I’ve been a huge fan of Hollenthon for a long time; they put out two records, one in 1999 and one in 2001, that were just thoroughly fantastic. Really groovy, well-written death metal with a fantastic array of samples (and keyboard parts? never can tell). I’ve never seen anything else like them, really; Amon Tobin-style strings, chants, Yat-Kha, a lot of Leonard Bernstein or Holst-esque orchestration. Of the two, one focuses more on ‘world-music’ style folk and chant, and the other on huge string and brass ensembles. Really, some of the only symphonic metal of any stripe that’s worth listening to.

And then they took 7 years to make a new one, partly while Martin Shirenc worked with his other band, Pungent Stench. At some point last year I became aware that they were working on a new album, and became suitably excited. But my repeated visits to the Hollenthon homepage for any scrap of new information, my high hopes, my love of the original albums, and their incredible distinctiveness also left me a little nervous that the new record wouldn’t be as good.

It’s almost inevitable, after all, that over 7 years a band that so clearly works from a position of originality and creativity would change up, and then who knows whether it would be good or not? And I watched 30 seconds of a Youtube video of the new single, “Son Of Perdition”, and was not buoyed. It was pretty simplistic and lacked the texture and layering that made Domus Mundi and With Vilest Of Worms To Dwell so rich.

So now that I finally have the album, I can say that all my fears were unfounded. It’s a little glossier, as recording techniques have become marginally nicer in the last seven years, but (the first half of) “Son Of Perdition” is a definite outlier; its simple, slightly boneheaded main riff is unlike anything else on the album. The rest of the songwriting on the album is incredibly vital; if Shirenc needed to wait 7 years to write songs that didn’t sound tired or overworked, I won’t begrudge him them.

The sample work on this record kind of splits the difference between the orchestral and the world-music sides. But the nice thing is that the riffwork is awfully catchy, and very much in Hollenthon’s characteristic style. And at first listen the rhythm section has everything very much nailed down; with all the chants and horns, pretty much every track has a monster groove to it.

компютри During a tour of Germany in 1958, Marx, accompanied by his then wife, Eden, his daughter, Judith and Robert Dwan, climbed a pile of rubble that marked the site of Adolf Hitler’s bunker, the site of Hitler’s death, and performed a two minute charleston.

wikipedia

Normally I wouldn’t bother with a comment myself, given the repetitive nature of this kind of grousing. But an excerpt from Mr. Bierma’s column caught my eye:

Brockenbrough reprimands pop stars for grammar gaffes in song lyrics, including Bryan Adams for singing “if she ever found out about you and I” (it should be “you and me,” she says) — even though that’s the best way to rhyme with the line before it: “She says her love for me could never die.” And she takes Elvis to task — is no one sacred? — for singing “I’m all shook up” instead of the proper “all shaken up.”

I think the bolded part (my bolding of course) is actually quite interesting. Because I think it brings up a point in this whole debate that is often overlooked. Often when people piss and moan about these supposed solecisms, their complaint is that through inaccuracy, inconsistency, change and inattention we diminish communication; that if we let our standards droop pretty soon we will all be talking different monkey languages at each other¹. Their opponents disagree; people are always speaking different regional and class dialects at each other and communicating pretty well; no one who has heard ‘I could care less’ has actually taken that at its literal face without trying; and communication is actually a pretty tricky act of interpretation and pas de deux anyway, and avoiding sentence-final prepositions is a laughably minor gesture in one direction or the other. These are all true assertions.

But what that quote brings to mind is, in my mind, a better counter-argument: people have better things to do with their language than simply convey facts. In the imaginations of the dryest of grammarians, perhaps, language—not speech, though; written language—is simply or reductively the tool that we use to transmit and record factual information. Everybody else, though, and I mean everybody, is answering to a series of more pressing concerns. Even when speaking prose, we are participating in aesthetic creation. Every utterance obeys rules of meter and rhythm as fundamental to language as its grammatical structure. Every utterance also, as DFW notes, bespeaks of its speaker, and so in reality the only people who are going to be careful to only use ‘decimate’ in its Latin sense are people to whom it is important that they are seen as people who care about the true meaning of ‘decimate’.

Sometimes it makes a body really want to rap these critics on the head; don’t you see that people are speaking here? Do you really imagine that people who say ‘between you and I’ don’t have anything better to do with their words than see that they conform to some superficial notion of grammar? Can you allow in your worldview the possibility that the greengrocer or urban youth has his own sense of language, and is actively wielding it, rather than simply trying and failing to follow all the rules?

Oy.

1. sometimes they also try to bring up—David Foster Wallace, I’m looking at you—that people judge you by the words you use, and pretend that 1: this is a fact descriptivists do not thoroughly accept and assume, and that further 2: descriptivists actually believe some vein of hippie-dippy anarchism, where either i: there are no rules, man or ii: everyone should just go around talking like how they want all the time, and nobody would/should ever draw any conclusions from their choices

Much of the problem is apparent in the rhetorical stances of many of the authors in this volume. They are preaching to the choir in a church full of dull-witted pagans from another, very wicked planet. […] Apart from a few asides about the necessity for Americans to know second languages in the global village, [one author] nowhere explains to his readers WHY the USA would be a better place if the primacy of English were less than it is today, or WHY the apparent gradual death of Yiddish (his example) is such a great national loss […] Students—and liberal humanities professors, for that matter—know in their hearts that the linguistic melting pot has always been the great American tradition, and that it has been viewed almost totally positively by everybody but linguists, and that there are powerful common-sense arguments in its favor. Dismissive scolding has little effect against such engrained ideologies.

My answer to that question has always been simple: it is, like many other things about which I feel strongly, essentially a matter of aesthetics. Diversity is a simple aesthetic, for me—density and richness and variety resonate with my sense of beauty. I love language, and the more languages there are being spoken, the richer the linguistic biosphere, the more beauty and diversity I get to enjoy.

Of course this is self-serving, but what else is there? We all fight for our own vision of the world. I might note, however, that this reviewer’s dismissal of tribal languages might make sense to the desire for a world where everyone can communicate perfectly with everyone else—but even those people who would be served by more perfect acquaintance with the dominant language tend to feel a sense of loss—of culture and identity—as their languages die. So it’s not just the linguists, but also the speakers of those languages. Presumably they have some right?

Anyway, among them were these two short notes that have something to say about the way my mind and my aesthetic sense works. Neither of them is particularly publishable, but for a couple hundred words written two years ago there’s a bit of interest there. I don’t remember how many days separate them when they were written, but they relate well enough.

Consider the example of calculus:

If any given function is a body of information, then that function’s derivative is a body of the same class (ie it can be represented by the same method), but one order higher, describing the original function.

By that same token, one may effectively or usefully apprehend some arbitrary set of information—say, a family of languages, or some body of music—by examining the variation within it; in this way, the phonetic relationships among Eastern European languages or the differing uses of harmony among the Minimalist composers can achieve a sort of beauty of the same class (if not equal to) the actual compositions or speech they describe.

This is why one may view in the same aesthetic light the relationship between a text and its instantiation as they do the literary aspect of the language, or the visual aspect of the letterforms.

The next one has an interesting point, but it’s ridden with quite a few pseudo-scientific buzzwords. Please excuse them.

The scored composition is best understood not as a set procedural instructions, but as a set of probabilities; the score maps to the set of extant recordings (and performances, though this is not demonstrable) like the Lorenz attractor or the current [nyamic—dynamic?] model map to the phenomena they describe; as probabalistic predictions of note choice, dynamics, rhythmn, timbre, etc.

The score is a superposition of probable instantiations of the piece. If we compare each performance they will probably correspond in each aspect that is defined by the canonical text, with error-correction increasing with the number of samples. The picture will get might be said to be the ideal of text; however the areas where they differ will provide what’s perhaps the most precious or rarified information, the shading, texture and timbre, so to speak, which have no written form. The oft-invoked dialogue between composer and audience shares a musical space with the dialogue between composer and performer.

On the way back from the LSA meeting, having finished the light reading that I had brought with me, I bought Steve Berry’s The Alexandria Link. At pp. 418-419 we read:

These words were chiseled into the granite below.

CVSTOS RERVM PRVDENTIA

“Prudence is the guardian of things,” he said, translating, but his Greek was good enough to know that the first word could also be read as “wisdom”. Either way, the message seemed clear.

Now, I don’t expect very many people actually to understand Greek, or even Latin, but is it asking too much for at least one of the people involved in the production of a book, if not the author perhaps an editor or proofreader, to know the difference?

I also appreciate, though, that this author’s notion being particularly adept at Greek translation is being able to swap ‘wisdom’ for ‘prudence’—without even having to look it up!

Sometimes I wonder if I’m going insane. Other times—the times that really bother me—I wonder how insane you’d have to be for anyone to notice.

Keller Mulroy, It’s Night Time in Minot, ND