Digital Music Revolution: Cacophony, Sound, and (the Bestowal and Withholding of) Pleasure

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by Virginia Konchan

One must soberly ask, in light of the enthusiastic rhetoric that surrounds new forms of postmodern audience participation: are these forms of “agency” designed to empower the listener, creatively or critically, or merely offer the simulated (“technical”) illusion thereof? The mimetic replication of urban and post-industrial noises reinscribes the very determinisms that all art forms both inherit and strive to overcome, and while on a neurological level the ear enjoys assimilating unfamiliar sounds, and harsh noises generated from dissonance, punk, heavy metal or electronic music, can induce an “unpleasing” cerebral pleasure, the sustained withholding of aural pleasure from the listener may be the last insidiously lingering form of 21st century authoritarian “control” of all.

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The Promised End

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by Greg Schutz

According to the Weekly World News, I am writing on the verge of apocalypse and this blog post will never be read. The nineteenth of December: two days until we reach the terminus of the ancient Mayan calendar and find ourselves ushered into a future better left to the imagination of Roland Emmerich. Or Nancy Lieder. Or John of Patmos. Or whomever. Apocalypses come and go, and if some prophets, like the Revelator or Nostradamus, achieve a more lasting fame than others, it seems to have little to do with their accuracy as doomsayers. What’s worth noting about our latest onrushing apocalypse, however, is just how timely it seems.

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Fun: A Manifesto

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by Claire Skinner

Above all else, a poem must be fun. Even poems that deal with decidedly not-fun topics (death, disaster, cruelty) must have elements of joy.

Fun. Not exactly a word thrown about in academic circles or in serious reviews of serious poetry. But, if a poem’s not fun, the likelihood of me finishing it (or enjoying it) are slim to none.

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“Invisible Green,” by Tung-Hui Hu

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In 1772, the twenty-six-year-old violinmaker Henry Whiteside began to build a lighthouse on a pile of rocks twenty miles off the coast of Pembrokeshire, Wales, called the Smalls. His design was unusual; the light perched on top of eight oak piers like the head of a stiff-legged octopus. Rather than making a solid base, Whiteside reasoned, he would let the force of the waves pass through the structure. But when the waves did so, the living quarters swayed violently; one visitor reported that a full bucket of water was half empty by the time he left. The force of the storm made each thing—bucket, glass, stove, table—resonant; it bent the lighthouse, shaping it into an instrument of music.

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MQR 51:4 | Fall 2012

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Tung-Hui Hu’s lyrical take on nineteenth-century life in a lighthouse off the coast of Wales, Craig McDaniel on color and perspective in Bonnard, Molly McQuade on Wim Wender’s tribute to Pina Bausch, Jeffrey Meyers on Thomas Mann in America.

Fiction by Mimi Herman, Sharona Muir, Dina Nayeri, Dalia Rosefeld, Charles Antin, Bipin Aurora, and Donald Yates.

Poetry by Angie Estes, Patricia Clark, Chris Cunningham, Sarah Messer, Nance Van Winckel, and Mark Wunderlich.

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Blue Balloon

On Maggie Nelson’s Bluets: Azul Simpático

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by Gina Balibrera

After reading the book, I pushed it on everyone I knew who might be familiar with eros the bittersweet, with injury, with morbid-hearted love, with ekphrastic inclination, with lust, with loneliness, with bitter laughter, with red wine, with weeping. (An archaic definition for the term “blue-eyed,” relayed by Maggie Nelson: 91…“a blueness or dark circle around the eye, from weeping or other cause.” ) “Heartbreak is a spondee (42.),” I heard myself telling strangers. Twice in one week, I wore pants in a color that shimmered between sapphire and cobalt, and on one of those occasions, I spilled a little wine and later on discovered the butterfly-shaped bone of my hip tinged blue. Bluets came out in 2009; clearly, I’m late to the party.

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Underwood Touch-Master 5

In Praise of Side Practice

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by Claire Skinner

Maybe we writers write because, at the bone of it, we’re eternal students. We thrive on learning, on discovering new angles from which to view the same old things: Love, Death, Time, and God. (After all, a metaphor—the writer’s version of a Vegas marquee—is simply a writer’s tool to get you, the reader, to see life differently.) But, to spend all one’s time thinking about Love, Death, Time, and God, and pondering how to write about Love, Death, Time, and God, and actually writing about Love, Death, Time, and God—well, that’s another thing entirely.

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