ARE ALL THOSE YOUR GUITARS? Mountain Goats epic posting, part three in a series of I do what I want! (No, seriously, I'll try to finish up tonight.)

The Sunset Tree: I am so easy for those songs where some indie-rock guitar singer-songwriter dresses up his voice like he's some kind of sexy gumshoe. ("Dilaudid," "The Lion's Teeth.") Also, "Up the Wolves" made me choke up this time. This is a really heartfelt album, trying hard to forgive a lot of things. I also really like how place-oriented all of these albums are; this one is Southern California, insistently, some sunny noir place behind the Orange Curtain. ...I also liked "Love Love Love" better this time around. Already liked the opening verse a lot--this guy is notably good at openings.

Get Lonely: Ehhh, this is the first one so far I haven't really loved. It's very breathy and just... there.

Heretic Pride: It took all the way to track four ("Autoclave") before I liked something, and there it was mostly because I am impressed by John Darnielle's commitment to this house-as-home metaphor across many albums.

"In the Craters of the Moon" and "Lovecraft in Brooklyn" are more tough-guy-bleeding songs, though, so I liked them. "Woke up afraid of my own shadow--like, genuinely afraid!" That's actually a pretty great updating, the Valley Girl slang combined with "Rats in the Walls"-level urgency. I'm trying to think of ways Lovecraft could actually illuminate this guy's lyrics and obsessions, and all I can come up with is the belief that (or struggle against the belief that) origins define outcomes, the past controls the future, the Old Ones will always come back to destroy us even when we think they've been sated and killed and forgiven. I don't actually think that's what this song is going for, though, so I'd welcome other interpretations.

Is a "dragon spruce" a real kind of tree? If so, I continue to love this insistence on naming the exact plants of each song's setting, e.g. "Louisiana live oak." So far we're five albums in and home is the unstoppable cry of each one: the contrast between Eden, our model, the memory which makes all insight a form of recognition, and the temporal places where we all lived out our unskilled childhoods. ...OK, so I guess it's obvious that I would really like this guy.

And just in time to ratify my belief that unsettled and painful metaphors of home are one of the defining characteristics of this guy's lyrics, here's the line, "If I forget you, Israel, let me forget my right hand"--and cf. "This Year" with "There will be feasting in Jerusalem this year," too. Also, with the Israel line, it's basically the chorus, which is always pop music's way of signaling what it considers its home: You return there after each verse, and see the chorus in a new way.

OK, two albums left here.

LOOKING FOR MERCY STREET/WHERE YOU'RE INSIDE-OUT: Ch 2: “A Skin of One's Own: Toward a Theory of Transsexual Embodiment.” This is my favorite chapter. So rich and chewy! There's so much to talk about here, so I'll just pluck out the thing I love most.

Prosser connects narratives of people with bodily agnosia--a brain disorder in which their body parts, for example legs or a hand, feel completely alien--with narratives of people who have sensations in “phantom limbs.” For both of these sets of people, their sense of their own body is visceral, physical, provoking real loss of sensation or presence of sensation... and yet this sensed body doesn't match up with the visible flesh. Prosser quotes a lot of transsexual autobiographies describing alienation from the parts of one's body associated with the sex one was assigned at birth, and a sense of homecoming and integration after (or even in preparation for) surgery. He draws an analogy: It can be said that a transsexual woman suffers from bodily agnosia toward her penis (and presumably also Adam's apple and other physical markers of maleness?) and a “phantom limb” sensation in the breasts and vagina (and again, presumably, womb?) she doesn't yet have. And vice versa for a transsexual man. Their post-reassignment surgery bodies are the homes they were never able to dwell in before. A post-surgery transsexual woman is not a mutilated man, or a man made into a woman from parts you can find at home, but a woman who has had major reconstructive surgery. The basic argument is summarized by Prosser's subsection heading, “From Mutilation to Integration: The Poetics of Sex Reassignment Surgery.”

You can see why this resonates with me, since it sounds so much like my usual Eden-via-Plato “all knowledge is memory” shtik. The idea of a home we've never so much as visited, but which we remember and which is real, is one which makes a great deal of sense to me. In fact, the world-in-general doesn't make sense if there isn't such a home, or if we're utterly unable to recognize it when we encounter it.

On a side matter, I'll note that if Prosser were willing to assert forcefully that sex difference is a core difference, rooted in human nature, ontologically prior to many other differences, he'd get out of some of the minor traps in this chapter, like his quick and I think too-blithe acceptance of cosmetic surgery.

UTOPIA VS. EDEN: Ch 5: “No Place Like Home: Transgender and Trans-Genre in Leslie Feinberg's Stone Butch Blues.” This is one of the only books Prosser discusses which I've read. Interestingly, I turned out to have completely forgotten the ending and its rejection of resolution of Jess Goldberg's gender identity. This chapter mirrors (by which I mean, both reflects and reverses) chapter two, as Prosser explores a transgender identity based on the rejection of belonging, the preference for remaining in-between, outside, exposed and endangered--and yet possessed of a sense of personal integrity, precisely because in this chapter “home” is treated as an illusion or projection.

The things in this chapter which are most interesting to me are both places where I have theological problems with Goldberg's/Feinberg's/Prosser's (maybe in that order?) stance. First and most obviously, I don't really think a Catholic can accept an identity which rejects the iconic binary of man/woman. That's probably not wildly interesting to anyone who isn't Catholic, though. Perhaps more interestingly, I think this idea of home as illusory projection rather than memory of Adam's happiness runs into the “how do you know what it looks like, then?” problem I talk about here and (if you read the “ethics can't just be a projection of self or culture” bits as pertaining to ontology as well) here.

What makes possible the psychic translation of the surgical incursions into the body into a poetics of healing is a kind of transsexual somatic memory. Surgery is made sense of as a literal and figurative re-membering, a restorative drive that is indeed common to accounts of reconstructive surgeries among nontranssexual subjects and perhaps inherent in the very notion of reconstructive surgery.
--Second Skins. This longing for and nostalgic memory of a home (a home in one's own flesh) which has never been experienced reminds me very strongly of Augustine's discussion of our memories of Adam's happiness. (Which... I only vaguely remember, at this point, your joke here. Am I making this up? It's certainly related to the Augustine-stuff I discuss here; the basic idea, as I understand it, is that we share not only in the legacy of Adam's sin but also the memory of his happiness, and it's this remembered happiness which allows us to long for goodness and to recognize it [when we do recognize it!] in this life.)

And in one oral transsexual account an anonymous male-to-female expresses her alienation from her male body in terms of being encased, surrounded by a false skin: "I used to look at my body and think it was a bit like a diver's suit, it didn't feel like me inside."
--Jay Prosser, Second Skins. Prosser doesn't draw out what to me might be the most striking aspect of this metaphor: the diver swims in an implacably hostile environment, the coldest depths of the ocean. This metaphor expresses the basic move of Catholic theology in which, when Eve and Adam fell, the whole world changed with us, became suddenly hostile and predatory and wrong.

A GIRL ON A BEACH: On October 30, I watched Nosferatu at the AFI Silver, with a live score by the Silent Orchestra. There are a lot of things one could notice about that experience (SOMEDAY I will own the SO-scored version of Alla Nazimova's Salome!!!!) but I will just pick one.

This movie is very long, for a silent movie, and it does have bland stretches. But it also offers lots and lots of scary ship upon a scary ocean. And it also is only the second movie, after Barton Fink, where I've found an image from my personal horror iconography presented in all its beauty and terror.

The Mina Harker character--I can't remember her nom de ripoff, but you know which one I mean--sits out on the beach and waits for her husband's ship. The waves crest black; the grasses shake in the wind. Crosses are planted here and there around the bench where she sits, memorials to sailors lost.

This one scene twists in my gut. It takes the hope, the memory, the sense that once there was a place where we were at home--all the things I associate with this scene of a beautiful girl on a beach--and studs it with crosses, with death and heartbreak.

I have been here before
But when or how I cannot tell;
I know the grass beyond the door,
The sweet keen smell,
The sighing sound, the lights around the shore.

--Dante Rossetti, "Sudden Light" (more from me)

Somewhere I have heard this before...

--Nirvana, "Drain You"

Just a beach and a pretty girl,
If you just take this potion

--The Levellers, "Fifteen Years"

I was a child and she was a child,
In this kingdom by the sea;
But we loved with a love that was more than love-
I and my Annabel Lee;

--Edgar Poe, "Annabel Lee"