I Just Read About That…

SOUNDTRACK: LULUC-“Star” NPR Lullaby SXSW (March 18, 2015).

Recorded outside of Stubbs while the groundscrew was cleaning up the huge mess, Luluc play a beautiful quiet ballad.

Steve Hassett plays lead acoustic guitar and sings harmonies while Zoë Randell plays rhythm guitar and sings lead. Interestingly, his voice often goes in higher registers than hers.

I really like the solo that he plays that adds a bit of uptempo feel to this otherwise quiet song.

Check it out here.

[READ: March 23, 2015] “At First Blush”

This issue of Harper’s featured five essays (well, four essays and one short story) about “Growing Up: five coming of age stories.”  Since I knew a few of these authors already, it seemed like a good time to devote an entire week to growing up.  There are two introductions, one by Christine Smallwood (who talks about Bob Seger) and one by Joshua Cohen who talks about the coming of age narrative.

Here’s yet another piece by Karl Ove (like the recent essay in the New York Times Magazine) translated by Ingvild Burkey

It’s hard for me to imagine that Karl Ove (who has written literally thousands of pages about his life) could have anything more to say–any incident that he hasn’t gone over with a microscope.  And yet, here he is with a new incident.

As with most things from Karl Ove, it explains a minute detail which proves to be a big event.  He was 12 and in school and told to spit out his gum.  As he walked up to the wastebasket the attention made him blush.  The first time he can recall the burning shame making him more self-conscious which then kept repeating itself.   And then some one said “Karl Ove’s face is all red!”

He relates this to social relationships–once you become aware of other people observing you (which must be happening at a younger and younger age these days).  When he was growing up groups of kids would hang out together and go down into the woods–playing or building forts.   Despite the lack of an adult presence, they had their own rules.  You were not supposed to boast or cry, nor be a coward or fight with girls.  You should be brave and loyal and of course never snitch.  If you broke the rules you were bullied.

In this case, this was the many bullying the one person who was out of line: “Deviance is evidently intolerable–it has to be rubbed out.”  Those who could not conform were exiled.

He says as an adult he sees boastful children and feels like warning them to stop so that they don’t come to a bad end.  But he knows that adult reprimand is no use.  Eventually it will stop because no peer group will allow it.

He also says that without bullying, the world would be quite different from what we know–no rules, no community.  When asked about the belief that to do away with bullying would bring about a better world, he says that “community depends on equality and equality demands sacrifice.”

Karl Ove always seems to take an unpopular opinion and bring some rationality to it.

This essay has a very different feel from his novels. Even though he is writing about himself and in detail about an event, the tone is different (or it is the translator).  It feels more like an essay than a novel, which I find really interesting.