I Just Read About That…

SOUNDTRACK: SEAN ROWE-Tiny Desk Concert #157 (September 16, 2011).

Rowe (rhymes with how) is a burly, bearded folk-singer-songwriter.  When he’s not singing he is into wilderness survival and primitive living.

Before the third song he tells a lengthy story about going out into the woods with just a knife and surviving on whatever he could find.  If you’re interested in his stories, you can read about them on his site.

Rowe plays three songs.  For the first, “Night” he stands and plays a rather delicate guitar.  I don’t love his voice though, especially during the ending “where is my lord?” part.

I was amused by him when he said that for $200 he would eat the toast that is on the shelves behind him.  Robin asks if it’s really that hard out there.

He plays a different guitar (and sits on a stool) for “Bluegrass Baby.”  He sings and plays louder on this song.

The final song, “Surprise,” is my favorite.  I like the repeated riff that he plays, and his voice seems to work better with this louder song.  I especially love the great strumming/picking thing he does at the end

For sure, Rowe is a fascinating character.

[READ: March 13, 2016] “Plexiglass”

This is an excerpt from DeLillo’s novel Zero K (I do like that Harper’s tells you that it is an excerpt right from the get go).

I found that I didn’t rally like DeLillo’s last excerpt that I read.  His books are pretty complex and multifaceted and typically an excerpt doesn’t do it any kind of justice.  And while I enjoyed this one more, it still felt very spare.  And without context clues it’s kind of hard to get invested in the story.

Especially since in this case all of the characters seem to be rather unemotional themselves.

The excerpt takes place primarily in a taxi.  The narrator is with Emma and her son Stak.  Stak is conversing with the taxi driver in Pashto (he has been studying the language in his spare time),  The conversation seems rather banal although midway through he turns to the adults and says the driver used to be in the Taliban.

Emma and her ex-husband adopted Stak in Ukraine when the boy was five or six.

Stak must have an autistic disorder–he counts pigeons on the rooftops and talks about the weather all the time, stating temperatures in far away places: Shanghai, Mumbai.  He also refused to take the subway, which leads the narrator to wonder, “Was he the species that rejected all the things we were supposed to tolerate as away of maintaining our shaky hold on common order?”

The taxi seems to be especially irritating as there is a TV screen between them on some kind of loop of informative messages . Each adult tries to turn it off many times, unsuccessfully.

There’s very little in the way of structure for the adults and their burgeoning relationship–if it has any future.  I did enjoy the last line of the except: “giving the boy another chance to turn a stranger’s life into lavish fiction.”

I have often felt that I wanted to read more of DeLillo’s novels, but I haven’t been terribly excited by these two excerpts.