Welcome to Reasonable Things, an occasional newsletter about music, language, and meaning from Joel Heng Hartse.

OK, first: here's a 40% off discount code for my new book!

Go to the publisher's website here (https://wipfandstock.com/9781498293822/dancing-about-architecture-is-a-reasonable-thing-to-do/) and use the code Image40 at checkout.

Welcome to Reasonable Things, an occasional newsletter about music, language, and meaning from Joel Heng Hartse.

Most of you already know this, but I just wanted to share that MY NEW BOOK IS OFFICIALLY OUT. I'm really excited about this book, but it's a weird kind of excitement, because I wrote most the stuff in it anywhere from ten to 22 years ago. It's a kind of personal greatest hits for me, so I'm excited to share it with you, but I'm also at the point where I've been living with it for so long that I don't know what to think of it any more. I hope you'll like it and consider recommending it to your friends.

Anyway -- below is some info about where you can buy it in various formats, plus information about the launch event next week.

The LAUNCH is happening on Zoom next Thursday, March 24, at noon Hawaii/ 3 pm Pacific/ 6 pm Eastern / 7:30 pm Newfoundland/ 10:00 pm GMT. It's sponsored by Image, which is so cool to me, because not only did they publish the essay this book is based on, but they sponsored my first book launch some 10+ years ago, and I was an intern for them in college. It will feature me in conversation with my friend Mischa Willet, who is a poet and professor at Seattle Pacific University, and musical guest John Van Deusen, who you might know from his former band the Lonely Forest or his amazing series of solo albums, I Am Origami.

Welcome to Reasonable Things, an occasional newsletter about music, language, and meaning from Joel Heng Hartse.

Hey! I hope to have news about my new book soon, but until then: let's listen to some music!

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Welcome to Reasonable Things!

(Warning: This is going to be a long one.)

Earlier this week I spoke to Aaron Weiss, the singer of the band mewithoutYou, for t For reasons that may be obvious if you know the band (a punk/screamo juggernaut with a multi-religious, existential vibe) and the magazine (America’s biggest evangelical publication, founded by Billy Graham), I had some trepidation about this piece. Probably I needn’t have worried; Weiss is such a warm and engaging (if verbose) person, and thus our conversation was simply so delightful, that I decided it would be worth it to share the whole thing rather than a few choice quotes for an article about the band.

Welcome to Reasonable Things, an occasional newsletter about music, language, and meaning from Joel Heng Hartse.

My pre-sabbatical summer of no teaching has been pretty crowded so far. So here are some highlights of stuff I’ve done lately!

• I submitted the manuscript of my new book to the publisher (more info later this year!)

“Everything I feel now as an adolescent is true. This is who I am. Each day that passes I grow away from my true self. Every inch I take towards adulthood is a betrayal.” - Stephen Fry, age 16

I remember feeling this way as a teenager, too. This feeling is powerful, but it can, with the benefit of the intervening years, be shown to be demonstrably false. Yet its power can be a force for good. This is partly why I love the music of the 90s, still, so much. There are good, true things that can (still) be accessed via the music one came to in one’s youth. Through it, you can remember things that truly matter: the thrill of discovery, the shock of finding like minds, the joys of love and friendship, the beautiful superfluousness of art.

This is probably why I keep writing about the 1990s. The theme of most of my music writing since about 2010 has been “guys, 90’s Christian rock was actually good.”

Many of the bands I discovered in the 90s were absolutely revelatory to me, and I’ve written about many of them over the years. I’ve found it difficult to write about Luxury, who – I hate to exaggerate but I don’t mean to – might actually be the best rock band of all time.

Chinese Satellite

When Judee Still introduced her song “Enchanted Sky Machines” at a 1971 concert in Boston as “a religious song about flying saucers coming at the end of the world to take all of the deserving people away till the holocaust is over,” a brief, muted round of applause breaks out before she finishes explaining the song and begins playing it. I think about the people who applauded there quite a bit. There were maybe ten? Twenty? Forty? who applauded in a crowd of, presumably, a couple hundred. Who were these people? Why did they applaud? Elsewhere, Sill said of the song, “When I wrote it, I think I believed it more literally than I do now, although I still believe poetically that deserving people will be spared.”

I see a clear line from this song to Phoebe Bridgers’ “,” from her 2020 masterpiece of an album, . Over a soaring string section, Bridgers sings:

Ahoy!

I am done with grading for the semester and here to share some stuff I’ve been writing, reading, and listening to.

WRITING

The first time I was really blown away by a radio DJ was when I heard KEXP’s DJ Riz, on a dark and rainy weekend night in Seattle in the early 2000s, play the instrumental version of Jeff Buckley’s “Dream Brother” and segue it seamlessly into the original version. The sheer audacity to repeat the whole song recontextualized the instrumental version as a six-minute introduction in service of the overall atmosphere of the whole four-hour set. The vibe was incredible.

My own forays into college radio DJing were marked by attempts to find the perfect segue – I’ve often bragged of the day I went from the Barenaked Ladies’ “Be My Yoko Ono” into Dar Williams “I Won’t Be Your Yoko Ono” into John Lennon’s “Oh Yoko” – and I still feel there is something electric in the creative juxtaposition of pop songs. Something wholly other emerges when they are put into overlapping conversation – a meta-meaning happens; songs somehow are opened to each other and themselves in ways they could not be in solitude. Each song becomes another’s exegesis.

Anyway, this weekend I spent a little time with Audacity and Mixcloud, the results of which I offer here. Follow this link to listen, and read the notes below.

I’ve found it almost impossible to read and write since about March 15. Did you know that anxiety plus a global pandemic generally – in my experience anyway – equals more anxiety? So the manuscript for my forthcoming book continues to languish, papers in need of grading continue to pile up (summer term, during which I’ve been teaching, ends today), and I continue to spend my free time mostly fretting. Thankfully, though, I’ve managed to read and listen to some pretty great things here and there, which I heartily recommend below:

NoMeansNo

I got really into the BC-based punk band NoMeansNo, who broke up a few years ago and whose work around the late 80’s is just astonishingly good – apocalyptic, prophetic, fun. Check out their 1989 album . I , which I’d recommend reading as you listen to their first few albums.

I love Effectively Wild. It’s my favorite podcast, and it helped rediscover my love of baseball . But I take issue with something that comes up on the show from time to time, which is the notion of baseball as a distraction from our mortality. The show’s co-host, Sam Miller, once said this of the game’s purpose:

Hi!

I’m Joel! This is my email newsletter!

I have been inspired by friends and writers I admire who seem to be pushing against social media, getting back to something a little more personal and relational by starting newsletters about stuff they are working on.

What I work on? The thing I have been mainly doing for the last ten years is academia, and most of the academic stuff I do is related to language and writing in higher education. That is my “real career.” I work at a university and grade papers and stuff.