I Just Read About That…

SOUNDTRACK: LOVE-Da Capo (1967).

A few years ago, my friend John gave me Love’s Forever Changes. I’ve enjoyed that disc very much and decided to get some other Love music.  I chose Da Capo (their second album, and the one just prior to Forever Changes) for two reasons.  One: Rush did a cover of “Seven and Seven Is” on their Flashback CD and two: there’s an 18 minute song on it, and I love me an eighteen minute song.

The first side is a bunch of shorter songs; each one is quite charming. In fact, “Orange Skies” is so sweet, complete with flute solo, that you can pretty much hear Arthur Lee smiling all the way through it.  The song is borderline cheesy, and yet I can’t help but find myself walking around singing “orange skies, carnivals and cotton candy and you….and I love you too.”

“Stephanie Knows Too” is kind of angular with a weird jazzy interlude.  And “Que Vida” is just a poppy little number that is fun and interesting.  It fits well with “The Castle,” another stop/start song that has a beautiful guitar melody at the opening.  The side ends with a classic psychedelic track “She Comes in Colors.”

The only oddball of the side is, paradoxically, the single “Seven and Seven Is.” It’s a fast rocking number with the fascinating chorus of “Oop ip ip Oop ip ip, yeah!”  Perhaps the only line that’s stranger is “If I don’t start crying it’s because I have got no eyes.” And this was the single?  Clearly Arthur Lee liked his psychedelia.

Then we move to the 18 minute gem.  Well, in fact, “Revelation” (the first song ever to take up an entire side of an album) is something of a disappointment to me.  It is basically a jam that sounds like it was done in one take, although since Arthur Lee was a taskmaster I doubt very much that it was one take.

It’s starts promisingly enough with a rapid harpsichord intro, but it moves into a fairly mundane jam session. There’s a great line from a Paul F. Tompkins skit, in which he says that jazz is just music of solos: “everybody gets one, it’s not like regular music where only the best dude gets one, in jazz everybody gets one.”

And that’s the case with this song.  The solos go: guitar, harmonica, vocals (Arthur Lee improvising some pretty lame segments (Mostly about how he feels good), and let me tell you, he’s no Jim Morrison when it comes to this sort of thing), another guitar solo, a clarinet solo (!), then a bass solo and finally a drum solo, rounded all out with a harpsichord outro that mimics the beginning.  The problem is that none of the solos (excepting the guitar) is particularly noteworthy, and it’s not recorded especially well.  It’s all rather flat.  In particular the sing along part, where Lee is screaming and whatnot, it’s just not convincing, especially since the band doesn’t seem all that excited about the proceedings.  I got tired of it at after about 5 minutes (although the opening of the clarinet solo which sounds an awful ot like a flock of geese is pretty cool).  It’s a shame really, because I wanted to like this track a lot.  Nevertheless, it hasn’t put me off of Love.

[READ: March 3, 2009] “Wiggle Room”

This week’s New Yorker featured not only a story by David Foster Wallace but also a sort of biography/obituary of him.  D.T. Max, a name straight out of Wallace’s imagination, writes a moving and depressing epilogue to the story of DFW.  (It’s available here) The main thrust of the article is that DFW had a hard time writing fiction after Infinite Jest, but that he had been working on a new book (which, although unfinished, is due to be published sometime this year).

The piece covers some ground that I knew (both from previous print obituaries and from general curiosity about the man).  But it also features some details that I didn’t know, and would have no way of knowing (he was on antidepressants for some 20 years (!)).

The piece really makes it sound like DFW struggled a lot, especially in his later life.  I have mentioned before that I feel most sad for his wife having to come home to find her husband dead, but it also sounds like the last few months with him were pretty horrible, and that his own anxiety was too powerful for him to live with.  All of it is very sad, and to an outsider it  seems hard to believe when his books reveal such a love of language and, one would suspect, life itself (for even in depression, the gift to be able to write about it seems like it would be a net positive).

It was also interesting to me to see that he wrote to a lot of other authors (something that I thought only writers from generations ago did).  The article quotes from many of these letters leading me to suspect that they may all be published someday.

All of which is a huge lead in to the story.  This story concerns Lane Dale Jr, who is, in fact, one of the characters from the unfinished novel.  And, indeed, this is most likely an excerpt from the novel.  (The aforementioned piece said that DFW tidied up what he had of his manuscript to be sent to his publicist, but he also left hundred of pages of files, notebooks and other random things, so who knows what might come of all of that).

Anyway, back to “Wiggle Room”

This story is one of DFW’s more or less stream of consciousness pieces (the first paragraph break comes about three pages into the story).  In it, Lane Dean Jr is an I.R.S. agent trying to cope with his own boredom.  The article said that DFW studied the I.R.S. for years, amassing all manner of information about the job; he also did extensive research into boredom.

These first three pages are classic DFW in that the nuances and intricacies of boredom are so thoroughly worked over, so lovingly detailed, that if you get into the story (and admittedly some people won’t be able to) it is like entering another world where reading about a person being bored to tears is actually captivating.  He fills the story with so much minutiae, that you know is all accurate, it makes this mundane job come to life.

When the paragraph break comes, it is to introduce a new character into Lane’s line of sight (he more or less stares straight ahead doing his job and working even harder to not look at the clock).  This new character sits on Lane’s desk and tells him the history of the word boredom.  This recitation continues for a page or so, and is interrupted by Lane’s own thoughts, especially wondering who this man is.  And why no one else seems to be acknowledging him.

The story ends soon after, when the man walks away, and we are left realizing that nothing much has happened, but things are probably going to be much different for Lane.

As a story, it’s not terribly exciting, but as a small piece of a larger work it’s quite enchanting.  I’m a little disconcerted at the idea of a publishing house releasing an unfinished book posthumously, and yet, seeing how well crafted and polished the “stories” of the book are, it really makes me want to read whatever is published.

It also makes me want to re-read Infininte Jest, which I haven’t looked at in over a decade.  The article made me concerned that since I’m no longer a twenety-something slacker gen-Xer I may not fully appreciate Infinite Jest anymore.  And yet I can’t help but think that I will.  Perhaps I’ll start with The Broom of the System first.

“Wiggle Room” is available here.