SOUNDTRACK: TRACY THORN & JENS LEKMAN-“Yeah! Oh Yeah! from Score! 20 Years of Merge Records: The Covers (2009).
Th
is cover makes me think that I like The Magnetic Fields for their songs, but not really for their singing or arrangements. This song is pretty hilarious (every yeah oh yeah is in response to something awful (Do you want to break my heart? Yeah, yeah, Oh yeah!). The cover by the wonderful Tracy Thorn & Jens Lekman is much more understated than the original, with simple instrumentation.
The original is a chiming, kind of noisy track. While the cover has Thorns beautiful voice languorously singing the lines while Lekman chimes in. The backing music is delicate and almost sweet (a nice contrast to the lyrics). I think the song is fantastic, but once again, I like the cover more than the original. This is especially surprising as the cover is actually slower than the original. But, really, it’s hard to pass on Jens Lekman.
[READ: April 30, 2012] “Borges on Pleasure Island”
When I browsed for Rivka Galchen articles the other day, I found a few published works that were not in Harper’s or The New Yorker. So, yes, I’m going to write about them here. And since I’m caught up with the end of Gravity’s Rainbow, these short non-fictions were a nice balm.
I have been encountering a lot about Borges lately. Roberto Bolaño loves him, there was a recent article in Harper’s about him (a review of some new translations called “The purloined Borges: Translation and traduction” by Edgardo Krebs) and now I get this article. This article is a strange one–and I’m not entirely sure where it would have appeared in the Times. It’s strange because it’s kind of a review of a new collection of Borges’ work (this one called On Writing, the first of three Borges’ related works published that month). Although really she only talks about one essay, “Literary Pleasure.”
She discusses how he loved to read–he read voraciously and his favorite book (read multiple times) was Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Wrecker, which I have never heard of. Galchen points out he amusing twist that his favorite book is a 500 pages “27-course Victorian feast,” whereas Borges himself never wrote a novel and most of his works were very short indeed–his Collected Fictions is 578 pages.
Galchen is very perceptive and this “review” looks at intricate details about both writers and sees how they fit. She also unpacks Borges idea that “It is a laborious madness, and an impoverishing one” to write a novel. And that “the better way to go about it is to pretend that those books already exist, and offer a summary, a commentary on them.”
I have Borges’ Collected Fictions but I haven’t read it yet. And the article in Harper’s was very critical of past translations of Borges’ books. Krebs wrote: “The sloppiness of Andrew Hurley’s translation in inexcusable.” Now I feel in a quandary about whether or not to wait for an ideal translation or to just dive into what I have. It almost seems like I’d be reading the wrong writer if I read the book on my nightstand.
Leave a Reply