About
About the writer
Wax Banks is Walter Holland, author of Phish’s A LIVE ONE for the 33-1/3 series among other books. Recently he helped his dad write his memoir, which was the best writing job he ever had. He is gainfully employed as a technical writer near Cambridge MA, where he gainfully lives. Writing this in the third person made him feel stupid.
About the blog
I’ve maintained a blog, or several, on and off for nearly 20 years — writing a metric ton during the Bush years (like so many people), much less during the Obama administration, and occasionally since. Like seemingly every idiot I read Twitter and post there but I’m trying to break that habit. I don’t use Facebook or Instagram. This is my primary online outlet.
There is no theme to this blog beyond my drifting interests, semirandomly sampled. A couple of the categories might could use explaining:
- highweirdness. This heading collects pieces that bear directly or indirectly on a yearslong writing project of mine, a book (‘the present work’) about the antirational variously defined and characterized. I sometimes post excerpts from the manuscript here, e.g. an essay on the ouija-board poet James Merrill as crank writer. I’d like to bring the first draft home in
20222023. - wicked pack of cards. A nonrandom walk through the Major Arcana of the tarot, written during the first year of plaguetime at the height of what I came to understand as a midlife crisis. The first half-dozen posts were written a decade ago and are no longer online. I’m in the process of gathering and mutating these posts into a book with the working title The Greater Fool. It has a lot of barely-digested Jung in it, and is not really ‘about’ the tarot in any deep sense.
- cognitivemusic. Crossover with the preceding two categories, along with some other broadly minds-related, or anyway minds-interested, short essays.
- phishbook. In 2015 Bloomsbury released my book on Phish’s double live album A Live One as part of the wonderful 33-1/3 series. You should go right now and buy several copies. This category collects Phish- and Phishbook-related posts, e.g. rejected epigraphs and some additional personal context and a response to a fascinating Phish-related scholarly talk I went to.
- irreal10. Greil Marcus used to do a column called ‘Real Life Rock Top 10’ which inspired the title this series of ‘listicles’ and, at least directly, nothing else. You’d think listicles would be easy but no.
- 100words500things. I bet you can guess.
Me online
I’m waxbanks in several places online, including email (gmail.com).
I have accounts on Twitter and Mastodon. I used to write on Medium (e.g. about the X-Files). You can find some of my books on Amazon and elsewhere.
Anything else, please don’t hesitate to ask.
wax banks 
Hi there! This NY Times book review https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/28/books/review/aimee-bender-the-butterfly-lampshade.html referenced an idea of yours I find fascinatiing — “The music critic Walter Holland recently proposed that “active musical listening is part patient attention to the moment and part predictive attention to the possible futures that that moment suggests.” I’d love to read this in its full context. Where was it from?
Hi there! I wasn’t sure myself — it’s from an essay in the 33-1/3 ‘B-SIDES’ collection, on the band Stars of the Lid:
> Now, the duration (or convertibly the spatial extension) of psychedelic art is essential to its working because it wanna be processed in flux, from within a private universe in chaotic motion. It remaps the sensory/cognitive apparatus with which it’s meant to be processed; yes you can lie around for two hours just floating on it but your changing inner context is in a sense — academics use ‘in a sense’ to mean ‘none of my claims are verifiable’ — is in a sense the true object of the art’s work. ‘The journey’ the hippies go on about. Which is why *And Their Refinement,* a pretty void, a work of art perversely empty of apparent musical informatiion and in which every instant seems instantly, almost willfully forgettable, seems to me a perfect success on its own terms: it creates a world sensible *only* from an internal vantage, and manifests the conditions of possibility of that transformed seeing. Put *slightly* less pretentiously, it teaches you how to hear it, but the lesson only makes sense in the hearing — and I say ‘hearing’ rather than ‘listening’ because (speaking just for myself here) if active musical listening is part patient attention to the moment and part predictive attention to the possible futures that that moment suggests, then *And Their Refinement* perversely resists active listening. There’s nothing to listen *to* or even really *for,* unless… (and then jokes about synths)
The broad point of that throwaway phrase is that if you’re listening closely to music, you’re in the moment of what you’re hearing now but your sense of it is inflected by what you think/hope/know is coming: a C7 chord on its own can ‘imply’ a resolving F chord, say, or can stand on its own in deliberate ambivalence, depending on context. It can do plenty of other things too but whatever. In open-ended improvisations (e.g. Phish’s longform jams), the music’s charge comes partly from feeling where it is, partly from wondering where it’s going, partly from intuiting what it’s suggesting (signaling transition/transformation), etc. When you’re way down in there with the music, you start to feel like the machinery of transformation is directly exposed to you; you don’t have to think consciously about where it’s going, you just ‘know’ it somewhere deeper. What an incredible feeling! And different music rewards that intense tight focus differently.
With Stars of the Lid and other deliberately static ‘duration music’ (at least for me) there’s so little musical information that it can feel weird, if you’re used to being flooded. So you kind of have to drift with the music, defocus. At least that’s how I listen to it. I’ve tried, but I can’t pay any attention to this album I adore. The B-SIDES essay is partly an exhortation to myself to be OK with certain kinds of simple pure art.
Dunno if it’s a GOOD essay, but it’s what I had.