I Just Read About That…

SOUNDTRACK: JIM GUTHRIE-Tiny Desk Concert #294 (August 10, 2013).

I was unfamiliar with Guthrie before this set and I almost didn’t play it because of his mustache–he just looks so country to me.  But then I read that he and his band drove 9 hours from Ontario just to do the show (which is 11 minutes long, so that’s pretty crazy).  But the set is really good.

The three songs come from Guthrie’s new album Takes Time (his first solo album in ten years).  And I was hooked…not right from the start, but 15 seconds into “The Difference a Day makes” when the guitar plays the chorus riff.  There is something so… Canadian about the melody line.  It reminds me of Neil Young, Sloan, Rheostatics, even Kathleen Edwards, all of these great Canadian songwriters who play with slightly different melodies.  The fact that he sings “doubt” and “out” with an Ontario accent solidifies it.  It’s one of my favorite mellow songs of the year.  “Before & After” sounds a bit like  Barenaked Ladies mellow song, like something  written by Kevin Hearn.  I tend to not like the Hearn songs, but I thin kit’s that I don’t like Hearn’s voice, because I like this song quite a lot.

Guthrie has a delicate but strong voice–I can’t imagine him screaming, but he conveys a lot.  Especially in the final song, the more mellow (and minor key) “Like a Lake.”  I’ve heard Tiny Desk shows that go on for five or six songs.  I wish that Bob and Robin had let them play for ten more minutes. Now I’m off to find his records.  Check it out.

[READ: September 10, 2013] 3 book reviews

Tom Bissell reviewed three new books in the August 2013 issue of Harper’s.  I like Bissell in general and since I’ll probably wind up writing about these when they get collected anyway, why not jump the gun here.  Especially when there’s three good-sounding books like these.

The first is Peter Orner’s Last Car Over the Sagamore Bridge.  I know Orner from McSweeney’s mostly, where I’ve read a few of his things  But one of the stories that Bissell mentions from this short story collection sounds familiar and yet it doesn’t seem to be something I’ve read.  Hmmm.  Well anyhow, he says that Orner’s previous book (with a title that Bissell assumes he had to fight to keep–The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo) was a great piece of fiction about Africa, and that his previous collection Esther Stories was also very solid.

This book is a little stranger—bundled into 4 sections, it includes more than fifty “stories” and is all of 200 pages.  (Sounds like just the kind of thing I can get into).  Bissell suggests that the stories have a layer of remove, like someone telling a story about someone telling a story.  Or, if they were about a bank robbery, the story would actually be about someone describing having once met the guy who sold the robbers their ski masks.  But the real selling point for me was this pithy description of the collection: imagine Brief Interviews with Hideous Men written by Alice Munro.   That sounds hard to pass up.

The second book he talks about is Adelle Waldman’s The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P.  Bissell was originally dismissive of the book because it’s another book about “bookish young New Yorkers falling into an out of one another’s beds”.  But this book transcends that stereotype.  Nate is something of a cad, and a particularly shallow cad when it comes to women.  He assumed he’d grow out of the belief that he could only like “pretty” women, but he never did.

But the story turns out to be about gender dynamics in contemporary Brooklyn as viewed through the lens of the nineteenth century manners–George Eliot in particular.  Even though I have never read George Eliot (shocking, I know), this book sounded very intriguing .

The book is not only about Nate, it is also about Hannah, one of the women whom Nate seems to reel in and then cast off.  And we get to see Hannah’s responses to this (which I’m intrigued by).  Bissell really sold me on this one, I hope it’s good.

The third book is Susan Choi’s My Education.  As with Nathaniel P. Bissell worried that this was yet another “horny professor novel”, but Choi transcends that style as well.  The lovers are Regina (21) and Martha (33), the wife of Regina’s mentor Nicholas Brodeur.  The women soon end up in bed.  The book is “manic and often raunchy but never embarrassingly so.”   It’s also very funny.

The quote Bissell gives is one I’’ll share: “The etiquette of contacting an ex-lover’s child to ostensibly compliment him on his blog is not yet codified.”  But the thing that Bissell finds most striking is that Regina is “almost repulsively needy” but she is “an infuriating, self-absorbed narrator whom you not only don’t loathe but sort of love.”  Within the trappings of brilliant people, this sounds like a book where a good education is provided.

I’d like to remember to read all three of these books.