I Just Read About That…

SOUNDTRACK: SHAMIR-Tiny Desk Concert #458 (July 31, 2015).

Shamir has an amazing voice–a high countertenor that is unsettling and pretty at the same time. He usually creates dance music, but in this Tiny Desk it’s just him and his guitar (on a stool).

The notes say that they asked the interns and staff to sit around him like at a campfire since he looked so alone up there by himself (and after the first song he says he is quite nervous).

He sings three songs. I don’t know the originals (I only know the one dance song from his record “On the Regular” which he doesn’t play here). But these versions are so different from that one that it’s quite shocking.

“In for the Kill” has a lot of intensity in his delivery and the chord structure (even if he plays he guitar rather softly).

The story of his writing “Demons” is very funny.  He was at work at Ross’ and he ran to the changing room when this melody came to him to write it down.  So he was hiding tin the dressing room plinking out notes and humming to himself while trying to get it down before he forgot.  I really like the twist in a song about demons: “If I’m a demon, you’re the beast that made me.”

I’m not sure I’d ever get his record, but I enjoyed hearing this acoustic version of such a dancey singer.

[READ: June 4, 2015] Virginia Woolf

This book comes from a series called Life Portraits.

This is a very brief (128 pages, but mostly one sentence per page) biography of Virginia Woolf.  But the real “selling” point of the book are the beautiful illustrations/paintings by Nina Cosford.  They are lovely watercolors that do a great job illustrating whatever detail is listed on the page.

Although the biography is short it is still quite comprehensive–skimming over many details in her life to get to the heart of the matter.

We get basic birth details–born Virginia Stephen on 25th January 1882.  We learn about her parents (ferociously intellectual father and philanthropic mother).  There’s even an illustrated family tree.

Then we learn that death followed her everywhere.  Her mother died when Virginia was young.  And that a few years later her half-sister and her father also died.  She remained with her sister Vanessa and her brother Thoby as companions.

It was Thoby who instigated what became known as the Bloombury Group.  Alkayat doesn’t go into any details about the other members of the group although another tree is drawn.  (I had no idea The Bloomsbury Group was so full of big names).  And this group was hugely influential in changing the face of literature and culture.  In the mid 1920s, she met Vita Sackville West a scandalous woman who was in an open marriage, had lesbian affairs (and was a mother to boot).

They were influential in speaking openly about sex and gender.  Virginia (scandalously) lived with three men in a house.  She eventually married one of them, Leonard Woolf.  In 1917 she and Leonard bought a printing press and began publishing books from “Hogarth Press” by E.M. Forster, T.S. Eliot, Katherine Mansfield and others.

Then she started writing fiction.  Her first book (The Voyage Out) took 15 years to sell 2,000 copies.  She then wrote Night and Day–a gently subversive novel of manners (1919) and Jacob’s Room–an experimental elegiac story of a young man (1922). Mrs Dalloway was an ambitious adventurous experiment in form (1925).  Orlando is a satirical romp with a sex changing title character (inspired by Sackville-West) (1928).  Then she wrote her essays A Room of One’s Own and The Waves.

Despite her successes, death followed her everywhere, with more family members dying and then the outbreak of WWII in 1939.  She could handle it no longer and drowned herself in 1941.

There are quotes from her books and letters as well–it’s certainly not a happy story but the art and style make it less depressing than it could be.  And Alkayat’s descriptions of the novels really makes me want to read them.