I Just Read About That…

SOUNDTRACK: ULVER-A Quick Fix of Melancholy (2005).

This EP came two years after Teachings in Silence (with a movie soundtrack and “greatest hits” collection in between).  This first track, “Little Blue Bird” is a simple soundscape with echoey keyboards.  When Garm starts singing, his most emotional side comes through (even if I really can’t understand him most of the time).

“Doom Sticks” belies its name and the EP title by being somewhat upbeat.  There are kind of squeaky keyboards that pulsate through the track.  After about a minute and a half, distorted drums keep a martial beat.  But it quickly morphs into a twinkly section that makes me think of the Nutcracker or some other kind of Christmas special.

“Vowels” is similarly upbeat (the music on both of these two tracks has a vaguely Christmastime feel somewhere in there–not that anyone would think these were in any way Christmas songs, or maybe it’s because I’m listening in mid-December).  For this, we get a return of Garm’s choral voice: deep, resonant and hard to understand (although I undertsand the lyrics are from a poem by Christian Bok).   But the poem quickly makes way for some dramatic staccato strings. 

“Eitttlane” begins with some menacing keybaords and staccato notes, creating a feel of a noir movie.  But when the vocal choir comes in, it gets even more sinister.

These Ulver EPs are really true EPs–stopgap recordings for fans.  Their larger works tend to be more substantial, but these EPs allow them to play around with different styles.

[READ: December 1, 2011] “Laureate of Terror”

Two authors I admire in one article, how about that!  In this book review, Martin Amis reviews Don DeLillo’s first collection of short stories and gives a summary of DeLillo’s work.

Amis opens the article by undermining my plans for this blog.  He states point blank than when we say we love an author’s works, we “really mean…that we love about half of it.”  He gives an example of how people who love Joyce pretty much only love Ulysses, that George Eliot gave us one readable book and that “every page of Dickens contains a paragraph to warm to and a paragraph to veer back from.”  Also, Janeites will “never admit that three of the six novels are comparative weaklings (Sense and Sensibility, Mansfield Park and Persusaion).  [I still hope to read all of the books by the authors I like].

Amis says he loves DeLillo (by which he means, End Zone, Running Dog, White Noise, Libra, Mao II and the first and last section of Underworld).  And he also seems to really like The Angel Esmeralda: Nine Stories,(well, much of it anyway), DeLillo’s first (!) short story collection

His main assement is that these pieces are a vital addition to DeLillo’s corpus. 

The stories date from 1979 (“Creation”) to 2011 (“The Starveling”–which Amis doesn’t like so much).   The title story “The Angel Esmeralda” was later incorprated into Underworld (and seeing how Amis describes it, I remember the scene very well).  And he raves about 2009’s “Midnight in Dostoevsky” and 1983’s “Human Moments in World War III.”

Amis, as the title of this piece indicates, believes that DeLillo is the laureate of postmodern terror and understands the way it hovers in our subliminal mind.  In 1998 it was earthquakes in “The Ivory Acrobat.”  In 1988 (“The Runner”) it was about a boy snatched from a park.

But mostly, Amis talks about DeLillo’s predictive powers (he talked about the World Trade Center as a pair of bull’s-eyes as early as 1977).  Or how in 2010 (“Hammer and Sickle”) he talks about insurrections (more or less months before they happened).  And yet despite all of this seeming doom and gloom, Amis points out that DeLillo’s stories are still fun.   

I have not read enough DeLillo (not even the ones mentioned about…not even White Noise yet!  Although I have read “Hammer and Sickle” the “Midnight in Dostoevsky”), and I’m very interested in reading these shorter pieces.  The big question of course if should I just read White Noise first?