SOUNDTRACK: SIGUR RÓS-Von (1997).
This is Sigur Rós’ debut album. It is a far cry from the gorgeousness that their later albums would bring. In fact it is primarily an excuse for washes of songs, trippy sound effects, otherworldly vocals and the occasional song. You can hear elements of that later Sigur Rós, but for the most part this is some pretty simple space rock.
“Sigur Rós” opens the album with spacey sounds and a distant hi hat. It’s a series of swirling notes and waves of chords for 9 minutes. Some vocals (okay screams) come in around 6 minutes making it a bit more scary than trippy. It morphs into “Dögun”which is closer to the famed Sigur Rós sound–swirls of notes and ethereal voices. At 3 minutes some really distant crazy voices start singing as most of the music drops away. “Hún Jörð …” brings some beats (backwards) until the song proper starts. There are two vocals singing high swooning sounds over a simple bass (two note) melody and drums. It’s a very simple song but especially after 12 minutes of space music that preceded it, it really coalesces as a song. And when the band crashes in and the drums start pounding (a great build up) the album really hits its stride. It’s a pretty great precursor to their later great songs and the studio trickery at the end of the song (making it go backwards) is pretty fun too.
“Leit að lífi” is a 3 minute song of spacey noodling. maybe backwards guitar and theremin. “Myrkur” reintroduces some bass guitar (this actually sounds like a riff from an 80s alt rock band). It may be their most conventional song. “18 sekúndur fyrir sólarupprás” is 18 seconds of silence. “Hafssól” is a trippy swirly song with waves of music and distant voices for over 12 minutes. “Veröld ný og óð” is mostly percussion, which then morphs into people talking and laughing.
Title tack “Von” also begins with percussion, but in a more song oriented way. The vocals also come in nicely in the mix letting you know that a proper song is coming–although it stays very spacey and fragile. “Mistur” is only 2 minutes of percussion. “Syndir Guðs (Opinberun frelsarans)” has a simple bassline with trippy squeaky guitars and whispered vocals. For 7 minutes. It’s simple and repetitive but very enjoyable. The final track “Rukrym” is six minutes of silence and then “Myrkur” played backwards.
Never reaching the heights of their later albums, this does give a glimpse into what they might get up to. However, it mostly feels like early trippy Pink Floyd.
[READ: November 27, 2013] Both Flesh and Not
Sarah got me this book for Christmas last year. I had intended to read it but I realized that I had read all of the essays individually before, so it became a lower priority. The only thing in the book that is “new” is the list of DFW’s definitions of words that he saved on his computer. Before each essay there is an alphabetical list of words he found interesting with their definitions (and some annotations). They help you appreciate the kinds of things he was interested in and the complexity of words. It’s pretty cool. I particularly liked: “muntin–strip of wood or metal that separates & holds various panes in a window, like a window w/four individual panes arranged in a big rectangle etc (that’s putting it well Dave).
But when I recently read Wittgenstein’s Mistress, I decided to reread his essay, so i looked in the book. And it all spiraled from there–so much that I’m going to compare the book versions to the original articles next week.
And but so, this is a very enjoyable collection of essays. The essays are arranged chronologically from 1988-2007 (except for the first article which gives the book its title and is a great opener, but which I argue is the one that should be read after a different essay). There’s a couple of essays on tennis, some book reviews, some essays about writing, and some thoughts on the (then) current political climate. Nothing is too too academic (well, a couple are), and while many of the stories do come from DFW’s younger writing days when he was a little pedantic, his later ones are a lot of fun (and his love for tennis is palpable).
“Federer Both Flesh and Not” (2006)
This essay is a magnificent look at athleticism and beauty, condensed into the body of a Swiss tennis player. In my original post about the article, I was sufficiently thorough (and gushing) so I’m not going to repeat myself. You can see what I wrote here. This is an excellent article to start the collection with, except that his other article about tennis was written several years earlier and should probably be read first to see the progression of his style.
“Fictional Futures and the Conspicuously Young” (1988)
This is probably the least enjoyable article in the book. It is quite useful to read if you’re interested in DFW’s own worldview about writing and entertainment (and you can see that he fictionalizes some of these ideas later in Infinite Jest), but he seems rather pedantic and, kind of jerky, actually. I seemed to enjoy it the first time I wrote about it, but this time I was rather annoyed by his tone, which mixes criticisms of media and writers. It’s also interesting to hear him complain about teaching when he himself would go on to teach later on. Ideas from this essay would resurface in “E Unibus Pluram.”
“The Empty Plenum: David Markson’s Wittgenstein’s Mistress” (1990).
Just wrote about this last week.
“Mr. Cogito” (1994)
This is the only essay in the collection that I had not read before. I looked for it when I was reading all of the individual articles but no one seems to have kept back issues of Spin. Imagine my surprise and delight to discover it is only two paragraphs long. It is a book review of Zbigniew Herbert’s Mr. Cogito, a book of poems from the mid 1970s. Mr. Cogito is a recurring character who grapples with Big Questions. Herbert is a postmodernist (which DFW doesn’t like) but he say that Mr. Cogiro allows him o be absurd and still strong–better than any American poet writing today. He wonders if political conditions get worse here if our poets will get better.
“Democracy and Commerce at the U.S. Open” (1996)
When I read this last time, I marveled at DFW’s nonfiction style. And I still do. He somehow seems to see more than anyone else would. I have been to many similar overstimulating environments (although never a U.S. Open), and I feel like the crowd and the noise just makes me shut down. And yet for him, here, he just absorbs everything–from the vendors, to the players to the sky to the lights to random people sitting around. It’s a wonderful read. It’s especially interesting coming about a decade before the article on Federer. Pete Sampras was the king at this time (it’s interesting to see how much more he likes Federer), and DFW seems less overwhelmed by everything in 2006.
“Back in New Fire” (1996)
I could never find the original article from Might (I subscribed to it, but only after this came out). But this article was published in the Might magazine book Shiny Adidas Tracksuits. I had read it when the book came out, but it was interesting to read it again fairly recently. This essay is about AIDS and sex, taken from a vaguely optimistic point of view (how the spectre of AIDS can be seen as an obstacle to sex like dragons were in mythology). It’s positive and a little insensitive–a common trait of DFW’s nonfiction.
“The (As It Were) Seminal Importance of Terminator 2” (1998)
This was originally published as F/X Porn in Waterstone’s magazine. What’s especially funny to me is that I used to shop at Waterstone’s in Boston so it didn’t occur to me that the article was originally published in England (there’s one or two clues). Anyhow, this essay basically talks about how the rise of special effects extravaganzas has reduced the quality of the films. And while I think that he’s a little harsh on the films he mentions, he is not wrong.
“The Nature of the Fun” (1998)
This short essay is about how much fun writing is (that’s the fun in the title). How when you start writing you do it because it is fun–you don’t expect that anyone will read it. And then, if you get published, you start to worry about what people will think, and the fun goes away. So then you have to try to get the fun back. I wrote about it first here.
“Overlooked: Five Direly Underappreciated U.S. novels >1960” (1999).
These are the five books DFW: Omensetter’s Luck by William H. Gass; Steps by Jerry Kosinski; Angels by Denis Johnson; Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy and Wittgensteins’ Mistress by David Markson. I barely wrote more than this here.
“Rhetoric and the Math Melodrama” (2000)
This is a strange title for a book review. The fact that the book’s version doesn’t include the opening blurb about the publishing info for the books makes it seem even less like a book review somehow. I originally wrote about it in a post about his book reviews. The gist here is that these two books are jumping on the (then) current math bandwagon (see Good Will Hunting, PI, etc). He is quite critical of these two books, but he is almost embarrassed to be critical of them because they come across as genre books rather than literature (the math genre!). And also because they are author-translated, so who knows if they were better in their original languages (Dutch and Greek). But really the biggest problem for both books is not knowing who their audience is–they can’t seem to decide if the books are to be read by non-math people or math lovers. Either choice would be fine but they seem to be trying to have both, which just makes it dumbed down for some and really hard for others. Neither book seems like anything I want to read (and he does more or less give away endings and such).
“The Best of the Prose Poem” (2001)
This isn’t so much a review of the book The Best of the Prose Poem as a review of prose poems in general, but if these are the “best” it’s a sorry state of affairs. In my original post I pointed out that the real notable thing about the review was the style it was done in. It was a series of bullet points with each point set up like the Harpers index. A statement with a colon: and then the follow up. The requirement for the article was 1000 words but DFW maintains that anything the precedes the colon is not part of the review and therefore not a part of the 1,000 words. Pretty funny stuff.
“Twenty-Four Word Notes” (2004)
According to my previous post about this, I said that I printed out all of DFW’s contributions to the Oxford American Writer’s Thesaurus. I can’t find that anywhere. Oh well. These twenty-four words are the contributions that DFW made to the Oxford American Writer’s Thesaurus. This book sounds wonderful useful and if the other entries are as informative/amusing as DFWs then this is a book every writer should own.
“Borges on the Couch” (2004)
This is a review of Borges: A Life by Edwin Williamson. DFW is a huge fan of Borges. He also greatly respects Williamson as a historian. But he feels that Williamson completely missed the mark on this biography. He says that any author’s life is bound to be boring since what they do is sit around and write all day. He then says that Williamson had to make most of his biography about things he knows of Borges and make the stories support these ideas. DFW is absolutely not impressed. Incidentally, not included in the book, but you can see in my original post that Williamson was none too pleased with DFW’s review.
Deciderization 2007–A Special Report (2007)
This was DFW’s introduction to “The Best American Essays 2007″ anthology. I wrote about it here. Basically he talks a lot about how even though he is the guest editor, he didn’t do any actual editing (most pieces were already edited originally). He also didn’t even really pick what would be in the book. Well he did, but only after the real editor narrowed down the pick from all the essays in the world to just a few.
He gets surprisingly political at the end of the essay–talking about an essay about Iraq. But he also talks about how the vast majority of Americans simply seem disengaged with the world (which actually ties back to his ideas in “Fictional Futures.”
Just Asking (2007)
This is a short piece (2 pages) in which he asks about what it is worth sacrificing for our safety. He sees that we have willingly given away a lot of freedoms. Is there anything that trumps safety? And he asks as a thought experiment if we just accept that thousands of people will die every year from terrorist attacks much like thousands of people die every year from traffic accidents. Since no one will actually discuss these questions, he asks, do we really trust our leaders to keep us safe? My original post is here.
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While perhaps not as great as A Supposedly Fun Thing…, this is a great collection of non-fiction.
I Just Read About That... 
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