I Just Read About That…

SOUNDTRACK: MUCCA PAZZA-Tiny Desk Concert #419 (February 10, 2015).

Even though I said that the Dan Deacon Tiny Desk was the most fun to watch, it is a close tie with this one from Mucca Pazza.  Mucca Pazza are a 23 piece band comprised of a huge horn section, violins, guitars, percussion, an accordion and even cheerleaders.  The group dress like a marching band (but everyone with a different colored (often ill-fitting) outfit).  The cheerleaders use caution tape as pompoms and do prompts between songs.  They tip their hats when songs are done.

They have been around for ten years (and have four albums out).  For this cramped Tiny Desk, they play four instrumental tracks (23 people and no vocalist!): “Subtle Frenzy” “J’accuse” “Dirty Chompers” and “Holiday on Ice.”

The songs are fast and fun and while there is an obvious marching band feel, they aren’t really marching band songs.  The electric guitar and strings tends to undermine the machine band tendencies (even if the xylophone adds it back).   Indeed, the electric guitars add a cool and sometimes disconcerting sound, like the guitar solo on “J’accuse” which is done on a teeny tiny guitar with a slide.

I love the melody of “Dirty Chompers”–such a fun song.  And “Holiday on Ice” is chock of full of the mayhem you might expect from the description of this band. The middle section slows down somewhat and sounds a little demented (in a good way) It also really highlights the different components of the group–with different horns playing different scales and the trombones keeping the main somewhat menacing riff consistent.

So there’s a kind of Balkan Brass band element underpinning all of this–but there’s also discord and rock and psychedelia.

I don’t know if I’ve ever seen so many people having so much fun before.  Their full stage show must be a riot.

You can watch the Tiny Desk here and listen to a full show (with a video of one song) here.

[READ: April 10, 2015] Ongoingness.

This book was excepted in Harper’s in December. I read the excerpt just a few weeks ago.  And then when I saw someone request it at work I found our copy and, since the book was short, decided to read it at lunch before sending it off to the requester (such power I wield!).

In my post about the excerpt, I said that I couldn’t imagine how there could be much more than the excerpt and that I wouldn’t want to read a lot more of the book.  Well, it turns out that the book itself is a brief 96 pages and the bulk of those pages are only a few lines.  So a rough count would suggest about 36 pages altogether–an easy to read at lunch request.  And that’s good, because if this book were 400 pages it would be either obnoxious or really tedious.

But at this length, it’s an interesting and enjoyable look at memory and life and how much we should be concerned about remembering.

Manguso says that she was given a diary at a young age but, like most people, she didn’t really use it regularly.  Then she began being concerned about forgetting things.  She started using her diaries as a way to remember things.  Then she grew utterly obsessed with it and felt like she had to write down everything.

I find her obsession to be rather a sickness–I’m not sure how much she would agree with me.  She is critical of what she wrote and fears to re read it, but I’m not sure that she thinks it was a colossal waste of time and psychic energy.  Which comes into sharp relief when at the end of the book she says she has no interest in re-reading those diaries (all 800,000 words of it).  And neither do I.

But this book isn’t exactly about the diary, it’s about stopping the diary and about the ongoingness of life.

She talks about when she had writing students and she made them listen to empty time–twenty or thirty minutes of nothingness and then had them write about it (which sounds interesting to do once or twice).  She talks about others reading her diary (they were not meant for others) and how she didn’t really feel violated by it.  She felt they were as honest a portrayal of her self as she wished others to see anyhow.

When she was 12 she realized that photographs were ruining her memory so she never took a picture again (that’s pretty crazy).

INn the middle of the book, between her talking about her diary and talking about her newborn baby, the language really shines.  In little aphoristic sentences,she conveys some beautiful thoughts about memory and life passing.  Indeed, given the terseness of this book, much of her writing is really quite economical and exceptional.

The most fascinating section was that her baby was due to be born at around the same ti me that her mother-in-law was sent into hospice.  For some writers this could be twenty pages of prose but Manguso beautifully encapsulates this in one sentence, the most powerful in the book:

Six thousand five hundred miles away from each other, two unplannable moments prepared themselves.

It takes the birth of her son for her to become less self-obsessed–to stop worrying about forgetting everything because, as any parent knows, the first few months of newborns are a completely forgotten blur.   And soon her diary became more about her son than her.

To me, all of these things, diaries and photos are there as index card for your preservation–aids to help you with your memory, not the memory itself.  Manguso feared her own mortality–if things were forgotten then she would be forgotten but her legacy will live on in her writing, he son and other accomplishments.

I fear that my tone of the book is very critical, which I don’t really mean to be.  I did enjoy the book, and I think Manguso’s writing is superb.  There is just so much self obsession in it that when I think about the project (rather than the actual words of the book) I’m turned off by hit.

Having said that at the end of the book in her Afterword, she says that friends encouraged her to excerpt parts of her diary for this book. And I a very pleased to say that she does not include any of it.  She gives many reasons, all of them perfectly valid.  But from the way she describes the journal, it sounds like a dreadful thing to read and I’m grateful that she didn’t give me the option to do so.