I Just Read About That…

SOUNDTRACK: COLDPLAY-Prospekt’s March EP (2008).

This EP was released hot on the heels on Viva La Vida. So hot, in fact, that since our copy of Viva was lost, I listened to this EP first.

If you absolutely love Viva La Vida, and wish it were longer, than this EP is perfect for you.  It has three remixes of songs from Viva.  I find the “Lovers in Japan [Osaka Sun Mix]” to be more satisfying that the original.  The opening track “Life in Technicolor ii” fleshes out the instrumental from Viva into a 4 minute song with lyrics.  And then there’s “Lost+” which tacks on an ill-fitting rhyme from Jay Z.

The rest of the disc is new songs in the vein of Viva.  They all contain that orchestral feel of the disc, especially “Glass of Water.”  Although the last track, “Now My Feet Don’t Touch the Ground” the a title that you would think would be over the top, is a more acoustic style ballad.

None of this is essential listening, but as a fairly cheap EP, it’s a not a bad addition to the Coldplay collection.

[READ: March 19, 2009] The Middle Stories

This seemed like it would be a fun little book. The cover (hand vandalized by Canadians, the website promised) has a photo of a man (see above). [In my picture, he is adorned in with a birthday hat, balloons and candles. I bought this from McSweeney’s recently (for a $5 sale, I believe) even though it was one of their first published titles.

Heti has two stories in McSweeney’s issues (#4 & #6), which are included here, but which I didn’t remember from before.  And that’s enough introduction. I really didn’t like this short story collection at all. There was maybe three characters at the most who were sympathetic or at least were not reprehensible. In fact, the landscape that she describes, and the people who populate it are so alien to me that I can only hope that she made everything up and had no real experience of its contents. In fact, I  have a hard time imagining who enjoys these stories. Not “likes” them but “enjoys” them.

The title also seemed to be a little give away, because I absolutely hated the first half dozen or so stories, but once I got to the Middles ones, they started to get less icky.

The first seven stories were just so crass, so exploitative, so detached, that I was very tense, and a little dirty, reading them.  While I am very familiar and often comfortable reading crass work, I think it was the utter detachment from the lives of these people (most of whom don’t even have names) that I felt so repulsed by.  A sample line from “The Poet and the Novelist as Roommates” :

She [a married woman visiting the titular men] closed the door and sat down beside him. She put the cigarettes in his hand. He looked at them dumbly. She wanted him to throw his leg across her, push her down on the bed, slap her and rape her hard.

I don’t even know what to say about that. But basically the book is full of characters who are negative, violent, unhappy and utterly ineffectual.

I really couldn’t wait to be done with the book.  So why did I keep reading? Well, the book was short, and I did pay for it.  Plus, with a short story collection, there’s the possibility that things will change in different stories.

And indeed, the stories where the characters are given actual names allow for a degree of humanity (even when they seem devoid of it themselves), and the shorter ones (about 4 pages) didn’t wallow in misery as much as the longer ones, which made them less despairing.

And the final story I read, “The Princess and the Plumber” gave the book some redemption. It was a longer story (10 pages) and it was full of despair and sadness, and the futility of a man longing for love, but it ended beautifully with a poetic flair that I didn’t see in any of the other stories.

The book blurb says, “The Middle Stories is a strikingly original collection of stories, fables and short brutalities that are alternately heartwarming, cruel and hilarious.” Please remove “heartwarming” (my heart was never ever warmed) and “hilarious” (you may get a smile or two, but never hilarity) and the truth will out: a strikingly original collection of stories and short brutalities that are cruel.

I really hope Shiela Heti isn’t as bummed as this book makes her seem, and I know I’ll be staying far away from her novel.

Table of Contents

• The Princess and the Plumber
• Mermaid in a Jar
• The Miss and Sylvia and Sam
• The Woman Who Lived in a Show
• The Middleman to Elda
• The Fundamental Race
• The Littlest Dumpling
• The Favorite Monkey
• The Giant
• The Girl Who Was Blind All the Time
• The Moon Monologue
• The Party at Her Place, with Her Piano
• The Girl Who Planted Flowers
• Eleanor
• The Accident
• Mr. Jones First Outing
• A Few Adventures of the Young Fornicator
• What Changed
• Janis and Marcus
• The Raspberry Bush
• Frame from Christianity
• A Bench for Marianne and Todd
• The Poet and the Novelist as Roommates
• The Sort of Woman Freeman Loved
• The Night of Rory
• The Man from Out of Town
• The Little Old Lady and the Little Old Man
• The House at the End of the Lane
• Cows and Bread
• The Man with the Hat