I Just Read About That…

SOUNDTRACK: STEVE GUNN-Tiny Desk Concert #299 (August 31, 2013).

Steve Gunn is a fascinating guitar player:

his work mostly stems from a bushy, overgrown definition of what we often call “Americana,” with a healthy understanding of the La Monte Young drone.

Grateful Dead and J.J. Cale certainly reside in the rubber-band bounce of “Old Strange,” a song that keeps the groove mellow, but will suddenly pop with water-drop elasticity. “The Lurker” comes from a much longer solo guitar version that originally sounded like one of Roy Harper’s acoustic epics, but with Gunn’s trio, it becomes a back-porch barn-burner.

For this concert, Gunn and his band play two 9-minutes songs.  They center around his guitar work which yes, has a drone, but the main focus are the Americana riffs that he plays with precision.

“Old Strange” opens with a lengthy guitar passage that shifts after 2 and a half minutes to a slow folky kind of style.  The song seems like it will be an instrumental but 3 and a half minutes in he begins singing. His voice is deep and he sings a kind of narrative story.  It’s quite mesmerizing.   “The Lurker” is a slower, more mellow jam.

[READ: September 3, 2016]: Beatrice

I have read a couple of books from Dixon through McSweeney’s.  I didn’t know much about him then and I still don’t, but I recalled liking his stuff pretty well.  And this book was short so I thought I’d give it a look.

This book is told in a fascinating style–a kind of stream of consciousness in the mind of the main character, but through really close third person.

The book details the encounter of the main character Professor Philip Seidel (there’s a joke about this name, as Seidel means mug) and a woman named Beatrice.  Beatrice was a student of his some 25 years earlier.  She has stopped at his house to deliver some food in condolence for the recent passing of his wife.  She knows about this because she is now a professor where he taught her, although he had retired a few years back.

She brought some food and also wanted to tell him that he was her favorite teacher back then.  She had studied German and wasn’t allowed to take fiction courses until she completed her requirements.  She loved his teaching method and loved how encouraging he had always been.  She has clearly been keeping tabs on him–she has read some interviews he gave–and she definitely knows a lot about his life.

When she leaves he briefly wonders if maybe she’s interested in him now that the are older.  But he puts that out of his mind.

Then he sees her again at a retirement party for another faculty member. He hasn’t gone to many parties since his wife died–he doesn’t want to deal with the questions.  But he decided he could go to this one.  But  he was overcome immediately upon seeing so many familiar faces and worrying that he’d have to talk about his wife.  But soon enough he saw Beatrice and she sat with him and brought him drinks and they talked and talked.

The way the book is constructed, it’s not always obvious what they are saying and what he is merely thinking.  When she introduces herself at the party (full first name and surname again):

He remembers her.  Two months ago.  Her cookies and pound cake, he thinks it was, were delicious.  He really at them?  Because after she left him that day she thought, because he’s so lean, he didn’t look like a pastry eater and the he’d keep them around till they got stale and then throw them out.  Not so. First he shared them with his daughter, she loved them, and the rest with a niece and her family who dropped in on him unexpectedly.  Like she did.  Well, it wad different, and he was glad he had something to give them.

And that whole style of close third person present goes throughout the story–where we experience his thoughts and his conversation although it’s not always apparent which is which.

After talking for a while they agree to have lunch.  They talk about her work (she writes in German and does translations) and his work (he is a published author now).  She does not like to talk about her work too much.  But she is happy to give him copies of her books. She also writes, but mostly poetry.  When he reads it he realizes it’s not very good–(back n school he thought she was a very promising writer).  However, there was something about the way she presented the poems to him–the way she uttered the word “Take,” that made him think perhaps she was interested after all.

They had many many lunches together and we get great detail about all of them.  But that one lunch seemed to really affect him and it puts him in a lengthy reverie.

About thirty pages from the end, we learn how the story ends–he thinks it.  But it takes those last 30 or so pages for the details to unfold.

Dixon’s work isn’t exactly postmodern, but it does fall into that camp somewhat.  As such this book feels a bit more like technique over story, which is after all just about a man who thinks a woman is interested in him.

On a mildly amusing note, my copy of the book had a sticker over the B in the title so my book read: EAT RICE.