The 46-year-old (he turns 47 on Monday) could be mistaken for just another Midwestern music lifer, forever doing the Thursday-to-Saturday club grind, resigned to living out his rock-and-roll fantasies in obscurity. This is not an original observation; as far as Tweedy’s secondary career as a character actor is concerned, “Midwestern music lifer” is his type, as evidenced by a recent guest appearances on Parks and Recreation as Scott Tanner, lead singer of Pawnee rock royalty Land Ho!“The writers said that when they pictured a washed-up rock star who used to have a band, they couldn’t stop picturing me,” Tweedy explained after leading me into Wilco’s northwest Chicago headquarters, past a long row of guitars and to a small cafeteria outfitted with a refrigerator and several cases of Mexican mineral water. “‘Why don’t we just go ahead and call him?’ [is] what they said. I was like, ‘I still have a band.’”
According to Apuleius, Pleasure is the daughter of Cupid and Psyche – of Love and the Soul, that is, a sufficiently elevated pedigree, one would have thought. Yet the British still put up a strong resistance to the idea that pleasurability might be a valid criterion in the response to literature, just as we remain dubious about the value of the ‘decorative’ in the visual arts. When Graham Greene made ‘entertainments’ a separate category from the hard stuff in his production, he rammed home the point: the difference was a moral one, a difference between reading to pass the time pleasurably – that is, trivially – and reading to some purpose.The ‘great tradition’ does not brook even the possibility of libidinal gratification between the pages as an end in itself, and F.R. Leavis’s ‘eat up your broccoli’ approach to fiction emphasises this junkfood/wholefood dichotomy. If reading a novel – for the 18th-century reader, the most frivolous of diversions – did not, by the middle of the 20th century, make you a better person in some way, then you might as well flush the offending volume down the toilet, which was by far the best place for the undigested excreta of dubious nourishment.
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“A Remark You Made”: a neglected gem from the fusion era of jazz — a little too poppy for some, but what beautiful, beautiful playing from Wayne Shorter on sax and the late, lamented Jaco Pastorius on bass, plus a brilliant keyboard solo near the end from the composer Joe Zawinul.
[gallery] Miles
[gallery] Cobb
[gallery] Chambers
[gallery] Evans
[gallery] Cannonball
[gallery] Trane
No matter the text that he’s ostensibly engaged with, Mr. Keating, like Hamlet in Stéphane Mallarmé’s wonderful description, is forever “reading in the book of himself.” This is what Keating’s namesake John Keats (referencing Wordsworth) called the “egotistical sublime.” Recently, some pioneering work in neuroscience has begun to suggest what English teachers have long known: that the power of literature is the power of alterity, creating the possibility of encountering the other in a form not easily recuperable, not easily assimilable to the self. “Imaginative sympathy,” we used to call it. To read literature well is to be challenged, and to emerge changed.Dead Poets Society Is a Terrible Defense of the Humanities. The funny thing is, I think the movie actually demonstrates some of what’s wrong with Keating’s approach, but I don’t think I’ve ever met a fan of the film who notices that.But for Keating, it’s the text (like Frost’s poem) that is changed, not the reader. He does the same thing to the Whitman poem “O Me! O Life!” that he recites to his students. Used as the voiceover for a recent iPad ad, Mr. Keating’s pep talk quotes the opening and closing lines of the poem, silently eliding the middle: “Oh me! Oh life! / of the questions of these recurring, / Of the endless trains of the faithless, of cities fill’d with the foolish, /…/ What good amid these, O me, O life? // Answer. // That you are here—that life exists and identity, / That the powerful play goes on, and you may contribute a verse.” He’s quoting from Whitman, he says, but the first line he omits is telling: “Of myself forever reproaching myself, (for who more foolish than I, and who more faithless?).” Go back and add that line to the quotation and see how it alters the whole. For Keating—and one fears, examining the scant evidence the film provides, for his students—every poem is a Song of Myself. This, then, is what’s at stake in Keating’s misreadings—I’m not interested simply in catching a fictional teacher out in an error. But he misreads both Frost and Whitman in such a way that he avoids precisely that encounter with the other, finding in poetry only an echo of what he already knows—what he’s oft thought, but ne’er so well expressed.