I Just Read About That…

SOUNDTRACK: NADA SURF-Live at KEXP January 30, 2008 (2008).

Nada Surf is criminally underrated and shamefully treated as a one-hit wonder for a song that sounds nothing like the rest of their work.

This four song set at KEXP features four acoustic renditions of songs from their wonderful  album Lucky.  The songs are stripped down, but the harmonies are all there.  The only song that really suffers in this format is “See These Bones,” which is a little less spirited than the recorded version (although the harmonies stand out even better).

They are also funny guys and very personable, as the interview shows.  This set is definitely worth downloading.  You can get it here.

[READ: October 6, 2012] Timequake

Timequake is Kurt Vonnegut’s last novel.  It is very much unlike any of his other novels because it is actually more of a fictional memoir than a novel.

There are two main characters in the book–Vonnegut himself and Kilgore Trout.  Vonnegut talks about his life a lot–and if you know anything about Vonnegut’s life, you know that the details in the novel are accurate.  At the same time, he talks about Trout’s life, specifically the end of his life and how he went from being a destitute bum to a celebrated and oft-quoted author.

And then there’s the matter of the timequake.  In 2001, there was the first timequake.  The world stopped expanding and moving forward and instead flashed back to 1991, where everyone picked up exactly where they were on that date in 1991, and relived every detail of their lives in exactly the same way.  Only this time they knew what was going to happen.  So every person lived on autopilot through every day for the next ten years–all the good and all the band (like the man who spent several years in prison and had to relive those years all over again).  Even the dead were resurrected and relived their days.

It’s an interesting concept and yet in the end it’s really not that interesting of a topic.  In the Prologue, Vonnegut says that he had originally written Timequake (which version he calls Timequake One) with that very premise, and that Vonnegut himself made a cameo. And yet I can see that it wouldn’t really have worked as a very good novel–unless he made up ideas for what happened to everyone and we the readers lived them for the first time– or something.

But so he bailed on that novel, but he certainly left parts of it intact for this one.  And rather than a cameo, Vonnegut features largely in this one.

The Vonnegut sections talk a lot about his family–his departed sister and his older brother who at the time of the writing of the book has been diagnosed with cancer.  And so Vonnegut revisits a lot of things in his past writing–science, the arts, death.  But unlike a typical biography  this book works in Vonnegut’s novelistic style of flashback and flash forward, all of which seems weird for real life.

The Trout sections are more successful.  Vonnegut talks about Trout as if he were a real person and he talks about various events which maybe Vonnegut attended himself?  Anyhow, the big thrust of the Trout section is that he was getting older and was living in a house for bums.  He was still writing stories (he wrote several a day), and he was throwing them all out just as he always did.  But one day a security guard saw him throw one out; Trout made such a spectacle of throwing them out that the guard thought they must be very important.  (Trout, dressed like bag lady was arguing with a pretend editor about the stories, but the guard assumed that the writer was speaking to God.  So he rescued all of the stories that Trout threw in the trash.

But the real moment of truth came after the timequake ended.  When time approached the day of the timequakes’ origin (or ending–in 2001), the world shifted and free will was restored.  But Trout, who always lived in his own reality anyhow, was the only person to realize the shift back to reality.  And since most people were unaware of the return, untold mayhem ensued–cars & trucks and planes crashed, people fell over, everything was chaos.  But only Trout realized it and he got people to wake up and actually do something.  He had a phrase that really worked: “You were sick, but now you’re well, and there’s work to do.”

And that became the motto for the post-timequake world.

Vonnegut has become pretty pessimistic and a lot less funny by this novel.  And his disdain for technology (which is kind of funny for a sci-fi writer) starts to overshadow his more benevolent tendencies. He also rails against modernity–televisions are stupid and make people stupid; what people need is extended families rather than modern conveniences (I tend to agree with him on this–the world would be a much better place if people actually thought of other human beings as family instead of strangers or, worse, enemies , but by this book we’ve heard the spiel before.

And I fear that in addition to a number of repetitions from his own work (some of which he acknowledges as repetitions) he uses an old joke and claims it as one of Trout’s: “To him, plagiarism was what Trout would have called a mopery, “indecent exposure in the presence of a blind person of the same sex.”  Which is quite funny, although I first heard the same joke in Revenge of the Nerds, and I gather variants of the charge have been around forever.

I read this book when it came out but I didn’t remember anything about it except for two chapters–they are wonderful chapters in which Vonnegut describes his going to the store and to the post office to buy an envelope and to mail out the chapters he has written to his typist.  And how that simple act of interacting with people (including a woman who he is in love with at the post office) really makes his day.  Those two sequences were beautifully written, earnest without being preachy and were actually quite funny.  And I’m sure that’s why I remembered them so vividly.

I also recall really liking the book when I read it.  And I assume that has something to do with the fact that I hadn’t read much of his work before reading this one.  So these ideas were new to me and the jokes didn’t feel rehashed.  SO I think if you’re unfamiliar with Vonnegut, this actually proves to be a pretty good place  to start–it’s not crazily original, but you’ll get introduced to Trout and learn a bit about Vonnegut, too.