Diswitted

Just a quick post–I installed iTunes 8, with the Genius system that acts like LastFM, giving recommendations based on selected tracks in your music library. Decided to give it a go with some Joanna Newsom: Selecting “Sadie,” for example, gives the standard New Weird America bunch (Devendra Banhart, Vashti Bunyan, Animal Collective) and some I’m not familiar with and will have to check out.

It’s a similar story for the other Newsom songs I’ve tried… except my favorite. “Colleen” gives no results. iTunes is unable to identify it. May just be a bug, or maybe iTunes just can’t find anything else like it. I’ll prefer to believe the latter for now.

More in-depth posting on Joanna Newsom forthcoming.

So, it’s time to address the second part of this blog’s subtitle: indie music. However, just as the ‘transcendentalism’ bit is too specific for the actual content, so is the ‘indie’ label. The music I talk about here will occupy a wide and fuzzy area around the centre of the Venn diagram where indie music and transcendentalist/romantic literature intersect.

Let’s par that down: I’m talking about indie folk here, and the genres of its ancestors.

The best way to semi-define the scope of music dealt with on this blog, I’ll present a 2-disc mix of songs that I associate with the same concepts of nature and self-examination inherent in the literary genres discussed in previous posts. The first is actually a mix I put together almost two years ago for an earlier incarnation of the blog. The second will be new material I’ve discovered since then. I’ll explain each track with a small blurb, but specific connections to the wider theme will have to wait for future posts. For now, just hit iTunes, start downloading the tracks that sound interesting, and enjoy.

(Adjacent photo of Sam Beam in concert 9-Feb-08 by Tristan Loper, licensed under Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 2.5).

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Diswitted is one of those great, old-fashioned words that carry too many awesome connotations to let molder in dictionaries of archaic and provincial terms. So when I first read it a few weeks ago in a Pitchfork article, which also noted its connection to a notable 19th century transcendentalist, I had the perfect title for a blog about random topics involving transcendentalism and indie music.

Diswitted is so archaic and obscure it’s not listed in my go-to sources for researching language, like the Online Etymology Dictionary. The earliest use I can find of the word is a 1627 poem by Michael Drayton, called “Nymphidia” (Drayton, p. 173). (Adjacent public domain etching of Drayton is dated 1619 and attributed to William Hole, taken from Wikimedia Commons). Drayton was pretty well connected among the Elizabethan literary set–he was a contemporary of Shakespeare and John Donne among others, and there is some evidence that he was friends with the former, or at least hung with him on occasion–apparently, Drayton was one of the merrie-makers at a notorious drinking binge which lead to Willy Shakes contracting a mortal fever…

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Free Spirit
ecstatic poem by J. Verdant, 2004

see out the window. tear the blinds away first,
dash thy screen from its casement and crack the
fuck out of the glass. now crawl through and see

the pale buds scream in birth-agony as your hands
deliver them from Her. worms writhe on the surface of
sky-drenched soil and wriggle and writhe and flail and scream
out to match the trees—joyful despite flocks of birds picking them off one by one,
mindful that in a desert, the surface alone would kill them.

shadows dance on the mountainside and you within them
dodging the laughing Moon nipping at your heels, then Her shining hands
as She collapses graze, and the spotlights from your eyes intersect.
Her grip tightens, clutches, strengthens, burns, devours, becomes god to a god, frees,
Her limbs burst forth and tickle your face with their leaves

and petals of Flora fall as spinning you rise through a canopy of green,
a calliope of mottled sun plays across you and spinning are carried higher.
smell fragrance as fresh greenery bursts in a shower of dew,
hear your breath leave. taste Her tongue running across.
brush leaves She has warmed.

now crawl through and see. She cleans up Her hedgerow.
She expects you to die for Her. don’t
expect Her to cry for thee:

birds and worms do not agree.

(The adjacent image is a 1913 painting titled “Flora,” by French painter Louise Abbéma. Public domain image from Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:L._Abbema_Flora.jpg.)

“Free Spirit” by J. Verdant is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License.