Leftovers: February 2025

What else has been kicking around

I have been unable to think of a witty title for this end-of-the-month post, but it is not a novel idea. This will be a shorter round-up of the other things I’ve been reading, watching, and listening to each month, but was unable to dig into in a more meaningful way in this space. May these be recs, or may they be another addition to the endless stream of online lists.

(P.S. If anyone would like, feel free to email me anything YOU have been listening to, reading, or watching. It is something I am genuinely always interested in. The line is open: soundandvision888@gmail.com)

Reading

Every year I try to revisit a “great book” that I read either too young to reckon with or at a radically different time in my life (and therefore need a new perspective). This year’s book was Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment (1866). I technically “read” this book when I was 18. But, it was by assignment in the waning months of my high school career and also aligned with the construction of my senior project. So, I have always felt as if I was essentially robbed of the experience of this, decidedly, primary text.

I have hardly gone all in on the Russians, and Dostoyevsky’s heady, straightforward prose perhaps kept me away from revisiting this one in years past. But, and this is controversial, this is a very good book. It is a deeply religious book and Dostoyevsky himself was a man who seemed to be pretty terrified at what the implications of the scientific revolution would be. But, there is so much to be gleaned using Dostoyevsky’s own religious anxiety about the future and applying it more broadly to the secular development of society. We are all always negotiating when to let go of the past and when to embrace the future (change is, famously, scary). And while Dostoyevsky’s anxieties and perspective are influenced by his religiosity, you can really feel him laboring on the page, trying in earnest to understand the psychology of others. Each character gets an opportunity to bare their philosophy and ethos on the page. This may not always make for the most beautiful prose, but it gets the point across. Crime and Punishment maintains its relevance because, like all great art, its primary ideas are unmistakably human. This excerpt features one of the characters, Razumikhin (perhaps the closest analog to Dostoyevsky’s real thinking) bursting forth with his philosophy:

“‘The fact that I am in error shows that I am human. You will not attain to one single truth until you have produced at least fourteen false theories, and perhaps a hundred and fourteen, and this is honorable enough in its fashion; but we can’t even produce our errors out of our own heads. You can talk the most mistaken rubbish to me, and if it is your own, I will embrace you! It is almost better to tell you own lies than somebody else’s truth; in the first case you are a man, in the second you are no better than a parrot! Truth remains; but life can be choked up; there have been instances. Well, what are we now? We are all, without exception, children in the kindergarten, in respect of science, progress, thought, invention, ideals, desires, liberalism, judgement, experience, and everything, everything, everything, everything! We have been content to rub along on other people’s ideas — we have rusted away! That is so isn’t it? What I say is true, isn’t it?’ exclaimed Razumikhin, shaking and squeezing both ladies’ hands. ‘Isn’t it?’”

That is a a nice microcosm of the experience of the novel. Feeling a need to develop a concrete philosophy in response to the terrifying modern world, proclaiming it boldly, and doubting it the whole time.

Also, this essay from Miriam Gordis.

Watching

This post is unintentionally focusing on old (relative) religious art; but a few weeks ago I watched F.W. Murnau’s Faust (1926). The only other Murnau I’ve seen was Nosferatu, and I wasn’t so blown away by it. The same can not be said for Faust. This is a seismic film. Murnau spends most of its run time inventing most modern special effects, and putting them to better use than most artists that came after him. The images that are super-imposed onto the film (specifically Faust’s elderly face, pushing through into the present in key moments) offer a haunting reminder of our life’s choices following us. These images and the classically German Expressionist acting adds tremendous visual element to a centuries-old religious myth. Truly an instance of the form expanding the material. And again, in visiting older religious art, you feel a true sense of struggle with the moral ideas at play. This is not saying we need more religious art today, merely to point out that those that peddle religious ideas in modern society are just very clearly applying these ideas at their most bastardized.

Also, Brian De Palma’s Body Double (1984). A filthy, disgusting movie (complimentary).

Listening

Two months into 2025 and I’ve still been spending time with Hurray For the Riff Raff’s The Past is Still Alive from last year. Specifically “Ogallala”. The more I listen, the more I feel this is an album that, like Weyes Blood’s Titanic Rising (2019), really captures all of the anxieties of Millenial conceptions of the future. Maybe I’ll write about this soon, and someone may have already written this, but I think this is meant to be a concept album in a desolate America, post-climate crisis. It’s western aesthetic and poignant title lull you into to thinking this is a piece of retrospective Americana. The revelation that we’re the era it’s reflecting on hits like a twist in a horror film.

Also, the songs of Townes Van Zandt. Specifically, 1969’s Townes Van Zandt and “Fare Thee Well, Miss Carousel”.

On a velvet beach far beneath the reach
Of those that come to pry and preach
The natural man that tried to stand is fallin'
Well, how long will it be before he sees
You own his legs, but his mind is free?
Only you can tell, Miss Carousel
How long will he be crawling?

What he said.