I Just Read About That…

SOUNDTRACK: AURELIO-Tiny Desk Concert #424 (March 7, 2015).

Aurelio is from West Africa.  He plays a nylon stringed guitar (finger picking and chords) and is accompanied by traditional Garifuna musicians and an electric guitar.  The Tiny Desk blurb says he “weaves together intricate layers of acoustic guitar to capture the polyrhythms of West African and the Caribbean.”

He sings in what I assume is Garifuna.  He is not young and his voice sounds like it.  From his chat, I believe he may also have been mayor once.

They play three songs: “Lándini,” “Funa Tugudirugu,” and “Nari Golu”  The guitar solos are (surprisingly to me) provided by the electric guitar while the acoustic keeps the rhythms.  The maracas and drum (box) keep the beat.  This is my introduction Garifuna music, which doesn’t sound too different from any other music (except the vocals of course).

[READ: March 22, 2015] “Keeping Time”

I’ve read somethings from Manguso before, in particular her McSweeney’s book of flash fiction.

This is an excerpt from a book called Ongoingness: The End of a Diary.  At first I found the entry a little annoying.  “I started keeping a diary twenty-five years ago.  It’s 800,000 words long.”  Manguso basically got into a frame of mind where she felt like she had to record everything–the perpetual loop of recording things as they happen and then recording how you feel about when you are recording them.

She says “I couldn’t face the end of a day without a record of everything that had ever happened.”  The fact that this was 25 years ago certainly predates the live bloggers and the daily diarists who tape everything. And it is interesting to see that her rather unhealthy obsession has been around longer than the technology allowed for it.

Manguso says she didn’t want to miss anything and by writing it down it was proof that she hadn’t.  She says that “the trouble was that there was so much I failed to record.”

I enjoyed many of the details of Manguso’s diary keeping–putting them into computer files labelled Differential Equations and other high level maths (which she didn’t study).

Some people had read her diaries–her parents once and then a boyfriend who had borrowed her laptop.  He read all 75 pages of it (including the part where she said she couldn’t feel him inside of her) and not only didn’t apologize but acted like his behavior “was a gesture of compassion.”

Things changed when she became pregnant “I couldn’t remember a thing.”  And when she became a mother she began to “inhabit time differently.”  Midnight feedings when you are awake and not and other ways in which time is lost.

Her diaries have become more abbreviated lately–a few words where pages would have done.  And most of the entries are now about her son.

I enjoyed her transformation from extreme narcissist to person who could let things go.

Although I honestly have to wonder how there could be more to this book than this expert.  It really did seem to be everything…perhaps she hasn’t given up all the writing just yet.