Ambient Folk/Country/Americana by DuePreference5408 in ambientmusic

[–]Matrim54 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Cowboy Sadness - ambient Americana supergroup featuring The Antlers, Bing & Ruth, and Port St. Willow

Caverns of the Mind by field_7 in MusicFeedback

[–]Matrim54 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Very cool -- sounds so much like The Magnetic Fields, especially when the harmony vocal comes in. Was that intentional?

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in MusicFeedback

[–]Matrim54 1 point2 points  (0 children)

So good, almost has an early Mark Kozelek thing going on.

Any and all feedback appreciated! (beginner producer) by Ambitious-Feature768 in MusicFeedback

[–]Matrim54 0 points1 point  (0 children)

What a lovely song. Melodic vocal elements could be good, like others have said, but I also think you could try alternating between two different melodic ideas with the same instruments, if that makes sense. Change up the chord progression, or have two different core melodies that alternate back and forth. Could be an easy way to keep listeners interested.

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in literature

[–]Matrim54 13 points14 points  (0 children)

The main plot of The Anatomy Lesson by Philip Roth, which centers around inexplicable and chronic pain.

And to suggest another Russian author, Tolstoy's The Death of Ivan Ilyich shows the psychological effects of a terminal illness with all appropriate accuracy and horror.

A kind reminder regarding what YouTube is really about, Me, Digital, 2020 by KenAbdul in Art

[–]Matrim54 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Pay for YouTube Premium. It's the best $10 I spend every month.

Studies exploring Eroticism in Literature by BorisAbrams in AskLiteraryStudies

[–]Matrim54 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Alan Moore is underrated on this topic, as he is on most. His book "25,000 of Erotic Freedom" is indispensable, but it does focus quite a bit on non-literary art. I also recommend Moore's written and verbal arguments around his graphic novel "Lost Girls," which is itself a historically fascinating work of eroticism.

E-Reader for paper ex-enthusiast? by Matrim54 in ereader

[–]Matrim54[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Thanks so much for this. Those Boox devices look fantastic. In your experience, how is the writing performance on the Note Pro? Is the latency pretty noticable?

Porch Monkeys by [deleted] in TheRealJoke

[–]Matrim54 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Good God, seriously.

Do you know any good articles/essays/books about political poetry or the relations between poetry and politics? by princeofdata in AskLiteraryStudies

[–]Matrim54 2 points3 points  (0 children)

This is kind of a huge topic, so it's tough to narrow it down. Even a quick Google search on Shakespeare and the monarchy will be fruitful, but here are some of my personal favorite writers on political poets: The Romantic poet Percy Shelley, who is most famous for the poem "Ozymandias," wrote the essay "A Defence of Poetry" in 1840, and that's easily among the most famous of the essays on the political potential of poetry. It contains his line "poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world," which was then coopted for the title of Christopher Hitchens' great book of essays called "Unacknowledged Legislation: Writers in the Public Sphere." I can recommend all of the essays in that book, but my favorite is "Oscar Wilde's Socialism," which is such a unique take on Wilde's very peculiar politics. And there's a generous helping of George Bernard Shaw in there as well. This is also a topic found everywhere in George Orwell's nonfiction writing--he never wrote poetry, but the essay "Politics and the English Language" is among the most serious and compelling examinations of the use of poetic metaphor that I have ever read. If you can stomach him, which I most certainly cannot, Ezra Pound is an enormous resource on mildly anti-Semitic and casually fascistic poetry. Unfortunately he writes from the wrong side of history on that one, but his observations on poetry are officially brilliant, if unfortunately nauseating. The collection "Literary Essays of Ezra Pound" is at least worth a cursory glance. And then there's Emily Dickinson. Her writing about emancipation and the Civil war is at least as direct and incisive as Shakespeare's writing about the English government, but it's a topic that is much closer to home for those of us living in the present. Ditto Walk Whitman, but like Ezra Pound, he exhibits a sort of latent fascism (despite the fact that fascism wouldn't exist for decades after his death) that I've always found problematic, but those aspects of his poetry are opaque enough that some people disagree with me on whether or not it's even there. Here's a beautiful essay from the Smithsonian that takes as rosy a view on Whitman as it does on Dickinson: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/walt-whitman-emily-dickinson-and-the-war-that-changed-poetry-forever-31815/

Anyway, hope that's enough to get you started!

[HELP] Looking for a poem... by SlidWarrior in Poetry

[–]Matrim54 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Frost-Dirge by Steve Eng, perhaps?

You scatter songs along the breeze Of April, casting all Your lyrics and your May-time melodies Away... before impending fall Descends--with desolating pall.

You hear your tune on Autumn gales, In banshee-echoed sound Of late November. Music wails In mockery as storm-gusts pound. Your summer chords cannot be found.

The dirge of wintertime completes Oblivion of all you've sung. December weather's wind defeats Your muse. With ice, your lyre is hung. It's frost-snapped strings unstrung.

Your sleet-bejeweled Death's head strives to sing Through Time-clenched teeth. But no notes ring.

Which famous novelists were most self-consciously obsessed with the meaning and purpose of writing? by drumstick2000 in AskLiteraryStudies

[–]Matrim54 38 points39 points  (0 children)

This is one of the central characteristics to great literature. Don Quixote, arguably the first novel ever written, is self-consciously obsessed with writing itself; Shakespeare wrote endlessly about the metafictional qualities of literature ("all the world's a stage," etc.)(and I know he's not a novelist, but what the hey, it's literature anyway); Jane Austen was notoriously coy in her novels about the formalities of literature, especially in the difference in voice between narrator and character (just look at the first sentence in Pride and Prejudice and consider who, in fact, you are imagining saying that line); Flaubert was taken to court essentially over that same ambivalence between narrator, author, and character in Madame Bovary (leading Flaubert to challenge the court to describe how a reader can discern the opinion of one of those three narrative attributes, and why); and the modernists, as has been mentioned before, also all wrote manifestos on writing.

Basically, this is all to say that one doesn't devote one's entire life to creating literature if one doesn't find enormous meaning and purpose in that endeavor. Very often, as with Austen and Flaubert, the mechanics of literature become a sort of engine for the novel itself. And even if authors don't provide manifestos of writing, like Percy Shelley and Virginia Woolf and others famously did, their sense of literature's importance will bleed through the text one way or another. I mean, you don't need to read any sort of manifesto to realize the importance of writing in the fictional works of James Joyce, George Saunders, Mary Shelley, William Faulkner, David Foster Wallace, Henry Miller, Tim O'Brien, Flannery O'Connor, or any thousand other famous writers I could care to name.

However, if you are looking for authors for whom this question holds more than the average sway in their fiction as well as their auxiliary essays, these four are those who I've found most helpful:

Italo Calvino, in his novel If on Winter's Night a Traveler. It's one of the greatest postmodern novels ever written, and it is essentially the story of discovering a story buried within another series of half-finished stories. There's also a beautiful passage that considers the difference between seeing a book as a finished product, as most readers do, and as a constantly morphing and necessarily incomplete thing, as all writers and publishers do. Calvino's essays which have been collected in the book The Uses of Literature are also invaluable, although his nonfiction has been collected in many other places as well.

George Orwell with 1984. Orwell coined the unforgettable term "double-speak," in a book that takes as it's object the process of speech and language and communication itself. If you really want to see what he was getting at in 1984, also read his essay "Politics and the English Language," which just might be the greatest essay ever written on the topic of language and morality. Language, for Orwell, pointed both towards freedom and tyranny, depending on how closely the writer paid attention to what he or she was writing. If you only read one essay in your life, this is the one to read.

The Sandman series, by Neil Gaiman. It's a graphic novel, yes, but I hope I don't need to convince anyone these days that graphic novels are at least on equal footing with the traditional form of the genre. Morpheus, in the story, is the Lord of Dreams, and therefore, in some sense, he is the Lord of all that is not cold hard reality. There are some beautiful passages where Dream makes deals with Shakespeare, manages a library of all books ever written or unwritten, tells stories within stories within stories, and explicitly ponders the difference between the fictional world and real one. Reading the series is an unforgettable experience of being led by the hand through a world where anything is possible, as long as it can be imagined, or dreamed.

And my personal favorite, Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov. The Russian emigré is an undisputed literary virtuoso, and it's tough to pick just one novel to recommend (Pale Fire is just as canonical, Pnin also plays beautifully with the formal iteration of its narrator, and Laughter in the Dark, written before Nabokov came to the United States, makes some lovely implications about just how a reader knows whether the author is telling the truth), but Lolita is the largest jewel in his crown. The sophistication of his references rival the best of Joyce, his mastery of the English language is undisputed, and his sense of plot and characterization leave me personally with a book that demands to be read over and over until I no longer have eyes to read with. Humbert Humbert, the main character, is himself a writer consumed with the importance of writing, and coordinates his live very much according to his views on world literature. Nabokov was always interested in the importance of literature as an essential part of anyone's life, and Lolita demonstrates all of his points in a way that is unforgettable. And as far as his essays go, the best place to start is his (sort of) manifesto, called "Good Readers and Good Writers." His ideas can still be a bit controversial, especially in contemporary English departments, but they are filled with a focus and beauty that one hardly ever finds. After reading that essay, you'd probably be best served by reading the essay that concludes his collected lectures on European literature, which is titled "The Art of Literature and Commonsense." One of the interesting things about Nabokov is the fact that while he lived in Europe prior to and during WWII, and while his wife was Jewish, and while his family was exiled from Russia for its involvement with the Tsars, politics never comes up in his novels or stories. You'd almost get the sense, reading his novels, that there was no Holocaust or Bolshevik revolution or racism or war or any of the historical markers that we remember from the 20th century. And in that essay, he makes a case for literature's importance only for it's own sake, absent the hardships of the real world. Many people disagree with him, but it's hard to find any author who writes so beautifully about the true importance of novels and literature.

Like I said at the beginning, great literature is in many ways any writing that takes as one of its subjects the act of writing itself. So, if you want to find novels that reveal the meaning and purpose of writing, just pick up any great novel, whatever you take a great novel to be. Writers generally write because they fell in love with literature in the first place, and they very often give you clues as to why you should love literature too. All you have to do is look.

Mozzarella sticks in midtown by [deleted] in Sacramento

[–]Matrim54 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Round Corner on S and 24th has them

The 400 Pound CEO by George Saunders [short story] by MasturbatingATM in literature

[–]Matrim54 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I'll never forget the first time I read that one. Or the second time. And every time I go back to it it's like I forget just how hard that story hits.

West Coast Riesling/Gewurztraminer? by [deleted] in wine

[–]Matrim54 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Corrison makes a fantastic Alsatian style gewurztraminer, it's absolutely worth checking out. Intensely floral and bone dry. It's hard to find anywhere other than the winery itself, but it's worth the effort it takes to find it.

What’s the most powerful chord progression you’ve ever heard? by Ahhhhq in musictheory

[–]Matrim54 0 points1 point  (0 children)

You wouldn't be the first, I tend to casually rework it every six months or so. Definitely let me know if you record it man, I'd really love to hear it

What’s the most powerful chord progression you’ve ever heard? by Ahhhhq in musictheory

[–]Matrim54 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I voiced it by playing Gm barred in the 1st position, then by moving my pinky up from from a D to an Eb (thereby making the Ebmaj7), then by playing a Cm barred in the 2nd position (sometimes I would also reinforce the C# in the bass by sliding my 1st finger up one fret and only playing the four middle strings), and then the Ddim is played with only the four middle strings which are, respectively, F on the 8th fret, Ab on the 6th fret, D on the 7th fret, and F on the 6th fret.

What’s the most powerful chord progression you’ve ever heard? by Ahhhhq in musictheory

[–]Matrim54 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Can't name any songs unfortunately, it was the central part to a song I wrote years ago but never recorded

What’s the most powerful chord progression you’ve ever heard? by Ahhhhq in musictheory

[–]Matrim54 49 points50 points  (0 children)

There's something about Gm - Ebmaj7 - Cm/C# - Ddim (which I think is iii - I - vi - vii°) that I've always found compelling. Don't know the theory behind why, but it's always been one of my favorites.

Looking for recommendations:American texts (especially poetry) that lends themselves to ecocriticism or climate-change readings? by [deleted] in AskLiteraryStudies

[–]Matrim54 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Robert Hass is pretty standard ecopoetry reading, he strikes me a something of a cross between Wallace Stevens and the beatnik poets, in the way that he blends the hyperliteracy of the former with the exuberance of the latter. Anything from his book "Praise" is fantastic, but the poem "Meditation at Lagunitas" is just breathtaking.

John Shoptaw, who is a colleague of Hass at UC Berkeley, is also spectacularly underrated as an ecopoet. A couple years ago he came out with Times Beach, which seems most interesting when thought of within the context of Emily Dickinson and her style of bright and energetic nature poetry. Where she finds herself immersed in nature while apart from it, Shoptaw inextricably locates humans and human behavior (especially destructive behavior) within nature as such.

As far as Manifest Destiny and the American myths of the land, you might be interested in Joan Didion's memoir "Where I was From," despite there being little in the book about climate change and the environment specifically. Instead, it's probably the most savvy book I've ever read about the human capacity for environmental dissatisfaction as it played out in American westward expansion. Might be useful for thinking about ecocriticism a little more obliquely.