I Just Read About That…

SOUNDTRACK: RHEOSTATICS-The Music Hall, Toronto, Ontario (May 2, 1998).

This show sounds different from all of their other live shows on Rheostatics Live around this time.  I don’t know much about The Music Hall, but it sounds like a more formal venue–like a bigger, perhaps seated, crowd.

There is also a string section and the ever reliable Kevin Hearn playing along with them.  Well, string section might be stretching it–there are musicians from UofT playing along with them, including beautiful violins on “Self Service Gas Station” and a surprise flute on “Take Me in Your Hand.”  There’s also a bunch of the musicians playing along on “King of the Past” which means I finally get to hear the great end section with a violin–but it gets cut off!  Agh.

With Kevin playing with them, they showcase some tracks from the Group of 7 release (which they explain didn’t have titles but now sort of do).  So they play “Boxcar Song” and “Yellow Days Under a Lemon Sun.”  They also play “Monkeybird” which they say is from Harmelodia (even though it’s not out yet).

There are a lot of glitches and weird things happening with this tape which is kind of a shame as it is a pretty unique concert.  It’s also only 90 minutes, which might just means a lot of the show was cut off.

[READ: January 3, 2014] The Bridegroom was a Dog

I bought this book years ago based on some recommendation or other.  Then I recently received a new version of it from New Directions.  Their version was just the title story.  This original book (which had the same translator, Margaret Mitsutani) contains the title story and two other longish stories.

Because I just read the other book (and its the same translation) I didn’t re-read “Bridegroom.”  But I did read the other two stories “Missing Heels” and “The Gotthard Railway.”

“Bridegroom” was certainly a weird story.  But “Missing Heels” may be even stranger.  I say this because of what may or may not be deliberate ambiguity in the word heel.  As the story begins the protagonist is stared at by people because of her heels.  I assumed she meant the heels of her shoes.  But by the end of the story it seems that she means the heels of her feet, which is even stranger.

The narrator is a mail order bride (from Japan I assume, but I’m not sure where she was sent to).  She arrives at her husband’s house, but he does not answer the door.  She goes away and comes back to find the door ajar.  So she goes in, but her husband is constantly hiding in different rooms.  She sleeps in her own room and wakes up to find breakfast and money waiting for her on her nightstand.  This goes on for several days but she never sees the man.

She has decided that she would also go to school while she was here so she goes to a school where the lessons are insane–like when and how long do people bathe in this country (before breakfast for no more than 2 minutes).  Or that people always say hello when they enter a grocery store.  Really weird stuff.  Eventually she is sent to a doctor who says he will perform surgery on her heel–filling in the missing pieces with plastic. What?

The end is a completely surreal scene with a locksmith and the huge surprise that waits for her in her husbands’ room.

What is so strange about this story is the way it is told some completely straight–there is no hint that anything about his (which is told from the narrator’s point of view) is weird.

“The Gotthard Railway” is a real railroad that runs through Europe and begins in Switzerland.  (From Wikipedia): The main line penetrates the Alps by means of the Gotthard Tunnel a 9 miles long tunnel through the mountains at over 3,600 ft above sea level. The line then descends as far down as Bellinzona, which is 791 ft above sea level, before climbing again to the Monte Ceneri Pass. The extreme differences in altitude necessitate the use of long ramped approaches on each side, together with several spirals.

So that was interesting in and of itself as I’d never heard of the railway or the tunnel and I can’t to learn more about it because it sounds fascinating).

The story is about a  young woman who is unemployed (and finds the idea of work as disgusting as rusty scissors).  Her friend, a freelance journalist, has asked her to take a ride on this train and to write about it for her.  Since the narrator likes the idea of going through this tunnel (she talks at length about her desire to do so), she agrees instantly.

The story becomes a somewhat philosophical look at the idea of entering or penetrating men.  She says that we have all been inside a woman but she has never been inside a man, (she likes to stick her finger in her boyfriend’s bellybutton).  So when thinking about Gotthard as a person, the idea of drilling into him is very compelling.

She imagines a lot of things on the trip–getting off in the middle of the tunnel and living there–what it would be like to be hit by a train (we learn from the conductor what that would actually be like).  She also reads from a 700 page book called Penetrating Gotthard, which talks about the construction of the tunnel (with varying aspects of sensuality included).  (I don’t think the book is real).

As with the other stories in the book dreams come into play, which call into question a lot of what we have just read.

All three of these stories were suitably surreal. As with the best surreal stories, individual moments are fairly normal and believable, it’s just when the whole thing is looked at or when certain details crop up that the stories just go completely wonky.

I’m not even entirely sure if I liked the stories, but I did enjoy reading them (and I feel satisfied that I finished this book–it only took 20 years).