I Just Read About That…

SOUNDTRACK: YASMINE HAMDAN-Tiny Desk Concert #359 (May 24, 2014).

Yasmine Hamdan is a Lebanese singer-songwriter.  The three songs she plays here are sung in Lebanese (I assume).  Sung with just the accompaniment of one guitar, Yasmine sings and sways her way through these beautiful songs.  It’s actually fun to just see her move while she sings, she’s so loose and relaxed and yes, sensuous.

The most interesting thing is that Hamdan had only just met guitarist Gabriel Gordon when they traveled down together from New York that morning. They’d never rehearsed together, so the interesting guitar lines he’s playing sound great even though they might not be what she intended.  (I wish there was a little more information about this partnership in the blurb).

“Beirut” is a song form the 1940s and she does some interesting vocal things by using her hands around her mouth.  “Deny” and “Shouei” are beautiful songs that Hamdan has written and the two of them sound just great together.

[READ: May 27, 2014] “Long Story Short”

I have been one of those readers who doesn’t really know what to make of Lydia Davis, so I found this article very interesting and helpful.  It allowed me to appreciate her super short stories a lot more.  For yes I have mused about why “she doesn’t call them poems or fragments.”  The answer: “She prefers the deeper associations of the word ‘story’.”

I was interested that she is considered “one of the most original minds in American fiction today,” and I tend to agree that she is because no one else really writes like her.  Her Collected Stories has “some two hundred pieces” in just over 700 pages.  This is thirty years worth of work.

But I also liked seeing the succinct comment “like many things that Davis writes, [a letter] had started out sincere and then turned weird.”  In this case the letter she wrote to a frozen peas manufacturer was published as the story “Letter to a Frozen Peas Manufacturer.”

I didn’t know much if anything about Davis, so this article acted as a biography as well.  She dated writer Paul Auster and while he write his traditional stories, Davis struggled to do the same.  Her stories never came together or seemed to be about normal things, as her mother commented: “Why don’t you write about your travels or something more cheerful?”  But it was when she started reading very short stories by the poet Russell Edson (of whom I’ve never heard), that she hit upon the idea of writing very short stories and “The Thirteenth Woman” was her first successful attempt.

I have often wondered why so many of her things seem simply like she is writing a list of her thoughts, that seem again, not so much like story.  But she explains that she creates a “construct that’s a little different from reality…a narrative voice that’s a little artificial, not quite my own.”  She says her narrators are desperate to be understood which is why they go into too much details.  Unlike her narrators Davis is actually quite social and has run for a seat on the governing board of the village where she lives (population 571).

There’s an interesting look at the story “The Two Davises and the Rug” which is based on a real incident with a person named Davis and her own son’s rug.  Almost all of the reality is the same–she’s still friends with the “other Davis” as well, but as you read the story you can see that it is a hyperreal example of a real incident.  She often asks permission when she uses people in stories, and while she seems to try to disguise people, she once called a person in a story Mitchell, when his real name is Mitch, (she felt that since no one called him Mitchell it was enough of a disguise).  But despite her calling on reality for her stories, she does draw the line–the children are off limits.

I’m also very intrigued by her translations–specifically her translation of Proust’s first book of Swann’s Way.  I had heard that her translation received nothing but praise although this article does say that some found that it’s accuracy “came at the expense of felicity.”  Although she says that the extant translations were quite flowery and that Proust was much more contemporary sounding than people assume.  All of this makes me want to read her book.

I definitely like Davis more after reading this–just learning what she was up to was a help.  I feel like I should check out her Collected Stories.  I like her stories better than poetry in general, and it seems like it would be fun to polish off a dozen stories before bed–just as long as when I post about it I don’t have to summarize every one.