This article is a favor to Holly

I spoke to the Guardian at length about some good bands that write "literate" lyrics. What you get: Just a few lines on Vampire Weekend and Hold Steady!

That's OK. I like all of the bands that the writer wanted to talk about (which also included the Silver Jews and Fleet Foxes, though I don't know the latter too well), and I also talked a lot about the Mountain Goats (I had just finished John Darnielle's Master of Reality, a book I enjoyed so much that I forgot to blog about it) — it's hard to lump all these groups together, since the Vampire Weekenders have a cumulative age of about 32 and the Silver Jews have been around since...early '90s? (Same with the Mt. Gts.?) But it's all good—heyyy, I'll take it!

Weekend Table-Talk for February 16-17

I. Dizzies Team Member Devin on Dave Marsh's The Beatles' Second Album (at Hey Dullblog)—ouroboric and brilliant:

Dexter’s Capitol mutations, whatever their lack of propriety, decency, or respect for the art of the Beatles — something not even the Beatles were convinced existed at that early date — are lovable, explosive, crass, and exciting albums. Mutated or not, slick with stereophonic grease or not, they are the essence of pop as commerce and con game, gaud and gift, bang for the buck. But because Marsh so hates Dexter, he must make the case for hating Dexter’s mutations — though this is obviously counterintuitive to him, not least because here he is himself making money writing a book about how great one of those mutations is.

II. The Guardian profiles Mountain Goats' maestro John Darnielle:

Today, he is drinking warm ale and discussing his new record, Heretic Pride. It is, he explains, "a much more fun record than I've made in a long time", full of songs about Prince Far I, cheap motels, religious cults and swamp creatures. "Now, there's real kinship between your monsters and your pulp-fiction figures and your cult leaders and all these two-and-a-half dimensional creatures that you can then invest with all these things that you yourself bring to the table," he says with an exuberant thwack, then launches into a tale of Michael Myers and Sax Rohmer and HP Lovecraft and Michel Houellebecq, and of his days as a "scrawny little fella" when an ingrained iggishness prevented him from watching any slasher movies. "It is," he concludes, "a sort of cataloguing of my old obsessions."

III. Bookcase challenge II:


How many books can you ID? (That's NBCC prez John Freeman and agent Nicole Aragi.)

(From an old Bookforum piece)

IV. Dizzyhead Dennis reports from the Berlin Film Festival. (Um, not for us, oddly enough, but for the NYT.)

The Dizz

Over at Hey Dullblog, which wants to be your Beatles site, Dizzies Team Member and HD guiding spirit Devin has a truly hair-raising outtake from his book, Magic Circles.

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Dizzyhead Brian sends us to Nina Katchadourian's Continuum of Cute. Be prepared to lose a half hour instantly.

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Listening to the new Mountain Goats—"Lovecraft in Brooklyn"!

I was trying to think what this reminded me of—then realized that in one of the unpublished Parkian novels, I invented a failed sitcom called Howard and Sonia. (I find this interlude in HPL's life terribly poignant—marriage to a fellow amateur writer, transplant to Brooklyn, searching for work, finding none, retreat.)