Arguing with the Twitter avatar of Paste's Matt Mitchell about his 'Full Force Galesburg' review. This episode runs from Antigone to Otis the Aardvark, by way of Roman re-enactors and the Romantic sublime, as I try to make sense of the snapshots of a 90s childhood.

Show notes

Matt Mitchell’s thoughtful and not actually objectionable ranking of the studio albums for Paste: https://www.pastemagazine.com/music/the-mountain-goats/the-mountain-goats-albums-ranked/

Liner notes to Full Force Galesburg: http://web.archive.org/web/20200930190323/https://kylebarbour.org/tmg/galesburg.html

1997 Duke Coffeehouse live show in Durham: https://archive.org/details/tmg1997-04-04.aud.128mp3/

Interview with the Des Moines Register: https://eu.desmoinesregister.com/story/news/local/columnists/kyle-munson/2017/02/25/john-darnielle-wanted-write-iowans-so-he-came-up-creepy-rural-elegy-different-sort/98192656/

‘Rocky Mountain Guy’ – 2001 profile by Iowa State Daily: https://www.iowastatedaily.com/article_4b1cb817-2033-5e2f-b9a6-a1cca11d691 8.html

John’s ‘Five Favorite Mountain Goats Characters’ for eMusic, featuring ‘Twin Human Highway Flares’: http://web.archive.org/web/20101223190232/http:/www.emusic.com/features/spotlight/2008_02-mountain-goats.html

Driving directions from Davenport, Iowa, to the Regency Inn, Geneseo: https://www.google.com/maps/dir/Davenport,+IA,+USA/Regency+Inn+Geneseo,+765+W+Main+St,+Geneseo,+IL+61254,+United+States/@41.5183787,-90.5272117,11z/data=!4m14!4m13!1m5!1m1!1s0x87e234c5e012a2f1:0xe8ea1f6356581fb0!2m2!1d-90.5776367!2d41.5236437!1m5!1m1!1s0x87e2100c5f82d557:0xa1fdd3c8fbe3bca3!2m2!1d-90.1671276!2d41.4480527!3e0

Burying the real songs: a live comment on ‘It Froze Me’: http://web.archive.org/web/20200907012721/https://kylebarbour.org/tmg/nfj.html#fnref:itfrozeme

‘Love Love Love’ fandom page, mentioning ancient Greek conceptions of love: https://themountaingoats.fandom.com/wiki/Love_Love_Love

Shakespeare’s Sonnet 73: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45099/sonnet-73-that-time-of-year-thou-mayst-in-me-behold

Joel Heng Hartse’s review of Dark in Here: https://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2021/july-web-only/mountain-goats-latest-pandemic-release-looks-into-darkness.html

2014 interview with Electric Lit: https://electricliterature.com/interview-john-darnielle-author-of-wolf-in-white-van/

My poem ‘National Moth Night’: https://andotherpoems.com/2013/07/30/richard-obrien/

Books and academic articles

Sophocles, Antigone. The Theban Plays. Translated by Robert Fagles, with introductions and notes by Bernard Knox. Penguin, 1984. p.101.

Aaron Kelly and David Salter, ‘“The Time Is Out of Joint”: Withnail and I and Historical Melancholia.’ In J. R. Keller & L. Stratyner (eds.), Almost Shakespeare: Reinventing His Works for Cinema and Television. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 2004, pp. 99-112.

William Cronon, ‘The Trouble with Wilderness; Or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature. Environmental History, 1.1, 1996: p.7-28.

Sarah Hibberd and Miranda Stanyon, Music and the Sonorous Sublime in European Culture, 1680–1880. Cambridge University Press, 2020.

Jean-Francois Lyotard, translated by Geoff Bennington, and Brian Massumi. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. University of Minnesota Press, 1984.

Peter de Bolla, The Discourse of the Sublime: Readings in History, Aesthetics and the Subject. Oxford: Blackwell, 1989.