I Just Read About That…

SOUNDTRACK: DUNGEN-Tio Bitar (2007).

This record, released in 2007, was uncovered in a vault dating back to 1970. Or so it sounds. In fact, this is a fascinating release from a Scandinavian band, or more precisely, guy, Gustav Ejstes. He has meticulously worked to make this record sound as if it was recorded in the early 1970s.

And not just with the recording techniques, but the sound and style of the songs is very psychedelic 70s. It is frankly astonishing and even more astonishing, is that it is really really good.

The album starts out with a screaming rock and roll instrumental jam that seems like it’s about 7 minutes long but is really only 3 and change (not to make it sound like it’s too long, it just compresses so much into it that it seems longer than it is).

All kinds of instrumentation appear on this record, from wailing guitar solos to flutes and mellotrons. There are folkie ballads, and beautiful melodies. It’s like compressing all of psychedelia and folk into a brilliant sampler. I can’t say enough about this album. It is truly fascinating.

Oh, and here’s the thing, when there are lyrics, they are sung in Swedish. I have no idea what any of the songs are about, and I don’t care. It makes me feel like those Japanese kids from the 80’s who loved American heavy metal and probably got 1/2 of the words.

The crazy thing is that you can’t even pretend to sing along because the Swedish words don’t really even sound like they might be English words (the way you can fake your way through some foreign bands song). But none of that matters when the music is this good. I fully intend to put a track or two on future compilation mixes for unsuspecting xenophobes out there!

[READ: November 2007] Um.

As I mentioned previously, I was really excited about this book. It sounded terrifically geeky, and for a geek like myself, terrifically fun. I am fascinated by language, and, having suffered through Public Speaking classes, and now actually teaching classes to library patrons, I feel like I have progressed very far in my speaking prowess. Therefore, discovering the keys to why we make “disfluencies” like um, and uh in our speech sounded like a wonderfully fun topic.

The review I read of it seemed to couch it in terms of examining our current president’s inability to speak very well and analyzing common speaking errors; I thought that the two combined: information about language, and mocking the president would be an excellent combination.

Now, this is going to sound weird coming from someone who has spent a lot of time in graduate school, but I found this book to be too intellectual for my enjoyment, especially for a book that seems to be marketed to a mass audience. The book is very rigorous. It begins with a look into Spoonerisms, one of my favorite verbal blunder/joke styles. Aside from letting Mr Spooner off the hook for much of his “work” (apparently his name is linked to a style that he was guilty of, but not to the extent that one is led to believe), the chapter was fun and rather promising.

Then he moves to Freud. Now, background information is always interesting and is certainly necessary for a fuller understanding of the material. But his exegesis of Freud was painfully in depth. The feud that Freud and a rival engage in is interesting, but so much detail was involved that it bogged the chapter down for me. The biggest problem with this chapter is that he talks about a lot of the speech disfluencies made that Freud and his contemporaries studied. However, those mistakes were in German, and he is peculiarly selective about including the original German AND telling us what the mistake would mean. He tends to do one or the other, which is rather unfortunate, and somewhat confusing. Just stating what the mistake is in English doesn’t always explain WHY the mistake would have been made. But just telling us what the German is doesn’t tell us if the mistake is funny.

Perhaps the most fascinating aspect of the book is the revelation that people only really started being interested in verbal blunders like um after we had recorded sound. In the centuries before recorded sound there is no real mention of this kind of verbal error in anyone’s analysis of rhetoric. None of the world’s greatest speakers seemed to be concerned with this issue which vexes contemporary speakers so much. The theory is that when you are simply listening to someone speak, you disregard these sounds. But when you start re-listening to them on tapes or transcripts, you really start to notice the lack of fluency.

As he gets to later chapters, with the more “practical aspects” of things, the book really takes off. The “Toastmasters” chapter is very interesting, and the ending chapters, about President Blunder and the future of Um’ing are great. There’s also a great chapter on the history of bloopers, which is interesting and funny.

He discusses common blunders and even gives some great examples (which is frankly, what we’re interested in). There’s also some fun with celebrities and famous blunders. This leads to a section about how the status of the blunderer tends to impact the humorousness of the blunder. Not exactly breaking news, but it’s nice to see it backed up with examples.

There is also some behind the scenes linguistic study going on including linguists who listen for their own children’s blunders (and, horrifically, write them down, sometimes in front of them).

I hate to sound anti-intellectual as I did in the beginning, because I can assure you I am anything but that. However, this book seemed perfectly designed for the casual observer of human speech, or even for those of us who have struggled with public speaking in general, or even those who enjoy mocking President Blunder’s abysmal speech patterns.

If you’re put off by the first chapters of the books, skip ahead to the present day sections, which are much more fun, and much funnier. However, if you do enjoy history, and are interested in Freud in particular, the early chapters won’t disappoint.