SOUNDTRACK: SUPERCHUNK-Hyper Enough (1995).
“Hyper Enough” is one of my favorite songs of all time. I don’t know if there’s much more that i can say about it.
“Never Too Young to Smoke” sounds surprisingly like a Cure song to me. The guitar seems very unSuperchunk and Mac’s voice even has traces of Robert Smith in it. It’ s neat trick. And it’s good song, too. It’s got a lot of slow building tension (again, unusual). And it really pays off.
The final track, “Detroit Has a Skyline” is another acoustic version (original on Here’s Where the Strings Come In). It has certain Cure-isms on it as well, but it is much more clearly Mac than Robert Smith. It has a great chord progression in the bridge, but we knew that from the original.
[READ: September 30, 2010] “Raft in Water, Floating”
A.M. Homes was the fifth writer in the New Yorker’s 1999 20 Under 40 collection.
I’ve really enjoyed A.M. Homes’ books. I liked The End of Alice, and I really liked This Book Will Save Your Life. She has a few books in between these, but I’ve been remiss about reading her.
And this story was definitely not my favorite. It is written in an exceedingly detached tone. A young woman is floating on a raft. She is described by an almost uninterested 3rd person voice. Even the young woman’s conversations are robotic and emotionless. In many ways it reminded me of Bret Easton Ellis’ style of distant characters.
Her boyfriend comes over, he gives himself an orgasm which she is complicit in and yet somewhat oblivious to, and then it gets really strange.As the story ends a character who may be a person or may be a wolf (or a duck) sits by the pool with her.
The only thing I can guess is that she is dieting and perhaps she’s hallucinating. And I suppose the detached nature of the story is designed to showcase superficiality, but I really just didn’t get it.
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