I Just Read About That…

SOUNDTRACK: LAURA MARLING-Tiny Desk Concert #230 (July 12, 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.

Since I first heard this Tiny Desk Concert, I have become a huge fan of Laura Marling.  Her album Once I Was an Eagle is dynamite.  Her voice is unique and beautiful.  She sounds so mature and sophisticated in her singing style.  It is astonishing to learn that she was only 22 when she recorded this (and she looks it).

Her guitar playing is wonderful—nothing fancy but the sounds she gets out of the acoustic are magnificent.  And they work perfectly with her voice.  Her guitar is as warm as her voice is distant.  It’s a great combination and I could listen to her sing all day.

She plays two songs from her then current album A Creature I Don’t Know.  “Don’t Ask Me Why” and “Sophia” highlight some of those great moment when she sings along to the chords she strums.  And I love when she switches from delicate falsetto to almost spoken deep-voiced dismissals.   She’s so compelling.

“Once” is a song she hadn’t officially recorded yet. So consider this performance a premiere of sorts.  It did come out on Eagle.

She’s very quiet between songs–hard to tell if she’s nervous or just incredibly composed.  The blurb tells us that she “once held a series of unplugged and unrecorded concerts in a near-empty room, each consisting of a single song performed for two strangers at a time.”  (Seriously, click on that link and read about her amazing concert experience).

[READ: December 12, 2016] “Oneness Plus One”

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 I’ve decided to post about every story on each day.

I’ve enjoyed Aimee bender’s stories in the past, although I don’t usually love them. She tends to look at things in a rather different way.

In this case, this story is all about a speck of dirt.  It had lived on the apartment floor for quite some time and had managed to avoid the broom.  It had not been attached to any of its kin and just wanted to be left alone.  So every day it huddled under the book case and tried not to be seen.

We learn of the speck of dirt’s comrades down there–the lint (who had seen God), the cat hair (who understood something of love), the broken half of a pistachio shell (who could recite poetry).  These three had gathered, determined to have community, they wanted to decompose together.  The speck of dirt wanted no part of it but since he couldn’t move, he was stuck with them.

It wasn’t until a big gust of wind blew them all out of their hiding spot that things changed.

The three are sanguine about their circumstances, but the speck of dirt is unsure.  He assessed the situation and found it okayt.  Until the orange rind begins asking questions he doesn’t want to deal with.

So yes, a little odd, this one, but sort of fun.