An Introduction & IronyA "deflection of expectation," where words, situation, or pe... More

Transcript

A few weeks ago I went to a fascinating concert from our own Detroit Symphony Orchestra with a guest conductor, Steve Hackman. Not a name you may recognize (or an orchestra you’ve heard), but no matter. What Hackman had produced and performed for us was a musical fusion of Symphony No. 1 by Johannes Brahms (you know the one, of course, it goes la la la); anyway, a fusion of Symphony No. 1 and the 1997 album OK Computer by Radiohead.

I know, right? Who does that? I mean, Radiohead’s Thom Yorke has never composed the lush harmonies of Brahms–his are far more open-spaced, ethereal in that sense; also, the only song that matches the symphony’s C minor key is probably “You Liked This,” but the rest of the album? And besides, Brahms didn’t even have a drum set. So what the heck is Hackman doing? 

And yet.  And yet . . . Hackman calls his project SymphonyFuze or just FUZE. His process is unique and definitely worth a listen or four–you’ll find links to his work in the show notes. But let’s recognize, too, that hybrid forms of art, artistic responses to previous artists, mashing and revising forms, building and deconstructing prior works, is hardly a new process. I might suggest–and I will later on–that it is almost completely what every artist–sculptor, painter, musician, poet, or novelist–does. 

That’s why I wasn’t surprised by Hackman, just delighted by his discoveries. But as I said, this happens all the time: 

• Duke Ellington rewrote almost the complete orchestral highlights of Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker into big band jazz, and the two are often paired piece for piece in concerts of counterpoint.
• In 2007 I saw hiphop artist DJ Spooky perform his new soundtrack to the 1915 film Birth of a Nation. I can’t say that original director D. W. Griffiths would have been happy. But does it matter?
• In 1905 Claude Debussy meets Paul Verlaine’s 1869 poem “Claire de Lune” and writes an inspirational song, part of his larger Suite Bergamasque; Japanese synthesizer artist Tomita did a riff on the tune in 1974; but rock band Styx then uses this song as an introduction to their work “Ballerina” in 1976 for their album Crystal Ball, unsurprising since Debussy’s song had by then been used for countless ballet interpretations; you’d think Tommy Shaw and Dennis DeYoung was the high point of incarnations of Verlaine’s poem, but you’d be wrong. Not to be outdone, in 2015 Australian artist Owl Eyes with band Flight Facilities did her own incredible vocal work atop the orchestrated Debussy piece. 

Don’t go, tell me that the lights won’t change,

Tell me that you’ll feel the same, and we’ll stay here forever,

Don’t go, tell me that the lights won’t change,

Tell me that it’ll stay the same,

Where we go, where we,

Where we go, where we go,

Where we go, where we go, where we go.

• Certainly it was breathtaking in its poetic innovation, despite by now having little resemblance to anything Verlaine did, but worry not. 
• While Tokyo uses the Debussy tune in its Closing Olympic Ceremonies in 2021, …
• The greatest use and revisionist approach to date must surely be in a particular film. I’m not talking about Giant, Casino Royale, or Oceans 11, where it definitely appeared. No, I’m obviously talking about in 2018, the main theme to the trailer of Godzilla, King of the Monsters, whose epic fiery breath must surely resemble Verlaine’s original text, “
  • Your soul is as a moonlit landscape fair,
  •     Peopled with maskers delicate and dim,

 

Where was I?  Oh, yes. I was talking about my experience seeing Radiohead melodies added to Brahms’s Symphony Number 1. This isn’t a matter of a mere “cover version” or “poetic response” as so many of my other examples are. This was an out and out merging, Hackman’s FUZE. 

But as I asked before, on what basis?  1876 and 1997, the musical dissonance, the mismatched instrumentation, the cultures worlds apart. . . . 

Well, let’s wait a minute. This is and isn’t what I want to talk about today. And it’s one helluva sidebar for the reboot of this podcast. Let’s figure all this out, but first . . . 

[[LITERARY NOMADS THEME]]

Okay. 

First, yes, when I heard about the Hackman concert with the DSO I thought immediately, “Yes!” because this is just the kind of thing which fascinates me. How, I thought, could Radiohead and Johannes Brahms have anything to do with one another, musically or otherwise?  They have as much to do with each other as, I don’t know, a 19th century French poet writing about moonlight and Godzilla. (And confession, I “did too” think this because I knew about Godzilla’s love of French Symbolist poetry long before the DSO concert.) 

And before this gets too out of hand, let me offer producer Hackman’s idea. At the concert, he told me (and about 1837 others) that we can see both Brahms and Radiohead as outsiders, Brahms looking backward toward the expectation that he might become the new Beethoven, and Radiohead looking forward towards the new thing called internet and the end of the millennium with anxiety and a sense of alienation. What binds them, in other words, is trepidation, uncertainty. 

Brahms wrote once: “You have no idea what it is like to hear the footsteps of that juggernaut who has marched before me.” And Thom Yorke sings: “Please could you stop the noise, I’m trying to get some rest / From all the unborn chicken voices in my head.” Uncanny.

Brahms spent some 21 years (I suspect with some emotional stress) building his first production upon sketches and themes themselves borrowed from Alpine folk melodies, from Beethoven’s earlier works, from a desire to emulate the most pastoral of sounds. Radiohead, also owing debts to the Beatles, to Miles Davis, to Bob Dylan, to REM and Talking Heads, author Douglas Adams, others–But themselves fusing and refusing all of it into a dread of what was before us all:

Shell smashed

Juices flowing

Wings twitch legs are going

Don’t get sentimental

It always ends up drivel

One day I’m going to grow wings

A chemical reaction

Hysterical and useless

Hysterical and

For Hackman it all fuzes here, in a familiar creative moment, one of dread and bravery, the utterance. . . . From here it is fairly small steps to the courageous and apprehensive utterances of folks like Kafka or Camus, Pink Floyd or Tangerine Dream, and then to what we must believe about the writings of Steve Biko, Malcolm X, or Ben Okri. Jamaica Kincaid, Mary Wollstonecraft, or Sarah Grimke. Chang-rae Lee, Marilyn Chin, and Arundhati Roy. Charles Baudelaire, Fyodor Dostoevski, or Soren Kierkegaard. Louise Erdrich, Kaitlin Curtice, Rebecca Roanhorse, or Stephen Graham Jones. Marjane Satrapi, ND Stevenson, or Alan Moore.

Hm. How many of those names sound familiar? A few, for certain. Others? Not so much, yet. 

But I’d like you to discover them with me. We’re going to wander, you and me. We’ll be moving, moving constantly, into familiar and unfamiliar territories. We’ll be undertaking practices in our reading, thinking, and writing, too, which will feel more and less comfortable. There, there is the main outline of Literary Nomads.

But let’s get more specific, if I can. I don’t want to give the shop away (and how could I? It’s scarce been decided! This is not new and also new for me, too!), so I don’t want to give away everything, just yet, but I want to spend the next few minutes giving you my sense of what we’ll be up to, and why I think it might be cool to listen in, at the least. 

This is Literary Nomads. It’s a bit of a reboot from an earlier podcast I began a couple of years back. That one, with its episodes still posted in this feed, was called The Waywords Podcast, named after Waywords Studio where it was created. Okay. I admit it. Not the best name. So with the new name and the reboot comes a more defined idea of my tagline: Wanderings on Literature and Language. 

As you’ve already seen, I can wander a bit. I want to help us see connections that we all make in our readings, in our language, in our cultures. We’ll be exploring literature, yes: poems, short stories, novels, philosophy and mythology, graphic works, music, and more. Anything that we can read is fair game–and, to be honest, from my view most of what we do in our lives is read, if reading means interpreting the symbols before us. I don’t make much distinction between kinds of reading, though. This is not a podcast that’s much about high brow and low brow literature. It’s more about reading itself, how we make meaning, how we discover it, what uses we put it to. In that sense, just about any old text will do, right? 

If you’re a lover of literature, then, I suspect you’ll be satisfied. I’m going to look thickly at some texts, exploring their ins and withouts at great length. I’ll wander around and through them, connecting them into unexpected spaces, maybe even–like a Steve Hackman–fuzing or forging something new to think about. If you’re a teacher of literature, I’ll offer some thoughts on approaching these ideas in classrooms or other spaces. And if you’re a student–we’re all that all of the time, yes?–I hope to provoke you to further discoveries of your own.

But we’re not stopping at reading on its own. I did say “Literature and Language,” so from my view, we’re free to look into some thinking about the languages we use, the words we slice and nudge together, the juxtapositions of meanings, and even–dare I suggest it?–how we might ourselves write to and about our discoveries. 

We’re “literary,” then. We want to explore the nature of narrative. How we read it, how we write and speak it, how we think about it. 

And we’re “nomads,” in this sense remaining in no place permanently, wanderers. We live and learn from the spaces we inhabit and, when the resources dictate, we move on. Not every path will be comfortable, not every journey clear in its end. But the amazing thing about the nomadic life is that our choices are made by curiosity, intuition, meeting new experiences. Travel may be slow, but is never marked overlong by attachment to any particular way of thinking or idea. Change is home.

Now, of course, I’m being ridiculous. I mean, why should you follow me, after all? I’ve barely told you my name, let alone offered you a reason to. Yes, obviously, I’m charming and marginally witty, but what am I bringing to the ear that you won’t get other places? Who is this Steve Chisnell guy?

Well first, I’m someone who’s been wandering about myself for awhile. If we count my college years, we can call that “awhile” over 40 years, and a whole lot of that time working with students in various classrooms from middle school through university doing this very thing. These days? I’m just excited to be doing this still, but at my business Waywords Studio. 

Don’t be too impressed. That little logo in the podcast player right now represents this one guy who is sitting in a small office space in his home near Detroit, Michigan. But if it helps you to think of me as the representative voice for a successful start-up of 200 staffers backed by a corporate partner and 401Ks, interrupting its podcast every four minutes with a bevy of ads, be my guest. These are good years to be wrong about stuff, I hear.

I’m an educator, sure. But as much, I am exploring through this stuff, frankly whether you join me or not. I want to learn as much as I can. I want to find out who’s talking where and how our reading and writing is successful or . . . less than. There’s a lot to say here about this next point, but today I’ll be brief. 

It’s important. I’m talking about learning to read critically, not just consume. I’m looking for discernment, not mere digestion. Maybe what we’re after is re-discovery as much as discovery; and maybe, somehow, we’re talking a bit about the heart of our own personal business: how we act out/on/with/against/beside/through/upon the world around us, about reading and wording ourselves into the milieu of language. About agency. Authenticity. Action.

As I said with Brahms, with Radiohead’s Thom Yorke, with Steve Hackman, these are choices of dread and bravery. We may well reduce that dread a bit, require less overt courage, if we know a bit more about what’s out there. 

Now expect me to wax on this from time to time, but I’ll also to try to offer some practical advice and tools no matter your circumstances. And I already know, this podcast has reached people across much of the planet. Not every episode or approach may be spot on for you; but the approaches we take–that how to read critically part, especially–should resonate. 

So what won’t you find here? I won’t be reading Wikipedia articles at you, I won’t be using AI for anything serious, like my voice, ideas, or writing. I won’t carry ads–my stand on freedom of expression. But while we may step into some serious or adult themes or topics from time to time, I’m not here to play shock jock. I won’t be gushing non-stop five-star must-read reviews at you. For those phobic about teachers, I won’t be correcting grammar overmuch or assigning homework. But maybe some opportunities. 

What I will do? I’ll share my sources (and there will be plenty). I’ll share my notes, my creations, my supplementary resources, my own writing work, my personal reflections on what we’re doing, and I’ll always be looking for more ways to help you with whatever personal projects you want to undertake. If they involve language, I’m in!  And very often, I’ll offer you opportunities to share what you are doing, to try something out. 

There are more and more ways to share and connect through Waywords. And I’ll talk about these as we go along. But right now, I’ve talked more than enough about my vision for the podcast and my promises to you. Let’s shift gears a bit and actually practice what I’m screeching. 

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I want to introduce you to the first stop on our journey. To be honest, it’s an important one for our thinking but also a bit of an apology to my listeners from the prior podcast. We began looking at this marvelous little work and then took  . . . I’ll call it a “euphemistic pause.”  But it’s a great spot to begin: traditional and Eurocentric male, part of what we call the “Western CanonCanon means "center," and a literary canon is a set of works... More of literature” (lifting the nose a bit is always important when saying that phrase). It’s a poem by Andrew Marvell called “To His Coy Mistress.” 

Now I don’t want to scare anybody. This feels like one of those old “classroom poems,” the kind we study in high school and college and ask, “Yeah. And?” Or worse, we’re told we have to appreciate it for its “classic quality” or “superior crafting,” then we decide that everyone who reads this stuff is a snob. Give my V for Vendetta or Fourth Wing. 

We may, though, be surprised to find that this poem has its own fuzed threads, its own hybrid responses, its own song covers, which extend backwards and forwards across more than 2000 years. So I guess it must have something going for it. (Or, I grant you, teachers may just be 2000 years of stubborn.) 

But mostly, as we edge forward towards this poem, and before we go today, I’d like to chat about one of my favorite topics, in literature, ironyA "deflection of expectation," where words, situation, or pe... More.

I’ll be spending more time on ironyA "deflection of expectation," where words, situation, or pe... More than this–a whole lot more–but a taste to whet the appetite a bit.

Back in, it must have been 1983 or 1984 when I took a college American Literature course from professor Walter Brylowski–his real name, though he has since passed away, and despite this story I have fond memories of him and he’ll come up again a few times, I imagine–he stood before the class in grisled angst and said something like, “You people are so stupid I think I’l shoot myself.” Mind you, these were the opening words to the class, even before we had written our first papers.  

Now, this memory is from 40 odd years ago, so I admit to maybe mashing up some details, but the spirit of what happened was true. He denounced us: “I bet none of you even know what ironyA "deflection of expectation," where words, situation, or pe... More is.”

So it was with no trepidation at all, that a young-20-something undergraduate named Steve Chisnell raised his hand and answered, word for word what was in Professor Brylowski’s own mimeographed course pack: “IronyA "deflection of expectation," where words, situation, or pe... More is a mode of perception in which at least two views of the same thing exist, one limited, the others less limited.”  I had read it the night before, but I remember it now word for word. “IronyA "deflection of expectation," where words, situation, or pe... More is a mode of perception in which at least two views of the same thing exist, one limited, the others less limited.” 

So frustrated did my answer make him–his pessimism thwarted, I guess–that he walked up to my desk, said something like “Think you’re smart, don’t you?” then he struck me across the cheek. It wasn’t hard, but it sounded through the room. Then he stormed out. 

Everyone wanted me to sue him. Get him fired. But my raised hand was more one of naivete than courage. What did I know of lawsuits and stepping into public spaces with loud opinions for the fates of others? No, I didn’t do anything like that. I didn’t complain, didn’t drop the class. I was more confused than injured, I guess. And I certainly wasn’t brave enough to stand up to him or much anybody else. No, my “act of resistance” which is how many students came to label it, was more a class answer given in innocent ignorance to the dynamics of the space. 

What did I know? I was a “limited perceiver,” one who didn’t see the whole picture, one who couldn’t understand what was happening or the politics of academic power and abuse. The folks around me? They seemed to understand better than I did what should happen next. After all, the drama was now underway! We’ve seen this story before in a dozen movies of the week and across Hallmark channels and reality television and excitable tabloids. The rest of the world in 1980-whatever, it seemed, knew more than I did about such things. 

This was the dramatic ironyA "deflection of expectation," where words, situation, or pe... More of Walter Brylowski’s awkwardly-written-but-hugely-accurate definition: “IronyA "deflection of expectation," where words, situation, or pe... More is a mode of perception in which at least two views of the same thing exist, one limited, the others less limited.” 

• I was the limited or “ironic” perceiver
• I was the girl opening up the closet doors in the haunted house while the tense music plays.
• I was Romeo who decides that Juliet is not moving, so she must absolutely be dead. A single Red Cross class would have done him a world of good
• I was Oedipus who says, “I get to wear the cool crown AND have this hot cougar momma?”
• I’m Mr. Roeper who believes Jack is gay.
• Quasimodo who thinks he’ll win the girl’s heart.
• I’m Walter White’s brother-in-law.

(intake of breath). Okay. I think we get the point. Dramatic ironyA "deflection of expectation," where words, situation, or pe... More (not sarcasm, not that stupid situational thing where the firehouse burns down), is what we’re talking about, the ironyA "deflection of expectation," where words, situation, or pe... More of story, of narrative.

But I’ll go eight steps further all at once: I might argue that dramatic ironyA "deflection of expectation," where words, situation, or pe... More is so powerful, so pervasive, that it lies at the heart of all literature. Somebody (maybe somebodies) ultimately knows more than the dude or dudette we’re looking at. That somebody could be another character, it could be the author, it could be the audience, or any combination. 

And it doesn’t have to just be stories, movies, and the like. I said all literature. Everything. Even a little grotesque of a poem written in the 1650s by Andrew Marvell. Maybe you know this poem. Maybe it’s new for you. But I will say that until we begin to peel away and peek at its ironies (um, eww), we cannot understand it, discover meanings we naively declared for ourselves didn’t exist. 

And what frustrates me more than it should about this poem and how it is too often taught, how it is written about in online sources and YouTube and TikTok videos and SparkNotes and Owlcation and GradeSaver and all those places, is that it is a poem that is about a seduction. Now, that answer isn’t wrong, but it’s only maybe 11.3% right. 

And this is what Professor Walter Brylowski had begun to teach me. “Think you’re smart, don’t you?” he said to me. And I wasn’t. I wasn’t at all.

IronyA "deflection of expectation," where words, situation, or pe... More is the first of just a few key tools I would always give my students to unlock literature, and I didn’t even get to slap any teenagers to do it. How does it work and how could it apply to a poem? We’ll save that for next time.

Find references and links to what I talked about today, and Marvell’s poem if you want to read it in advance, in the show notes and also on my website: Waywords Studio dot com.  And did I say, thank you for being here? I think we’ll have a good time and occasionally uncomfortable trip! 

For now, though, I challenge you to do a task worthy and important: Go read something.

[[CLOSING CREDITS]]

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Show Notes Links:

Steve Hackman’s website: https://www.stevehackman.com/brahms-x-radiohead 

Hackman: Brahms V Radiohead: https ://www.youtube. com/watch?v=Yr8Y-emrLPI 

Brahms: Symphony No. 1: https:// www.youtube. com/watch?v=NjIduF3equQ 

Radiohead: OK Computer: http s://www.youtube. com/playlist?list=PLxzSZG7g8c8x6GYz_FcNr-3zPQ7npP6WF 

“Clair de Lune” playlist of versions: https: //www.youtube. com/playlist?list=PLnMqLgwuHXsNoVwRn3VLlPaOfVS03elkc 

Godzilla: King of the Monsters with song “Claire de Lune”: https: //www.youtube. com/watch?v=5BiPKlgkAHc 

DJ Spooky: Rebirth of a Nation: https://djspooky.com/rebirth-of-a-nation/ 

Andrew Marvell’s poem “To His Coy Mistress”: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44688/to-his-coy-mistress 

Citations:

Brahms V. Radiohead. Detroit Symphony Orchestra, Steve Hackman, conductor, Orchestra Hall, Detroit, MI,  8 January 2025. 

“Brahms X Radiohead — Steve Hackman.” Steve Hackman, www.stevehackman.com/brahms-x-radiohead, n.d.

Ellington and The Nutcracker. Detroit Symphony Orchestra, Jader Bignamini, conductor, 

Orchestra Hall, Detroit, MI, 6 December 2024. 

“Rebirth of a Nation.” DJ Spooky, 2 July 2024, djspooky.com/rebirth-of-a-nation. 

“Steve Hackman on Fusing Classical and Contemporary for ‘Radiohead X Brahms.’” Composer 

Magazine - Spitfire Audio, June 2024, https://composer.spitfireaudio.com/en/articles/steve-hackman-on-fusing-classical-and-contemporary-for-radiohead-x-brahms.

“To His Coy Mistress.” The Poetry Foundation, 22 June 2024, www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44688/to-his-coy-mistress.