I’ve attended weddings of marriages I swore would last forever. I’ve attended weddings of marriages I swore wouldn’t outlast the Kardashian-Humphries debacle. If there’s one thing I know for sure, bad marriages can unhappily last forever and seemingly happy marriages can end.

Is marriage a total crapshoot? Research suggests not. Relationship experts recommend gauging the health of your marriage to help identify and resolve marital troubles before they snowball into marital deal breakers. Here’s how.

SOUNDTRACK

Lars from NPR’s All Things Considered picked this as his summer music preview song.  I don’t know a thing about Six Organs of Admittance, but their discussion of this song makes it seem like this is atypical for the band (which has a massive output).  Evidently they’re usually more droney sounding. But man, this song is pummeling and wonderful.

It’s seven minutes long and opens with a simple, plodding heavy bass riff.  The vocals are kind of whispered and strained.  But then comes the guitar solo–a raging piece of distortion that complements the bass.  And that’s just the first three minutes.

The second half of the song features a quieter section–the bass is quieter, while the guitar noodles around and the vocals play over the rhythm.  The song slowly builds again, and by the last minute or so there’s another fierce guitar solo. Until the song is exhausted by the final distorted notes.

This is some beautiful noise.  And, no I have no idea what the band’s name means.

[READ: June 27, 2012] Deadeye Dick

Deadeye Dick is the last Vonnegut book that I was completely unfamiliar with.  I had no idea what it would be about.  So I didn’t realize until very late in the book, and then I looked online and confirmed that this book is set in the same location as Breakfast of Champions, Midland City, Ohio.  Indeed, some of the same characters appear in this book as appeared in that book.  But more about that later.

Vonnegut is not known for his happy books.  Misanthropy is pretty rampant in his pages.  But this book is one of his bleakest books yet.  The story concerns the Waltz family–Rudy (the protagonist) and his brother Felix are the only children of Otto and Emma Waltz.  Pretty early in the story we learn that Rudy is a double murderer.  Yipes!

As with most Vonnegut stories, this one is told in a convoluted and non-linear fashion.  He foreshadows (and really just casually mentions) a lot of crazy things that are going to happen in the book.  Like the fact that Midland City is going to be devastated by a neutron bomb.  In fact, his preface (like with many of his prefaces) tells us a lot about what’s in the book and who the characters are based on and the fact that there is a neutron bomb (but the reality of a neutron bomb is different from what he says).  There is something about knowing this information ahead of time that impacts the way you read the story.  Whether you think maybe he’s not telling the truth about what will happen (can the narrator really be a double murderer?) or maybe somehow the foreshadowing makes it even worse when it actually happens–the revelations are perhaps more deliberate.  But the style–a recursive style in which he says what happens and then he goes back and fills in the details, makes the events that much more powerful.

The funny thing about this story is that a lot happens to the characters in the beginning of the story and then not too much happens to them after that.  But that early stuff is pretty exciting and it has an impact all the way through.

Perhaps the most interesting conceit that Vonnegut throws in here is that Otto Waltz was friends with Adolf Hitler when Hitler was a young painter.  Otto was a something of a ne’er-do-well but his parents wanted him to be an artist.  So they built him a studio and paid for lessons.  Then they shipped him off to Vienna to study art for real.  But he was a terrible painter.  And he basically spent all of his money on drinks and whores.  When he finally went to get his painting professionally assessed, he was told that he stunk.  The applicant next to him was Hitler, a poor, struggling young painter.  Hitler was also told that his painting sucked.  Otto was so annoyed by the master that he bought Hitler’s painting right there for a ton of money (Otto’s family was very wealthy).  Rudy points out that it’s very possible that if his father didn’t do that, Hitler may not have become, you know, Hitler. In case you didn’t know, Hitler was indeed a painter and the painting over to the right is one of his.  It’s called The Minorite Church of Vienna and it’s actually pretty good.

When Otto is sent back to Ohio, he keeps in touch with Hitler and when Hitler rises to power (but before he became, you know, Hitler), he sent Otto a Nazi flag which Otto proudly waved and showed off to everyone.  Of course, once Hitler became, you know, Hitler, Otto was terribly ashamed and the family was mocked behind their backs.  But Otto always aspired to being more important than he was.  He dressed in outlandish garb and spoke highfalutin language (even though he was not really educated and in one classic examples gets his metaphors mixed up).  When Rudy’s crisis happens (see below), Otto takes the spotlight himself in a weirdly selfish selflessness.

He also spent a ton of money to have their house turned into a preposterous hexagon. The Waltz family also had black servants who more or less raised Rudy and Felix. Vonnegut has to be one of the most strong advocates of racial harmony that I know of.  I mean, maybe by the mid 80s, this attitude wasn’t quite so radial, but he has always strongly stood for black people, often stating (by various characters) that they are better human beings than rich white folks.

Otto taught Rudy and Felix how to use guns.  One of Otto’s expensive habits was collecting old armaments–they had a gun room at the top of their house.  Felix and Rudy were excellent shots.  And one day when Rudy was 12 he was given the key to the gun room.  On that momentous day, Rudy went in, carefully polished his gun and then committed murder.  Accidentally.  The details are pretty surprising and unbearably horrifying, and Vonnegut really never lets you forget what happened.  But as with any good social critic, Vonnegut also hates the way that Rudy and Otto are subsequently treated by the police and the town.  It’s a delicate balance which Vonnegut threads nicely.

Felix pops into the story from time to time–usually with a new wife (he has six by the end). He is wildly successful in his life (becomes President of NBC) but also has some mighty failures (he is kicked out of NBC).  But it’s his marriages that stand out as being nothing but disasters for him.  And the details of how he met and married the women is quite funny.

Although the Waltz family is the center of the book, the heart of the story is Celia Hoover–who was briefly mentioned in BoC as the woman who drank Drano.  Hoover is the prettiest girl in all of Midland City, bar none.  But she is very poor and very antisocial.  When Felix finds himself without a date for the prom (an accident of course, as he is class president) he decides to be a big man and ask out the strange but beautiful girl.  Their date is hilariously disastrous.  But Celia keeps appearing throughout the story.  Once as an actor in Rudy’s play (more on that in a moment).  And then later as drug addict (Vonnegut has awesome stuff to say about drugs).  And then finally as the woman who drank Drano.

Celia Hoover’s husband is the car salesman Hoover in BoC.  If I had read this book sooner (closer to reading BoC) I probably would have picked up on that sooner (of course it was nine years between these two books so I wonder who recognized it right away?).  But it was through the mention of the homosexual piano player named Bunny that sparked this connection.  Bunny is Celia’s estranged son.  And basically this is a kind of fuller, sadder look at more of the characters of Midland City.  Of course they were all killed by a neutron bomb so they probably won’t be back again.

Can you tell it’s not a happy story?

As for Rudy’s play….  Rudy entered a contest and wrote a play about a friend of his father who went in quest of Shangri-la.   It won the contest and was performed in New York.  For one night.  But what’s interesting is that several times throughout the story, Rudy resorts to telling what happened to him as if he were in a play.  He is able to cope with the terrible incidents if he puts himself at a remove from the action by being a character.  It’s very effective in the story.  And Vonnegut had been writing plays all along so he knows from dramatic usage.

This is a pretty bleak novel.  My gut feeling is that I didn’t enjoy it as much as some of his others.  And yet, it was a quick read, I couldn’t put it down and I certainly enjoyed parts of it.  I think maybe there was a hopelessness to it that was more overwhelming than in his other books.

Geez, how bleak is Galapagos going to be?

By the way, interspersed throughout the novel are recipes.  Vonnegut says he got them all from a cookbook which every cook should already have–Marcella Hazan’s The Classic Italian Cook Book and Bea Sandler’s The African Cook Book–so don’t try his versions.  There are some delicious sounding dishes in there!

SOUNDTRACK

Viking picked this song back in September of 2011 as his song of the week (or however often he posted then).  I’d never heard of East of the Wall, despite their New Jersey pedigree.  (I know I don’t know every band from New jersey, but usually by the time a band has three records out I’ve at least heard of them).

This song is just over five minutes long and the vocals don’t come in until about three an a half minutes.  By the time the vocals come in, we’ve had three or four different stylistic changes.  And, by  the time the vocals have been with us for a minute it’s possible that there are four vocalists in the band.

It opens with some clean guitars playing an open (but slightly off) chord progression.  Over that comes a slightly distorted guitar and a bass playing mostly the same notes but just enough to be notably different.  Then add some drums so the song is builds very nicely.  The solo gets more and more complicated and when the drums rumble in for a climactic progression…the songs shifts into a kind of loud heavy rock/almost funk.  A new more angular solo plays over the funk riffs and it all works wonderfully.  Then the song becomes a rapid fire snare drum metal song and that’s where the vocals kick in.  I assume this is all one vocalist but who knows.  For the sake of argument I’ll pretend they are all different.

The first vocalist is a screamer–hard to understand but fitting in perfectly with the now heavy riffs.  He doesn’t say much before the second vocalist comes in.  This section of the music is mellow and kind of prog rocky and the vocalist fist perfectly–actually crooning along with the melody.  Until vocalist three comes in with a kind of cookie monster vocal which is interspersed with a different cookie monster vocalist.  By the quarter to 5 moment the first vocalist comes back, and there’s more screaming until the song ends.  It’s chaotic and cool and keeps you on the edge of your seat.  I wonder what they’re singing about.

Wow.  If I’m this exhausted writing about it, imagine how they must feel playing it.  I’m going to have to check out more from them.

[READ: June 28, 2012] “Another Life”

This story is disconcerting in that the first paragraph is a page and a half long.  And it works very well stylistically.  The whole first paragraph concerns a man (the husband) as he returns from a party for father-in-law.  He’d rather not have gone to at all, but since he is also sick and on medication, he takes the opportunity to leave early.  He arrives back at the hotel and sits down to read Rousseau’s Discourse on the Origin of Inequality.  (Holy crap!).  He can’t focus on the book so he decides to go down to the hotel bar (with the book) just to mix things up.

There are a few people in the room, but he sits alone at the bar.  The bartender (whose name is later revealed to be April P) is very nice and chats as she serves him.  She sees his book and asks what he’s reading.  He’s a bit embarrassed, because she’s never heard of Rousseau.  But she says that she reads everything and her favorite is Emily Dickinson.  He is thrown by her choice of authors and by the fact that he can’t think of anything clever to say about Dickinson.  He fumbles a bit.  She remains nice but is clearly unimpressed.

Then his wife calls his cell phone wondering where the hell he is.  He tells her that he’s in the bar and she comes down to see him.  In the meantime a guy (the sleazebag) sits down and starts talking to the bartender all familiar-like.   When the husband’s wife arrives she sits between the men and the sleazebag starts talking to her about the Celtics (it’s set in Massachusetts).  The husband marvels at how easily the sleazebag can chat with a strange woman and how effortlessly confident he comes across.  When the bartender gives the sleazebag the brush off, he leaves.

And then his wife remembers that she forgot something at the party.  She says she’ll be back shortly.  Then April says it’s last call.

The husband leaves but then thinks again about his wife, the sleazebag and April.  He rushes back in and asks April if she’s have a drink with him.  She says yes and they go to a different bar.  And from there things really take off.

There’s so many undercurrents and omens in the story (his heart is mentioned more than once, as is he debauched past, we also learn about the bartender and her relation to the sleazebag) that everything feels like a portent.  And yet, just as it ends in an unexpected way, none of the portents are played out before the story ends.  I gather we are to imagine what happens after the story ends properly.  Because for the last few paragraphs, the focus of the story changes completely.  It ends in a kind of gimmicky way, but it is very effective in this story.  By not telling us anyone’s name (except April P), we really don’t get too attached to them and the ending seems to rewrite the story.  I wouldn’t want every story to be like this, but I enjoyed this one.

The edition I’m using.

SOUNDTRACK: RICHARD WAGNER-”Ride of the Valkyries” (1856).

Possibly the most famous piece of music from any opera (known for a billion reasons other than the opera itself).  This song was introduced to be by Bugs Bunny.  And then cemented in my consciousness in Apocalypse Now.

It’s really impossible for me to listen to it without seeing helicopters dropping napalm.

I’ve never seen it performed before.  Most of us think of it as an instrumental, but there are vocals, and they add a lot to the performance.  I also didn’t realize that the whole first minutes is a prelude to the third Act–with a darkened stage.  I just watched this version by the Danish Royal Opera in which the setting is updated.  The Stage is amazing and it’s a pretty powerful image, that won’t leave me head too soon.  And of course, the women sound phenomenal.

Smells like victory to me.

[READ: Week of June 19, 2012] JR Week 1

And so begins the saga of JR.  A little of my background:

I read JR about a decade ago.  I recall the structure and some of what happens, but not enough to actually remember anything ahead of time, plotwise.

Usually for these weekly group reads, I post fairly detailed recaps of the book.  And usually I do that because there’s so much going on in a large book, that it’s one way for me to keep track.  JR is going to be a little different.  If you’ve gotten this far in the book, you’ll notice that there’s not a lot of plot going on.  There’s a few scenes with lots of dialogue and maybe something comes of it, maybe not.  So, I’m certainly not going to try to recap everything that happens in the dialogue, nor am I even going to try to figure out who said what or even who is in every conversation–I’m not even sure that’s possible.  But I am going to talk about each scene a bit and see if I can pick out anything that seems important.

The book strikes me as being like an unedited film.  Or like a Picasso–Gaddis wants to show you everything, and let you pick out the important bits.  And so the book feels like a boom mike has been inserted into a room or scene.  We’re not really sure who everyone is, or even who is talking at a given moment.  But we hear everything that’s said. And then the boom mike pulls out and the camera pans somewhere else and the boom mike goes down and we hear some more.  It’s not always clear even that a scene has shifted–although usually a dense paragraph of prose indicates a shift in scene.

As far as characters, it’s not clear if anyone mentioned early on is going to stay with us through the book.  It’s clear that JR will be here (although his first real scene is right after my spoiler line for this week).  There’s also the Bast family who will no doubt play some ind of important role.  Then there’s a lot of teachers as well.

JR opens with dialogue—attributed to no one (and none of the dialogue is every attributed to anyone–fun!  It talks at cross-purposes and is a bit unsettling.  But once you get into the flow, it proves to be one of the more creative forms of exposition I’ve read.  There are three characters in the scene: Coen, a legal representative, and two sisters, Anne and Julia Bast.  Coen (whom the women keep calling Cohen—in a very funny joke that I’m not sure would even translate audibly) is trying to gather some information from the sisters about their dead brother Thomas in order to clarify his estate.  The sisters, who clearly have lived together forever and have their own way of talking to each other, talk over him and seem to deliberately fog his questions (although they are also jumping ahead of him so it may not be deliberate).  They misunderstand what he asks and go on tangents unrelated to anything.  One of them even sews a button on his coat while he is talking to them.  My favorite thing is that in addition to the women talking at him, they also react to him.  So, although we don’t see a lot from Coen, we hear the sisters telling him to sit down or have a drink or that he broke his glasses.  But Coen does speak, primarily in legalese (making this whole section of dialogue all the funnier because the sisters do not get what he is saying at all).  Basically no one understands what is happening.

This goes on for 17 pages.  And it is very funny indeed.  It also sets up the way Gaddis is going to reveal information–you’ll have to glean stuff from what people say or don’t say.  Through all of this we learn some basics about the Bast family (whom we assume will stay with us in some capacity throughout the story, but who knows).  There were five children: Julia, Anne, Thomas, James and Charlotte.  Charlotte went by Carlotta and had a stoke, although that’s not what killed her.  James is a composer, and it seems, a musical inventor.  Thomas founded General Roll, which we eventually learn sold player piano music rolls.  Thomas and James fought about everything.  Including, it seems, Thomas’ second wife, Nellie.  Nellie eventually moved in with James.  Coen wants to find out if Nellie and Thomas were ever divorced and exactly who is the father of Nellie’s son Edward—who stands to reap the benefits and pay the taxes on Thomas’ company.  But it’s a lot funnier the way Gaddis tells it.

I trust everyone’s page numbers are the same–since there’s no chapter breaks at all, it will be very hard to keep everyone together.  At the bottom of page 17 brakes squeal and we watch Coen’s car take off.

And we focus back in on a scene with Edward Bast (he’s Music Appreciation) and Mrs Joubert, two teachers who are, we will see, involved in videotaping lessons.  But just as we think we’re going to get some more Bast information, Whiteback, the owner of the bank misinterprets who she is talking about and says that no, that’s Coach Vogel (more confusion as two people look in different directions).  Turns out that Mr Bast is helping out at the Jewish Community Center, helping Miss Flesch teach her kids Wagner’s Ring for an upcoming production.  In and of itself this is hilarious.  For those out of the loop, Wagner’s Ring (from which “Ride of the Valkyries” comes) is a massive opera.  A full performance of The Ring often takes place over four nights with a total playing time of about 15 hours. The first and shortest opera, Das Rheingold, which we will later learn they are practicing, typically lasts two and a half hours.  And it’s all in German.  There is also an undercurrent of antisemitism in the book, although just how widespread is unclear.  Wagner had also written publicly anti-Semitic statements (although he was friends with Jewish men and women–weird–but funny for the set up here).

But back to the scene, Mrs Joubert is holding a bag of money (primarily coins) because her students are about to go into Manhattan and buy a share of stock.  I love this plot idea.  It seems like the kind of thing that may have happened in the past but probably doesn’t anymore.  I wonder if it really ever did.  Anyway, it makes me laugh that she has a bag of coins instead of trading it in for bills (they are literally across the street from Whiteback’s bank).  Especially when Bast elbows her and she drops the coins and some slapstick ensues as they retrieve the money ($24.63).

The scene shifts to the school from which Gibbs is watching the proceedings.  Gibbs becomes a prominent character, but I’m still not entirely sure what he does there.  The “camera” pans around the school to show us the engraved motto: ΕΒΦΜ ΣΑΟΗ ΑΘΘΦΒΡ which will cause some stir throughout this week (and from what I can tell doesn’t mean anything in Greek).  There’s a man who is writing it down (to use as the epigraph of his book).  Someone later suggests it might come from Empedocles.

The book the man is working on is about technology.  He tells the (actual) cameraman: “And get some of those blank faces.  There, the one at that window having  smoke in the boys’ washroom while his class is being taught by television, speaking of technological unemployment.”  There’s some interesting stuff about education in this section–stuff that kind of foreshadows No Child Left Behind (perhaps this was all relevant in 1971 as well, I don’t know).  Gibbs (I believe) says:

Before we go any further here, has it ever occurred to any of you  that all this is simply one grand misunderstanding? Since you’re not here to learn anything, but to be taught so you can pass these tests, knowledge has to be organized so it can be taught, and it has to be reduced to information so it can be organized do you follow that? In other words this leads you to assume that organization is an inherent property of the knowledge itself, and that disorder and chaos are simply irrelevant forces that threaten it from outside. In fact it’s exactly the opposite. Order is simply a thin, perilous condition we try to impose on the basic reality of chaos… (20).

And of course, it encapsulates the very structure of the book–chaos is everywhere–how can we construct a plot out of so much chaos.

Then we meet Mister Dan diCephalis who, along with Miss Flesch (Gaddis is having some fun with names like Pynchon, eh?), Major Hyde and Whiteback (who we learn is president of the bank and principal of the school) have a discussion about new technological equipment.  DiCepahlis did video driver training (as Bast did Music Appreciation on video) until Coach Vogel took over.  Now diCephalis is being saved for math and physics.  diCephalis is the school’s psychometrician in charge of all testing–and very concerned about the budget as we’ll see in the next scene.  Dan claims that the problem isn’t the machines, it’s the holes in the computer cards.  But there is much wringing of hands about the expense of all of this technology–some of which hasn’t even been opened yet.  Then in comes Congressman Pecci (hilariously at the same exact time as salesman Skinner whom Miss Flesch is trying to avoid–more confusion ensues).  And all present begin talking about finances for the school.  They also discuss The Foundation who have sunk “seventy or eighty million into this school tv project nationwide.”

This leads to comments that really predates the TV in the classroom issue that was big in the 90s:

The point like I’ve been saying from the start is that in-school tv, to be in-school tv, it has to be in-school tv with lessons piped into school receivers in school classrooms for school kids in school classes, a simple interference-free closed-circuit school setup where every Tom, Dick and Harry can’t tune in on the kind of open-circuit broadcast you’ve got now and write letters telling you off on the new math.  (27).

I also got a kick out of this: “Now the Senator, Assemblyman Pecci, that is, he has a bill he’s introducing that makes all this mandratory [sic], it will get this in-school television out of the community entertainment field and back into the school” (27).  The characters even pronounce things wrong.

Then we get several pages of people interrupting each other as they watch examples from the tv in a classroom footage.  It’s not always clear what’s happening, although helpfully, the TV dialogue is in a different font.  Then Miss Flesch leaves with the salesman–she needs a ride over to where her kids are practicing Wagner.  And we head over to the Jewish center to watch the kids working on the Rhinegold–where chaos ensues and lots of jokes about Wagner and music fill the air.

This scene finally introduces us to JR (in an oblique way).  JR is a sixth grader who is supposed to be playing Alberich the dwarf but he is not there.  He is the boy reading the newspaper by the window as the scene opens.  When he finally gets back to the stage area, Bast realizes that the bag of coins is missing (the chaos never ends!). Then Ann DiCephalis takes Bast back to the school so that they can do some TV lessons.

We also finally meet someone from The Foundation–Mister Ford and Mister Gall (who was the man writing the book earlier).  And they all watch Bast and Flesch recording and going way off script: “For believing and shitting are two very different things” (42) [see Simon's comments for why Flesch is crossed out].  Then we see Mrs Joubert and her class interacting on the video screen (a new thing they’re trying–usually the kids are not on-screen).  During her exchange we hear her suggest that they buy “–mond Cable or some other growth stock… –What did she say? what stock?” (48) because Wrigley’s gum is too pricey for them.  Turns out that one of the men in the room owns Diamond Cable,and he’s pretty excited.  Then things get ugly in the room.  (Oh and Miss Flesch got into a car accident with the book salesman).  There’s an amusing interchange in which Gibbs questions the Congressman’s bumper sticker “Keep God in America” Gibbs says “Didn’t know he was trying to get out Major, that’s all I…” (47).  And there appears to be a bit about the “under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance.  Gibbs also pokes some holes in the corporate speak: ‘tangibilitating unplanlessness where’d you pick up that language, Whiteback?” (50).

The scene pulls away as Mr and Mrs diCepahlis drive off.  And they bicker the whole way home and into their house.  Where he turns off lights (and she calls him cheap) and he tries to clean up, but the papers are her Foundation Grant application papers–why is he trying to throw away all her work??  They even bicker about anonymous computerized questionnaires.  He is also looking to give back some of the tax refund they received because he estimated they would get $37.10 but they received $336.  She thinks he’s crazy for doing this.

The scene shifts again and this time it’s Mr Bast walking home and JR catching up to him quickly.  JR is carrying an armload of mail–free publications about all sorts of things (Gem School of Real Estate, Amertorg International Trading Corp, Ace Match Company) and Bast is baffled.  “You just send away for it” JR explains matter of factly (59).  As their quick encounter ends, JR shouts, “–I just mean like maybe we can use each other some time” (59).

The scene shifts back to the Bast home and Julia and Anna. They are talking with Stella Angel (formerly Bast).  They are being indiscreet about the scar on her neck (“you might want to wear a necklace” (60)) and she tells them that the kids think she’s a witch.  And they are indiscreet about her never having children with her husband Norman and how much Edward has a crush on her.

There are no photos of Nellie in the house.  Then Stella notices a photo and asks if it is Edward as a little boy.  But they point out that no it is Reuben the boy who James adopted because he was such a musical prodigy).  The aunts say he never adopted the boy, that it was that Cohen that started that rumor.  Then they show Stella Coen’s card and say it’s surprising they left the h off his name and he should get them reprinted (ha).  Some more background is filled in–Thomas wanted to sell piano rolls but James thought he was nuts.  And also that he used James’ connections.  So that Thomas was asking people like Saint-Saëns (!) to record piano rolls for him.  (Saint-Saëns died in 1921, so I don’t think that’s likely).  There’s a little more antisemitism about Reuben (“not a jewy Jew” and he borrowed the name Bast and never returned it).

We learned that James gave Nellie trumpet lessons and that she had consumption–but there’s still not a lot of detail given about that part of the past.

And then Edward turns up with a beer can.  I believe that he had a crush on Stella (all stemming from an incident when he caught a glimpse of her taking off her suit) but unless I am mistaken, they are, well, certainly related–possibly brother and sister they are cousins.  (Stella is Thomas’ daughter).  At any rate, is currently living in James’ studio (on the grounds of his older aunts’ house).  He takes her over there and she notices that the window is smashed–someone seems to have broken in, but nothing is amiss.  She puts on a record player and the music plays over the entire rest of the scene, adding unusual punctuation to their awkward conversation. Edward says he is no longer teaching [was he let go after the TV incident?], although he is trying to work on a composition.  Again, their conversation overlaps and contradicts each other–about the room, their past, his music–he’s easily offended when she mentions it and thinks she is mocking him.  Then he snatches a “knotted length of rubber stretched like a dead thing on the stair” hoping she hasn’t seen it. This has significance although I don’t know what exactly.  (Drugs? Condom?).  He puts the rubber in the beer can.  And then Stella’s cab pulls up to take her to the train.  Edward stuffs his beer can between the seat cushions and the cab drives off.

At the station, Stella runs into an old flame, Jack.  Unfortunately she’s holding the beer can because the cab driver didn’t want it left in the car.  The man is immediately hostile to her, suggesting that her father had financial reasons for getting her married off.  She accuses him of being a drunk (which he returns at her when he sees the can) because he’s dressed like a bum.  Turns out that he’s just come from a play rehearsal.  After some back and forth, he offers to get in the train with her.  She doesn’t refuse and the scene morphs into next week’s read, starring Mrs Joubert and her kids.

I enjoyed this reading an awful lot.  There’ a lot of humor in it.  Also, I’ve been reading a lot of books to my kids where every sentence of dialogue ends “said Jack” or “said Annie” so JR is making up for all that excess.  It’s simultaneously impossible to follow and yet also not that big of a deal to follow. Some of the details get lost but for the most part they’re not relevant to the story, so that’s fine.  However, when new characters come in and they are not introduced it gets a bit confusing.  It’s also really hard to know what’s important and what’s not at this stage.  Should you be carefully reading about what the kids are learning in school?  My minor spoiler is that you should pay attention to what JR is doing as the book is named after him.

I have continued reading into the next section at this point and it is really a lot of fun.  I hope others are enjoying it too.

I sign this: #OccupyGaddis.

[For spoiler-free information, read Simon's comments below.  It also includes links to more details than I'll ever give!]

For ease of searching I include: Camille Saint-Saens

SOUNDTRACK

This is Kathleen Edwards’ latest album.  And every time I listen to it, it gets better.  Her songwriting has reached amazing heights.  The lyrics are wonderful and the melodies are just outstanding.  “Empty Threat” (“I’m moving to America…it’s an empty threat), opens the disc with a bouncy acoustic guitar and, eventually, a full band.  The lyrics for “Chameleon/Comedian” are wonderful: the juxtaposition between these two ideas is just amazing—each verse gets more complex.  I would quote them, but the whole song is great.  And, amazingly, the “I don’t need a punchline” is easy to sing along to as well.  “Soft Place to Land” is a nice ballad—a full band that never gets overwhelmed by any of the instruments—the violin adds a nice texture as do the military drums mid way through.  “Change the Sheets” is one of my favorite songs of the year.  It starts out slow, with simple guitars and more great lyrics.  As it builds (of course it builds) it grows into an amazing bridge/chorus that just dares you not to tap your feet.

“House Full of Empty Rooms” is like a minor palate cleanser before “Mint.”  “Mint” opens like a classic 70s rock song (Bad Company or Tom Petty), but she brings in her unique voice and phrasings and changes the song into something very different.  But again, that chorus–how can you not sing along to the catchy/voice-breaking chorus after the minor key verses?  The tension builds wonderfully.  “Sidecars” is a fun poppy track (“You and I will be sidecars, we chase down the hard stuff”).

“Pink Champagne” is a five-minute piano ballad.  It’s more akin to her earlier more country songs.  It’s a wee bit long but never overstays itself.  It’s followed by “Going to Hell,” which features some great screaming guitars in the midst of more delicate singing.  “For the Record” closes the album with a seven minute slow burner.  It begins quietly, and builds and builds–never the ecstatic heights–but with a chorus that is as catchy as it is mournful.

I have this CD in my car and every time it comes up, i just can’t stop listening.

[READ: June 18,2012] I Dream of Zenia with the Bright Red Teeth

I received this limited (autographed!) chapbook from The Walrus when I re-subscribed recently.  That’s pretty cool.  It has been sitting around because I thought it was a much longer piece.  When I received the latest issue of The Walrus, and saw that the same story was in there, well, I realized that this was just a short story and could be polished off pretty quickly.  The issue of The Walrus also told me that this story is a kind of follow-up to The Robber Bride.

I have never read The Robber Bride (I like Atwood quite a lot and yet have never read her most iconic books!).  So I would never have known that this was a sequel (of sorts).  As I said, I don’t know The Robber Bride, (and hope to read it maybe this year).  I don’t know exactly how it ties to the novel (the first line of the Wikipedia entry tells me that the three main characters are the same), and given the tone of the story, I assume it is simply catching up on them some twenty-five years later.

In this story, Claris, Tony and Roz (who are all women, I didn’t realize that right away) are going for their weekly walk in the woods together (because it’s good for you and Roz hopes to increase their cellular autophagic rates).  Tony and Roz bought (from a shelter) a dog for Claris called Ouida.  Ouida is a wild terrier mix (who hops on Roz’s orange coat and leaves footprints).

It quickly becomes apparent that Claris is something of a hippy—organic, vegetarian, communing with spirits and whatnot.  Claris just had a dream about Zenia.  Zenia (who I assume is in The Robber Bride, because why wouldn’t she be), was a woman from their past.  She stole a man from each one of them—with varying outcomes in each woman’s case.  Zenia died about twenty years ago but she has come back, Claris believes, to tell her about Billy.

Zenia stole Billy from Claris many years ago and they left Claris alone in a house with many murdered chickens.  But now Billy is back and he has moved into the other half of Claris’ duplex (on Clari’s suggestion).  Roz and Tony are not pleased.  And neither is Ouida, who growls at Billy whenever he sees him.

The story is pretty full, given its length.  It really packs a lot into it and, even though I haven’t read the source material, I felt like I was right there with them (and now I want to see what happened Then—I hope this story didn’t give it all away).  The ending is very satisfying—funny, a little weird and with good closure and seems to be everything that I have come to expect from Atwood.  I must stop putting her off!

PHISH-The Man Who Stepped Into Yesterday (1987).

This record was created by Trey Anastasio as his senior project at Goddard College.  The thesis included an essay piece and this collection of songs (recorded by Phish) relating this epic tale from the band’s fictional land of Gamehendge.  It was never officially released, but since Phish is so free with the tape trading, it is pretty widely available online (heck, even Wikipedia has a link to the Lossless SHN download of the album).

This release is legendary in the band’s history because they have played all of the songs from this album many times in their live shows (some much more than others, of course).  And while they have more or less played the Gamehendge saga a few times in concert, I’d always wondered what the original story was all about (many songs have since been added to the saga as it grew larger).

So here in all its tape-hissy glory is the original.  My first thought is that I guess it was hard to get good sound recording equipment in 1987 (or else this is a multi-generational copy—the “white cassette” from a year earlier sounds better).  And there seems to be a few flubs in the narration (which could be from copying).  I actually surprised he didn’t use a more authoritarian voice for the narration.

For fans, this is fun to hear because of that narration.  Live, the narration varies all the time, not always explaining what is going on the same way (some live narrations are far better and much more interesting).  But here you get it straight from the source.  The narration is accompanied by rather pretty instrumental music (which varies depending on who he is speaking about).  But for those of us who know all of these songs, the biggest surprise is finding out that “AC/DC Bag,” “The Sloth,” and “Possum” were part of the story (or maybe the biggest surprise is learning from the narration what the hell an AC/DC bag is (a robotic, mechanized hangman, of course).

The story is pretty interesting (Wilson and the Helping Friendly Book and all that), although by the end it loses itself a bit.  And I’m not really sure that “The Sloth” and “Possum” fit into the story at all.   But hey, he was a college senior when he wrote it, one can forgive a little sophomoric nonsense, right?

[READ: June 11, 2012] “The Republic of Empathy”

This is the first fiction I’ve read of the sci-fi issue.  I’m not sure if it’s supposed to be sci-fi, because it’s not really, at least not in terms of genre (I’d say sci-fi fans would object to the designation of sci-fi for this).  But it is futuristic and neat.  I especially enjoyed the humor and the construction of the story—Lipsyte is usually good for both of these.

It begins with William.  Williams is married to Peg.  Peg wants to have a second child as a gift for their first child (who has just grown out of the new baby smell).  William thinks this is crazy, but Peg says it’s a dealbreaker.  The next day William, who works for a flip-flop company, smokes a joint with an ex-cop friend, Gregory on the roof of their building.  On the roof across from them, they see two men fighting. And then one falls of the roof—splat.

Gregory says he’s seen this before but that William will be traumatized.  And he is in his dreams, but he’s even more traumatized when he dreams that his wife is pregnant and they already have two kids.  Oh, and that the neighbors, the Lockhorns, masturbate each other in the living room with the windows open.

Section two is from Danny’s point of view.  Danny is Gregory’s son.  Every few weeks Gregory is dating a new, younger lady.  This one is only a few years older than Danny.  It’s gross (and Danny feels like a bad YA narrator as he relates the story).  This is all before (I assume) Gregory comes out of the closet.  Because William knows that he’s gay in the above scene.

The next section jumps to Leon and Fresko, the guys fighting on the roof.  They were planning on making a cheap movie with a fight scene on the roof.  Not very smart.

Then we jump to Zach, a cocky rich kid.  He has more money than he knows what to do with, but he’s having an existential crisis (which he worried might be a fake existential crisis).  So he sets off on a quest to interrogate authenticity (there’s a funny (kind of) joke about waterboarding in there).  He buys off professor to support his quest.  And the first person he meets is Gregory, an artist in a coffee house. (I love the joke that Gregory is scraping off the toppings of his everything bagel making it a nothing bagel (“Typical of an artist to make a conceptual work out of his breakfast”).

The penultimate chapter is devoted to Drone Sister.  Drone Sister Reaper 5 is a drone with artificial intelligence.  She is communicating with Base Jango and is having an existential crisis about bombing people.  Base Jango tells Reaper 5 that she is just a machine and has no feelings.  And besides, base camp sets all the controls anyway.

The final section is given to Peg.  Peg wraps up most of the story quite well, but I’m not going to give it away.  I admit I had to go back and re-read parts of it because I missed who one of the characters was.  I was also focusing entirely on something other than what happened, so the ending was a  huge surprise.  That’s a neat trick.

This story was funny, a little confusing, and oddly satisfying.   Even if it wasn’t satisfying in any conventional sense.

If cheating is your game, then Illicit Encounters is the name.  The home page of their website advertises as follows:

Married but Feeling neglected? In need of some excitement?
Illicit Encounters is a discreet & confidential extra-marital dating service for women & men…

I love it.  Who cares about those stupid vows you took way-back-when with that fat cow you now call husband or wife?  Enough is enough of eating vanilla every day.  It’s time for some chocolate two-timing, some rocky road faithlessness or some praline perfidy.  In short, no need to be dodgy about your desire to have an extramarital affair.  Just log on and browse all the men and women who are right there with you.

Dear Smile On Your Face,

I like that your moniker is a black stallion.  Very subtle.  Very sexy.  I’m slightly confused by the first lines of your advert though.

‘A well-educated, intelligent professional, smart, honest, kind, extremely passionate, tactile, loves kissing and above all a gentleman.’

Aren’t we on an illicit encounters website?  A venue so that married people like us can have affairs without having to hang-out in seedy hotel bars?

Super glad you included ‘honest, kind…and above all a gentleman.’  I wouldn’t have my adultery any other way.

Meet you in the lobby of the Hilton at 5…I’ll look for that black stallion t-shirt you mentioned.

xo Sara

 

Make Sure Your Audience or Customers

“Get” What You’re Trying to Communicate

Oh, the wonders of our connected world!  A message in a foreign language appeared on my Facebook page. Someone recommended I use Google Translate so I googled it, cut and pasted in the foreign text and an English translation popped up.

It said, “Hello, greetings from Columbia. Wanted to ask if ud is the author of stay in the sky while your husband is in hell, how do I get it. A hug. God bless you.”

The stilted translation referred to an old version of my newly revised book: Holding On to Heaven While Your Marriage Goes through Hell  (published via Kindle Direct Publishing and CreateSpace). I hadn’t launched the book yet, but had sent 2500 copies out into cyberspace. This note from a woman reaching out across a language barrier and a continent to find me felt like a direct reply. I had recently resumed a public life as an author. This note from afar felt more exciting than receiving a fan letter in the mailbox. I had communicated with someone in another country who needed my book to help her marriage.

Going back and forth using Google Translate and Facebook messages, we understood each other. At a heart level, marital crisis is the same in any language. She could read English better than I could read her language, but either of us could immediately use Google Translate to switch to our native tongue if we chose.

Remember the story (in Genesis 11:1-9) where “nothing would be impossible” to those who had no language barriers? Are we there yet? Not so fast, a few days later I went to a business conference where a session on Cross-Cultural Marketing highlighted business opportunities to reach into other language markets. The speaker’s appeal was more interesting after discovering Google Translate. However, the next presentation was by two men who spoke English, but did not speak our language. They talked about what they understood and what they did, but few in the audience could figure out what they meant or why it should matter to us. They used jargon fluently, but I don’t speak their advanced computer jargon and apparently, this troubled another audience member who asked if “API” stood for Asian Pacific Islanders. Finally, another man in the audience came to the rescue. Instead of a question, he offered to be a translator. In a few paragraphs, he explained to the speakers why the audience was confused, gave an analogy using common terms familiar to everyone. In so doing, he connected what they were trying to say with what we were trying to understand and explained how the speakers’ content could help small-business owners. Thank you! The audience burst into applause.

So, even with the advent of Google Translate, others will not fully understand us until we “do not merely look out for our own personal interests, but also for the interests of others” (Phil. 2:4). As writers, communicators, speakers, bloggers, or presenters we must make sure that we care enough about our listeners/readers to think through how what we want to say can be translated into what they need to hear and can understand. Rarely, will Google Translate be enough; it takes:

• Careful work
• Putting yourself in the place of your audience
• Feeling their needs
• Finding a bridge of common understanding or starting in their comfort zone rather than yours
• Then connecting the new information you hope to impart to the familiar knowledge they already know.

In short, it takes caring more about your audience and their needs than you care about what you have to say. When I taught at a writer’s conference and reviewed manuscripts, these qualities separated the acceptable manuscripts from those that would be rejected. These tips also work beautifully for communicating with teens or across generation gaps.

Okay, so, we are not back to Babel yet; but we do have amazing power to communicate with people, in the same room and around the world. Let’s make the most of it.

If you have wisdom on best practices to be understood or get your message across feel free to share in the comments section.

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SOUNDTRACK

This album is a wonderful surprise.  I had not heard of Esmerine before this CD (they have put out two previous records on a different label).  All I knew about them was that violinist Becky Foon (who is all over the Montreal scene and who is really good) was one of the founders of this band.  So I expected some epic instrumentals ala all of the Constellation Recordings bands that she has played with (Godspeed, Silver Mt Zion, etc).

I was delighted by the opening fast marimba notes of “A Dog River”.  I’m not sure if the marimba can play minor key notes, but the melody that co-founder Bruce Cawdron plays is uplifting and mesmerizing.  When Becky adds her strings, it takes on a new element–a kind of wistfulness.  Then at nearly 3/4 of the way in, some loud guitars come in to give the whole song a feeling of urgency.  And all the while it is very filmic.  It’s a wonderful opening.  “Walking Through Mist” is a much slower piece, and the marimba adds contextual pacing–they’re still not minor key or sad marimba notes, but they are not as uplifting as on the first track.  “Last Waltz” introduces a vibrato’s piano as the primary instrument.  It is at once unsettling.   It’s also the first of three songs with vocals.  The vocals work well on this song–they fit the mood perfectly–especially the wordless singing at around 4 minutes.  But I have to admit that I like the instrumentals better.  The same can be said for “Snow Day for Lhasa” (another song with vocals) which I find a little too slow to be impactful (it actually reminds me of a very slow version of Broken Social Scene’s “Lover’s Spit”).

“Trampolin” introduces a harp and some vibrant percussion.  It’s uplifting and feels like a perfect song for a theatrical dance company to perform to.  “Sprouts” is an uplifting new-agey sounding track.  By itself it might veer uncomfortably into the new age scene, but amidst the songs of the album it works very well.  “Little Streams Make Big Rivers” returns to that slower sound from earlier.  But this song is short and feels like a slow building march.  By the half way mark when the drums kick in, the song is unstoppable.  The album proper ends with “Au Crépuscule, Sans Laisse” a slow filmic song that returns the album to the quiet sound it was toying with earlier.

I mentioned Lhasa earlier.  Lhasa was a Canadian singer who had international fame (from my own experience, I know that X-Files creator Chris Carter wanted to go see her live–I know this because I was friends with his assistant and she told me the tale of trying to find tickets for this show).  I checked out her stuff but it wasn’t for me.  Anyhow, Beckie and Bruce were supposed to tour with Lhasa for her 2010 album, but sadly, she died of breast cancer (at 37, Jesus), right after the album came out.  So this album is dedicated to her.  The final song “Fish on Land” is a previously unreleased version of a Lhasa song that was made with Bruce and Beckie.  I wish I liked it more, but as I said, she’s not my thing.

I absolutely love the instrumentals on this album and I’m going to have to check out their earlier releases, too.

[READ: May 24, 2012] “Referential”

This story is like a kick to the stomach.  When you’re lying on the floor.  After you’ve thrown up.  And I mean that as very high praise indeed.

You know you’re in for trouble when the story opens: “For the third time in three years, they talked about what would be a suitable gift for her deranged son.”  We quickly learn that the woman’s son was fine until he was about twelve years old when he stopped brushing his teeth and began muttering to himself.  By then Pete had been dating the woman for about six years.

Pete and the woman had been coping with her son’s placement in the institution for over three years now.  There were so many rules they had to follow when visiting the boy–almost nothing could be brought in for fear of its being used as a weapon–even the homemade jam was taken because it was in glass.  Similarly, the woman has stopped wearing accessories, as a kind of solidarity–she would just have to remove them anyway.  She is now aging naturally and (she fears/admits) not very prettily.  An amazing slap in the face comes at the end of the first section with this amazing sentence:  “‘To me, you always look so beautiful,’ Pete no longer said.”  [Ouch!].

Pete has lost his job and is clearly unable to handle the strain of her son any longer (there’s a wonderfully painful scene where the boy asks Pete why he hasn’t come to visit lately).

The story is mercifully short (you can only take so much abuse, right?), but man is it brutal.  Moore puts so many wonderful details into this story.  Possibly the most subtle–the only person who is given a name is Pete.

There’s really no happiness in store for anyone here.  But the writing is so good you don’t want to stop reading.

UPDATE: If you see the comments below you’ll see that this song is related to Vladimir Nabokov’s” Signs and Symbols.”  Which I have posed about (and discussed Moore’s use of) here.

SOUNDTRACK

 I really like the guitar sound that Leo creates for this song—angular and reminiscent of late 80s alt rock.  It’s not that different from the original, but it really grabs you.  By the time the big chorus kicks in, there are big vocals and big guitars,  It’s a nice pairing with the noisy solo and more aggressive verses.

Once I realized it was a Robert Pollard cover it made complete sense—it sounds exactly like a Guided By Voices song. Pollard’s version is about thirty seconds longer and I think that makes the difference.  I’ve always been kind of eh about Pollard.  I think some of his songs are awesome and some are just okay—he needs a serious editor (which is a funny thing to say about someone who has so many songs that are about a minute long).  I’ve also never really gotten into Ted Leo, although everything I’ve heard by him I like.  And this is no exception.

I prefer the Ted Leo version, and maybe it’s time to see what else he and Pharmacists have done.

[READ: April 4, 2012] “Hand on the Shoulder”

Its funny how different writers handle pacing so differently.  It’s kind of amazing in general how writing can have such different pacing.  Typically, Ian McEwan’s pacing is slow.  Not dull, but slow.  His stories evolve, they don’t just happen.

And that’s why it takes a little while to read this story.  It’s not especially long, but the pacing is very detailed (as befits who the main character becomes).  It also turns out that this is an excerpt from a novel (New Yorker, you fooled me again—although I kind of assumed this was an excerpt because I don’t think of McEwan as being a short story writer).  Knowing it’s an excerpt means the pacing makes even more sense.  This is a story that will unfold—there’s no hurry.

Serena Frome was recruited by the British security service forty years ago in 1972.  She was attending Cambridge and had just started dating a boy named Jeremy Mott.  Jeremy was an amazingly selfless lover—lasting for hours but never seeming  to reach orgasm himself.  We twenty-first century types know what this probably means about Jeremy, but Serena (and presumably Jeremy) didn’t find out until after they had broken up and he was then dating a man.

But the important issue is that he introduced her his history tutor Tony Canning, a gallant fifty-year old man.  Because of Serena’s political interests (which were atypical for a twenty-something, but not so far afield as to be weird), Canning was very interested in her.  It turned out that Canning had connections and was actually looking to recruit future spies from the right-minded youth of Cambridge.

It was unusual for women to be recruited like this and it was clear that Cannning’s motives were not completely above-board.  And soon enough they began an affair.  She was cheating on Jeremy when it started and Tony was cheating on his wife—I guess spies are good at secrets.

The rest of the story is about their affair—which was always more scholarly than sexual, although sex was ever-present (but seriously, never as good as with Jeremy).  Reading the story I felt badly for Serena, that she gave up so much of her youth for an older, married man—although clearly he was instrumental in her future plans.  So, which is the greater sacrifice?  The affair is completely secretive and seems to be more about grooming her for her exams.  She enjoys the luxuries that he affords for her (the fancy car, the house in the woods where thy have their trysts), and she never really seems jealous that he is married (a common trope in stories, and in life, I suppose).

The end of their affair comes because of a very simple slip up.  In her version he told her to do something.  In his version, she was trying to move in on his family.  I had to wonder if, given that the timing was just before her exams and the start of her future career—his actions were designed to harden her, to maker her a better spy.  That is not expressly stated, but it seems like the spy thing to do.

As I said, this is the beginning of a novel, so the ending is going to be disappointing if presented as a short story.  It’s not completely unsatisfying on its own—I mean, we learn how a woman may have been approached to be a spy in the 70s, and we see the process from beginning to end.  Of course, we don’t really get any sense of her beyond being a student and, since the story is told from her POV as an older lady, we know there is much left unsaid.

I’ve enjoyed McEwan’s novels in the past and I would certainly read this one, too.

SOUNDTRACK

A new single from Rush came out on Thursday.  And it’s seven minutes long!  Yeeha!  It’s also really heavy.

It opens with a cool bass riff and then thundering guitars.  This song continues in the heavier, grungier sound from Vapor Trails.  The middle section sounds distinctly Rush (late 80s style), and Geddy’s voice hits some pretty high notes.

There’s a brief extra section with a spoken word part–I’ve not been able to make out what it says, but the instruments (especially the great guitar sound) is fantastic behind it.  That’s followed by a great solo from Alex (that hearkens back to his wild solos from the 70s).  Geddy throws some cool bass fills–although he’s not showing off as much as he might).  And, of course, Neil is doing some cool drum things through the song–little fills and whatnot–and he sounds like he’s pounding the hell out of the drums.

Here’s the video

[READ: April 14, 2012] Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk

As I mentioned yesterday, I bought a book to have David Sedaris sign it, but decided the wait wasn’t worth it.  This is the book I bought.  It very excitedly claims to “with one new story” which I thought was funny both in itself and also because I hadn’t read any of the other ones (I gather they are from This American Life, although they’re mostly too vulgar to have read on the radio).  It also has illustrations from Ian Falconer, who is the guy behind Olivia, the children’s book series.

Anyone who has read David Sedaris essays knows what to expect–funny, presumably exaggerated stories about his family and loved ones.  Indeed, the stories that he read from during the show were just that–dark and funny and about his loved ones.  So imagine my surprise to find that these were all short fictional stories about animals!  No Sedaris’ are harmed in this book.

All of the animals are behaving like people, so Sedaris’ caustic wit and attacks on hypocrisy are all in play.  However, because they are animals, Sedaris can go much much further with them.  Matt Groening said that he could get away with a lot more social criticism because The Simpsons were cartoons; the same applies here.  Indeed, these are some of the darkest stories that I have ever read from Sedaris.

Some of them are kinda funny, but most of them left me mildly bemused at best.  Because while they seem to be a kind of laugh-at-the-recognition-of-our-foolish-behavior (as done by animals), really they are preachy and seem generally disappointed in us.   And who wants to read that?  It basically seemed like an opportunity for Sedaris to make fun of things that he doesn’t like about people.  But he knew it would be obnoxious to makes stories about people acting that way, so he made them animals instead.  And perhaps he thought that would make it funnier.  At times this was true, but not very often.

This was Sedaris’ darkest work yet–animals have their eyes eaten out, they are injected with all manner of things, and most of them end up a bloody mess.  It’s no secret that Sedaris doesn’t like animals.  He said as much in our show; his gleeful endorsement of Gordon Grice’s Deadly Kingdom: The Book of Dangerous Animals was summed up as: “If you’ve ever felt bad about eating meat, just read this book.”  He said that monkeys are assholes, and that sentiment seemed to apply to all of the animal kingdom.

So, sure animals are inherently more violent and brutish than people (most people).  These stories take that natural brutality and add in doses of genuine human foibles and test how they might pan out.  I really didn’t think they were that funny though.  Many got a smile of recognition, but very few out loud laughs.

Perhaps the thing that I liked least about the book was that the stories felt like morality tales.  I guess having them be about animals made them a bit more like fables, but it’s unsettling to have a moral come in such a disturbing form.  ”The Vigilant Rabbit” is about a rabbit who is a centurion at the gates of his village.  And as he fills with power he becomes more and more brutal with his cudgel–until the wolves come and show him what real brutality is.  It’s not terribly profound and it’s not terribly funny.

And I have to say, I’ve always thought that Falconers’ drawings were creepy–Olivia is a weird-ass looking creation.  But the illustrations in here are really awful (not in quality, but in subject matter).  He uses only three colors, and the garish red (which is used a lot, there’s so much blood) is really harsh and grotesque.  Most of the animals have that wavery line that he does so well, which makes the animals all the more scared/abused/horrified.  I mean, “The Motherless Bear” is a pretty graphics and disturbing story (the bear is captured by the circus–her teeth are torn out and her knees are swollen from all of the work)–and Falconer spares nothing in his depiction of it.

I know that a lot of Sedaris’ work is dark and misanthropic, but he usually manages to feed us the truth with heavy doses of sugar.  There’s no sweetener, natural or artificial here.

SOUNDTRACK

The Shins have taken this song and completely turned it into a Shins song.

It is bouncy and poppy with some nice tempo changes.  It could easily fit onto any Shins album.

The original (I’d never heard of Tenement Halls) is very similar to The Shins’ version.  The big difference is that it doesn’t have The Shins’ vocals and musical sensibilities.  The original feels kind of flat, the highs just aren’t as high.  But it serves as a good stepping off point for the cover.

[READ: March 30, 2012] “Chapter Two”

This story is about A.A.  But, amusingly, Hil is tired of telling her own stories at A.A., so she starts telling the story of her fifty-something alcoholic neighbor (with the wonderful name of), Bergeron Love (the story is set in Houston).

Interestingly, no one at A.A. complains that she is talking about someone else (in fact the blind guy just seems to smile politely).  This is just as well because Bergeron’s story is pretty funny.  Bergeron arrives at Hil’s door, stark naked and invites herself in.  This is not atypical for Bergeron who crashes neighborhood parties and plays ridiculous pranks.  But not everything she does is funny: she also reports overgrown lawns and loose dogs.

Hil lives with her son and a roommate, Janine.  Janine is a very fat woman (see my diatribe about fat characters yesterday).  But Janine is not the victim or the pity-case in this story (well, maybe a little).  Hil figures Janine must eat all day to be as big as she is, but she has never seen her eat.  But then Hil’s son, Jeremy, a shy teenager enjoys playing video games with Janine more than going out with his peers (and more than being with his mom, I believe).

Another Bergeron story concerns her reporting a neighbor to Child Protective Services and the neighbor getting revenge on her–by egging her house, smashing her car and tormenting Bergeron’s own son (who has since grown up and moved to Austin).

The story itself jumps around to various Bergeron episodes, like the first time that Bergeron came over, drunk.  This was back when Hil was still married and her husband still seemed to like her.  Bergeron announced that she was running for office. It’s a very funny scene.

But the story mostly focuses on that nude evening.  Hil calls up Bergeron’s house where her boyfriend Boyd (clothed, thankfully) finally answers the phone and deigns to cross the street to pick up his woman.

As the story ends, we see Hil looking for a new meeting to go to so she can tell new versions of these stories.

What I especially liked about this story was the A.A. bookend.  That while Hil was complaining about the extroverted antics of Bergeron, she was really no better herself.  There were some very nice details (like the way that Bergeron’s story is wrapped up) and overall it was very solid.

SOUNDTRACK

I really wanted to like this album because of the cover–which is striking.  I know, I know, never judge…  My initial reaction to the disc was kind of poor.  I’ve followed Ulver’s progress through their many incarnations, and it’s not entirely surprising that they should make an entirely ambient record.  It just strikes me as an odd release–mellow and almost lullaby-ish but also a little creepy (the voice mostly).

But at the same time, musically it’s quite pretty.  And while it wasn’t a very good listen for a car trip to work, it was actually really perfect for listening to at work–where headphones allowed for hearing so many nuances.

There’s not much point in a song by song listing, as the songs are similar–washes of music with slightly distorted, deep vocals.   But there are some interesting musical choices that make each song unique, and consequently better than a lot of ambient in which all of the songs use the same musical palette.  “All the Love” employs piano and come cool electronic sounds near the end.

“Let the Children Go” is a much darker song (with drums!).  “Solitude” is the most melodic song of the bunch.  It reminds me of Black Sabbath’s “War Pigs” (which should tell you something about the overall tone of the album).  It has a noticeable vocal line (and really audible lyrics, which are quite melancholy and more emotional that I would have expected: “You just left when I begged you to stay.  I’ve not stopped crying since you went away.”

Another observation.  At times when he actually sings, the vocals sound a bit like XTC–”Shadows of the Sun” in particular.  And since that song has pianos it’s not inconceivable that this could sound like XTC (although not really).

With the right atmosphere, this record proves to be a very impressive listen.  Kristoffer Rygg’s vocals really suit the mood and, all in all, it does reflect the album cover rather more than I initially thought.

[READ: March 18, 2012] The Marriage Plot

I had put this book on hold a few months ago.  And I was ninety-something on the list, so I didn’t think too much about it.  I looked the other day and I was 10.  Yipes.  How was I going to read this 400 page book  in three weeks while also reading Gravity’s Rainbow??

Well, amazingly, The Marriage Plot worked as a nice foil to GR. It is a supremely easy read.  It is completely uncomplicated.  And, it actually has some unexpected parallels to GR–specifically, two of the characters travel to Europe, one on a pilgrimage the other on a honeymoon, and they travel to Paris, Geneva, Spain, Zürich, and even Nice.  There is literally no connection between these two books (although Mitchell does bring Pynchon’s V along with him), but it was fun to see new people go to the cities that Slothrop has been traveling to for very different reasons.

I powered through the book, reading large chunks and staying up way too late both because I liked the book and because I wanted to get it back on time (beware the library police!).  And there really is something about finishing a book quickly, it really keeps the story and characters fresh and makes the experience more enjoyable.

But on to the book.

This book centers around three people in a kind of lover’s triangle.  The woman at the center is Madeleine (and yes there are wonderful tie-ins to Madeline the children’s book series). The two men are Leonard and Mitchell.  All three of them are graduating from Brown in the mid 80s.

I identified with the book immediately because Madeleine is an English major (as was I).  She studies the Victorian era [and I had just read the piece by Franzen about Edith Wharton] and is on track to write her thesis on this era.  The title of the book comes from this section–novels written at that time were especially focused on marriage–if a woman did not marry, she was more or less doomed, and so the plots centered around her quest to find a suitable mate.  As Franzen noted in the above article, Wharton and some of her predecessors sounded the death knell for the “marriage plot” and Madeleine was going to do her thesis on that.

As the pieces of the triangle fall into place we learn (skeletal at first with much detail added later) that Madeleine and Mitchell were very good friends initially.  So good, in fact, that she invited him back to her parents house for a vacation.  He was head over heels in love with; however, out of fear (mostly) he never acted on the opportunities she gave him, and she thought that he wasn’t interested in anything more than friendship.  Basically, he blew it (although he doesn’t learn this until much later–I can relate to this all too well). As the story opens, she has just woken up, hungover, smelling of a party, with a mysterious stain on her dress.  She knows she did something with someone last night but she’s not sure what.  Not atypical college behavior.  But the kicker is that it is graduation morning and her parents are ringing the doorbell of her dorm right now.

They had a falling out because she felt a bit offended by the fact that he wasn’t interested, but he kept hanging around her.  Ultimately things get weird and they stop speaking.  Turns out (of course), that Mitchell is the man she made out with (but nothing more) the night before graduation.

Leonard, on the other hand, is an intelligent, aloof philosopher/scientist.  Madeleine first encounters him in a class on Semiotics (the transition from Victorian literature to Semiotics is wonderful, especially if you were an English major).  I could relate to this because I took a class in Post Modernism, so I had read Foucault, Derrida, Eco etc.  Leonard has an amazing confidence that Madeleine finds seductive.  But she is not willing to pursue him (she’s had some very embarrassing hook ups at school so far).  Finally he asks her to the movies and they become a couple.

Mitchell is devastated, but since he knows that he and Madeleine are destined to get married, he’s just going to sit back and wait.  From there, there is not a ton of plot to describe, which is not to say that there isn’t a lot of drama.

Leonard and Madeleine see a lot of each other.  He is kind of obnoxious, but in a fun, intellectual sort of way.  And the sex is great.  After graduation, they are planning to head off to Cape Cod together.  He is going to work at a science facility and she is going to work on getting her thesis published.

And then they have a huge fight.  The excerpt of the fight was published in The New Yorker (I reviewed it then).  I loved it then and I enjoyed it even more with more context.  When they break up, Madeleine is angry but Leonard falls into a major depression.  It turns out that he is manic depressive and has been taking lithium for a long time.  But he recently went off his meds which coincided with this breakup.  He ultimately admitted himself to a hospital, which Madeleine learned about on graduation morning.

After an intense detailing of their long recovery, they reunite and decide to go to Cape Cod as planned.

Mitchell, on the other hand, has been watching on the sidelines–appalled that she is dating that phony Leonard.  He and Madeleine seem to have an uncanny knack for running into each other.  Which is not surprising given that it is a small campus and they know all the same people, although they do run into each other twice in new York City as well.  And on graduation morning (before Madeleine learns about Leonard), Madeleine and her parents see him sitting on the grass meditating.  Her parents (who liked him quite a lot) invite him for breakfast.

Mitchell explains that he is going to Europe and India on a kind of pilgrimage.  Madeleine’s parents are very supportive of him, although when Madeleine says she is too (just to see their reaction), they blow her off.  They don’t know that she and Leonard have broken up and she can’t face the thought of moving home with them, so she’s pretty agitated.  Not to mention hung over.  And embarrassed.

But sure enough, the next we see of Mitchell, he and his friend Larry are flying out to Europe to rough it for a year or so.  And excerpt from this section was also published in The New Yorker (I reviewed it too).  And again, more context is helpful although the excerpt worked on its own.

It’s interesting because Mitchell is basically away from the Madeleine/Leonard sides of the triangle for most of the actual time of the story.  And she really doesn’t think of him at all.  Although Leonard actually does think of him–they took a class together and Leonard was respectful of Mitchell’s intelligence and mannerisms in the class, although that was before he knew that Mitchell and Madeleine had a history.  There is one connection, though, when Madeleine sends Mitchell a letter updating him on what’s been happening (basically telling him to leave her alone).

And so we see Mitchell flitting around Europe, getting overthrown by his friend Larry and becoming a more spiritual person.  He ultimately winds up volunteering to work with Mother Teresa.  All the while Mitchell is down on himself for not doing more (especially compared to the family (a man brought his young children to volunteer! gasp) who are so selfless.

The drama culminates in a (believable) coincidental meeting in New York where things come to a head for the entire triangle.

Throughout all of this Madeleine has to deal with her parents not liking Leonard, as well as Leonard’s erratic behavior.  Her parents are thoroughly believable, as are Mitchell’s parents (who are much less present in the novel but show understandable concern for their globetrotting son).  Leonard’s family are almost completely absent, even when they are present.

And when all was said and done, I found the ending to be well thought out and really very satisfying.

I was surprised at how much I related to this story and how much it grabbed me.  Between Leonard and Madeleine’s studies and Mitchell’s behavior, I felt like a whole chunk of my college life was comparable here.  So I was completely absorbed in the story.  And some of thee story is set in Prettybrook, New Jersey which I have narrowed down to possibly being Pennington which is not far from where I work.

There were a few sections that I didn’t enjoy–a very scientific/medicinal section during Leonard’s breakdown) and a couple of religious/angsty sections (in Mitchell’s section).  Although really those were only a few dozen pages out of 400–not bad at all.  I really enjoyed it.

SOUNDTRACK

This was the song of the day on NPR on March 14th.  While NPR describes it as like 90s indie rock, I find it to be much more like early 2000s indie rock (think The Strokes or Arctic Monkeys).  True, those bands were playing in the spirit of 90s rock, but they had a slightly different take on things–cleaner, perhaps.

So, while the guitars are buzzy and distorted, the vocals are up front and clear (even if the words aren’t entirely understandable–a neat trick that).  The song is under three minutes and has a catchy, powerful chorus.  I’ll bet it’s a lot of fun to hear live, although honestly I don’t think it’s anything all that special.

[READ: March 9, 2012] “Ever Since”

I’ve enjoyed many of Antrim’s stories in the past.  And, I rather enjoyed this one as well.

This was a fairly simple story of a man who has not let go of the woman who broke up with him a year earlier.  And how she haunts him and his current relationship still.

The opening of the story is really quite wonderful.  It didn’t really have an impact on me at first but when I reread it, I realized it’s a wonderful precis of the story:

Ever since his wife had left him–but she wasn’t his wife, was she? he’d only thought of her that way, had begun to think of her that way, since her abrupt departure, the year before, with Richard Bishop [I'm interrupting to say wow, has he packed a lot into a dependent clause.  And then he continues with the rest of the powerful descriptor]–Jonathan had taken up a new side of his personality, and become the sort of lurking man who, say at work or at a party, mainly hovers on the outskirts of other people’s conversations, leaning close but not too close, listening in while gazing out vaguely over their heads in order to seem distracted and inattentive waiting for the conversation to wind down, so that he can weigh in gloomily and summarize whatever has just been said.

Now, THAT, dear readers, is a SENTENCE!

To make him even more pathetic, when he summarizes an idea he often claims that his ex-wife felt a certain way about it…and then explaining that she wasn’t really his ex-wife.

The crazy thing is that Jonathan has a new love in his life: Sarah, the kind of woman who  appears by his side at a party (a work party for her) and says, “Hey Buster, lets’ go fuck in the bathroom.”  It’s unclear whether she was joking, which makes it even more fun.

But he is till hung up on Rachel.  And when Sarah overhears him call Rachel his ex-wife, she is understandably pissed.

All of the action takes place at the above mentioned party and as the two of them get drunker, they do things that are questionable (although, amazingly Jonathan keeps his fidelity intact) and by the end (of the story and the party) it is unclear who will remember all of what just happened.

There wasn’t a lot of substance to the story, and yet I really enjoyed it.  The characters were completely real and by keeping it contained at the party it allows all of the details to be cogent.  Sometimes a simple, realistic story hits the spot.

SOUNDTRACK

This is, as the title implies, a Smiths song done in the musical style of Super Mario Bros.  And, why yes, it certainly is.

This song is especially amusing to me as we just got a Wii for Christmas so I am now far more familiar with the Super Mario Brothers musical style than I ever expected I’d be.  The opening notes are spot on and while it is a bit long for something of a joke, at under 3 minutes it never wears out its joyousness..

The little sound effect of scoring points at about the 2 minute mark is as wonderful of a surprise as when you get the unexpected point in the game and it easily sustains the song until the end.

It doesn’t honestly warrant repeated listens, but two or three will certainly make you smile.

Check it out

[READ: March 6, 2012] The Great Gatsby

I knew I’d be reading Gravity’s Rainbow for a while so I wanted some shorter, easier works that I could use as occasional diversions.  I’d read The Great Gatsby in college and really enjoyed it, but clearly, as I learned by reading it again, I didn’t remember anything about it and what I remembered, I’d remembered wrong.

The other thing I was thinking about is that I didn’t read this in high school.  In fact, I didn’t read many books that I know people are supposed to read in high school.  I don’t think it’s because I didn’t feel like reading it (that;s possible), I think it wasn’t assigned to us.  My high school, as I recall, has a weird selection of texts that we read.  For instance, I recall reading Táin bó Cúailnge (and hating it).  Who is reading The Tain (which is an Irish epic) and not Gatsby?  Kids in Ireland, that’s who!

Anyhow, this book is considered number 2 in The Modern Library’s 100 Best Novels of the 20th Century (Ulysses is #1–that’s a 1 and 2 that couldn’t be much more different!) and, as I said it’s on virtually every high school curriculum.

As I was reading it I wondered how well high school students could relate to this story.  There are two cases of infidelity, there’s murder and suicide, there’s bootlegging alcohol and false identities.  I mean, sure they should love it, but how well can they relate to it?

The novel opens with Nick Carraway reciting advice that his father gave him: “Whenever you feel like criticizing anyone, just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantage that you’ve had.”  This is an interesting quote to open with since the quote both applies and does not apply to the great Gatsby who is Nick’s neighbor.

How so?  Well, because Gatsby is a supremely wealthy man and a swell guy, He hosts parties all the time, there’s a kind of open invitation to anyone who wishes to come, he hires caterers and has more booze than you can imagine.  He’s also charming and calls everyone “old sport.” And he’s a genial host. But at the same time, Gatsby is not who he seems.  He comes from a very poor family in the Midwest.  He grew up with next to nothing and even lost the love of his life.

And he is clearly very lonely.

But we don’t meet Gatsby right away.  Rather, we learn about Nick’s past and his current “eye-sore” of a house sandwiched between two mansions on West Egg (Great Neck) Long Island (his cost $80/month while the mansions were thousands a month).  He knew that his second cousin, Daisy Buchanan (and her husband Tom, who he knew in college) lived over on East Egg (Manhasset Neck) the more fashionable of the two Eggs.

In the way of sitcoms today, Daisy and Tom have a daughter although she is all but forgotten in the book and may or may not even be necessary as a plot point.  There’s an amusing line when Pammy comes out that “I don’t think he (Gatsby) had ever really believed in its existence before” (123).  It’s fair to say the audience may not have either.

Tom goes over for dinner one evening and the first plot of the story gets under way.  At the dinner is a professional golfer named Jordan Baker.  Jordan and Daisy are friends and exude the excitement that wealthy white people felt in the roaring 20s.  When Tom takes a phone call and Daisy goes to see who it is. Jordan explains that the call is from Tom’ mistress and that everyone (not sure if that includes Daisy) knows about her.

Indeed, Tom is having an affair with Myrtle Miller.  Myrtle is married to George Miller, the mechanic that Tom often does business with–although Tom describes him as “so dumb he doesn’t even know he’s alive” (30).  George thinks Myrtle is visiting her sister in New York, which technically she is although she is visiting her with Tom.  Catherine (the sister) notes that neither Tom nor Myrtle can stand their spouses and wonders why they just don’t divorce.  (Ostensibly, it is because Daisy is Catholic).

By Chapter 3, Nick is finally invited to Gatsby’s house, with apologies for the delay in invitation.  Nick couldn’t miss the parties–Gatsby’s house had been lit up all hours of the night with dozens of party guests–the majority of whom had never met Gatsby and only knew rumors about him.  And the rumors were frightening (like that he killed a man).

At the party, Nick finally gets to see inside Gatsby’s house.  It is huge (and the library has real books!).  Anything that anyone could want is offered around.  Nick even runs in to Jordan, but he never gets to meet Gatsby.  Soon enough, however, Gatsby himself asks for a private meeting with Jordan.  And by the end of the night, Nick begins talking to Gatsby by accident; and they develop a kind of strange kinship.

Eventually Nick learns the truth about Gatsby (which I won’t reveal) but let’s just say that he is not who he says he is.  But he also learns another truth about Gatsby which is that he is in love with Daisy Buchanan.  He and Daisy knew each other five years previously.  They had several romantic moments together and then Gatsby went off to the war.  And he was stuck in France while Daisy could wait no longer and married Tom.  When Gatsby moved to West Egg he knew that Daisy was right across the bay and he could see the green light of her dock at night.

Through some ministrations form Gatsby (via Jordan who is now an item with Nick), Nick invites Daisy to his house for a lunch while Gatsby waits to surprise her.  Clearly Daisy knew that he would be there because she doesn’t gasp in astonishment when he walks in.  Nevertheless, there is a great deal of awkwardness at first.  But soon Nick excuses himself and the couple get on just fine, truly making up for their lost years.

So now at this stage we have each Buchanan having an affair.  Daisy spends a lot of time with Gatsby (and some with Nick and Jordan).  While there is some spark between them, Gatsby is really trying to impress her with his things and she doesn’t seem all that impressed by what he has–or by his parties.

On an outrageously hot day near the end of the summer (I enjoyed reading about this excruciating heat because it’s easy to forget that even the rich suffer from heat when there are no air conditioners) Daisy invites Nick and Gatsby for a lunch.  By now Tom knows about her and Gatsby and is not happy about it (hypocrisy is a bitch, eh Tom?).  But everyone is too proper to address the issue in front of them.

Rather than suffer in silence in their house, they decide to go to New York (where I believe they were going to rent hotel rooms so they could take cool baths??).  Tom brings some whiskey and they plan for a jolly, awkward time.  But when Daisy drives with Gatsby instead of Tom, things heat up even more and in the hotel, Tom confronts Gatsby who proclaims that Daisy never loved Tom.  Daisy won’t acknowledge such a thing.  And as tensions mount, Daisy demands to go home.

In a turn that I was completely surprised by, but which makes for a wonderful narrative experience, the couples race home and by the time we catch up with them, there has been a terrible accident.  This accident impacts everyone (again in very surprising ways) and leads to a climactic sequence of events that seems out of keeping with the rest of the story but which never defies belief.

As the story ends and more truths about Gatsby come out, the real extent of Gatsby loneliness comes out and even Nick is surprised by what it all means.

The story is a really fast read–it’s quite short and the pacing is very quick.  The arc of the story from wild party to lonely ending is quite dramatic a well.

There quite a lot of humor in the story (the endnotes explain a lot of them). Although much of it is circa 1920s humor (making fun of a very popular book, for instance), there’s also general mirth like the playwright named Vladimir Tostoff and the descriptions (and names) of the party-goers. Fitzgerald doesn’t quite reach the dizzying heights that Pynchon does when naming people, but there’s still some funny ones.

There’s also some uncomfortable racism in the book. Tom says, “if we don’t look out the white race will be–will be utterly submerged.  It’s all scientific stuff; it’s been proved” (17).  To which Daisy adds, “‘We’ve got to beat them down,’ whispered Daisy, winking ferociously toward the fervent sun” (17).  I don’t know enough about Fitzgerald to know if this was him, his character, or the general tone of the 20s.  Having it just thrown into the story though, tells something about the character of Tom, although I don’t think it says what the author intended anymore.

But that aside, the story was really enjoyable.  Funny, breezy and quite surprising.  If you haven’t read it since high school, it’s worth another look.  And no, I didn’t even mention the eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg.

Happy Friday Eve!

I just had the biggest laugh in the world, like a ROTFLMBAO type of laugh.  I was in the middle of my daily routine of catching up on the gossip on Mediatakeout.com (don’t judge me!) during my lunch hour, when I came across the story about Karrine Steffans A.K.A Superhead going HAM on her Twitter regarding her husband and their marriage. I don’t care what folks say about Super, but the one thing that I admire about her is that she always keeps it real, like 110% real. This is the most hardcore “break-up rant” that I’ve read/heard in a loooong time. Kudos to Karrine for having the balls to just let it alllllll out (’cause I know his ass is going to try to kill you! LOL) Check it out….

Sometimes, in relationships, the pleasure is all theirs. Alone, I am a superhero. With you, I am a mere mortal. You deplete me. I’m tired of being your upgrade. We are not equally yoked. You really deserve someone more basic. I’m tired of pretending your mediocracy is okay with me. I’m tired of pretending I don’t miss G650′s. I’m tied of pretending you’re not a burden.I’m tired of pretending I don’t deserve a f-cking BOSS! I’m tired of you driving my car. Stop telling me you love me as if you’re doing me some sort of favor. I don’t need you to love me. I love me. I’m tired of pretending like you shouldn’t be intimidated by the other men in my life. Cuz you should. I’m tired of pretending as if I support your bullshit dreams. I’m tired of pretending your d-ck isn’t the smallest d-ck I’ve ever seen in my life. Cuz it is. I’m tired of pretending your favorite rapper didn’t just beat it up on Friday. I’m tired of paying for everything.

I’m tired of you taking all this sh-t for granted as if you ever deserved any of it. Give me my Mac back. For real tho. I’m tired of washing your wack ass clothes. I hate your whole face. I’m tired of acting like the sex is good.I hate when you roll all the way over onto my side of the bed to hold me. I’m over here for a reason. Did I mention I’m tired of paying for everything? Okay.I’m tired of giving you the game.I’m tired of pretending you’re anything more than a bum. I should’ve just hired you as a cook and kept it moving. I’m tired of congratulating you for accomplishing minuscule sh-t. I’m tired of you begging

I’m tired of moaning when I can’t feel anything! I’m tired of having to think about someone else to get off. I’m tired of having to lock my phone when you’re around.I’m tired of taking showers with you. Can I get a moment! Damn! Yes. He’s better than you. Next question. All night. ‘Til 6 in the morning. Next question.Yes. And I didn’t have to pay for none of it. Next question. Presidential suite. Next question. About 10 inches. Next question.69. Next question. Like a boss. Next question. Balls deep. Next question. I’m tired of having to pretend you’re not the 3rd worst decision I’ve ever made.

You should really be with that one chick who bagged our groceries this weekend. That’s more your speed.

MY TWO CENTS OF ADVICE to anyone about to enter a relationship or marriage: Please make sure  you are getting the exact person that you want/need in your life. More than likely, he or she won’t change, so the qualities that you see now are what you are going to end up being stuck with. If you’re high maintenance, make sure you have a man/woman that can keep the maintenance up. DON’T SETTLE!!

Talk to you all later!

SOUNDTRACK

Dave Bidini was a driving force behind Rheostatics.  Although when I think of the band, I think of Martin Tielli’s wackiness and Tim Vesely’s hits, which kind of makes Bidini the sort of stable, middle of the road guy.  But I don’t think that’s right either as Bidini has both a wacky side and a hit-making side.  But this “solo” project focuses mainly on Bidini’s storytelling skills.  Most of the songs are little narratives, which is always enjoyable.

“Desert Island Poem” is actually a story of the dissolution of the Rheostatics–when they survived a plane crash in Drumhella and ate the drummer.   “Memorial Day” surprises because of the clarinet solo (which works wonderfully).  “We Like to Rock” and “Song Ain’t Any Good” are the other kind of song that Bidini writes–songs about playing music.  These kind of songs are always dopey and “We Like to Rock” is no exception–I think I ‘d like it more if it weren’t so tinny sounding.  “Song Ain’t Any Good” is kind of funny, especially if you get through the whole song, although I don’t know if multiple listens are rewarded.

On the other hand, “The Land is Wild” is a great song about Bidini’s other passion: hockey.  This is a lengthy (nearly 7 minute) story about Bryan Fogarty, a young hockey player who was a star at 21 but a forgotten addict by 31.  It’s a sad, cautionary tale about how the hockey establishment all but ignored him as he wasted away.   “How Zeke Roberts Died” is a very similar song,  it’s an 8 minute biography of Liberian singer Zeke Roberts.  This song has lead vocals by a variety of singers.

“Last Good Cigarette” is a delightful ditty about smoking with famous people (and it is super catchy–ha-cha!).  “Pornography” is a funny political song about George W. Bush that is also quite catchy.  And the wonderfully titled, “The Story of Canadiana and Canadiandy” is about living close to America.

Although the album is mostly folky and kind of mellow, “Terrorize Me Now” shows some of Bidini’s more wild guitar noises.  And the final song, “The Ballad of 1969″ is a great song that is reminiscent of the kind of highs that the Rheos would hit.  There’s a bonus untitled song [later called "The List (Killing Us Now)"] which is a simple song of people who have aggrieved him.  It’s funny, especially in the live context it is given.

While not as great as a Rheostatics album, this release is like an extension of the band.  Bidini has a new album out which I haven’t heard yet, but I’ll certainly be checking it out.

[READ: March 5, 2012] “Haven”

Munro is back (talk about prolific!) and she has created a darkly claustrophobic house in which to place the young protagonist of this story.

The story is set in the seventies.  The protagonist is from Vancouver, but her parents are heading off to Africa for a year so they have sent her to live with her Uncle Jasper and Aunt Dawn.  Despite this mission to Africa, they are not going there for a missionary purpose, they are going there to teach (and haven’t come across many heathen).  They’re also Unitarian.  Uncle Jasper, on the other hand, insists on saying grace before meals and gets on the protagonist when she starts eating before the prayers.

It turns out that Uncle Jasper is the man of the house.  Aunt Dawn does not begin eating her meal until the discussion of grace is over (after receiving an invisible nod from Jasper).  More examples of her deference are given, but the quote that sums up Aunt Dawn (whether she said it or not) is “A Woman’s most important job is making a haven for her man.”  Although, given that, Jasper does show her some affection: a gift and some closeness towards the end of the story.

The protagonist is a free spirit and bristles as the restrictions that Jasper has placed on them.  But she doesn’t really fight them because the entire community seems to follow the same rules. Jasper is the town’s doctor.  Everyone knows and respects him.  And when the protagonist has to visit him after wiping out on a bike, she learns that his professional manner is warm and gentle, exactly the opposite of his home manner.

The bike incident could have been trouble–she hadn’t asked to take the bike–but it turns out to be more of a lesson for her.  Soon enough, Aunt Dawn says, she’ll have friends and won’t need to go gallivanting around.  The quote that follows sums up the situation succinctly and direly:  “She was right, both about my acquiring new friends and about the way that that would limit the things I could do.”

The action of the story comes when Aunt Dawn, for once, tries to do something without Jasper knowing.  Jasper did not entertain people.  Ever.  He didn’t like others in his house.  When new neighbors move in next door, they invite Jasper and Dawn over for dinner.  Jasper accepts and, despite himself, has a nice time.  Dawn knows they must reciprocate, but can’t imagine how that would happen.

Around the same time, a string trio is to be performing at the local arts center.  It transpires that one of the trio is actually Jasper’s sister.  But they are long estranged and do not speak.  The neighbors are going to the performance, so Dawn invites the neighbors and the trio over for an after-performance cake and tea (on a night when Jasper is at a dinner).

The party is quite a success until they lose track of time. Jasper doesn’t say anything when he storms in, which makes it all the more worse.  Later he reveals that he doesn’t even like music–a waste of time, he says.

The story takes something of a surprising turn (to me).  It doesn’t feel safe to reveal the surprise even though it’s not a spoiler kind of surprise.  But it shows Jasper remaining truly unemotional in what could be a comic scene but is resolutely not.

Although the story follows the life of Jasper, the heart of the story comes in the middle when the protagonist, while not entirely swayed by Jasper’s way, feels less alienated by it.  I can’t help but wonder if that is what her parents anticipated.

Munro’s stories are so real, I can see every detail of this house, and its claustrophobic tidiness.  It’s a great story.

SOUNDTRACK

I got this album when a patron donated it to the library.  I had never heard of this band, but the other CDs he donated were really cool so I grabbed this one, too.  This is an almost entirely instrumental album (vocals are whispered when present) that feels like a soundtrack to a futuristic Western.  “Tarantula” opens with some creepy, ghostly sounds and then what sounds like spurs walking across the landscape.  When the guitar comes in it sounds like an old Western.  In many ways this album reminds me of a great band called Scenic, although this one makes more use of electronics, which gives it a more eerie feeling.

“Custom Car Crash” has a very Western feel.  Over creepy scraping sounds, a clean guitar plays very simple guitar lines and chords.  When the keyboard lilts over the noise, it’s quite eerie.  This song has vocals; deep, almost whispered vocals, and I can’t really make them out,  There’s also a live bonus version at the end which really captures the studio version, but which I think is better.  “June” has a slow droney sound: more atmospheric than anything else–it seems maybe ten years ahead of its time).  The 8 minute “Only Drowning Men:” introduces more guitars and a lit of tension.   From the noise a delicate guitar pattern emerges for the last minute of the song.

“Elsewhere” is full of buzzy guitars; there’s a live version at the end of the disc as well.  “Truth About Robots” is my favorite track, a real melody over the noise.  Despite its length (just over 2:30), it tells a full story.

“Trinidad” comes a surprise because it opens with bass (you don’t hear much bass on this album).  But “Keyes” is so quiet as to be almost not there.  “Awake and Under” on the other hand has a great guitar and bass sequence with spoken lyrics (reminiscent of many indie bands of the 90s) but which is very effective here.  There’s a live version as a bonus track and it is a highlight.

This is more interesting music for creating atmosphere, but not something I’d listen to a lot.  I was surprised to find out how many albums they had out.

[READ: March 2, 2012] “A Prairie Girl”

I’ve enjoyed Thomas McGuane stories before, but I wasn’t sure if I’d like this one as it opens with a brothel.  Since I’m thinking about the implications of sex in Gravity’s Rainbow, the last thing I needed was a hooker-with-a-heart-of-gold story.  But this isn’t that.  And it has a brothel with a very funny name: The Butt Hut .  The Butt Hut closes down when the madam dies.  Most of the women moved away (either with local men (to the dismay of many) or on their own).  But one girl who stayed was Mary Elizabeth Foley.

Mary Elizabeth attended church weekly, but most of the people gave her a wide berth—literally an empty pew.  It was finally decided that someone should speak to her since she wasn’t going away.  And so Mrs Gladstone Chandler, wife of the town’s bank owner and all around respected individual, sat near her during the mass.  Afterward, she asked Mary Elizabeth: “Where are you from?”  Mary Elizabeth answered “What business is it of yours?”  And she soon had her pew back.

The story follows Mary Elizabeth as she settles into the community with alarming (to some) speed and ease.  Her first order of business is to marry the son of Mr and Mrs Gladstone Chandler (which is what people called them even though their real names are Paul and Meredith Tanner–I love the way this fact was revealed, it was wryly funny, so I won’t spoil it here).  Mary Elizabeth married their son Arnold, a gay man.

The Tanners are pleased that their gay son (gossiped about since this is a small town) is settling down with a woman!  They only wish it wasn’t her.

Mary Elizabeth tries to “convert” him but finds it futile.  Nevertheless, she falls in love with him anyway and they have quite a good marriage–for a time. And then she gets pregnant.  Obviously, Oliver knows it’s not his.  But they carry on like it is.  Even when she wants to name the boy Pedro in honor of a man she once knew (they settle for Peter).

The rest of the story moves quickly through the years—the Tanner’s growing dislike but grudging respect for Mary Elizabeth, Mary Elizabeth’s rise in the community and in the bank (Oliver is being groomed to take over the bank).  We even see the maturation of Peter—from baby to wise adolescent.  And each step along the way shows that Mary Elizabeth, will achieve what she wants.

I’m skipping around on details because they are all so interesting.  Especially when Peter asks why his mother’s family was ashamed of what she did—she’d never told him.  But her new job at the bank has a wonderfully symbolic tie to her past, and her answer to him is excellent.

This was another good story from McGuane (and quite different from his others).

SOUNDTRACK

My Aunt Marg gave me this disc for Christmas a few years ago.  She said that she knew it from a spa that she went to.  And I can totally tell. I don’t know anything else about the artist, and it’s even hard to find stuff about him online.

The disc has an Indian (Eastern) vibe (which surprises me given the name of the artist and the African-looking person on the cover).  It also has a real world music feel.

Overall, I like the music quite a lot.  It’s certainly new agey, but not treacly new age or anything.  It showcases some cool world music without resorting to clichés.  However, I admit to not caring much for the spoken lyrics of the opening track,  “Sometimes.”  His voice is deep and distracting, especially over such mellow music.  Despite the very Indian feel of “Sometimes,” the rest of the disc explores other sounds as well.  “Kokou” has a 70s kind of organ and bongos (with more appropriately world musicy chanted vocals).  “Raindance” has a cool flute over some bongo beats (all very soothing…with crickets).

I really like “Girl from Orissa” with its cool Eastern instrumentation.  There’s a sarod, a veena and a sitar on the disc.  (Orissa is located on the eastern side of India).  “Khali Gandaki” also features this cool instrumentation. (The Khali Gandaki valley is in Nepal).

“Mswati” opens with some percussion. But this track differs because of the interesting riff that plays throughout the song (whether guitar or keyboard, I can’t tell).  “Touba” has a nice bassline, which really stands out on a disc with minimal bass. It also has some neat wah-wahed guitars.  And “Preaching of Buddha” has a kind of Dead Can Dance feel to the vocals (they’re my go-to band for world music).

“Katarajama” (a pilgrimage site for Sri Lankans and South Indians) has a great riff to it, and it’s even better when the other instruments play along.  “Patan Part 1″ also has a cool sitar riff.  Although if Part 1 is 8 minutes, how long is  the whole song?

The final song, “Sufi Kalaam” has a somewhat more sinister or perhaps just movie soundtracky sound (low bass chords underpin the beginning of the track).  There are chanted vocals and lead vocals in another language.  I rather like the song, but it doesn’t really fit on the disc.

The whole disc is definitely a background/new agey kind of deal.  I can hear it all (except the first and last songs) working well for a relaxing evening of massage.  Just don’t listen to it while driving!

[READ: February, 17 2012] “Lorry Raja”

“Lorry Raja” won Narrative magazine’s “30 Below” contest for 2011.  After the wonderful stories that came in second and third place I expected something pretty amazing to win.  And I was maybe a little disappointed by this story because of it.  And I think I have to blame a cultural disconnect for that.

This story is set in Karnataka, India, a poor state in the south of the country.  People there are so poor that they live in tents and work in the mines–smashing up rocks to get at the iron ore inside.  The children can’t afford to go to school, there’s no electricity and everyone is covered in a red dust from all of the dirt in the mines.

Madhuri Vijay is able to create a compelling story out of this harsh environment.   The story concerns one family as they struggle to survive under these conditions.  The father (I had a really hard time keeping the names straight, so I’m not going to include them here) had an accident and cannot work to his full capacity, so he is stuck working less lucrative jobs. The mother works smashing up iron ore.  The middle son, 12, works and plays around the mine (collecting a few rupees each day).  They put some money aside for his eventual education.  The older brother has just gotten a job as a lorry driver for the mines–he takes the ore out to the port cities.  He is only 14, and, being 14, he takes especial care of his lorry–cleaning it from all the red dust and driving it in a very proud manner.  So much so, that everyone starts calling him Lorry Raja.  There’s also a baby brother who doesn’t play much of a part except (in the way I read it) to show off how hopeless things are (the boy is playing in the dirt and when it is time to feed him, his mother just takes her breast out in front of everyone).

The story is narrated by the middle son.  And we watch as he grows jealous of his brother–the Lorry Raja.  We see the narrator break up rocks, spy on his mother, spy on his father (who is lowered by a rope in to a deep mine (!)).  And we see him talk to the owner of the mine (who has a car, a generator and drinks Pepsi).  And finally we see him spend some time with his brother’s ex-girlfriend (they broke up more or less once he started driving his lorry).

When the girl casually remarks that the narrator should get his lorry license and then he could drive her to China, that sets a new part of his life in motion.  (They are thinking about China because the “Lympic Games” (“Whatever they are” he says) are being played there this year).

The narrator is an idealistic boy, especially for such a location.  He imagines getting a job in the mines and not needing to go to school so that he can have extra money.  He genuinely believes that the girlfriend will choose him.  Then his brother sets him straight on how things really are in Karnataka.

The ending holds a brief glimpse of respite for them all even while it gently mocks everything that the narrator believed to be true.

Although I implied I didn’t like the story, I did.  My problem with it is that I can’t tell if my heartstrings are being pulled because they live in such utter squalor.  It’s hard not to be moved by this story.  It’s the narrator’s idealism that is so sad in the story.  However, I appreciate that she doesn’t play it maudlin or to play on our sympathies (and I suspect that ‘s what makes it such a good story), but it still makes me feel bad to be reading about their lives.

You can read it here.

SOUNDTRACK

I love this Constellation release. It is one of my favorite releases of theirs in a long time.  This album sounds like a kind of TV on the Radio demo/tribute.  I don’t mean that in a knock-off way, but there are many elements about TV on the Radio that I recognize here (voice and musical style).  But the fact that a) Jordache plays all of the instruments himself and b) he keeps things simple, makes this an impressive release.

It opens with “Radio Generation,” which has a really cool bouncy guitar riff and bassline.  It doesn’t quite display the signature sound that I think of this album as having but it certainly points to it. “Get It (I Know You’re Going To) is where I hear the first signs of TV on the Radio.  Jordache sings with two voices at the same time–with his deep voice underpinning his higher voice.  It’s a great effect.  And the fiddly guitar bits are really interesting.

“Salt on the Fields” opens with some “wee ooh” vocals in a fairly high register but when the main vocals come in, they are processed and sound not unlike an old radio (and a singer who I can hear but whose name I can’t place) and then midway through, the song introduces a great guitar riff.  “Phantom Limb” features drums and looping from Merrill Garbus who I didn’t know when I first heard this album but who I now know is tUnEyArDs. And, heh, a little browsing tells me that they are in a band together called Sister Suvi.

“Gold Bound” feels more like a demo than the other tracks, it’s a very simple guitar melody with some echoed vocals.  It’s also the shortest song on here and it’s a nice change of pace.  It also ends with a strange excerpt from something else, a vulgar, rocking little piece advising you to run mother fucker.

“Song for Arthur” returns to that cool high-pitched ooo-ooing.  But “The 2-Step” changes things quite a bit.  An interesting processed guitar and loud echoey drums, but that voice is recognizably his.  There’s also more guitars than on other songs which brings a new texture to this album.

The final song “ukUUU” is a slow meandering piece. There’s some interesting sounds going on (reverse vocals and such) and a lengthy spoken piece about love, but it lacks the punch of the rest of the disc.

Nevertheless, this album is interesting, intriguing and a lot of fun.  I’m looking forward to more from him.

[READ: February 12, 2012] “Liability”

I recently saw that Narrative magazine picked three “30 Below” winners for 2011.  So I thought I’d see just what kind of short stories win their prizes.  This is the third place finisher.

I admit I was a little less than excited when I started reading the story.  It was written in second person, which I liked, but it seemed like a pedestrian story about “you ” and your wife.  How she is so beautiful and you feel you have let her down.  But my misgivings soon gave way.  And I think it was with this little section that won me over:

You crave energy and excitement, and to this end you have bought a beautiful condo downtown in the “bohemian quarter,” as the realtor pitched it, which means that it’s cheap enough for artists and poor black people.  That’s okay.  You love art and hate racism.”

By the middle of the next page, after the explanation of your wife’s job (guidance counselor in a poor school) we get to what turns out to really propel the story: “Although, to be honest, she has a small drinking problem.”  He diffuses this bold statement with a qualifier in the next paragraph: “But the drinking problem is only a problem sometimes, and the drinking problem is not a problem tonight.”

But we slowly learn that it is a problem.  A very real problem.  And we watch as “your” wife gets worse and worse with all of the deterioration that accompanies such a transformation.

A couple of things make this story different from your typical “drunk” story.  The drunk is a woman and “you” are a man.  When the situation gets very dire, and violence comes into play, it’s atypical and all the more powerful for it.

The other thing, and the more interesting thing from a storytelling standpoint is that “you” sell insurance.  Hence the title.  The whole “liability” issue brings an interesting perspective on the woman and how “you” deal with it.  “You” are a professional who deals with risk every day, and when “your” wife’s mother asks why “you ” married her if you saw she had a drinking problem, it is a fascinating question.

It is interesting to feel sympathy for a man in this kind of situation, and Trapp does not make it “sensationalist” at all;  it’s not a “men go through this too, you jerks” attitude at all.  It’s just a straightforward account of a person as she crumbles to alcohol and the person who loves her and has to save her from herself.  And yet at the same time, Trapp does not create a sad, wallowing in misery type of story.  It is often funny, despite itself.  And for all of those reasons I thought it was really superb.

You can read it here.

SOUNDTRACK

This is the third and final disc from Constellation’s MUSIQUE FRAGILE 01 collection.  Khôra is Matthew Ramolo doing solo work on the guitar.  But unlike any other guitar album you may have heard, this one is processed and manipulated so that much of the album sounds nothing like a guitar.

Most of the sounds on the disc are washes and waves of guitars that grow and fade.  Although the opening track “Natura Naturans” has a recognizable acoustic guitar melody, the washes are all processed guitar sounds.  This sound also has an echoing church bell, the kind of sound that would bot be out of place on a black metal album although this is as far from black metal as you can get.

The church bell, by the way is a field recording, and in addition to the guitars there are plenty of field recordings on the disc.

He generates a wonderfully expansive amount of moods as well.  There are haunting melodies like on “Body Aperbut also beautifully upbeat ones like on “Hushed Pulse of the Universe”

I find the artwork that accompanies the Khora album to be the most satisfying of all three.

[READ: February 15, 2012] Tres

Another month, another posthumous Roberto Bolaño release.  Tres is so-called because there are three pieces in it.  They are described as poems, although I have a hard time seeing them as such.  It has the Spanish title because it was originally published as Tres and the English version is actually a bilingual version with facing Spanish and English pages (translated by Laura Healy–I guess if Laura Healy translated it, it must be poetry as she is Bolaño’s poetry translator).

Tres is also amusing to me because it is so clearly a way to make a very small book seem bigger.  In addition to the facing pages of the text, most pages have a paragraph or two at most (short ones at that).  So it’s total 173 pages is really half that and then, given how much white space there is, it’s easily half that as well.  None of this is a complaint, it’s just an observation.

The reason I’m confused about calling it poetry is because of the three pieces only one “looks” like poetry (with line breaks and what not).  Indeed, the first piece, “Prosa del otoño en Gerona” literally translates as “Prose from Autumn in Gerona.”  The second piece (the one that looks like poetry) is called “Los neochilenos” or “The Neochileans” and the final one is a series of numbered paragraphs (again, with no poetry conventions) called “Un paseo por la literatura” or “A Stroll through Literature.”  I read each of these pieces three times primarily because I found them hard to follow and wondered what I was missing.  Multiple readings did help, although I find with Bolaño’s longer short pieces, the details are exquisite while the overall picture is a bit confused.

“Prose from Autumn in Gerona” is a series of paragraphs that create a scene of a woman (a stranger) and “you.”  What’s fun (and confusing ) about it is that Bolaño also retells this story as if it were a film…while he is still telling the main story.  All of Bolaño’s elements are here: an author, sex, potential violence.  It just has such an elliptical feel that it’s hard to digest properly. Even after three readings.

There’s also a problem with my not always knowing who Bolaño is talking about.  He’s got a section about Giorgio Fox, who he describes as “a comic book character, seventeen year-old art critic.”  I assume he is fictional, but who knows; I thought Enrique Lihn was fictional until I looked him up.  (I don’t see anything about Fox online).

There is also an interesting aspect to the story in which the protagonist (Bolaño?) is in Gerona, Spain on a visa which does not get renewed.  So that is hanging over his head as well.  The whole piece comes together as a curious moment in the life of this protagonist, even if it really isn’t all that clear to me what’s going on.  It was written in 1981 right after Antwerp, which I also found evocative but confusing.

A word as to why this can’t be a series of poems.  Because no matter how interesting this text (which is all that was on a page) is, it is not a poem:

The protagonist is left with adventure and saying, “It’s started snowing, boss.”

So maybe the whole piece is a poem?  As always, Bolaño is meticulous about his word choices (the makings of a good poet), but if you connected the paragraphs, it would read like any other piece of prose.  I could accept that maybe there are several shorter pieces within the overall piece and maybe they are prose poems.  But perhaps I’m thinking about this too much.

“The Neochileans” is, indeed, a poem (by my old-school standards).  And it’s a long one (eighteen pages!).  It deviates from Bolaño’s usual subject matter in that this is about a rock band called Pancho Relampágo and the Neochilanos.  They are on a Northward tour of Chile.  I found this poem light and fun, with some very funny moments and some typical band on a tour behavior.  The band members are young (the poem ends “And none of the Neochileans/Was over 22) and are filled with “Pure inspiration/And no method at all”.  Pancho Ferri (who is 28) is the lead singer.  The band is given a van to tour the North (if you follow on a map you can see their journey up rte 5 to Copiapó and on to Arica, 1,200 miles from Santiago, where the started.)  They even cross into Peru and head for the shining city of Lima!

After Pancho Ferri got sick he wanted to change the band name from Pancho Relampágo and the Neochilanos (relampágo means lightning) to Pancho Misterio and the Neochilanos.  Pancho’s fever won’t break and the band plays instrumentals without him wondering where this will finally end.  Dare they dream of reaching Ecuador?

This was written in 1993 and I really enjoyed it (especially once I got out the map).

The final piece, “A Stroll through Literature” (written in 1994) is another strange “poem.”  There are 57 numbered paragraphs.  Again, not in poetry style at all.  It opens: “1. I dreamt that Georges Perec was three years old and visiting my house.  I was hugging him, kissing him, saying what a sweet boy he was.”  [See, that's not a poem.  Nor is "5. We, the nec spes nec metus"].

After a short break in that style, the remaining 50 paragraphs all start with “I dreamt.”  He dreams about all kinds of literary figures: Alonso de Ercilla, Manuel Puig, Enqique Lihn, Gui Rosey, Gabriela Mistral, Philip K. Dick, Mark Twain, (sex with Anaïs Nin and Carson McCullers), Alphonse Daudet, and even James Matthew Barrie.

The “poem” ends with Bolaño promising to take care of young Perec, which I interpret as a loving embrace of the history of poetry. It’s a strange melding of all of Bolaño’s passions.  And again, his detail is wonderful, it’s just never entirely clear what the overall point is.

This book is not a great place to start if you’re interested in Bolaño.  Indeed, this would be for die hards only (which is why I suppose none of my libraries had it and I had to have it shipped from a University).  But then, there’s not too many books that are bilingual, right?

We are nearing the end of the Bolaño posthumous p[publication list.  According to the Wikipedia, there are six books left to be treated.

1. The Secret of Evil (due out soon), 
2. Una Novelita Lumpen, 2002, [A Lumpen Novella]
   
3. Los Sinsabores Del Verdadero Policía, 2011 [The Troubles of the Real Police Officer]
4. Diorama (this book is unpublished at all, so it’s unlikely to be translated anytime soon),

There’s also a poetry collection

1. The Unknown University [due out this year].

And what I think of as the Holy Grail:

1. Consejos de un discípulo de Morrisona un fanático de Joyce, 1984  [Advice from a Morrison Disciple to a Joyce Fanatic].  This novel has the coolest title and I am really looking forward to its publication.  Of course, it’s a very early Bolaño piece so it is probably nuts.   But then it was written in collaboration with Antoni García Porta, so who knows what he brings to the table!

For ease of searching I include: Khora, Bolano, otono, Pancho Relampago, Anais Nin, Antoni Garcia Porta.

SOUNDTRACK

Not too many albums start out with clicking blocks and quiet guitars that build for a minute before the actual song kicks in.  Not too many albums sound like early Cure sung by Lou Reed and not too many albums are called Crazy Rhythms when the thing that’s crazy about them is their vocals and guitars.  But that’s what you get with The Feelies debut.

In addition to the blocks, the opening song also features some sh sh sh sounds as a rhythm (techniques used by The Cure on Seventeen Seconds, also 1980).  There’s two guitar solos, each one vying for top spot in different speakers and, yes, the rhythms are a little crazy.

The album feels like it is experimenting with tension–there’s two vocalists often singing at the same time, but not in harmony.  There are oftentimes two guitars solos at the same time, also not in harmony.  The snare drum is very sharp and there’s all manner of weird percussion (all four members are credited with playing percussion).

That early-Cure sound reigns on “Loveless Love” as well, a slow builder with that trebly guitar.  There’s a lot of tension, especially with the interesting percussion that plays in the background.  And there’s that whole Lou Reed vibe in some of the vocals.

But not every song sounds like that, “Fa Cé-La” is a punky upbeat song with two singers trying to out sing the other.  “Original Love” is another short song, it’s fast and frenetic and fairly simple. It’s as if they couldn’t decide if they were going to be The Velvet Underground or New Wave punks.

The next surprise comes from their choice of covers: “Everybody’s Got Something to Hide (Except for Me and My Monkey”).  It goes at breakneck speed with some surprising pace changes after the chorus.  And a wonderful ringing percussion that makes the song sound even more tense than it is.  “Moscow Nights” is a more traditional song (although the backing vocals seem very spartan.

“Raised Eyebrows” is almost an instrumental, until the last-minute when the seemingly random vocals kick in.  And the final track, “Crazy Rhythms” seems to combine the speed of the faster tracks with the insanity of the other tracks.  It’s a pretty amazing debut, really heralding an age of music.

  It’s a shame it took them 6 years to make another (very different sounding) record.

[READ: February 8, 2012] “To Reach Japan”

I love Alice Munro’s stories, but I found this one a bit confusing.  Now, I admit that i read this under poor circumstances (while I was supposed to be attending a company-wide presentation), so that may have led to my confusion. But it felt like there was some questionable juxtapositions of the timeline in this story.

It opens simply enough with Greta and her daughter Katy waving goodbye to Peter (the husband and father) as they pull away from the train station.

The story immediately jumps back to Peter’s mother and how she fled on foot from Soviet Czechoslovakia into Western Europe with baby Peter in tow.  Peter’s mother eventually landed in British Columbia,where she got a job teaching.

The second time jump comes a few paragraphs later.  It seems like we’re back in the present, but the section opens, “It’s hard to explain it to anybody now–the life of women at that time.”  This describes how it was easier for a woman if she was a “poetess” rather than a “poet.”  But I’m not exactly sure when that was.  Presumably when Greta (who is the poet) was younger, but how long ago was that?  In Toronto, even?

The story jumps back to the present to say why Greta and Katy are on the train and Peter isn’t.  They are going to housesit for a month in Toronto while Peter goes to Lund for a summer job.

Then it jumps back to when Greta was a poetess and actually had poems published.  The journal was based in Toronto, but there was a party in Vancouver for the editor.  So she went.  And she had a lousy  time among the local literati.  She gets drunk and sits in a room by herself, but soon enough a man approaches her and offers to take her home. There is the potential for something more to come of it but it never materializes.  But she never forgot the man’s name: Harris Bennett, journalist.

And yet, reading it again, it seems like she was with Peter during this time of this party, a time that seems quite long ago.  There’s also a line a little later about “awesome” being a new word, so maybe the “now” of the story is also quite some time ago.

On the train ride, Greta meets two actors who work with preschoolers.   They immediately warm to Katy.  And when the woman gets off the train, and it is clear that the actors are not “together,” Greta and the man, Greg, spend some time together while Katy slowly drifts to sleep.

Greta and Greg move their tryst to another berth so as not to be despicable in front of Greta’s sleeping daughter.  When she returns a little later Katy is gone.

Munro is not the kind of moralist who punishes women for indiscretions (thank goodness, because this would have been an awful story if she were).  Rather, the story shifts somewhat towards acknowledging the consciousness of Katy.  And so for the end of the story we think about Katy.  About how this whole experience (father leaving her at the train station, mother leaving her in the train) must be affecting her.  And Greta starts to feel bad about how she’s ignored her both on the train and in general.

And the ending (just a few paragraphs later) is quite a surprise!

So even though I was confused by the timeline of the story, I really enjoyed it.  In fact, although some of the details would have been lost, it probably could have done without the time shifting at all.  True, some of the information about Peter’s mother was useful in setting up Peter as a character, but I’m not sure it really paid off.  And just a word or two to give a frame of reference for the poetry party (during the party not after) would have been very helpful too.

Nevertheless, the entire ending sequence was incredibly powerful and lived up to everything that I know and like about Munro’s writing.

For ease of searching, I include: “Fa Ce-La”

SOUNDTRACK

I was not aware that this EP existed (I guess technically it’s a single).  It came out after their original EP but before their first full-length.

The title track is a rocking number with all kinds of cool keyboard noises strewn about.  This is clearly early template TV on the Radio.  “The Wrong Way” will appear on Desperate Youth, Blood Thirsty Babes and it shows a new noisy sound for the band–lots of horns and a reluctance to allow silence appear, there’s sound filling up every space.  The final song, “Modern Romance” feels like a B-side.  It is kind of slow and meandering.  There are a few interesting sonic bits but mostly they are overshadowed by a kind of monotony.

Not essential listening for the TV on the Radio fan.

[READ: December 29, 2011] Chew: Volume Four

It was delightful to get volume four of this series so quickly after finishing volume three!

As with previous issues, this one starts out with a quirky opening.  A series of shots of a chicken restaurant (Mother Clucker’s) thirty-five years ago, then twenty-five, then fifteen and then five (nice clientele drawings over the years).  And then finally we see it today, after the ban on chicken–a wasteland.

But this story introduces an entirely new element (which goes through the arc of the book.  Lights from (presumably) an alien life form fill the skies.  They spell out words in a language that absolutely no one can understand.  And it is so vexing that money is taken away from the FDA (the people who are fighting the chicken war) and put into NASA.

This first chapter also introduces a new kind of character: a man who is voresophic–if he is eating he is unbelievably intelligent. Of course, if this was your gift, how long would you be able to stay slim?

Chapter Two jumps us right into a NASA space station.  Just as it explodes.  A quick cut to a school (where Tony Chu’s estranged daughter goes) reveals a more down to earth problem.  Since the letters have appeared in the sky people have been acting weird.  And one technologically savvy boy, who has been picked on most of his school life is looking for revenge.  But is he responsible for the space station explosion as well?

Chapter three is wonderful for a couple of reasons.  First, Chu and John Colby are getting assigned increasingly dangerous missions (because their boss wants them dead).  It culminates in a hilarious scene at the USDA (a furious female army). Chu and Colby are the last resort.  If everyone else fails, they have a fall back so dangerous that it is classified.

Chapter four is amazing for opening with a series of scenes that are gruesome and awful and, as the narrator boxes keep repeating, never actually happen.  And that is because Tony Chu has been assigned to work with his twin sister Toni Chu–NASA bigwig and (unknown to anyone else, fellow Cibopath–she doesn’t tell anyone so she’s not treated like a freak like her brother).  It’s great to see the two of them work their magic.  And while I wouldn’t want it to replace the Chu/Colby team, it would be fun to see future pairings of these two.

Chapter five (this is the first book with five chapters!) opens with a wonderfully long sequence of Agent Mason Savoy (he never went away, he’s always in the background) sampling something amazing.  And we get several wordless pages of him processing what he has just ingested.

But the more amazing thing is that suddenly the letters in the sky simply disappear.  And there seems to be a cult leader who predicted this, right down to the minute.  The cult leader ingested scads and scads of gallsaberries when she was adrift at sea and it led her to the Truth.  And she has lots of followers who are willing to drink her Kool-Aid.

The book ends with two wonderful cliffhangers.  The first one is (mild spoiler, but not really since it will be dealt with in the next book) that their actions lead Chu and Colby to get fired.  The second one is that Mason Savoy has learned a special secret about one of Tony Chu’s relatives (remember we saw them all in that cool scene from the last book?).  And he takes advantage of that knowledge.

The series isn’t over by a long shot.  Awesome.

A couple other things, first off–welcome back Poyo!  I loved the faux story they created about his background and then the negation of said story.  Also, this books reintroduces the vampires that were mentioned early in the story and then kind of hidden.  I love when stories pick up threads like this.  And a final quick nod to all of the excellent little jokes in the margins of the pictures.  I read them all and I love them…keep them up!

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