I Just Read About That…

SOUNDTRACK: PAVEMENT “Stereo” on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon (2010).

Pavement were making the rounds of lat night TV around the time of t their Central Park reunion concert.  They showed up on Jimmy Fallon.  I don’t really like his show, but he has consistently great musical guests.

Pavement played “Stereo” which is a song I’ve always liked (the Geddy Lee part makes me smile), even though I never bought the album that it’s on.  This is one of their weirder songs (which is saying a lot).  The opening is all kinds of crazy noises (feedback and keyboard nonsense).  When the verse starts it’s all bass and drums, but when the song kicks in it rocks heavily and crazily.

The live version features a crazy cal and response from the keyboardist (which I enjoyed a lot) and some really great guitar work.  The video also has the winner of Fallon’s “Play Guitar with Pavement” contest, although I can’t tell how much he adds/subtracts from the performance.

[READ: September 24 & 25] “FC2” & “Books”

These three pieces were short, so I’ve decided to lump them together.

“FC2” is a Shouts & Murmurs piece.  I thought that the Shouts & Murmurs were all comic pieces. This one is funny but it’s not as “ha ha” as many of the other pieces I’ve read.  It even seems to be autobiographical.

Franzen says he had just recently written a section of “The Fifth Column” for the Village Voice.  And on this particular day he received a very suspicious package whose return address was FC2.   He speculates that the content of his section of the story may have triggered a psychopath to come after him.  (The Unabomber used to use the letters FC as his code, so perhaps FC2 is his protegé).

Obviously it didn’t blow up or anything, and the revelation is anticlimactic, but it’s still a mildly amusing tale.

“A Reader in Exile”

These two next pieces came under the Books section of  The New Yorker.  Books seems to have been different than it is now.  In fact, there’s a lot of things in the 1995 incarnation of the magazine that are quite different.  I wonder when it underwent its makeover (that’s probably easy to find out, although not as easy as a Google search).  It’s also been fun to read these old issues because of the ads at he time…look Camille Paglia…now in paperback!

Anyhow, this first of two “Books” sections sees Franzen reviewing (and offering a lot of personal commentary, which may have been the thing to do at the time?) about three books in particular.  A is for Ox by Barry Sanders; Being Digital by Nicholas Negroponte; and The Gutenberg Elegies by Sven Birkets.

I remember when Being Digital came out and I remember reading it with something like excitement (although I don’t remember anything about it at all now).  I still have my copy downstairs.  But Franzen takes a bit more of a luddite perspective about that book.  In fact, the article opens with him revealing that he has just gotten rid of his TV, so that rather sets the tone for his technological impairment.

A is for Ox cites rising youth violence and falling verbal test scores as a sign of the apocalypse.  (TV is more or less the culprit).  Its a good segue into Being Digital, which is not about TV, but about, well, our current life in the digital era.

Franzen’s criticism of Negroponte (who used to work for Wired), is that the book is more about money than technology (or more like technology as money).  It’s all about how the “consumer” will dictate our needs in the future.   But the interesting juxtaposition is that where Barry Sanders sees the decline of literacy, Negroponte sees a mathematically adept and visually literate generation of kids.

It’s interesting to read Franzen’s criticisms of the burgeoning digital culture (remember, this is circa 1995–he even wonders if this information highway (I guess this is before it was a superhighway) will amount to anything).  At the time,Douglas Rushkoff said that a literate culture is a very middle class notion; Robert Coover (I didn’t know he wrote about this) talks about hypertext as a good thing because it will liberate readers from domination by the author; Newt Gingrinch says that electronic town meetings are the antidote to Second Wave liberalism (!?).

And how do we tie this in to the novel?  It is dying because consumers don’t want them.

Enter Sven Birkerts who defends the novel completely and enthusiastically.  I would have liked to have read this book then (although I won’t bother now) because Franzen (although slightly critical of the book) makes it sound like Birkerts is very passionate.  Birkerts grew up reading novels and feels that his life was rescued by books.

In sum, he frets that the world is becoming more binary, making the subtleties of the novel harder to communicate.  And, more importantly, making it harder for the novelist to be in opposition to the whole apparatus.

Franzen loves of the written word (and his luddite comments sort of emphasize that).  And his argument that the reader does not want to be released from the dominance of the author is a convincing one (and one I find true). The whole conceit of the choose your own adventure, while a fun diversion, just seems silly.  We read because we want the author’s authority.  If I wanted to get away from the author I’d write my own book.  And I haven’t done that…yet.

I really enjoyed this article.

“First City” (Feb 19, 1996)

I enjoyed this Books article about New York City rather less.  I’ve lived near the city most of my life, I even considered moving to the city at one time; however, I just didn’t care that much about this article’s love of the city.

I enjoyed the opening about the family who were looking forward to NYC so they could stand in the window of the Today Show (I wouldn’t have believed that people really did that if I didn’t know someone who longed to do it) and The Fashion Cafe (what on earth is that?  Was it the “supermodel” restaurant which closed in like 1998…somebody wanted to travel to New York City to go there??  Amusingly you can’t even Google the place).

Aside from that opening, the rest is a look at cities in general and NYC in particular.  It’s a subject that I have been interested in at time, but which I just couldn’t muster the excitement about here.

So this is the first piece by Franzen that I didn’t love.   But I won’t hold it against him yet.

“On the Bus” (Feb 5, 2001)

This piece is headed under Inaugural Postcard.  It is a very brief (two and a half columns) and it focuses on George W. Bush’s inauguration.  Franzen (apparently) rode a bus to the inauguration with a group of protesters.  He found the protests moving and yet also a little confusing.

I recall that there was a lot of anger and hostility during his inauguration.  I watched a bit on TV and the weather was dark and overcast, gray and dismal.  And the mood of the people watching matched that scene perfectly.

And he seems to find the whole display dispiriting.

Because of its brevity, it’s not really worth commenting on, but I’m adding it for completion.

“Countdown” (Apr 18, 2005)

This is a non-fiction memoir type piece (all of two pages).  It’s headed under Are We There Yet? and it looks at what it was like to drive with his parents in 1969.  Specifically it focuses on the drive from Minneapolis to St Louis and his father’s mileage-number-crunching every time they did the trip (from 238 miles down to 179, rounding down, desperately trying to get to double digits).

It’s a familiar story to anyone who has driven long distances, although it’s hard for me to imagine how much longer it must have taken in 1969 to drive the same terrain (I’ve never done Minneapolis to St. Louis, but I can imagine some of the routes that I’ve taken must have been very different 40 years ago).

This piece gets a little weird towards the end as the sky turns green and the last line has them “back home on the moon.”  I’m a little unclear if he intended something that I missed.  But it was fun to be reminded of driving around in a boat of a car (like the one my parents drove) back on vacation in the 70s.