For the Record: AP English, 1979-1980

In the summer of 2013, in the run-up to my departure from New Orleans, I discarded a thick binder of items from the Advanced Placement (AP) English course that I took as a senior in high school during the 1979-1980 academic year. I now very much regret having done this: in my defense, let me say that the prospect of having to move sometimes causes one to do irrational things.

There are actually two AP English courses:
(1) Language and Composition
(2) Literature and Composition ("Composition and Literature" back then)
The latter was the only AP course offered by my high school and that's the one I took.

AP English was far and away the most rigorous course I took in high school - it was decidedly tougher than analytic geometry/introductory calculus, if I do say so myself. The course was run by one Patricia K. Prather, a take-no-prisoners instructor who did a good job of whipping us all into shape (at least she whipped me into shape). The primary course text was Laurence Perrine's Literature: Structure, Sound, and Sense (2nd edition, published in 1974, buy it here from Amazon); there were one or two supplementary texts whose title(s) I don't remember.

Course content

The course began with what you might call a writing workshop warmup period: if memory serves, I and my fellow classmates were during this time put through writing assignments on point of view, tone, setting, that sort of thing. Subsequently, the course veered into units on the short story, the novel, poetry, and drama; some milestones thereof are detailed below:

The short story

• We all wrote five-paragraph essays on "Tears, Idle Tears" by Elizabeth Bowen, "Youth" by Joseph Conrad, "Two Little Soldiers" by Guy de Maupassant, and "The Drunkard" by Frank O'Connor. I had no recollection at all of writing these essays upon throwing them out.

• We also wrote a literary analysis paper discussing "The Infant Prodigy" by Thomas Mann and "A Hunger Artist" by Franz Kafka.

The novel/la

• Over the course of the year, everyone wrote eight five-paragraph book reports: my first five book reports were on Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell, Roßhalde by Hermann Hesse, We by Yevgeny Zamyatin, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, and The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka.

• In the middle of the year (November 1979 through February 1980), we read the following class novels: The Mayor of Casterbridge by Thomas Hardy, Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad, The Plague by Albert Camus, and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce.

Poetry

• By far the strangest thing I threw out was a detailed prosodic analysis of "Heaven—Haven: A Nun Takes the Veil" by Gerard Manley Hopkins. Trochee, spondee, anapest, what is this stuff? Get it away from me!

• Everyone wrote a literary analysis paper discussing "The Changeling" by Charlotte Mew and "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" by T. S. Eliot.

Drama

• My last three book reports were on Oedipus the King by Sophocles, A Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams, and Oedipus at Colonus by Sophocles.

• In class we read out loud parts of An Enemy of the People by Henrik Ibsen and The Tragedy of Othello, the Moor of Venice by William Shakespeare.

• Everyone wrote a literary analysis paper discussing The Wild Duck by Henrik Ibsen and The Cherry Orchard by Anton Chekhov.

Over and above the aforenoted essays/book reports/papers, I chucked a large volume of instructional material for these units that Mrs. Prather had given us throughout the year. Again, I wish I had held onto this stuff, but I didn't.

The course culminated in the AP English Composition and Literature Exam on Monday, 12 May 1980. The exam fee back then was $34; today it's $91 - still a good value if you do well and are then able to get out of taking a semester of X at college. All told it was an intense experience that generated a great deal of camaraderie in the class and great relief when it was all over.

A final comment

I did save one item from my AP English materials, that being my A Streetcar Named Desire book report. I didn't do a very good job on that report and Mrs. Prather accordingly raked me over the coals for it; that said, I would like to take the opportunity to briefly respond to the following part of her critique:

Williams sets the delicate, romantic, obsolete Blanche against the brutal, realistic, vital Stanley to play out one of his themes about the South and its people. They are declining in strength because they cannot adapt to a world in which soft lights, bed baths, mint juleps, and gallantry/hypocrisy are obsolete.

Obsolete? Nah. Blanche was simply a flake who was not up to the task of bettering her situation. Just because Blanche couldn't get her act together doesn't mean that there weren't other Southerners on the scene who could supplant her and enjoy those soft lights, bed baths, and mint juleps. Moreover, societal hypocrisy is as entrenched today as it ever was (in case you haven't noticed).

There, I feel better now.

Reading assignment

Almost all of the works mentioned in this post can be found on the Web. (Indeed, Elizabeth Bowen's "Tears, Idle Tears" and Hermann Hesse's Roßhalde were the only ones I couldn't find! And that doesn't mean they're not out there somewhere.) I offer no guarantee that the following links point to resources that are complete and not in violation of copyright.

Short stories
• "Youth"
• "Two Little Soldiers"
• "The Drunkard"
• "The Infant Prodigy"
• "A Hunger Artist"

Novels and novellas
• Nineteen Eighty-Four
• We
• One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
• The Metamorphosis
• The Mayor of Casterbridge
• Heart of Darkness
• The Plague
• A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

Poems
• "Heaven—Haven: A Nun Takes the Veil"
• "The Changeling"
• "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"

Plays
• Oedipus the King
• A Streetcar Named Desire
• Oedipus at Colonus
• An Enemy of the People
• The Tragedy of Othello, the Moor of Venice
• The Wild Duck
• The Cherry Orchard

Don't Fill In the Blanks

(For this post, the term "music video" refers to a video that accompanies a studio recording as opposed to a video of a live performance.)

I don't like music videos - most of them, anyway. Per Joe Jackson, I don't like them for the following reason:

• Devaluation of music.
Though a live musical performance often contains an element of visual showmanship, music itself is an art form that is experienced with the ears, not the eyes. Being forced to associate forever a preconceived set of images with a particular song robs the listener of the ability to use his own imagination. It also tends to kill the potential of a song to evoke special feelings, memories, and associations for the individual listener.

The preceding blockquote is taken from a "Video Clips: A Personal View" article that Jackson wrote in the mid-1980s, which I encourage you to read in its entirety (thanks, The In Crowd).

If a song can't stand by itself - as its own 'organic experience', shall we say - without some cheesy video to accompany it, then it shouldn't be recorded in the first place. If you can't listen to music without some sort of visual complement thereto, then I would question whether you really are a music fan.

YouTube video taxonomy

In the previous post, I noted that I now stream music at YouTube, and praised YouTube's music offerings - how do I reconcile this with my dislike for music videos?

As it happens, not all YouTube music videos are created equal; there are at least five types of backdrop for a song:

(1) Sometimes all you get is a still photo of the front cover of the album on which the song appears: see, for example, this page for "Thumbelina" from the Pretenders' Learning to Crawl.

(2) Sometimes you get a video that writes out the song's lyrics on a solid-color background: see, for example, this page for "Out of the Shadows" from Sarah McLachlan's Touch.

(3) Sometimes you get an image montage of some sort: see, for example, this page for "The Song of Solomon" from Kate Bush's The Red Shoes.

(4) Sometimes you get an official video: see, for example, this page for the title track of The Cars' Panorama.

(5) Sometimes you get a homemade video: see, for example, this page for "The Itchy Glowbo Blow" from the Cocteau Twins' Blue Bell Knoll.

Brief commentary

(1) I can't complain about the still photo 'videos' because, of course, they're not really videos at all.

(2) I like reading a lyric sheet while listening to music so I'm not going to complain about the lyrics videos either.

(3) Hard-core fans will like a photo montage of an artist but if I were the artist I would find it somewhat creepy/obsessive.
("Every breath you take, every move you make, every bond you break, every step you take, I'll be watching you" - you didn't think that was a love song, did you?)

(4) In the "Panorama" video we are treated to scenes of Ric and the boys running around like a bunch of idiots. Who thought this up? How much did it cost? Did the band have 'fun' doing it? What a waste, in every way.

I don't mean to single out The Cars: the overwhelming majority of official music videos make my skin crawl. However, here's one I like.

(5) I don't care for homemade videos either, but I'm going to cut shum65 some slack because (a) he does go to the trouble of making his own videos and (b) his videos do capture the otherworldly feel of the Cocteau Twins' music.

To sum up, YouTube music videos should be judged on a case-by-case basis; for a bad video, you always have the option of minimizing the page and just listening to the song.

Grooveshark update

As of this writing, the Grooveshark farewell message is still in place, the http://grooveshark.li/ site hasn't been shut down (yet), and there haven't been any new entries at the whymusicmatters.com blog since the last time I checked (hmmm...).

Before leaving the Grooveshark topic behind once and for all, I would like to finally thank Grooveshark for curating very good collections of progressive rock songs and post-punk songs and for introducing me to Strawberry Switchblade and Wild Sweet Orange.

Closing the Gate

A year ago I wrote an "I'd Like to Make a Request" post about the Grooveshark.com music streaming service: therein I noted that Grooveshark has been sued by all of the major music companies. As you may know, Grooveshark shut down at the end of April: the legal walls were closing in on it and its proprietors decided, wisely no doubt, to cut their losses and run. As I did a lot of music listening at Grooveshark I thought I would write a brief 'post-mortem' about the situation.

To recap, I viewed Grooveshark as an end run around radio gatekeepers who at best have deeply parochial musical tastes and at worst don't care about music at all, i.e., it was a place to seek out deep cuts and other music that ordinarily wouldn't get played on the radio. In this regard my Grooveshark listening highlights included:

• Miles Davis's Get Up with It in its entirety
• All four parts of Lou Reed's Metal Machine Music
• "Sister Ray" from the Velvet Underground's White Light/White Heat
• Big chunks of Captain Beefheart's Trout Mask Replica and Lick My Decals Off, Baby
• "The Fountain of Lamneth" from Rush's Caress of Steel
• "An Index of Metals" from Fripp & Eno's Evening Star
• "Wild Women with Steak-Knives (The Homicidal Love Song for Solo Scream)" from Diamanda Galás's The Litanies of Satan
• Selected selections by Glenn Branca

Ah, much better than "Don't Stop 'Til You Get Enough", "Don't Stop Believin'", or "Blank Space", wouldn't you say?

I'll admit that my time at Grooveshark was not always spent 'productively': I often visited the site at night and opted to listen to old favorites because I was too tired to be adventurous. I did what I could.

Not with a bang

I can tell you the last song I listened to at Grooveshark: on 30 April at 12:29 PM (right before lunch) I streamed Fleetwood Mac's "Storms", which originally appeared on Tusk and which I have never heard on the radio and which is IMO a better song than the Fleetwood Mac songs that do get airplay (I'd make an exception for "Sara", also from Tusk, but it's been quite some time since I've heard "Sara" on the radio). If the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) were willing to pressure radio stations to play "Storms" instead of "Go Your Own Way" or "The Chain" then I might have some sympathy for its complaints about Grooveshark, but it isn't.

When I returned to the site at 9:44 PM that night it was all over: the site's proprietors had put up a .png image of a farewell message
(a-b) announcing the shutdown and providing a summary thereof and
(c) exhorting its users to seek out a licensed service that compensates artists and other rights holders: toward this end it advertises an RIAA-affiliated whymusicmatters.com/find-music music service portal.
The message is still in place as of this writing.

Meanwhile, a http://grooveshark.li/ site has popped up: I've tested its search engine with a variety of songs and can report that its library comes nowhere close to that of the original site (you won't find "Storms" there, BTW).

FYI: A search for http://grooveshark.com/ at the Internet Archive generates a Page cannot be crawled or displayed due to robots.txt. error.

Exodus

As it happens, I was in the process of migrating my music listening from Grooveshark to YouTube at the time of Grooveshark's demise anyway. The quality of the Grooveshark service had deteriorated over the past few months: at times the playback was smooth but at other times it was choppy, sometimes to the point of being unlistenable. YouTube is a great place to listen to all kinds of music, its video focus notwithstanding - I've found stuff there that wasn't at Grooveshark and the audio quality is usually as good as it was at Grooveshark on a good day.

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At the end of my "Musical Loose Ends" post I reported that I am no longer within walking distance of a library, but this is actually not true: I could in fact walk to Vista's library if I really wanted to. Although I enjoy/ed listening to music at YouTube and Grooveshark, I miss checking CDs out from the library as I did in New Orleans - if I get back into this I'll let you know.