I Just Read About That…

SOUNDTRACK: PHISH-Live Bait, Vol 1 (2010).

This first Live Bait release contained songs from Phish’s 2010 tour.  It was a good way to see how the band sounded these days and, as the title suggests, it was a good way to bait the fans into buying full shows.  The sampler covers shows from NJ, NY, GA and MA and it runs about 80 minutes.

Although it features primarily older tracks (a great version of “Tweezer” and a lengthy “Slave to the Traffic Light”) it also includes my first exposure to a live version of one of their new songs: “Backwards Down the Number Line.”  It also contains “Show of Life” a song that’s really a Trey Anastasio solo song–although frankly it doesn’t sound any different from a Phish song here.

The band sounds great–the hiatus did them wonders and it’s an auspicious beginning to a whole bunch of free music.

[READ: September 25, 2011] 3 Book Reviews

When I first discovered that Zadie was going to be writing the New Books column at Harper’s I deliberated about whether or not to write about each one here.  I mean, first off, it’s book reviews, how much can you say about someone else’s book reviews?  But second off, would I be writing about her reviews forever?  I mean, it’s a monthly column, it would be exhausting.

Well, it was exhausting–for her anyhow.  At the end of the column she admits that she can’t keep up the schedule (and frankly, reading that many books a month would be exhausting for me, but she’s also trying to write a novel, teach classes and “bring up a kid.”)  So this is her last one.  She had a pretty decent run from March-October 2011.

And she ends unexpectedly (for me anyhow) by talking about science fiction!

She opens by talking about two of the best books she’s read this month which were both by Ursula Le Guin–1969’s The Left Hand of Darkness and 1974’s The Dispossessed.  But she’s not writing about those books, she’s writing about The Wild Girls, a collection by Le Guin that contains one story, an interview, a few short poems, a brief meditation on the virtues of modesty and angry essay about publishing.  Zadie dislikes the poetry but likes the essays and interview.  But she says the highlight is the story”The Wild Girls.”

I have never read Le Guin, and I wasnt all that impressed by the excerpts here.  But I hear that the Earthsea series is pretty great.

I am rather intrigued by Magnus Mills, though. Zadie reviews his new book A Cruel Bird Came to the Nest and Looked In.  I’d never heard of Mills, but she really makes a case for his peculiar style of writing.  Despite the sci-fi leanings of his book, she describes the writing as deliciously Kafkaesaque in which freedom is an illusion and those who seek it are ridiculous.

The quotation she offers is from a wonderful scene that is more or less Parliamentary, but in which the role-call–and the over-the-top formalities of it–are clearly more important than any business they may attend to .

Zadie says that Mills has been running this same trope in all of his novels and he is in something of a rut, but if this is the first book by him well, there’s no rut for me.  I’ll be keeping an eye out for it.

The final book is by Jamie James and is called Rimbaud in Java: The Lost Voyage.  I don’t know much about Rimbaud, but evidently he spent some lost time Java, and no one knows anything about what he did there.  James was going to write a fictional account of the story but feared giving Rimbaud dialogue, so instead he made it a non-fiction piece.

The book is short (a microhistory, she suggests) and she says it is the perfect length to read about a subject that the author cares so much about.  I don’t know if I’ll pick it up, but I’m glad to have read the review.

I’ll miss you in these pages Zadie; you introduced me to a lot of books I would never have heard of.  But I’d much rather read your new novel anyhow.