When I said Halloween series, did you assume that that would mean the sidelines and backbenchers rather than the serious literary poetry we sometimes take out for a musical spin here? Let me break through that expectation quickly with today’s selection from seven years of the Parlando Project — it’s a part of a literary poetic landmark, T. S. Eliot’s“The Waste Land.”

When it comes to dread, I’m not a fan of jump scares — I rather prefer the slow build — but did I frighten some casual readers who are reaching to click to the next web site already? I hear you muttering.*  “The Waste Land’  — isn’t that long, boring, indecipherable, so full of stuff you need footnotes for?”

OK, so you believe you have a fresher aesthetic than some old Modernist war-horse — but I do wonder if there isn’t a chill as sudden as a just unconcealed weapon or bared fangs, a suppressed shuddering beneath the contempt. “Is there going to be a test? Do I have to write an essay on what it means — pretending it means anything  to me?”

Schoolwork. Many learn to love and to hate poetry in that single place.

Done over several Aprils here on this Project, I used music and performance in my serialized presentation of the whole poem to remind us of the abstract ways that music makes us feel through non-literal modes, without explications and decoder rings. The unreal city section of “The Waste Land,”  sliding for now over the specifics of place names and time-jumping references, is just a nightmare of the possessed and undead, of a speaker so PTSD’d by a world decimated by violence, epidemic, and careless oppression that the masks have fallen off the faces of his city. The dark humor of friendly small talk is of dogs digging up corpses.

Additional advisories: wear sunscreen, and don’t look directly at the sun without the proper filter.

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You can hear the performance of the unreal city section of “The Waste Land”  with the audio player many will see below. No player visible?  This highlighted link will open a new tab with a player that will let you hear it.

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*Sure, you have that over-tape or closed shutter on your web cam, but rather than composing, recording, or researching new pieces, I instead have been listening to the microphones on your devices. I actually don’t care what you say about parents, children, partners, bosses, or coworkers. I’m listening with dread to what you say about my making the best of my voice and somewhat restricted musical skills. Dogs digging corpses out of the garden aren’t scary compared to those fears.

And of those infamous footnotes in “The Waste Land?”   Have you considered this: are they a frightened nerd being asked to show what he means?