I Just Read About That…

SOUNDTRACK: ARBOREA-Tiny Desk Concert #218 (May 17, 2012).

I’d published these posts without Soundtracks while I was reading the calendars.  But I decided to add Tiny Desk Concerts to them when I realized that I’d love to post about all of the remaining 100 or shows and this was a good way to knock out 25 of them.

Arborea is a totally captivating band.

The band consists of Shanti and Buck Curran.  They play three songs and each one is really different, but all with in a spooky, mellow Appalachian feel.

“Song for Obol” features Buck playing an electric guitar with an e-bow and a slide—creating single-note sirens that roar and fade.  The sounds are magical.  But they’re not the most interesting part of this song.  Because Shanti is playing the Ban-Jammer–“a sweet little hybrid that’s part banjo, part mountain dulcimer.” Shanti also sings and her voice is high and delicate—sometimes almost a whisper.  The Ban-Jammer is such an interesting and compelling sound and those washes of electric guitar so enticing that I didn’t want this song to end—even if I never really paid attention to what she was singing about.

For the second song Bob Boilen himself goes behind his desk to play harmonium with them.  Shanti plays acoustic guitar and tells us that the harmonium is

Inspired by the tales in Maine about fishing boats that were lost to the ocean—this song is about a woman who loses her lover to the sea—the harmonium is the ocean and the wind.

The harmonium isn’t very loud, but it keeps constant background while Buck pays the electric guitar (with slide, but no e-bow) and Shanti picks out the acoustic guitar melody.

The final song “A Little Time” is played on an acoustic tenor guitar.  Both Shanti and Buck sing for this track.  At first I wasn’t crazy about his voice accompanying hers, but he really gets the same tone very nice;y.  And her oh-hoos are beautifully haunting.

I’d really like to hear more from these guys.  And it is pretty fun to actually see Bob behind his Tiny Desk.

[READ: December 6, 2016] “Dream Girl”

Near the end of November, I found out about The Short Story Advent Calendar.  Which is what exactly?  Well…

The Short Story Advent Calendar returns, not a moment too soon, to spice up your holidays with another collection of 24 stories that readers open one by one on the mornings leading up to Christmas.  This year’s stories once again come from some of your favourite writers across the continent—plus a couple of new crushes you haven’t met yet. Most of the stories have never appeared in a book before. Some have never been published, period.

I already had plans for what to post about in December, but since this arrived (a few days late for advent, but that was my fault for ordering so late) I’ve decided to post about every story on each day.

I wasn’t aware of Katie Coyle before reading this story.  Perhaps the only reason I might have known about her is because she is a YA author from New Jersey.

But I’d like to know more about her because this story was wonderful.  The point of view of the story was fantastic and the whole concept was weird and cool.

The narrator is never revealed, but I love this beginning:

This all started when Winston’s girlfriend Sheila dumped him at his high-school graduation party.  Or maybe it started when Sheila began to notice that Winston didn’t understand her.  Certainly it never would’ve happened had she not turned to Winston in their Modern Conflicts class nine months earlier and said, “It’s Winston, right?”

Such intrigue!

At the party, after he’d been dumped, he sat down next to his Grandma Jean.  Jean was a cantankerous lady who didn’t much like anyone.  Although since Winston was her first grandchild, she had a soft spot for him.  But she still told him when he was being a dumbass.  When he told her what happened, after she called Sheila the girl with the dumb hair, she told him how to win her back.

The key was to get her to dream about you.  Since Jean was into all kinds of new age stuff like dreamcatchers, Winston ignored her.  But she said that as you are falling asleep you should imagine her sleeping and imagine yourself as the size of a pea.  She’ll open a door on her temple large enough for you to walk in.  And then you’ll be in her dreams all the time.

But he ignored Jean and went about pining for Sheila.

I love that the narrator jumps in again:

I wish that before he’d gotten in so deep, someone had pointed out that Sheila’s Facebook page left out most of what was Sheila…. If she’d let him see the actual her, the mess of her, isn’t it possible he’d never have fallen in love with her?

So Winston went to college assuming he’d forget about Sheila and meet some dumb blonde bimbo.  But that didn’t happen and he wound up monitoring her Facebook page.  And he saw her having a great time and now talking a lot about a guy named Jorge.  So Winston went out with his roommate and got really drunk.  And that night he imagined Sheila, but he imagined her the size of a pea.  He picked her up, opened the door on the side of his temple, and put her inside.

And now the story gets really trippy, because we get to see Winston’s weird dreams which involve Bruce Springsteen and a Sheila who seems to scare off everyone else in his dreamland.

This was all just before Thanksgiving.  When he gets home his parents are happy to see him, but they have sad news. Sheila has been missing for several days.  She was seen in her dorm room and then simply wasn’t there anymore.

Is the real Sheila is inside his head?

There’s about half a story left after this happens, and I love the way it evolves–how he interacts with his friends back home and what his dreamscape does to him.  The story ends with more questions than answers (many of them asked by Winston himself).  And we never do learn just who the narrator is, and it doesn’t matter, the ending is great.