Delving:The High Goblin Curriculum. 🌀📻

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The High Goblin Curriculum Comes to the VFW: A Review of an Evening of Sound, Myth & Revelation

There are concerts, there are lectures, there are community dinners, and then there are those rare civic disturbances where all three are stacked on top of each other until the fire marshal begins reconsidering Plato.

Saturday night’s High Goblin Curriculum event, held in the rented back hall of a VFW that looked as though it had hosted both wedding receptions and paranormal committee meetings, was billed as “an evening of sound, myth & revelation.” This was accurate in the way a weather report saying “possible rain” is accurate before the river comes through the floor.

The room itself had been transformed, or at least cornered, into a kind of working-class Eleusis. Folding tables. Brown paneling. Flags. A faint smell of floor wax, cigarette ghosts, and tomato sauce. At the far end, beneath fluorescent lights that seemed personally opposed to transcendence, a turntable sat beside a stack of paperbacks, a microphone, two floor speakers, and a crock of spaghetti large enough to baptize a softball team.

The evening began, appropriately, with Frank Zappa’s 1966 TTG material spun at a volume that suggested education by abrasion. The guitar did not so much play as interrogate the room. A few older attendees nodded knowingly. A few younger ones looked as though they had been handed a map of a country that only exists during migraines. Someone near the bar said, “This is music?” and someone else, without turning around, replied, “Eventually.”

Then came Nietzsche.

A guest reader, wearing what I can only describe as the face of a man who had agreed to this before understanding the acoustics, read from Thus Spoke Zarathustra while plates of spaghetti were being passed down the long tables. There is something clarifying about hearing the Übermensch invoked while a woman in a Bruins hoodie asks whether anyone needs more grated cheese. The effect was not disrespectful. Quite the opposite. Nietzsche, who has spent too long trapped in dorm rooms and internet avatars, benefited from the sauce. His mountain air became VFW air. His thunder came with garlic bread.

After a pause for Lone Star beer, which appeared to be both refreshment and conceptual material, the program shifted into E. R. Eddison’s The Worm Ouroboros. Here the evening found its true altitude. The reader approached the prose like someone trying to operate an ornate piece of machinery without losing a finger. Names bloomed, curled, and bit their own tails. The audience entered that special state produced by high fantasy read aloud in public: half enchantment, half trying not to cough during the wrong sentence.

And then, because the curriculum had not yet completed its climb into fuzz-blood, Wheels of Fire was played from the remaster. Cream hit the hall like a truck carrying velvet. Suddenly the event’s private logic revealed itself. This was not nostalgia. This was ceremonial overgrowth. Nietzsche supplied the altitude. Zappa supplied the crooked nervous system. Eddison supplied the jeweled labyrinth. Cream supplied the bloodstream.

The spaghetti, it should be said, was excellent in the way VFW spaghetti often is: sincere, heavy, communal, and free of all fashionable anxiety. It sat in the stomach like a moral position. The Lone Stars were cold, plainspoken, and necessary. No craft beer could have survived the metaphysical pressure of the room.

By the end of the night, the event had become less a performance than a minor local rite. Nobody seemed entirely sure whether they had attended a record night, a book club, a psychedelic church service, or an unusually literate fundraiser. That uncertainty was the point. The High Goblin Curriculum does not explain itself. It assembles a ladder from cheap beer, maximalist prose, bad lighting, volcanic guitar, and the stubborn belief that revelation should be allowed to happen in rented rooms.

One left with several impressions: that the canon is improved by folding chairs; that prog and philosophy belong closer to spaghetti than to prestige; that Zappa at TTG sounds even stranger when heard beside a plastic tablecloth; and that The Worm Ouroboros, whatever else it may be, is exactly the kind of book that should occasionally be read aloud to people holding paper plates.

Was it educational? Technically.

Was it coherent? Not in any ordinary civic sense.

Was it worth attending? Absolutely.

For one night only, no repeats, no apologies, the VFW hall became a mountain, a garage, a mythic serpent, a sauce-stained academy, and a radio tower broadcasting toward the part of the mind that still believes culture should be a little dangerous and a little ridiculous.

Bring your own mind, the poster said.

Good advice.

You may not get the same one back.