I Just Read About That…

SOUNDTRACK: LES SAVY FAV-“Precision Auto” from Score! 20 Years of Merge Records: The Covers (2009).

This is a cover of a Superchunk song.  The Superchunk song is fast and furious with screamed vocals.  The Les Savy Fav version is faster and more furious with screamed vocals.  It doesn’t sound very different from the original except that they use a high guitar playing a repeating motif which seems to increase the pace and intensity of the song.  They even keep it up through the moody instrumental break

Usually I don’t like a cover that sounds so much like the original, but it’s a great cover.  It basically just intensifies the song, and that’s a good thing.

I don’t know much about Les Savy Fav, so I don’t know if this is why they normally sound like, but it’s pretty darn good.

[READ: April 3, 2012] “P.E.”

Sometimes a title can impact ones desire to read a story.  This title is, well, it’s not bad, it’s just…uninspired.  I can’t see myself saying, “I really want to read, “P.E.”  What’s surprising is that the title is so blah, when the story is so interesting.

I like my short stories to be light and fluffy (even if I read heavy duty novels).  So this one was kind of fun.  In the beginning.  It starts with Freddy waiting for his dad at the airport.

Freddy is fat.  I have to admit right off the start that whenever a character is described as really fat (like really fat, as Freddy is), it irks me.  First off, I always assume that writers are not fat (not really a fair assumption but author photos are often glamorous, right?) so they aren’t writing from a location of truth.  Second, whenever a character is really fat, it always signals that something bad has or will happen to him.  And so it is with this story.

But before we get to that point, we have some more amusing scenarios.

Or, well, really not amusing so much as disturbing (but funny).  Freddy’s mother hanged herself when he was seven.  And his father took it badly (not unusual).  He even took to wearing the noose around his neck like an article of clothing (unusual!).

When Freddy’s Aunt Helen discovers this behavior, she swoops in, takes Freddy to live with her and sends Freddy’s father to “work at the nut-and-bolt factory” (a wonderful euphemism that he doesn’t understand until much later).  She basically raised Freddy while his father went about his life during Freddy’s teen years.

When Freddy’s father comes to visit, so many years later, Freddy knows it is his duty to babysit his alcoholic dad for the two weeks or so that he stays in Tuscon.  And he’s not happy about it.

And so, the story is about his father’s stay in Tuscon.  Or is it?  One thing that I liked about the story was that it had the audacity to, after two and a half pages, state:

I need to stop here.  This isn’t right.  This is, wow, this is practically backwards….   This story isn’t really about my father.  The thing is, though, you put him in something like this and he just takes over. He’s like a narrative virus.

That bold interruption comes because the narrator really wants to talk about P.E. (so the title isn’t lame, it’s just confusing).  P.E. stands for Parallel Energies and it a group (not a bunch of crazy people) who believe that there are other versions of you and they’re inside of you at all times.  And P.E. teaches you to have dialogues with these other versions of yourself and draw their energy.  Not the negative versions of yourself (obviously there are versions worse than you), but the positive ones–the ones whose fathers didn’t wear a noose around the house.

What’s particularly interesting about this is that as the narrator describes P.E. it seems not unreasonable–perhaps an extreme version of the whole multiple timelines theories, but not totally crazy.  Yet as the story proceeds, it’s not always clear who is doing the babysitting.  Was Freddy’s father sent by Aunt Helen to look after Freddy?  Is Freddy’s belief not as zen as it seems?  And, pointing back to the beginning, is Freddy fat because he’s given up on his life?

The story went from funny to dark with lots of pit stops into amusing cul de sacs.  Aside from that one thing about the fat character, I though the story was really clever.  And by the end I really wasn’t sure what to believe–a good trick, indeed!