SOUNDTRACK: THERAPY?: Music Through a Cheap Transistor: The BBC Sessions (2007).
I enjoy the title of this disc quite a bit. Fortunately, I also enjoy the music quite a bit. This is a collection of BBC recordings from Therapy?
It’s a strange collection in that they recorded songs on five separate occasions and yet there is a lot of duplication of tracks (the liner notes deal with this issue).
John Peel Sessions (and there’s much made in the liner notes about the fact that they thought they’d be meeting Peel himself when they went in, when in fact it was just a random engineer) are essentially live recordings done in the studio. They tend to be slightly more experimental (done after a band has toured and messed around with the songs some) and for some bands (like Therapy?) they tend to be more raucous.
This collection was recorded from 1991-1995 with a final show in 1998. Obviously the band isn’t thinking about the future CD release of the sessions when they recorded these sessions, so it probably didn’t seem strange to record “Totally Random Man” 3 times. But it does seem strange to listen to it like that.
The songs are definitely rawer than the studio versions. Even their more poppy tracks from 1998 are a bit harsher. However, their first EPs were really raw, so these songs sound much better (much cleaner). They also include a lot of fun/weird unreleased tracks and covers.
My only complaint is that neither version of “Teethgrinder” features that awesome drum sound that is my favorite part of the track. Otherwise, it’s a great collection.
[READ: June 1, 2010] Lost in the Funhouse
I checked out this book so I could read the title story. I enjoyed that one quite a bit so I decided to read the whole collection. The Author’s Note says, “while some of these pieces were composed expressly for print, others were not. For instance: “‘Glossolalia” will make no sense unless heard in live or recorded voices, male and female, or read as if so heard.” Um, yeah.
The first story: “Frame-Tale” consists entirely of this: “Cut on dotted line, twist end once and fasten AB to ab, CD to cd.” The cut part is a strip of paper that reads: “Once Upon a Time There/Was a Story That Began.” It’s cute.
The next story, “Night-Sea Journey” is a proper story of a night sea journey. The secret to the story is gradually revealed, and is rather amusing.
“Ambrose His Mark” is a sort of prequel to “Lost in the Funhouse.” It is really enjoyable: with weird characters and a crazy swarm of bees. It’s a bit hard to reconcile the fairly normal family in “Lost” with the lunatics in this one, but many years have passed, so perhaps they have stabilized.
“Autobiography: A Self-Recorded Fiction” is a meta story which is fun, but thankfully short.
“Water-Message” is another Ambrose story. It’s a slice of life bit about childhood Ambrose whose older brother and friends won’t let them join their “gang” (even though he came up with their name). It’s a very convincing story of childhood. With these three Ambrose stories, Barth has me sold on a really enjoyable collection of tales. And, had he written more “normal” fiction, I would have really loved this collection.
“Petition” seems like an exercise. A long exercise. I don’t recall if I finished it or not.
“Lost in the Funhouse” I rather liked.
“Echo” is one of several retelling of Greek stories. And it begins the end of my enjoyment with this collection. Aside from the short “Two Meditations” and the aforementioned “Glossolailia” which were short and harmless (if not terribly comprehensible), the rest of the book felt intentionally off putting.Challenging in a way that David Foster Wallace is challenging and yet for me far less enjoyable or rewarding.
“Title” is a sort of fun meta story, with lots of interruptions, but it wasn’t as effective as “Lost.”
“Life-Story” has more of those interruptions (“What a dreary way to begin a story he said to himself upon reviewing his long introduction”). And by the end, the “author’s” hostility with the reader manifests, but I didn’t really love it.
“Menelaiad” and “Anonymiad” are the two closing stories. “Menelaiad” retells the Odyssey from Menelaus’ point of view (with contemporary lingo). It’s kind of funny but gosh is it ever long and tedious. The general conceit of the story is that each section of the story is one layer deeper in terms of people telling the story and thus, of quotations. So Section 2 starts with him quoting a story told to him by someone else. Section 3 does the same. So that Section 7 opens with so many quotation marks:
“‘”‘””By Zeus out of Leda,’ I commenced, as though I weren’t Menelaus, Helen Helen, ‘egg-born Helen was a beauty desired by all men on earth….”‘”‘”‘” (153).
The sections after 7 count back from 7 to 1, each one losing a set of quotation marks. Normally I love this kind of thing, and yet I didn’t find anything enjoyable about this. I even know and like The Odyssey, so I more or less “got” what they were talking about. And parts of it were funny, but I think it depends upon a level of understanding which I simply do not possess.
I waited several days to attempt “Anonymiad” but after just two pages I gave up.
I suspect that this reaction was kind of the point of the book, as well.
I also suspect that if this were DFW’s (or another of my favorite author’s) books I would have put a bit more effort into these stories. Interestingly, I really didn’t like DFW’s similar Greek myth-parodying stories). I’m willing to concede a level of laziness about this. I just went from such a high with the (admittedly normal) Ambrose stories, that it was a major letdown to get to these late stories and simply not care.
Table of contents
- “Frame-tale”
- “Night-sea Journey”
- “Ambrose His Mark”
- “Autobiography”
- “Water-message”
- “Petition”
- “Lost in the Funhouse”
- “Echo”
- “Two Meditations”
- “Title”
- “Glossolalia”
- “Life-story”
- “Menelaiad”
- “Anonymiad”
I read Barth’s Chimera sometime in the last year and had much the same reaction that you had to much of this book. Some of it’s very clever, and framing is a central concern, but it gets tedious and not very fun. He messes around with mythology, and my knowledge of mythology’s not solid enough that I can always pick out things he’s changing for effect; it’s like I’m not in on the subtle jokes a lot of times. His early stories (novellas?) “The Floating Opera” and “The End of the Road” are fairly entertaining and a good bit less irritatingly playful. I read The Sot-Weed Factor this year too and found it very fun in places but maybe too long. Right now I’ve got some Coover (another meta-fictionalist) lined up (sparked in part by your review of his recent piece in Harper’s, which reminded me that I needed to read this guy), and so far, it’s not looking like he’s going to be much fun. But I’ve just read one little story.
This is kind of off-topic but it’s on my mind, so I’ll mention it. I’ve been reading stories by George Saunders lately, and he is fanfuckingtastic.
I don’t like criticizing books that i suspect I’m not knowledgeable to “get” and yet, I’m a pretty knowledgeable guy, so if I really don’t get something I figure it must be pretty impenetrable (or I’m feeling especially lazy).
With a lot of these things I find that I’m torn: when I was in college and feeling very smarty pantsy, I probably would have given a lot of time to these books, and since the sources were fresh, I may have gotten more. And yet I find that now that I’m older I comprehend a lot more of what’s going on (certainly in Joyce), even in some of these Barth stories. But I’m not willing to put that much time or effort into them.
The Sot-Weed Factor sounds incredibly familiar, although I’m not sure why. But that title really sticks out for me.
Coover I’m iffy on. I’ve enjoyed some of his things, but as with the last piece, I’m not fully on board with him.
George Saunders I’m actually also split on. I’ve loved some of his pieces but then been kind of eh about some others. I think I don’t like his “funny” pieces, as I don’t think they’re really very funny. But his more serious and surreal works I think are great. I was interested in reading his non fiction collection. I’ll have to see if it’s out yet.
I know what you mean about comprehending better as you get older. Maybe it’s just the years of practice, but I find that it’s just easier to read some types of writing (e.g. some of Joyce) than it would have been for me 10 or 15 years ago, even if references in the work aren’t as familiar as they might have been then. I’m also not as willing to put as much effort into some things; I’ve given up on reading Ulysses with a very close critical eye because I think I’m either not equipped for it or it defies such a reading the first time through. I’ve got other things I want to do, so I have to allocate my resources accordingly.
“The Sotweed Factor” is an old poem by one Ebenezer Cook. Barth fabricated/dramatized a lot of backstory for the poem and came out with a 700-800 page book.
I’ve read just a few things by Saunders in Harper’s, and now I’m working through In Persuasion Nation. I’m a sucker for quirky little stories, and that’s what I’m finding mostly so far.
Chimera I actually pretty well enjoyed (some parts more than others, obviously), and The Sot-Weed Factor was really uproariously funny in enough places that it was worth doing—although Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon feels like it covers similar ground and is just all-around a much better book.
Saunders, though, is amazing, and I’m so glad to see you two mention him. CommComm and “Brad Carrigan, American” opened up a new part of my brain—they worked to do things I haven’t seen many authors bend their writing toward, using methods I haven’t seen any authors put to that use. He takes an interesting approach to a problem I actually heard DFW mention at a reading: being deathly afraid of sentimentalism, because it’s become so difficult for readers to accept earnestness unironically. We know DFW’s answer, which is usually to trick his own writing into missing the fact that it’s smuggling in earnestness; Saunders instead (in his best stuff, anyway) couches it in impossible worlds and with a recognition that, like ours, those worlds will crush it, but that it’s important anyway.
(Forgot my quotation marks for “CommComm,” which is actually a link up there, even though I can’t tell by looking.)
Jeff, I’ve read all the stories in In Persuasion Nation but the two you mention and maybe one more. I’ve been knocking out the shorter ones as I’ve had time but saving those slightly longer ones for a break between episodes of Ulysses. I should wrap up and write my post for episodes 16 and 17 tonight, so maybe I can get to the other Saunders stories over the weekend.
I started Mason & Dixon a few years ago but got sidetracked and never finished it (not, for once, because I was finding it painful to read). I hadn’t thought of it as having a kinship to Barth’s book, but now that you mention it, I can remember obvious similarities even just based on the first hundred or so pages that I read. May have to put M&D back on the list in the fairly short term.