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The Waves Playlist

Pop songs, not classical or Jazz.


The characters

Rules: One song each. Gender matching. Must express as many of the key character traits as possible. I must love it.

Bernard: Bob Dylan � To Ramona
Susan: Kate bush - Mrs. Bartolozzi
Rhoda: Throwing Muses � Fear
Neville: Anthony and the Johnsons � Crazy in Love
Jinny: Julia Holter - Gold Dust Woman
Louis: Jeff Buckley - A Satisfied Mind

[Percival: John Cage - 4'33]

The novel

4 rules here - reference to water in title or song (mist or fog counts), thematic connection over and above this to the novel, something about the feel matches the novel too, and it has to be a song I love.

Grouper � Heavy Water/I'd rather be sleeping
Joanna Newsom - Time, a symptom
Joanna Newsom - Divers
Smog - Rock bottom riser
Judee Sill - Kiss
Julie Holter - Sea calls me home
Beach house - On the sea


****

This is It. This is The Book. The One. The collection of carefully crafted words I hold most dear in the world.

It is for this very reason I cannot write a reasonable review, I cannot simply tell you that this is a masterpiece, that this deals with the most profound and important issues of Being in the most beautiful ways imaginable, nor can I simply say that, though I have read it many times, I still find new pearls to treasure in almost every line.

So I will take a quote, a relatively famous one, and ramble on a little about what makes it so wonderful. From this one can extrapolate the rest�

Towards the end of the novel, Bernard says the following:

"How tired I am of stories, how tired I am of phrases that come down beautifully with all their feet on the ground! Also, how I distrust neat designs of life that are drawn upon half-sheets of note-paper. I begin to long for some little language such as lovers use, broken words, inarticulate words, like the shuffling of feet on the pavement. I begin to seek some design more in accordance with those moments of humiliation and triumph that come now and then undeniably. Lying in a ditch on a stormy day, when it has been raining, then enormous clouds come marching over the sky, tattered clouds, wisps of cloud. What delights me then is the confusion, the height, the indifference and the fury. Great clouds always changing, and movement; something sulphurous and sinister, bowled up, helter-skelter; towering, trailing, broken off, lost, and I forgotten, minute, in a ditch. Of story, of design, I do not see a trace then."


This is, of course, a comment by Woolf on her art, and illuminates some of her key concerns as they relate to the confused and tattered nature of reality. But I do not wish to speak of that here. I want to talk about the music of this passage, the song of her writing.

We begin with an old Rhetorical trick: repetition. He is tired, that much is clear, and do we not feel a similar fatigue? The fall of those sentences, like an exhausted sigh raising themselves up to the exclamation point at the end. Then alliteration, that echo of anglo-saxon origin, propels us through the next, short sentence. All those hard "d"s, the rippling between "life" and "half" (deep ripples those, though I will not explore them here)�

And the alliterative magic continues, bouncing like bows on taught strings, "L"'s for longing, little, language and lovers, the repetition of "words", shuffling the sentence like those feet on the pavement.

Then, as if to prove such shattering and shuffling inevitable, a sentence which falls on its own sword, ending with its feet over its head and undeniably unstuck.

But we shall right ourselves. Pulled back by the gentle arms of another "L", and those commas, like the beats of a conductor's baton, getting us back up to speed, ready for the pounding out of those key words "confusion", "height", "indifference" and "fury". And we understand how fury can be delightful, how indifference can fill us with joyous awe.

The next sentence is, according to Microsoft Word, incorrect. It is a fragment which I should consider revising. But how can one truly speak of the fragmented without using broken and un-finished lines? Here too all our alliterative friends return � those "C"s, "L"s, "D"s and "S"s, the repetition of "ing", like light and dancing footsteps following the music they themselves create.

This is Design. This is Song. This is the tension between the beauty and craft of great prose, and the dirty, broken Truth of the World. Woolf is the Master of this tension, she walks on the thin thread tied tight between them. And when the thread broke, she drowned and the World lost too much to be easily comprehended.

Of all books in the world, of all the voices I have been lucky enough to overhear through the magic of literature, hers is the one I love most, and the one I miss most. Read her. Read all of her. Then go back and start all over again.