SOUNDTRACK: SUFJAN STEVENS–Joy! Songs for Christmas Vol. IV (2006).
This disc has only one guest on it: Bridgit DeCook. And she adds some very nice harmonies to some of the songs. It also contains only one short (less than a minute) instrumental: “The First Noel” (which is a lot of la las and is really nice)The rest of the disc stays around the 3-4 minute mark, with no long songs.
There are two full-length traditional Christmas songs: “Away in a Manger” in a a beautiful simple folk rendition. And there’s also the best rendition of “Little Drummer Boy” I’ve ever heard: it’s understated and moving with beautiful harmonies (and virtually no drums).
There are three Sufjan originals on this EP. “Hey Guys! It’s Christmas Time” has that distinctive Sufjan original sound. Even though the instrumentation is simple guitar (really fuzzy out in the opening notes), it is clearly an original and a good one. “Did I Make You Cry on Christmas? (Well, You Deserved It!)” is one of those songs that is stark and negative and yet it is so catchy. It’s something that Sufjan does very well. The third original is “The Incarnation.” It’s a brief instrumental, which sounds rather mournful.
The final song, “Joy to the World” is a bit more subdued than I prefer this song to be, but it’s still pleasant, and the unexpected guitar riff between verses is unusual but very cool.
[READ: January 5, 2009] “Meeting with Enrique Lihn”
I had been hearing a lot about how Bolaño had died while finishing up his latest and last novel 2666. And since the book was just released here, I had it in my head that he had just recently died. However, as most anyone knows, this U.S. edition is a translation; the book was actually published a few years ago. And Bolaño died in 2003. This doesn’t really make a big difference to anything, it just somehow means I didn’t “just miss” reading him while he was alive. But regardless, that has little impact on this story.
I just had to look up to see if Enrique Lihn was a real person (which shows my unsurprising dearth of knowledge about Chilean poets). This makes the story a little bit more, well, something. Nevertheless, it is quite clear from the story just who Enrique Lihn is (whether he was real or not).
So, this short piece is something of a fever dream in which a fictional Roberto Bolaño, a famous Chilean poet, meets Lihn, the most celebrated Chilean poet. Bolaño meets him in a bar, even though he knows the man is dead.
After fighting his way through the sycophantic young poets (and he sees his own young self in these poets) he manages to score a meeting with the poet himself. The end takes a surreal turn into the land of the dead.
One of the most unsettling things about this story (and I believe this is true for most of his work) is his lack of paragraph breaks (or really any break in the flow of text). If you look here, you can see this one, long paragraph story. And so, this story is three solid pages of writing with nowhere to pause. It allows for wonderful stream of consciousness.
This was translated by Chris Andrews. It’s available here.
For ease of searching I include: Bolano.
[…] with Enrique Lihn” This final story in the book is also one I have read already. I found the story confusing on first read. But this time, the hallucinogenic quality of the […]