Throat-clearing
Hi!
I'm Joel! This is my email newsletter!
I have been inspired by friends and writers I admire who seem to be pushing against social media, getting back to something a little more personal and relational by starting newsletters about stuff they are working on.
What do I work on? The thing I have been mainly doing for the last ten years is academia, and most of the academic stuff I do is related to language and writing in higher education. That is my "real career." I work at a university and grade papers and stuff.
The ten years before that, my "career" felt like it was mostly about rock and roll: playing it, writing about it, listening to it. That still animates a lot of what I care (and write) about. You might have read my 2010 book Sects, Love, and Rock & Roll, which is a not very serious book about being a fan of Christian rock as a teenager in the 1990s. (I know.) I still write sometimes for magazines like Christianity Today, Geez, and Image about music-and-religion stuff, because there is still almost nothing else that interests me more.
My current long-overdue book for Cascade, which also published Sects, is called Dancing about Architecture is a Reasonable Thing to Do. It is ostensibly a book about the purpose of pop music criticism, but it's also about love, faith, and meaning. The book's main thrust is that writing about music is not the exercise in futility it has been made out to be, but is a response, an act of inspired creation, in the same way writing a song or having a conversation or baking a loaf of bread is; that there is a mysterious meaning-making impulse that drives obsessive pop-culture nitpickery, and that that impulse, driven by something like love rather than "criticality," is worth pursuing.
In part I'm starting this newsletter to let people know that this book is coming, and to try to create some accountability so I can actually finish the damn thing. In addition to this argument about what music criticism is, it will also feature writing about music and the ineffable, via pieces about bands like Stars, Luxury, Sigur Ros, Sufjan Stevens, the Weakerthans, and a handful of other artists whose music seems to get at something transcendant. These are attempts -- essayez? -- at "dancing about architecture," or really, meaning about meaning, where meaning feels both obvious and elusive. In other words, music I can't not write about.
Reasonable Things the newsletter will feature no less than this: stuff I can't not write about, in whatever form that may take. Music will feature, as will language, and writing, and perhaps occasionally baseball, just because.
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Here's a quick and easy one: last week I went to see the Mountain Goats, a band which, if you have not heard them, maybe reassess what you're doing with your life. (I made a 10-song playlist of some of my favorite songs of theirs here.) I've been listening to them off and on for the last fifteen years; this was my first time seeing them, and it was pretty incredible. John Darnielle, who's also a great novelist, writes songs that are mostly about damaged, desperate people, but that are also deeply hopeful. When Christianity Today asked me to talk about what makes this music special, I said, among other things, that the Mountain Goats' songs have "a kind of large-hearted opennness to the beauty of the world, the goodness of life and humanity, and the infinite worth of the particular."
There's also something apocalpytic about their work, I said at the time, and I feel it even more after seeing them perform "Werewolf Gimmick" and "Going Invisible 2" -- Darnielle writes a lot of songs about people at the end of their rope, and sometimes literally at the end of their lives or the end of the world, and the things that this lays bare. There's a bracing, unflinching gaze at the truth in many Mountain Goats songs.
The high point of the show for me was the band's "hit," if nerdy-ass literary indie rock bands have them, "This Year." It's just a lovely, life-affirming thing to shout "I am gonna make it/ through this year/ if it kills me!" with seven hundred other people.
Have a good week, and get in touch if there's anything you want to talk about: the lines are open.
JHH