25 Most Influential Albums

Following Vincent's lead, I've assembled a list of the most influential albums in my life. Please note that these are not my top 25 favorite albums, though many do overlap. I plan to fill in explanations as time passes.

In descending order:

1. Bob Dylan, Blood on the Tracks

2. Neil Young, Harvest

3. Bob Dylan, Bringing it All Back Home

4. Neil Young, After the Gold Rush

5. Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel, The Best of Simon and Garfunkel

6. Jeff Buckley, Grace

7. Are You Experienced?, The Jimi Hendrix Experience

8. Bob Dylan, Blonde on Blonde

9. Bob Dylan, The Times They Are A Changin’

10. Cameron Mackintosh, Les Misérables

11. The Beatles, Rubber Soul

12. The Beatles, The White Album

13. The Grateful Dead, American Beauty

14. John Coltrane, A Love Supreme

15. Credence Clearwater Revival, Chronicle: The 20 Greatest Hits

16. The Righteous Brothers, Unchained Melody: The Very Best of the Righteous Brothers

17. Leonard Cohen, The Best of

18. David Byrne, David Byrne

19. Talking Heads, Remain in Light

20. Johnny Cash, At Folsom Prison

21. Al Green, Greatest Hits

22. Nick Drake, Pink Moon

23. Pink Floyd, Dark Side of the Moon

24. Tom Waits, Rain Dogs

25. Bonnie “Prince” Billy and Matt Sweeny, Superwolf

"Suicide's Note" -Langston Hughes

Suicide is a theme that courses throughout Langston Hughes's oeuvre, most famously perhaps in this small haiku-style poem:

Suicide's Note

The calm,
Cool face of the river
Asked me for a kiss.

I've always loved this poem. But just this morning I realized that one could read the river as a mirror of the speaker's thoughts. The speaker, contemplating suicide, looks into the river and sees his own reflection. Read in this way, the river loses its agency and becomes all the more "cool" and "calm," an unbiased but unforgiving environment. Conversely, the burden of suicide comes to rest all the more on the speaker, as he becomes both the receiver and producer of the thoughts.

For a more lighthearted take on suicide, check out Hughes's "Life is Fine."

The Winter's Tale -Shakespeare

The Winter's Tale is my favorite Shakespeare romance. No, it's not as concentrated as The Tempest, nor as crepuscular as Cymbeline, but the sheer amount of dramatic trickery and innovation makes it a real pleasure to read. My favorite scene is toward the end, when Hermione's "statue" comes to life. Leontes, Hermione's husband, comments on her “statuesque” form:

...What fine chisel
Could ever yet cut breath?

In a play which so insistently calls attention to itself as a piece of dramatic artifice, this questioning of artistic capability seems particularly poignant—especially since it comes at a time when Shakespeare is straining both the medium of theater and the genre of romance to their limits. We have already seen Time come on stage and announce that sixteen years have passed, as well as a bear chase Antigonus offstage. Now, with the resurrection of Hermione, “It is required that / You do awake your faith” and consider whether or not a chisel can cut breath.

The two hard “c”s and the “ch,” all stressed, are the dominating sounds in the line, drawing attention to the hard sounds of a chisel cutting at stone in the act of sculpting. These hard sounds counterpoise nicely the breathy “fine” and “breath,” just as these lines attempt to counterpoise the hard medium of sculpture and the lively figure of Hermione. The complicated “could ever yet” means something close to “could have ever until now,” thus opening up the possibility of a life-creating art—a possibility out of place in the first part of the play but now believable in the thoroughly romantic second half.

The question is also couched in two contexts. First, it is a question posed by Leontes to Paulina concerning the statue of Hermione. I am inclined to answer “yes” at one moment because I read just a few lines later that the breath was in fact real. I could also say “no,” since chiseling had nothing to do with her breath—she is, in fact, alive.

It is also a question being posed simultaneously by the audience to Shakespeare concerning The Winter’s Tale--that is, the play itself. Will the playwright be able to successfully create a scene in which unbelievable elements can create pathos even when the dramatic artifice is so blatantly exposed—especially to those spectators in the front row who can see the subtle movements of the boy actor playing Hermione? I am inclined to answer “yes,” since this scene has endured as a theatrical tour de force.

However, I believe the double meaning of the question also allows for a type of “no.” While “cut breath” primarily means to “shape breath,” I cannot help but hear the more sinister meaning—the possibility of a chisel taking breath away. This second meaning allows the presence of death to enter into the generically festive scene of recognition. While generic convention presses for a prevailing since of life and restoration, this final scene is overshadowed by the deaths of Antigonus and Mamillius as well as the loneliness of Paulina. Herself a figure of the artist much like Prospero, Paulina has “sculpted” a plot which has restored Hermione to life (“cut breath”) but has left both the king’s son and her husband dead (“cut breath”).

Whether life or death prevails at the end of the play is certainly as ambiguous as the statue of Hermione. Is this play, in the end, a romance or a tragedy? Is it both? Shakespeare’s careful “cutting” of The Winter’s Tale allows for ambiguous conclusions and leaves the reader or spectator questioning whether the medium of theater and the genre of romance are able to adequately contain and define this play.

The Rainbow -D.H. Lawrence

I've recently noticed a trend amongst academics: They refer to some work by Lawrence (usually Women in Love) and then follow it up by saying that The Rainbow is actually a better novel. That said, no one ever really talks about the novel itself, and few people make any mention of Lawrence when discussing "serious" modern literature--Joyce, Woolf, et al. He was not mentioned once in any of my undergraduate courses and he rarely shows up on the GRE subject test. But things seem to be changing. The Rainbow surfaces on no less than three syllabi for the Fall 2009 semester at Berkeley. So I decided to dive in myself.

I can't say I'm a big Lawrence fan. The Rainbow has been putting me to sleep for days now. The narrative lacks structure, the dialog is overwrought, and the characters (while pathetic) are just not that interesting. Still, there is something in this novel that I haven't found anywhere else in modern literature: dense, voluptuous metaphors that go down like an old right-bank Bordeaux. And like a good claret, they last for minutes. I've found myself at times enmeshed, almost mired, in a play of contradictions and unlikely combinations that takes minutes to climb out of with any sort of clarity. In the following excerpt, Tom Brangwen, a young-twenties newly-wed by turns melancholy and sanguine, visits a cathedral with his wife:

Then he pushed open the door, and the great, pillared gloom was before him, in which his soul shuddered and rose from her nest. His soul leapt, soared up into the great church. His body stood still, absorbed by the height. His soul leapt up into the gloom, into possession, it reeled, it swooned with a great escape, it quivered in the womb, in the hush and the gloom of fecundity, like seed of procreation in ecstasy.

Here Lawrence makes good on his reputation as an overtly sexualized writer. This paragraph, in fact, is part of a three-page orgy involving Tom and various altars and arches. Forget insinuation and innuendo, Tom is actually having a mystical-orgasmic experience inside of a Gothic cathedral. I had to read the scene twice just to make sure I hadn't been witnessing a steamy love scene between Tom and his wife Anna. One of my favorite passages in "literary theory" addresses this phenomenon--that is, when metaphor overtakes its subject. Listen to Kierkegaard:

But as the metaphor gains more and more ground, accommodates more and more in itself, it invites the onlooker to rest in it, to anticipate a pleasure to which restless reflection perhaps would lead one by a long detour. When the imagistic finally acquires such dimensions that all existence becomes visible in it, this is the retrograde movement toward the mythical. (The Concept of Irony)

To rephrase Søren: when metaphor overtakes its subject to the extent that it becomes the subject, we are witnessing the creation of myth. Mapping this theory of myth onto Lawrence has interesting consequences. "All existence becomes visible in it" becomes "All existence becomes visible in sex." Note also that Lawrence is not sexualizing a pastoral landscape, a raging storm or the act of pollination; he is sexualizing a church. To rephrase again: "All religion becomes visible in sex." I read this as emblematic of Lawrence's larger project, which tries to displace organized religion as a totalizing ordering system (both epistemological and metaphysical) with a more natural and vigorous sexual mythology.

Much could be written on the actual language of the passage: Why is the ecstatic moment "gloomy?" Why is the soul a "she?" What's entailed in the deliberate separation of body and soul? But I just want to briefly rest on the closing words, "like seed of procreation in ecstasy." I love this for two reasons: First, it's not a man or woman in ecstasy, but the seed itself. It 's the seed that is likened to a soul "quivering in the womb." I just love that image. Second, it's the only reversion to simile in the passage (uses "like"). Unlike Kierkegaard's concept of metaphor, which grants metaphor near totalizing power, simile's claim to validity is confined by mere appearance. However, placing this simile at the end of this paragraph firmly establishes the reader in the world of metaphor. Rather than using simile to connect us back into something concrete--such as, "like waves breaking on the shore," or "like a flower sprouting from the earth"--Lawrence circumscribes it within the broad field of the sexual metpahor. The metaphor has grown to the extent that the simile can only have referent within that imagistic system.

There's an interesting philosophical question involved here, too. One could question if metaphor truly has the power that Kierkegaard says it does. Further, suppose it does have myth-making abilitites, what is the place of myth in a world (our world) so bereft of mythology. I like to think, as a future English scholar, that there is some place for the myth of which Søren speaks. Would be interested to know what others think...

"The Circus Animals' Desertion" -W.B. Yeats

This is one of the most depressing titles in poetry, and most of the poem is similarly so. It is a late poem (literally the last poem in Last Poems). In it Yeats paints a sobering portrait of an aging artist (the ring leader and Yeats himself) profoundly disenchanted with his trade. The central problem revolves around his inability to forge a work of art (the performance or, for Yeats, a poem) out of the characters and tropes at his disposal: circus animals, stilted boys, burnished chariots, "lion and woman and Lord knows what..." Yeats was always anxious about his poetic symbolism--look at the short poem "The Coat" to see how he renounces "old mythologies" and decides that "there's more enterprise / In walking naked." I think it's crucial while reading this poem to imagine Yeats himself looking back at his own oeuvre, questioning the deployment of his own constellation of characters and tropes. Read in this way, the poem is thoroughly post-modern, a poem about writing poems.

I was most impressed by the closing strophe of this poem, but I'm posting the whole thing--it's not too long, and it's necessary if one is going to fully appreciate the stunning finale.

The Circus Animals' Desertion

I

I sought a theme and sought for it in vain,
I sought it daily for six weeks or so.
Maybe at last, being but a broken man,
I must be satisfied with my heart, although
Winter and summer till old age began
My circus animals were all on show,
Those stilted boys, that burnished chariot,
Lion and woman and the Lord knows what.

II

What can I but enumerate old themes,
First that sea-rider Oisin led by the nose
Through three enchanted islands, allegorical dreams,
Vain gaiety, vain battle, vain repose,
Themes of the embittered heart, or so it seems,
That might adorn old songs or courtly shows;
But what cared I that set him on to ride,
I, starved for the bosom of his faery bride.

And then a counter-truth filled out its play,
'The Countess Cathleen' was the name I gave it;
She, pity-crazed, had given her soul away,
But masterful Heaven had intervened to save it.
I thought my dear must her own soul destroy
So did fanaticism and hate enslave it,
And this brought forth a dream and soon enough
This dream itself had all my thought and love.

And when the Fool and Blind Man stole the bread
Cuchulain fought the ungovernable sea;
Heart-mysteries there, and yet when all is said
It was the dream itself enchanted me:
Character isolated by a deed
To engross the present and dominate memory.
Players and painted stage took all my love,
And not those things that they were emblems of.

III

Those masterful images because complete
Grew in pure mind, but out of what began?
A mound of refuse or the sweepings of a street,
Old kettles, old bottles, and a broken can,
Old iron, old bones, old rags, that raving slut
Who keeps the till. Now that my ladder's gone,
I must lie down where all the ladders start
In the foul rag and bone shop of the heart.

I only recently discovered that Yeats wrote that last line, even though it's quite famous. I became acquainted with it while working at Shakespeare and Company bookshop in Paris, where it is inscribed above one of the door frames. I think Allen Ginsberg called S&Co. "the foul rag and bone shop of the heart." A great image. Anyway, back to the poem...

In the first section, the ringmaster, "being but a broken man," is struggling between sticking to his trade (seeking a theme) or being "satisfied with [his] heart." The second section opens with a depressing revelation: "What can I but enumerate old things." I don't believe this means that he has run dry of creativity; rather, much more darkly, he is wondering whether he has ever produced anything truly original. After recalling the themes which have defined his career (by the way, these stanzas make direct references to Yeats's early work), a kernel of self-knowledge comes in the third stanza of the second section:

It was the dream itself enchanted me:
Character isolated by a deed
To engross the present and dominate memory.
Players and painted stage took all my love,
And not those things that they were emblems of.

The ringmaster is questioning the validity of the abstract ideals he has represented with the "players and painted stage." Having become enchanted by "the dream," his art became disconnected with reality to the degree that its relevance and potency waned. It had become hollow, a play of masks symbolizing nothing. That said, there is beauty in the representation:

Those masterful images because complete
Grew in pure mind, but out of what began?

A bit of back-patting on the part of Yeats (calling his poetry "masterful") before asking a question that has been asked many, many times by many, many poets. Where does poetry come from? Or, What is the source of inspiration? For Yeats, who has just described the emptiness of a poetic system committed to the abstract and ethereal, the answer is thoroughly anti-Romantic. No fountains of knowledge, no vague notions of genius, no imagination "bodying forth." What is the origin of poetry?

A mound of refuse or the sweepings of a street,
Old kettles, old bottles, and a broken can,
Old iron, old bones, old rags, that raving slut
Who keeps the till.

Where are the sweeping vistas of the Lake District? Where are the existential crises of Hamlet? Where are the gods? Where is the Muse? Where are the fatefully beautiful women? Where are the warriors? Where is the impossible love? Where is the innocent child? Without them, what is the poet to do?

Now that my ladder's gone,
I must lie down where all the ladders start
In the foul rag and bone shop of the heart.

I suppose this final retreat into the self is somewhat Romantic--but Yeats's portrait of the artist's interior is not at all. Deprived of access to the ethereal realms (the ladder is gone), he must finally be "satisfied with [his] heart"--here described as a foul rag and bone shop.

I like to think of this as a response to a goal Yeats set for himself earlier in his career in "The Fisherman." Speaking of the eponymous character, he cries,

'Before I am old
I shall have written him one
Poem maybe as cold
And passionate as the dawn.'

I think "The Circus Animals' Desertion" comes pretty darn close.

The Sheltering Sky -Paul Bowles

I read The Sheltering Sky for the first time about eight months ago. It's an absolutely stunning novel, driven by a bleak philosophy right through to the very end. I think of it as French existentialism without any of the individual freedom that Sartre insists on. Bowles reveals the redemptive quality of that system to be not so much false as it is ludicrous, unsatisfying and virtually impossible. A naturalistic fatalism pervades the landscape, characters, and even the language itself. Last night I finished my latest read (The Ballad of a Sad Café) and needed something to put me to sleep. Why then did I pick up The Sheltering Sky?

Towards the beginning of the novel, Port goes out to explore the Saharan town to which he has practically dragged his wife and friend. He finds himself walking with a local out into the desert to meet a girl. Port realizes that this is a bad idea, yet he keeps walking:

You can still break it up. Stop walking. Now. But the combined even rhythm of their feet on the stones was too powerful.

I like to imagine the two men walking in perfect synchronization, hands in pockets, each looking at each others' feet. Thematically, it's pretty simple to see what Bowles is getting at here: a sort of ambient fatalism is propelling Port to do things he knows he shouldn't do. But the power of the passage derives from its refusal to locate this force outside of the natural elements in the scene--there is only man and the desert. Port is theoretically free to turn around and walk back to the safety of the hotel. "But the combined even rhythm of their feet on the stones was too powerful." What a sentence! What an image! A battle is staged between Port's rational interior monologue and the rhythm produced by his unthinking footsteps.

Formally, the italicized "thoughts" of Port are short and jerky--increasingly so as he nears the decisive moment. The narrative that follows is an elegant, down-beating sentence with consistent hard stresses that overwhelm with sheer metrical force the fragmented interior protests. "Combined even rhythm of their feet on the stones" can almost be scanned as trochaic hexameter--that is, six consecutive stressd-unstressed feet (When's the last time you've seen one of those?). Bowles is describing "even rhythm" with even rhythm. The pathetic "You can still break it up" doesn't stand a chance.

On the imagistic level: this rhythm originates from human movement but is decidedly inhuman, usurping the very bodies which give it life and in turn acting maliciously against them. But it's not just the feet creating the rhythm; it's their resounding percussion on the stones. I should mention that Port is in the desert--these are not cobblestones. The harsh, impassive, cruel landscape has no mercy. There is no room for a false step. Each fall reverberates through the great expanse all the way to the edge of the sheltering sky. We are in Bowles's universe. It's terrifying. Tread lightly...literally.

"Lachrymae Christi" -Hart Crane

Making a purchase on this poem in any sort of wholesale form was impossible for me, but somehow the potency of the images lingered like a blow to the head. My readings have graduated from an apocalyptic vision of contemporary Cities of the Plain into a rumination on the general project of the Romantic artist—that is, to convert raw emotion and mystical experience into a piece cathartic verse. I’ve only started reading Crane recently, so I’m not qualified to situate this poem within his broader oeuvre. It comes from his first book of poems, White Buildings. The title is rendered in English “Tears of Christ.” Strangely, a wine I recently consumed (twice) bears the same Latinate title. It is a simple, fleshy Italian white from a vineyard located on Mount Vesuvius.


Lachrymae Christi

Whitely, while benzine
Rinsings from the moon
Dissolve all but the windows of the mills
(Inside the sure machinery
Is still
And curdled only where a sill
Sluices its one unyielding smile)

Immaculate venom binds
The fox's teeth, and swart
Thorns freshen on the year's
First blood. From flanks unfended,
Twanged red perfidies of spring
Are trillion on the hill.

And the nights opening
Chant pyramids,--
Anoint with innocence,--recall
To music and retrieve what perjuries
Had galvanized the eyes.

While chime
Beneath and all around
Distilling clemencies,--worms'
Inaudible whistle, tunneling
Not penitence
But song, as these
Perpetual fountains, vines,--

Thy Nazarene and tinder eyes.

Let sphinxes from the ripe
Borage of death have cleared my tongue
Once again; vermin and rod
No longer bind. Some sentient cloud
Of tears flocks through the tendoned loam:
Betrayed stones slowly speak.)

Names peeling from Thine eyes
And their undimming lattices of flame,
Spell out in palm and pain
Compulsion of the year, O Nazarene.

Lean long from sable, slender boughs,
Unstanched and luminous. And as the nights
Strike from Thee perfect spheres,
Lift up in lilac-emerald breath the grail
Of earth again—

Thy face
From charred and riven stakes, O
Dionysus, Thy
Unmangled target smile.


The most difficult stanza, I believe, begins with “Let sphinxes from…” For me, resolving the difficult syntactic and semantic aberrations was akin to tackling a Magic-Eye crossword puzzle—to the point that I was physically turning the book on its side for new “angles.” Reading “let” as an adjective is crucial to the first sentence, which makes it synonymous with “loosed” or “released.” Leaving the “letting” agent deliberately ambiguous insinuates a divine, unearthly power descending to bestow inspiration on the poet. But it’s a damn gruesome portrait of inspiration (I can’t help but think of Isaiah and the burning coal). Compare with Wordsworth’s recollection in tranquility, or Milton’s invocation! The image “Betrayed stones slowly speak” is the lynchpin of this poem’s dramatic force—and its soft redemptive power. But before analyzing it, I want to parse out the narrative development.

The opening landscape sets the reader firmly (this firmness will erode) in the industrial/post-industrial age, with an alliterative serpent (sill / [that] Sluices its one unyielding smile) moving in sibilants through a scene of caustic, stagnant waste. The first sentence finishes, on the other side of the parentheses in the next strophe, in which chemical imagery gives way to a more violent, dynamic, organic destruction. Insidious sibilants give way to a more forceful, but somehow unsatisfying, set of fricatives. The lamb (flanks unfended), of course, is Christ, and the red of his blood contrasts with the “whitely” benzine. This “white” is a symbol of spiritual purity; but it also represents a sterile, cold, chemical blankness, which contrasts with the red passion of a human body. The life force of this blood is such that it “twangs” (literally plucks a string) a trillion perfidies on Golgotha (note the temporal shift)—a song that will continue to reverberate in the next two strophes, and rise to celestial prominence in the closing lines.

“Thy Nazerene and tinder eyes” marks the major turn in the poem. The first half has laid the groundwork for Christ’s fiery death and ultimate resurrection in the form of Dionysus. (Before diving in, I just want to point out, if it’s not already obvious, that I’m treating Christ/Dionysus as a poet-figure, and visa-versa.) The second half images a sort of profane illumination rooted in the surging passion of Dionysus and a purgatorial vision of poetic inspiration.

Let sphinxes from the ripe
Borage of death have cleared my tongue
Once again; vermin and rod
No longer bind. Some sentient cloud
Of tears flocks through the tendoned loam:
Betrayed stones slowly speak.)

The image here is beyond elliptical: sphinxes from the ripe borage of death? I’m not going to attempt a word-by-word reading. I see this as a loosing of the Word from its connection with the physical body of Christ (“The Word was God”)—a splitting of the logos, which grants a vigorous, physical strength to poetic language outside of religious constrictions. The “sentient cloud” (the closest thing to God we have in this poem) descends into the earth, infusing the inert landscape with creative agency: betrayed stones slowly speak. First, note the alliteration and the four consecutive hard stresses. It’s good poetry. The reference here is to the verse from the Gospels, which claims that if no one praises God, the very stones will cry out (Luke 19:40). By dying, Christ has betrayed the faithful (remember the trillion perfidies). But in this very betrayal, a new song is rising from the earth itself—one not bound to traditional notions of spirituality. It’s important that the stones begin murmuring within seconds of Christ’s death, and not three days later by an empty tomb.

Crane denies a traditional resurrection. Instead, he locates the redemptive power of Christ in his very mortality. There is no spiritual rebirth, no heaven, no immortality in Crane’s retelling. This is not a cause for despair; rather, it is an affirmation of the physical world as a site of sacred illumination. Further down, the song of the spheres “[lifts] up in lilac-emerald breath the grail / Of earth again,” once again bringing low the celestial realm. Or is it, perhaps, a raising of the mundane?

The poem concludes with Christ, now Dionysus, smiling—a not so subtle response to the diabolical smile in the first stanza. The poet figure has come out victorious, despite having been crucified (and not yet removed from the cross). How? I read it as a thoroughly Romantic victory affirming Shelley’s quasi-religious belief in the the legislative power of poetry. Victory has come through the killing-off of systematic religion and escapist fables. Stripped bare of tradition, Christ's Promethean death unleashes the Word.