I Just Read About That…

SOUNDTRACK: PHOENIX-Tiny Desk Concert #60 (May 18, 2010).

I’m really enjoying these Tiny Desk concerts.  They’re sort of unplugged, but even less so, because they just don’t give the band room enough for more than guitars and small accessories. If you watch the video, you can see that they are literally in someone’s office!

This set comes during Phoenix’s American tour of Wolfganag Amadeus Phoenix.  They play four songs: “Lisztomania” “Armistice” and “1901” from the album.  The big surprise at the end is a cover of Air’s “Playground Love” from The Virgin Suicides.  (I can’t confirm this, but the page notes say that Phoenix (or at least the singer) was involved with the original).  All four songs sound great.  Even though the album is very electronic and very keyboard heavy, these simple stripped down acoustic versions show how wonderful the songs are.  And of course “Playground Love” is a wonderfully unexpected treat.

[READ: December 14, 2010] “Good Neighbors”

This is one of the final two pieces by Franzen that are from the New Yorker.  This (and the other) is a short story that I am fairly certain is an excerpt from Freedom.  I believe that the main character of this piece is in Freedom, but I don’t know if this passage (or story arc) is in the book.  (I’ll be reading Freedom sometime in 2011).

It’s nice to get back to Franzen’s fiction after reading so much of his non-fiction; I am forever more of a fan of fiction than non-.  This story is about Patty Berglund and her family.  They were the first white family to move to the Ramsey Hill section of St. Paul, Minn.   Despite the abuse that her family took, they stuck it out and built up their home, investing their life into it and the community.

Slowly, the neighborhood grew more affluent (ie., white).  Yet for all of Patty’s pioneering work, she was never widely embraced by the new community members.   She was accepted, of course, and people wouldn’t say anything bad about her, but she never opened up enough  for people to feel they really knew her.

And that may be the moral of the story. As I’ve noticed with other Franzen stories, bad things tend to happen to good people.  Or more specifically to people who aren’t particularly bad, but maybe stick out a bit.  So, despite all of Patty’s good deeds with her next door neighbor –Cathy (a holdout from the earlier days) who is a single mom and who is not really around very much–the story is all about her family’s gradual decline.

For although Patty is publicly good, some of the neighbors, specifically Merrie Paulsen tend to resent her, finding her phony and self-aggrandizing.  Her husband Seth seems to think the world of Patty, which makes Merrie even madder about the whole thing.  And they seem to just wish for something bad to happen.

I do rather hope that there is much more to the Berglund family in Freedom, because in those few pages I came to care about them very much.  In fact, the first few pages of this story, which were ll about Patty, were so wonderful that I felt like I knew her.  Franzen quickly establishes a community that is utterly believable in its breadth of support and depth of back-stabbing.