, he is still on the go. The rock is still rolling.

I leave Sisyphus at the foot of the mountain! One always finds one’s burden again. But Sisyphus teaches the higher fidelity that negates the gods and raises rocks. He too concludes that all is well. This universe henceforth without a master seems to him neither sterile nor futile. Each atom of that stone, each mineral flake of that night filled mountain, in itself forms a world. The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy. — Albert Camus, “The Myth of Sisyphus”

***

I don’t write about myself very much on here, and indeed, since beginning of this site in 2008 — covering nearly 1,500 posts — I can probably count on one hand the number of times I have written about my personal life, much less about my own health.

That said, I may now be coming to a crossroads in life, whereby I have to make a decision that could impact my future, for better or worse — I won’t know which until the die has been cast — and affect my ability to continue writing, newspapering and reading, etc., and most important of all, being here for my family.

Long story short, I am in need of a lung transplant stemming from complications related to a lengthy hospital stay as a baby. The disease could have formed by aspirating mineral oil into my lungs, from several bouts of severe childhood pneumonia or some combination of both. But the cause matters little at this point, and reality is all that’s left. The reality is that four years ago when I moved to my current home in Tennessee and began seeing a lung doctor here for the first time, the pulmonologist said I needed a lung transplant “yesterday” after looking at my breathing and heart exams, and after another round of tests just in June of 2015, one surgeon said I was living on a “knife-edge” (Thanks, Doc) given the critical nature of my condition. The good news is that I have been stable at 15 percent lung capacity for four years or longer; the bad news, of course, is that I am at 15 percent lung capacity. I could get into what the means for me on a daily basis, but it’s equal parts boring and dreary, so I’ll spare you and me.

I was officially diagnosed with COPD as a teenager but have lived with it since I was a child. I am now 38. I may take more time later to explore the philosophical implications of all of this and attempt to outline how I have dealt with this reality emotionally and mentally over the years, particularly since throwing off the last vestiges of religion in 2008-09, but for now, I wanted to let folks who may not follow me on Facebook know what’s going on and how you can help if you are so inclined.

Briefly, here is where I am at in the process of trying to get the transplant. Within the last couple months, I received approval from the insurance company to get a medical evaluation at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center and will be heading to Pennsylvania next week for a series of tests and consultations. Because of other health issues, I was previously turned down for a transplant at both Vanderbilt and Duke.

The hospital in Pittsburgh looks promising because they have experience treating people with my particular set of complications. If accepted, I will most likely have to leave work for awhile, move to Pittsburgh and live there for several weeks or months before the surgery and then hang around for 3-6 more months after the procedure in recovery.

Needless to say, between relocating, the surgery, medicine, post-op care, etc., this is an expensive proposition. A good friend of mine took it upon himself to set up a GoFundMe account on me and my family’s behalf to help shoulder the burden of these costs in anticipation that at some point down the road I would be able to get on “the list.”

Hopefully that time is approaching, but regardless, I appreciate the support many have already given, and if nothing else, I am at least looking forward to the extra reading time several (more) stultifying days shuffling from clinic to clinic might afford. I will provide more information as it is forthcoming.

Here is the link to the GoFundMe page for those who are interested in contributing. The page also contains more background on my medical history. Thanks for taking the time to read this.

Jeremy

[Cover photo credit: chevyhax @ DeviantArt]

Completed reading list: 2011-2015

Since at least 2011, I have, along with a former co-worker, kept a list of books completed each year, along with dates, the number of pages per book and the number of pages per year. My cohort has since changed jobs and moved to a different state (as have I), so we haven’t really continued what I previously dubbed as our friendly office read-off between the two of us, but I have continued my own list. Here’s a brief recap: In 2012, I read about 5,000 pages, and in 2013, the total came to 7,616. Last year, I managed 7,925 pages.

This year, since I haven’t had the influence of Blake in my ear five days a week in quite awhile — he seemed to inspire me to read more nonfiction — I have reverted, if “reverted” is the right word, to my old ways of reading more fiction than history, but I still mixed in several substantive nonfiction works. My favorite nonfiction book for 2015 was “Ratification” by Pauline Maier (my second reading), and in fiction, my pick is “O Lost” by Thomas Wolfe, which is the unabridged version of “Look Homeward, Angel,” the epic semiautobiographical work set in a fictionalized Asheville, N.C.

The reason I have continued keeping a detailed list of books, including dates and page counts is because it challenges me to try to read more each year, and I can track how specific interests have changed over time. Following is my list for this year — I just finished my last book today — and for posterity’s sake, I’ll go ahead and post lists for the previous four years, with page totals, completion dates, etc.

2015

1. “Game of Thrones” Book II by George R.R. Martin; started November 2014; did not finish by Dec. 31; 194 pages in 2015.
2. “Demons” by Fyodor Dostoevsky; started Jan. 10, 2014; finished Jan. 25; 681 pages.
3. “Dark Bargains: Slavery, Profits, and the Struggle for the Constitution” by Lawrence Goldstein; started Jan. 21; finished Jan. 31; 195 pages.
4. “Ratification” by Pauline Maier; started Jan. 31; finished Feb. 25; 768 pages.
5. “The Ghost Writer” by Phillip Roth; started Feb. Feb. 21; finished Feb. 24 (?); 131 pages.
6. “Giants” by John Stauffer; started Feb. 28; finished March 14; 314 pages.
7. “Dreams from My Father” by Barack Obama; started March; finished early April; 442 pages.
8. “The Call of Cthulhu” by H.P. Lovecraft; started April 18; finished April 29; 360 pages.
9. “Blindness” by Jose Saramago; started about April 30; finished May 4; 326 pages.
10. “American Gospel: God, the Founding Fathers and the Making of a Nation; started May 5; finished May 10; 250 pages.
11. “Underworld” by Don DeLillo; started May 10; June 6; 830 pages.
12. “Between the World and Me” by Ta-Nehisi Coates; started Aug. 15; finished Aug. 16; 98 pages.
13. “Game of Thrones: A Storm of Swords” (Book III) by George R.R. Martin; started June 6; finished Aug. 30; 1,261 pages.
14. “The Selfish Gene” by Richard Dawkins; started Aug. 23; finished Sept. 13; 368 pages.
15. “O Lost” by Thomas Wolfe; started Sept. 6; finished Oct. 22; 662 pages.
16. “The Secret History” by Donna Tartt; started late October; finished Dec. 6; 559 pages.
17. “Flags in the Dust” by William Faulkner; started Dec. 20; finished Dec. 31; 433 pages.

Total: 7,872; average per book: 463.

2014

1. “War of the Worlds” by H.G. Wells; started Jan. 1; finished Jan. 9; 160 pages.
2. “House of Leaves” by Mark Z. Danielewski; started Jan. 3; finished Jan. 29; 662 pages.
3. “All On Fire” by Henry Mayer; started Jan. 30; finished March 9; 632 pages.
4. “The Planets” by Dava Sobel; started March 10; finished March 17; 231 pages.
5. “Hamilton, Adams, Jefferson” by Darren Staloff; started March 17; finished April 6; 361 pages.
7. “The Captured: A True Story of Abduction by Indians on the Texas Frontier” by Scott Zesch; started April 9; finished April 20; 300 pages.
8. “The Pillars of the Earth” by Ken Follet; started March 16; finished May 25; 973 pages.
9. “Letter to a Christian Nation” by Sam Harris; started May 25; finished May 26; 114 pages.
10. “A Manuel for Creating Atheists” by Peter Boghossian; started (?); finished in April; 280 pages.
11. “Beyond the River” by Ann Hagedorn; started late April; finished May 27; 279 pages.
12. “The Story of Edgar Sawtelle” by David Wroblewski; started June 1 (?); finished July 22; 640 pages.
13. “Novus Ordo Seclorum” by Forrest McDonald; started July 23; finished summer 2014; 293 pages.
14. “Possession” by A.S. Byatt; started September; finished Sept. 27; 555 pages.
15. “Needful Things” by Stephen King; started summer 2014; finished Oct. 5; 736 pages.
16. “Lolita” by Vladimir Nabokov; started October 2014; finished October 2014; 309 pages.
17. “Game of Thrones” Book I by George R.R. Martin; started November 2014; finished Dec. 11; 862 pages.
18. “Intruders in the Dust” by William Faulkner; 227 pages.
19. “Game of Thrones” Book II by George R.R. Marti; started November 2014; did not finish by Dec. 20; 611 pages.

Total: 7,925; average per book: 417.

2013

1. “Cleopatra: A Life” by Stacy Schiff; started Jan. 1; finished Jan. 20; 324 pages.
2. “Reconstruction” by Eric Foner; started Jan. 21 (?); finished March 31; 612 pages.
3. “The Oedipus Cycle” by Sophocles; finished April 7; 251 pages.
4. “Why I Am Not A Christian” by Bertrand Russell; started March; finished April 7; 259 pages.
5. “The Portable Nietzsche,” edited and translated by Walter Kaufmann; started April 6; finished May 6; 687 pages.
6. “Absalom, Absalom!” by William Faulkner; started May 7; finished June 5; 303 pages.
7. “The History of White People” by Nell Irvin Painter; started May 7; finished June 29; 396 pages.
8. “Judgment Days” by Nick Kotz; started July 20; 434 pages.
9. “Big Chief Elizabeth” by Giles Milton; started July 20; finished Aug. 16; 344 pages.
10. “The Fiery Trial” by Eric Foner; started Aug. 14; finished Sept. 8; 336 pages.
11. “The Negro Classics” by Booker T. Washington, W.E.B. Dubois and James Weldon Johnson; started Sept. 28; finished Oct. 4; 511 pages.
12. “V.” by Thomas Pynchon; started Sept. 8; finished Sept. 28; 533 pages.
13. “Half Slave and Half Free” by Bruce Levin; started Oct. 4; finished 6; 255 pages.
14. “The Dante Club” by Matthew Pearl; started Oct. 5; finished Oct. 10; 380 pages.
15. “Six Women of Salem” by Marilynne K. Roach; started Oct. 13; finished Oct. 26; 400 pages.
16. “God and Gold: Britain, America, and the Making of the Modern World” by Walter Russell Mead; started Oct. 27; finished Nov. 13; 413 pages.
17. “Vineland” by Thomas Pynchon.; started Nov. 15; finished Dec. 1; 385 pages.
18. “Go Down, Moses” by William Faulkner; started Dec. 1; finished Dec. 11; 383 pages.
19. “The Time Machine” by H.G. Wells; started Dec. 9; finished Dec. 13; 104 pages.
20. “Morgan: American Financier” by Jean Strouse; started Dec. 14; finished Dec. 31; 689 pages.

Total: 7,616; average per book: 381.

2012

1. “Grant” by Jean Edward Smith; finished late January; 428 pages (628 total, 200 pages read in 2011).
2. “The Killer Angels” by Michael Shaara; finished Feb. 12; 374 pages.
3. “General Lee’s Army: From Victory To Collapse” by Joseph Glatthaar; 475 pages.
4. “This Mighty Scourge” by James McPherson; 272 pages.
5. “State of Denial” by Bob Woodward; finished April 2; 491 pages.
6. “The Greatest Show On Earth” by Richard Dawkins; started late March; finished May 13; 437 pages.
7. “Madison and Jefferson” by Andrew Burstein and Nancy Isenberg; started May 16; finished July 21; 644 pages.
8. “From the Temple to the Castle” by Lee Morrissey; started May 13; finished July 22; 144 pages.
9. “Lyndon B. Johnson and American Liberalism” by Bruce Scheulman; started mid-July; finished Aug. 19; 245 pages.
10. “You Can’t Go Home Again” by Thomas Wolfe; started Aug. 19; finished Oct. 10; 743 pages.
11. “Grant and Sherman” by Charles Flood; started Oct. 10; finished Nov. 7; 402 pages.
12. “The American Civil War” by John Keegan; started Aug. 19; finished Dec. 31.

Total: 5020; average per book: 418.

2011

1. “Positivist Republic: Auguste Comte and the Reconstruction of American Liberalism, 1865-1920” by Gillis Harp; 264 pages.
2. “Letter to a Christian Nation” by Sam Harris (reread); 114 pages.
3. “John Brown, Abolitionist: The Man Who Killed Slavery, Sparked the Civil War, and Seeded Civil Rights” by David S. Reynolds; 592 pages.
4. “The Alchemist” by Paulo Coelho; 165 pages.
5. “Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life” by George Eliot; 794 pages.
6. “1491;” 403 pages.
7. “Thomas Jefferson Vs. Religious Oppression;” 150 pages.
8. “Night” by Elie Weisel; 120 pages.
9. “1421: The Year China Discovered America” by Gaven Menzies; finished in the spring; 491 pages.
10. “From Sea to Shining Sea: From the War of 1812 to the Mexican War, the Saga of America’s Expansion” by Robert Leckie; finished in late spring; 623 pages.
11. “The Religious Life of Thomas Jefferson” by Charles B. Sanford; finished in summer; 179 pages.
12. “Tried by War: Abraham Lincoln as Commander in Chief” by James McPherson; finished in summer; 384 pages.
13. “Slave Religion: The ‘Invisible Institution in the Antebellum South” by Albert Raboteau; finished in summer; 321 pages.
14. “Lyndon Johnson and the Great Society” by John Andrew III; finished in August; 199 pages.
15. “Union 1812: The Americans who Fought the Second War of Independence” by A.J. Langguth; finished Sept. 7; 409 pages.
16. “Ratification: The People Debate the Constitution, 1787-1788” by Pauline Maier; finished Oct. 2; 489 pages.
17. “The Federalist Papers” by Madison, Hamilton and Jay; finished Oct. 30; 527 pages.
18. “Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism” by Susan Jacoby; 370 pages.
19. “The Theory of the Leisure Class” by Thorstein Veblen; 400 pages.
20. “Erewhon” by Samuel Butler; 260 pages.
21. “The Anti-Federalists: Critics of the Constitution 1781-1788” by Jackson Turner Main; 286 pages.
22. “Grant” by Jean Edward Smith; 200 pages, (628 total, 428 in 2012).

Total: 7,740; average per book: 352.

Total since 2011: 36,173.

Some light housekeeping

As you can see, I have made some rather drastic changes to the look and feel of this blog.

After about seven years — seven years! — of more or less the same look to the site, I thought this would be a good time for an overhaul, and this decision was, admittedly, quickened by the fact that my previous theme was apparently causing some explained problems by which I could no longer access the administration area of the site. As I looked into this issue further, I learned that my old WordPress theme, the aptly named “Journalist” — since I happen to be one by day — was heavily modified by myself on this blog, was not even available anymore.

Thus, I had to scrap most of the old design. In doing away with the large banner across the top and going with virtually no banner at all, a marvel concept I know, I attempted to go with a less is more approach, and I really liked this elegant theme and subsequently tweaked it a bit to fit my particular needs.

One of the main differences in this theme is that it supplies room for a “featured image” for each post, which are thumbnail images that somehow related to the post topic. With my previous theme, which I literally used for years and years, I had no need to use WordPress’ “featured image” option. As such, I will try to add as many “featured” images as I can to older posts from earlier this year, but in general, postings beyond a few weeks will not utilize this feature.

People manually going back through the archives using the page links at the bottom of the site might find some blank spaces as they scroll the list of posts, but other than that minor issue, websites on Google are usually indexed by each individual posts, so readers who access this site from there or any other search engine will see the original posts as they were intended.

If you have any thoughts good or bad on the new design, feel free tweet @ourdailytrain.

Top posts of 2014

Better late than never! Here is a collection of ODT’s best posts from the last year:

Sye Ten Bruggencate versus a ham sandwich (Dec. 23)— I have to say, after hearing Sye Ten Bruggencate in several “debates” and learning more about this bizarre branch of Christian apologetics called presuppositionalism, I have to say he and his ilk make St. Augustine look like Friedrich Nietzsche. Case in point …

John 3:16 revisited (Dec. 22) — How much did God really love the world? A quick revisiting of the story will show that either a) not all that much and quite possibly the converse of that or b) he had good intentions that somehow went awry as soon as the serpent showed up in the garden, an option that itself belies the very nature of an all-knowing, all-powerful God. …

Anita Sarkeesian and violence against women in video games (Nov. 14) — More than a year has passed since I have commented at any length on feminism and the issue of gender equality because frankly, the blog/YouTube wars and constant bickering between feminists, the men’s rights crowd and those who are somewhere in between made my head hurt. …

Affleck, Harris and the ‘liberal’ response to Islam (Oct. 10) — I’ve always thought of Affleck as a sharp and thoughtful guy, but based on this he seems to me to represent the kind of weak-kneed, truly bleeding heart liberal of GOP folk lore who has little understanding of the real world and just wants everyone to play nice and not criticize anything or anyone lest we be called racists or bigots. …

Outfoxed again and again (Aug. 27) — I wouldn’t care whatsoever if FOX News just came out and said to their audience that they were a biased news organization with a clear agenda of castigating President Barack Obama, the Democratic Party and all progressives at every opportunity. At least that would be honest. …

Debunking theistic evolution (Aug. 18) — A common misconception floating about among Christians is that scientists, freethinkers and others “believe” in evolution the same way they believe in God or divine providence, and sometimes we slip into the misleading language in this way to describe our perception that evolution is a real process. Of course, this misunderstanding is essentially based on skewed semantics, as the word, “believe,” can be used to mean both something that a person takes on faith and a disputed piece of information that a person chooses to accept against the alternatives. …

On Sam Harris’ controversial essay on Israel (Aug. 5) — For all the intense criticism that has been hurled against neuroscientist Sam Harris for his recent essay, “Why Don’t I Criticize Israel?,” I think a lot of his naysayers, including Andrew Sullivan, P.Z. Myers, A Million Gods blog and others, missed the larger point. …

Who deserves to sit at the ‘adult table?’ (June 18) — I really wasn’t going to comment on the recent disagreement that seems to have erupted among folks in the online atheist community. …

Apologetic logic (April 15) — I’m glad this guy readily admits that believers’ “proof” in the afterlife amounts to nothing more than “clues” and “circumstantial evidence” because he sure did whiff on the rest of his argument, issuing one fallacy after another …

The Abrahamic dilemma (March 6) — Twitter was all a-bluster this week with a hoax — what a surprise? — about Ray Comfort and the story of Abraham sacrificing his son for God. A person named Martin Roberts supposedly asked Comfort whether he would be willing, like Abraham in the Bible, to kill his son to show his devotion. …

The failed Tea Party experiment (Feb. 12) — I’ve been writing about the Tea Party’s lunacies on here since the spring of 2009 (Here is my first substantive post about it). As I’ve tracked the trajectory of this experiment in political unrest, I think it’s safe to say the party is all but toast at this point, and here’s why. …

God, capriciousness and the 1 percent (Jan. 5) — The writer over at Skepticism First has proposed an interesting argument against the existence of God by supposing that we imagine a world in which Hurricane Katrina in all its fury actually killed 1 percent fewer people. …

Office read-off 2013

Below are the results of the 2013 office read-off between Blake and myself. Blake’s details are listed as page count, publication year and date completed. Details for my list are shown by the start and finish date and page count. I have provided links for the works we thought were the strongest.

Blake

  1. “George Washington’s War” — Robert Leckie, 660, 1992, 1/19
  2. Beyond the River” — Ann Hagedorn, 279, 2002, 3/17
  3. “The Man Who Would Be King” — Ben Macintyre, 291, 2004, 4/13
  4. The Captured” — Scott Zesch, 300, 2004, 4/20
  5. “Selling the President, 1920: Lasker & Harding” — John A. Morello, 102, 2001, 4/23
  6. Nellie Taft: Unconventional First Lady” — Carl Sferrazza Anthony, 411, 2005, 5/8
  7. “Eisenhower” — Alan Wykes, 157, 1982, 5/11
  8. Hamilton, Adams, Jefferson: The Politics of Enlightenment and the American Founding” — Darren Staloff, 361, 2005, 5/26
  9. “Means of Ascent” — Robert A. Caro, 412, 1990, 6/4
  10. “Words from the White House” — Paul Dickson, 179, 2013l, 6/6
  11. “Grover Cleveland: Study in Character” — Alyn Brodsky, 456, 2000, 6/17
  12. “Renegade: The Making of a President” — Richard Wolffe, 334, 2009, 

    6/28

  13. The Hunting of the President” — Conason and Lyons, 373, 2000, 7/11
  14. “Rothstein” — David Pietrusza, 387, 2003, 7/18
  15.  “A Good Life” — Ben Bradlee, 499, 1995, 7/26
  16. “Dominion of Memories” — Susan Dunn, 224, 2007, 8/3
  17. “Old Hickory” — Burke Davis, 386, 1977, 8/11
  18. “Presidency of James Earl Carter” — Burton I. Kaufman, 214, 1993, 8/18
  19. “The Kennedy Brothers” — Richard D. Mahoney, 377, 1999, 8/24
  20. “Founding Myths” — Ray Raphael, 277, 2004, 8/31
  21. “Island of Vice” — Richard Zacks, 366, 2012, 9/12
  22. “Last of His Kind” — Charles Robbins, 153, 1979, 9/19
  23. “Fraud of the Century” — Roy G. Morris Jr., 256, 2003, 10/1
  24. “The Devil in the White City” — Erik Larson, 390, 2002, 12/29

Jeremy

  1. Cleopatra: A Life” by Stacy Schiff, started Jan. 1, finished Jan. 20. – 324
  2. “Reconstruction” by Eric Foner, started Jan. 21 – 612, finished March 31
  3. “The Oedipus Cycle” by Sophocles, finished April 7. – 251
  4. “Why I Am Not A Christian” by Bertrand Russell, started March, finished April 7 – 259
  5. “The Portable Nietzsche,” edited and translated by Walter Kaufmann, started April 6, finished May 6 – 687
  6. “Absalom, Absalom!” by William Faulkner, started May 7, June 5 – 303
  7. “The History of White People” by Nell Irvin Painter, started May 7, finished June 29 – 396
  8. Judgment Days” by Nick Kotz, started July 20 – 434
  9. “Big Chief Elizabeth” by Giles Milton. Started July 20, finished Aug. 16 – 344
  10. The Fiery Trial” by Eric Foner – Started Aug. 14, finished Sept. 8 – 336
  11. “The Negro Classics” by Booker T. Washington, W.E.B. Dubois and James Weldon Johnson. Started Sept. 28, finished Oct. 4 – 511
  12. “V.” by Thomas Pynchon. – Started Sept. 8, finished Sept. 28 – 533
  13. “Half Slave and Half Free” by Bruce Levin – Started Oct. 4, finished 6 – 255
  14. “The Dante Club” by Matthew Pearl – Started Oct. 5, finished Oct. 10 – 380
  15. “Six Women of Salem” by Marilynne K. Roach – Started Oct. 13, finished Oct. 26 – 400
  16. “God and Gold: Britain, America, and the Making of the Modern World” by Walter Russell Mead – Started Oct. 27, finished Nov. 13 – 413
  17. “Vineland” by Thomas Pynchon – Started Nov. 15, finished Dec. 1 – 385
  18. “Go Down, Moses” by William Faulkner – Started Dec. 1, finished Dec. 11 – 383
  19. “The Time Machine” by H.G. Wells, Started Dec. 9, finished Dec. 13 – 104
  20. Morgan: American Financier” by Jean Strouse, Started Dec. 14, finished Dec. 31

Total page count — Blake: 7,844, Jeremy: 7,616.

Washington: The path to progress

As I said a couple days ago, I have been reading “Three Negro Classics,” which includes Booker T. Washington’s “Up From Slavery.” Unlike W.E.B. Dubois’ “The Souls of Black Folk,” Washington’s work reads more like a straight biography with some insight dotted throughout, whereas as I would regard Dubois’ “The Souls of Black Folk” more as a work of art in its eloquence and emotive power.

For his part, Washington caught a quite a bit of heat in his day for emphasizing cooperation among the races and for not coming down hard enough on the racist South. An editor of the Boston Guardian, William Monroe Trotter, even dubbed him a traitor to his race.

It’s hard to say whether Washington, in his tireless work to support mutual respect and solidarity among whites and blacks in America, was way ahead of his time in the late 19th century and early 20th century or merely an idealist. In any case, here is what I regard as the most profound statement from “Up From Slavery” and one that we are still striving toward to this day:

In my early life I used to cherish a feeling of ill will toward any one who spoke in bitter terms against the Negro, or who advocated measures that tended to oppress the black man or take from him opportunities for growth in the most complete manner. Now, whenever I hear any one advocating measures that are meant to curtail the development of another, I pity the individual who would do this. I know that the one who makes this mistake does so because of his own lack of opportunity for the highest kind of growth. I pity him because I know that he is trying to stop the progress of the world, and because I know that in time the development and the ceaseless advance of humanity will make him ashamed of his weak and narrow position. One might as well try to stop the progress of a mighty railroad train by throwing his body across the track, as to try to stop the growth of the world in the direction of giving mankind more intelligence, more culture, more skill, more liberty, and in the direction of extending more sympathy and more brotherly kindness.