#29: The Gap
Over the weekend I had trouble getting on with it. I did some good work on my dissertation prospectus during the week but it didn’t translate to momentum, unfortunately, and I could not find my way back there during my precious free hours on Saturday and Sunday. It is a mental block of mine, I’m finding. The fear. The scope of it can get on top of you. I imagine myself talking for the length of 250 pages. Some days I can barely get through with the sound of my voice in my own head, so you can imagine the problem.
///
On Saturday morning I woke up early — Jonathon asked me I had seen any of his work shirts. “In the dryer.” I open my phone and Tim Kinsella has posted a little story about the Joan of Arc record Eventually, All at Once, released 20 years ago the day before. He put the album in the bottom spot when he ranked all of the Joan of Arc records in 2018, and it’s not even on streaming, so it was kind of surprising to see him acknowledge it at all. It is on Bandcamp, though, so I let it play on my phone on the pillow to the right of my head as I closed my eyes.
The Bandcamp page calls this the “dead dad record” — it was recorded directly after the passing of Kinsella’s father, a coping process. I can see why he might have ranked it so low. It probably wasn’t an easy experience, and the record is shockingly normal for Joan of Arc, who usually delight in deconstruction and opacity.
But the music is beautiful, subtle. It got me in a mood. I went downstairs and listened to my Live in Chicago, 1999 LP, which Jonny recently gifted me, a surprise. Then I listened to my LP of The Gap, which I found years ago online for a good price. The Gap is the one the world rejected. It famously got a 1.9 from Pitchfork on release, seeming to deeply offend everyone around with its supposed pretension.
It is kind of a strange record, to be fair. It stutters and veers, digresses and refuses to circle back, resolve. Recorded in 1999, Kinsella talks about how he was fascinated with the power of new digital recording tools, particularly their ability to allow for absolute silence — no tape hiss. The record is clearly a result of this preoccupation. It sounds like someone shutting themselves up in a room, quiet at their disposal, and saying, “what can I make happen here?”
Odd though it might be, the backlash is kind of quaint when you actually listen to the album. It’s not exactly noise. It’s melodic, often beautiful. Difficult, sometimes, but definitely not always. It’s a mild freakout, an insular one, a quiet one. I think it’s a cool record.
This morning I listened to So Much Staying Alive and Lovelessness, which came after The Gap and the subsequent critical/public nausea. The band tries to swing the pendulum back a bit — Kinsella calls it their “Fleetwood Mac album.” In the rank your records article, Kinsella expresses a clear distaste for this album that bleeds through his discussion of the albums around it (“I can’t believe it’s not lower”). It is somewhat more straightforward. AV Club called it “a grand step back into listenability.” Still, it’s not exactly pop music, or Cap’n Jazz (on which the Kinsellas originally made their name) for that matter.
It’s clearly not Kinsella’s desire to be direct or traditional, and the closer he gets to legibility the less he cares to revisit (at least that seemed to be the case 8 years ago, when he submitted his ranking). But not a note of his exists that isn’t at least a little bit off-kilter. I can’t really think of many records I’ve heard that sound or feel the way that So Much Staying Alive and Lovelessness or Eventually, All at Once do. These are records that invite you in, but they do something interesting with your time.
///
While I listened to Joan of Arc on Saturday I read the first 60 pages of 2666 by Roberto Bolaño. I am immediately beguiled by it and so little has actually happened. This is the exact thing I should not be doing right now, starting a 900-page book with a full-time job and a dissertation over my head. I am constantly reminded of this because the four main players in part one of the novel are literary academics with a shared, defined interest. They go to oh so many conferences.
///
When I decided to go back to school: it was during the long middle of the pandemic and I had just spent a week in a cabin in the mountains with my isolation pod. I came back home and sat on my bed and decided that I could not return to my life as it had been before. Something, everything had to change. I had been waiting for something to rupture for so long. But it would not happen to me. I had to make it happen.
While in the mountains I had received an advance stream of the new, final Joan of Arc album Tim Melina Theo Bobby. I listened to “Destiny Revision” and “Karma Repair Kit” — shifting, curious, elliptical — over and over and made a long list of programs all over the country. I didn’t tell anyone for a little bit. I felt I was doing something dangerous, irresponsible, idealistic. I had a job I could have stayed in forever, where I was making more money than I ever had in my life (still not much, still not enough, mind you). I was cutting it off, starting somewhere different, with no good reason1. I was transforming my life into a song from The Gap — halting, insular, irrational. I felt alive.
///
Graduate school is, of course, a mess, with a little while still to go. The humanities are, famously, falling apart. I have outmoded myself — I used to work in software development, now I’m in an English department, trending downward fast, everyone seems to be saying.
But these were, in fact, the right decisions. I messed everything up and it all immediately felt better. I, like Tim Kinsella, resisted the straightforward options.
Speaking of career considerations, hear “Cover Letter Song,” in which Kinsella essentially recites his resumé (“I mopped floors, I scrubbed toilets, and I wrote…”) to the sound of a trap beat. It ends abruptly after “taught a few classes,” which I find funny.
My name is Jordy Walsh, and I’m a writer based in Philadelphia. I Keep a Diary is a newsletter about music, books, and writing.