I Just Read About That…

SOUNDTRACK: PJ HARVEY-“Let England Shake” [Live on the Andrew Marr Show] (2011).

PJ Harvey has a new album out.  I’ve listened to it free on NPR, and in the introduction, they mention this live version on the Andrew Carr show.  Harvey (solo) plays an autoharp, and the melody is provided by a sample of the original version of “Istanbul (Not Constantinople)”  (done by The Four Lads).

The album version doesn’t use the sample, although the melody is the same.

I loved PJ Harvey back on her first few albums, but I didn’t even get White Chalk.  Harvey has undergone a bizarre transmogrification, where not only is she no longer a rocking guitar woman, her voice has lost its growling edge and his been replaced by an amazing falsetto.

This version also differs from the official release in that this one is shorter (probably time constraints on the show) and has fewer verses.  It also has Harvey singing the “Istanbul” chorus which isn’t on the disc.  So, this is a unique interpretation of the song, one that likely won’t be available anywhere else.

I wasn’t expecting to like this as much as I did.  It’s not the PJ I know, but this new PJ is certainly interesting.

[READ: January 31, 2010] Lemon

Krauser hand-scribbled the covers of all 10,000 extant copies of this book.  So if nothing else, the covers are all unique!  (Click here for a larger scan).

This is one of the first half-dozen or so books that McSweeney’s published and to me it speaks volumes about the kind of absurdist books that they initially released.  Those early titles were weird and possibly ironic and maybe post modern and were kind of interesting but not necessarily enjoyable.  Thankfully, they have since published very very readable books, but everyone has growing pains, right?

That sounds like I didn’t like this book, which is not exactly true.  I was bemused by it, but mostly I kept thinking I can’t believe that this guy did this much research about lemons, he was practically as obsessed about lemons as his main character.  For indeed, that is what this book is about: a man’s obsession with lemons.  Or, specifically, one lemon.

Willard has just been dumped by his girlfriend Marge.  She has moved out and taken most of her stuff, leaving him a roach-infested apartment and her plants, which she asks him to water.  Willard has spent much of his time in bars, naturally, and one night someone slips him a lemon wedge for his cocktail.  This innocent gesture is almost a gateway to an appreciation of lemons that totally consumes him.

The actual acquisition of the lemon is nebulous and dreamlike, rather poetic really.  He feels the craters of the lemon on his face as he sinks his head into his pillow.  And when he wakes in the morning, things feel different for him. The rest of the story shows Willard unable to part with his beloved citrus.  He brings it to work, he brings it on a date, he brings it to bed.  It’s really weird.  And people start to notice.

It even costs him his job.  In the funniest detail of the book (although not for Willard) a simple typo of his boss’ name gets him fired.  His boss, a descendent of Buckminster Fuller, has noticed this lemon obsession and how it has distracted Willard from doing his usual exemplary job.  Fuller investigated levels of discrimination and determined that it is not discriminatory to fire what he calls a “citrusexual,” for that is what he believes Willard has become.

Obviously things go downhill from there.  His parents are disappointed and, inevitably, his lemon starts to rot.  But he is prepared to fix his beloved however he can.

So yes, this is a weird story of a man who becomes enamored of a lemon.  But it is more than that.  Krauser gives very detailed information about the history of lemon cultivation.  The specs of where, when and how much a lemon tree could produce.  Lemons in the history of art.  Lemons in all manner of society, all interspersed with Willard’s travails (and told in such a way as to make me think that Willard is telling this information to the lemon–which he never names, it’s only a lemon after all).  The detail is pretty amazing (if not a little dull and distracting from the main story).

So, now that I have said what the story is about, it’s hard for me to say anything that will get you to read it.  It’s a bizarre story.  I was going to add an “and yet” to that sentence, but I really can’t.  It does live within its own crazy realm, but I’m just not sure that anything in the story is believable.

Especially when we get to the end and the police get involved.  Their reaction seems very over the top, and it kind of broke the spell of the weird lemon-infused fantasy.

I will say that the book has given me a new respect for lemons as a fruit, and has actually made me crave the fresh fragrance of the beautiful yellow citrus.