Dancing about Architecture is a Reasonable Thing to Do

  • It’s been said that writing about music is a difficult, even pointless enterprise—an absurd impossibility, like “dancing about architecture.” But aside from the fact that dancing about architecture would be awesome, what is that ineffable something that drives people to write about music at all? In this short, insightful book, Joel Heng Hartse unpacks the rock writer Richard Meltzer’s assertion that writing about music should be a “parallel artistic effort” with music itself—and argues that music and the impulse to write about it is part of the eminently mysterious desire for meaning-making that makes us human.

  • “Joel Heng Hartse gives a heartfelt apologia for writing about music. He suggests that the writer is not merely a commentator but an artist himself crafting and responding to the art with something new and creative.”

    —Christopher Foley, bass player of Luxury, and priest in Orthodox Church in America

    “At times, it is a love poem to music . . . At other times, it is an exploration of our humanity, why and how we seek meaning through music. Above all, at a time when we are overwhelmed with musical content and noise, Heng Hartse’s book grounds the reader with a tangible sense of the richness and wonder that is music.”
    — Alan Noble, author of You are Not Your Own and Disruptive Witness

    “I enjoy Joel’s thoughtful perspective and casual profundities, of which there are plenty. But to me, what makes Joel a great music writer is the fact that he spent an entire semester abroad hunting down a single used CD from an obscure indie band. It’s what any reasonable person would do.”
    —Drew Dernavich, New Yorker cartoonist and author of Elvin Link, Please Report to the Principal’s Office

    “In this wide-ranging book, the relation between criticism and composition . . . is set aside for something emergent and difficult. Something verging on ineffable. The lack of aesthetical pretension, the presence of real examples and first- person experience—all of this and more make reading this book, as a scholar and a musician, exciting and, dare I say, joyful.
    —Sam Rocha, University of British Columbia, author of A Primer for Philosophy and Education

Perspectives on Teaching English at Colleges and Universities in China

  • I wrote this book for TESOL’s “ELT in Context” series with my friend and colleague Jiang Dong. We met while working at the same institution in China, and in this book we provide complementary viewpoints on teaching English at the university level there, sharing insights about the sometimes very different experiences of local and foreign teachers of English working at this level. Touching on the history of English education, student life, testing and assessment, educational policy, and other unique features of English in the Chinese context, this book is for practicing or aspiring English language teachers who are considering teaching at the university level in China, or for anyone interested in learning more about this context.

  • “This book in the ELT in Context series, coauthored by a Chinese teacher of English in China and an American teacher of English who worked in China, is a powerful example of international collaboration and highlights one of the distinctive features of this series. In this new volume, Joel Heng Hartse describes working as a foreign teacher of English at Zhejiang University and Jiang Dong describes his work as a local teacher of English at Yuanpei College. This combination brings together two equally important and complementary areas of expertise, in which one teacher-author can be considered to be an expert in the ELT system of that country he was educated in and is the product of that system, while the other teacher-author can be considered to be an expert in the use of the target language.” - TESOL

Sects, Love, and Rock & Roll

  • Church-camp sing-alongs gone horribly wrong, infatuation with Christian contemporary music, teenage love set to indie rock soundtracks, playing rock in churches and church music in rock clubs, betrayal by Christian rock bands—Sects, Love, and Rock & Roll is a book about how listening to music makes us who we are, and it’s an exploration of the intersections between the evangelical church and the pop music scene. In these essays, Joel Heng Hartse, a youth group dropout turned music critic, combines laugh-out-loud humor with thoughtful reflection to describe how his obsession with rock and roll has shaped him, and how living in the shadow of God and guitars can transform all of us.

  • “Heng Hartse’s book is top-notch rock writing, music snobbery at its self-indulgent, self-effacing best. He listens to music with a theological ear, and he writes about it so well.” – Kurt Armstrong, Christian Week

    “His coming-of-age stories are spot-on, and I wish I knew this guy now.” – Hearts & Minds Books

    “Sects is infused with appealing honesty and humor, and is free from the bitterness that drives some post-evangelical memoirs. – Image Update

    “In the same way Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity is more about our emotional response to music than about the music itself, Sects, Love, and Rock & Roll is a look into why someone might have had a love affair with Christian music in the first place. Even if you never saw dc Talk in their back-up dancer days, the humanness of Joel Heng Hartse’s story shines through the Plankeye references.” – RELEVANT magazine

    “I found myself laughing, groaning, and shaking my head knowingly with every turn of the page…” - Adam Newton, Englewood Review of Books