It's been a while since I rapped at ya...

It was baby-time at my house (all of a sudden - long story) and this place has been neglected for a while.  I'll be back.  Real soon now.

Blitzen Trapper on Ahead of the Curve

Continuing the Blitzen Trapper love, here's a quick video of the group doing an acapella version of the first verse of "Sleepytime in the Western World" on MTVU's Ahead of the Curve.

It's fully awesome.

Check out their archive for other performances by CSS, Fleet Foxes, Okkerville River and Tokyo Police Club.

Blitzen Trapper and M83 on Juan's Basement

A little while ago I wrote a sort of love letter to the band Blitzen Trapper because I absolutely love their 2008 album, Furr.  So anyway, while surfing the information super-highway I came across a little video program on the Pitchforks called Juan's Basement.  They had a four-song performance by Blitzen Trapper recorded (you guessed it!) in this dude Juan's basement.

You might think that something recorded in some guy's basement would sound kind of crap, but it's awesome.  It looks and sounds fantastic.  I found myself watching other episodes featuring bands that I didn't even like, just because I enjoy the format so much.  In doing so I discovered some music that I'd previously written off.  The best example is a band called M83.  Their performance in Juan's Basement is excellent and sent me directly to their most recent studio effort, which I've been enjoying.

So check out Blitzen Trapper on Juan's Basement.  It's a good time.

New Yorker Short Fiction - "Julia and Byron"

The March 30, 2009 issue features Craig Raine's "Julia and Bryon"

"Julia and Bryon" reads like a poem reworked as prose.  It is sparse, terse, and full of imagery.  In many ways it reminds me of the material in Lydia Davis' Samuel Johnson Is Indignant.  This is probably because the piece's author is Craig Raines, author of a number of poetry collections and founder.editor of the literary magazine Areté. 

The story starts with Julia, discovering she has cancer.  Thanks to an experimental drug called Mandragorax, things quickly go downhill.  Once off the drug she recovers, but only briefly, as her doctor prescribes an experimental course of chemo that eventually kills her.

Byron is (or was) Julia's husband.  The rest of the story deals with him finding Julia's diary and discovering that she found him extremely difficult as a husband. 

Some things I noticed:  Bryon may be a reference to the poet Lord Byron, but I can't find anything in Lord Byron's personal life reflected in Raine's story.  Early in the story we find this passage: "The medication had a beautiful name.  Mandragorax.  Made by a pharmaceutical company that knew its Shakespeare."  The Shakespeare reference referrs to the bard's use of the word in both Anthony and Cleopatra (Act 1, Scene 5) and in Othello (Act 3, Scene 3).

There are also a number of references to poems by A.A. Milne in the text.  Julia quotes "Sneezles" in her interactions with the doctor and Byron reads "Us Two" at Julia's funeral.

Overall I really enjoyed the story.  It was short, but like any really great short story it leaves a lot of space and room for interpretation and personalization. 

"Julie and Bryon" was written by Craig Raine and appeared in the March 30th issue of The New Yorker.

New Yorker Short Fiction - "She’s the One"

"She's the One" centers around Ally, a young English woman who finds her life upset by the suicide of her brother.  While living at home and working at a writer's center, she meets Hilda, an initially unlikable Canadian in her fifties who is a student in a week-long course at the writer's center.  The two develop a relationship wherein Ally is able to find comfort in Hilda's simple cottage.  The story ends with an exchange between Ally and her dead brother's ex-girlfriend, Yvonne.

Tessa Hadley shows restraint from the first line, "The winter after her brother killed himself, Ally got a job at a writers’ center near her parents’ house, helping out with admin in the office."  A flashier opener would have ended after the word "center" and created a succinct and punchy first line.  But Hadley decides to give us a lot of information instead, utilizing a sort of breezy voice.  Ally's brother killed himself.  Ally works at a writer's center.  It's near her parents house, so she probably lives at home.  She does administrative work in the office, so you know she's not a writing instructor or even an instructor's assistant.  She's low man on the totem pole at a place that's pretty low on the career ladder to begin with.  All that information in a first sentence that gives us something to draw us in (suicide!) but not without giving us a pretty good character sketch in the process.

Hilda's home life is difficult.  Her mother struggles to get over Ally's brother's death, essentially living in the past by wearing her son's old clothes under her own.  In fact, all of the scenes at Ally's home give a sense of past, the weight of the past, the grip of the past on the present, the inability or unwillingness of people to escape the past.

Hilda, on the other hand, offers something completely different.  Hilda has given up on her novel, saying that it has "died."  The novel had been based on an incident from Hilda's youth, revolving around the 60's, a guitar player, her mother and a song.  Hilda's mother uses the song as an emotional crutch as she gets older, believing the song to be about her.  But it isn't.  The song is about Hilda.  And the shame of it, the delusion it causes in her mother, it is a poison.  So as she tries to write the novel she wraps herself in the era, trying to recreate it on the page.  And it just dies.  It leaves nothing behind but failure. And with the death of the novel comes Hilda's freedom from her past.

Hilda offers Ally an escape from the weight of the past.  Hilda lives completely in the present.  She is about action and moving forward and is a nice counter to Ally's mother.

The encounter with Yvonne at the end of the story is excellent, well-written, exciting.  Yvonne, in a fit of anger, throws the ring Ally's brother had given her into the river.  Realizing what she's done, she begins to freak out, begging Ally to help her get the ring back.  Yvonne isn't ready to let go yet.  She thought she was, but she isn't.  Ally goes after the ring, not because she wants it, but to prove her distance from the "hysterical" past.

The last paragraph is a fantastic metaphor for moving on, seeing an opportunity and snatching it up.

"She's The One" was written by Tessa Hadley and published in the March 23rd issue of The New Yorker.

Odds and Ends

I just wanted to repost a few things that have been rather popular recently...

• 2666 Characters and References
• This document is being updated as I read 2666<.  It has been updated to include the first two parts of the book: The Part About The Critics and The Part About Amalfitano.  I have just started reading The Part About Fate, so expect updates soon.
• 1993 Interview with David Foster Wallace
• This fantastic interview from Whiskey Island Magazine had a few typo's that I'm fixing and I'm annotating some of the references with links to Wikipedia.
• The Savage Detectives Character Reference
• Roberto Bolaño's TSG's second part (of three) features a few hundred pages of interviews with many, many characters.  I started this reference document to help me keep track of all of those characters.  Updating this document is on hiatus while I read 2666, but I'll return to it soon.

1993 Interview with David Foster Wallace

Thanks to the folks on the wallace-l and The Howling Fantoids, we've got this great 1993 interview with David Foster Wallace from Whiskey Island Magazine, the literary magazine of Cleveland State University. Nick from the Fantoids got permission to post scans of the article, Gabriel on wallace-l did an OCR and Patrick provided the raw text. The link below is formatted the way I like it and I'm putting it out here for you all.


Looking for a Garde of Which to be Avant: An Interview with David Foster Wallace


Wallace was my favorite writer and I'm still very sad about his death.  Reading this interview, which appeared three years before his landmark novel, Infinite Jest, it just makes me miss him more.