I Just Read About That…

SOUNDTRACK BELA FLECK & ABIGAIL WASHBURN-Tiny Desk Concert #741 (May 11, 2018).

I know and like Bela Fleck.  I know and like Abigail Washburn.  I had no idea they were married.

A very pregnant Abigail Washburn points to Bela Fleck at the Tiny Desk and says “and just so you know, this is his fault.” I won’t spoil the video by telling you his response.

Bela Fleck and Abigail Washburn are two American musical treasures. This husband-and-wife banjo duo write original tunes steeped in the roots of folk music. Their playing is sweetly paced with melodies interweaving through their intricate, percussive picking all while Abigail soars above it all with her discerning, yearning voice.

I also had no idea how political they are.

Their first tune, “Over the Divide,” was written at the height of the Syrian Refugee Crisis. They’d read a story about a Jewish, yodeling, Austrian sheep herder who helped Syrians out of Hungary, through the backroads that likely only sheep herders know.

Lyrical content aside, the music is just stunning.  The banjo is oft-mocked for its twang, but these two play such beautiful intertwining lines, it is just magical.   The opening melody is just jaw-droppingly lovely.

They each switch banjos to rather different-looking ones–deeper more resonating sounds

The second tune, “Bloomin’ Rose,” is a response to Standing Rock and the Dakota pipeline that is seen as a threat to water and ancient burial grounds. The intensity and thoughtfulness in Bela Fleck’s and Abigail Washburn’s music is why it will shine for a good long while, the way great folk tunes stay relevant over the ages.

But Abigail isn’t just banjo and vocals,

For the third tune, Abigail waddled over to a clogging board. And before she began her rhythmic patter, told us all that “my doctor said that what I’m about to do is ok! I have compression belts and tights on that you can’t see.” [Bela: so do I].  They then launched into “Take Me To Harlan,” another one of their songs from their 2017 album Echo In The Valley.

She says that they met at a square dance in Nashville, and she loves dancing and movement.  Bela plays and Abigail sings and taps for this jazzy number.  The middle of the song features a call and response with Bela on banjo and Abigail tapping [“Eight month?  No problem.”].

For the final song, “My Home’s Across the Blue Ridge Mountains,” Abigail says it’s usually done in a perky bluegrass country style but they listened to the lyrics and decided it was not perky at all.  So they turned it into a different thing.  It’s a somber song with Bela on a relatively slow banjo (with a slide that he sneaks on near the end) and Abigail singing mournfully (she can really belt out a tune).

Although as Steve Martin pointed out, with a banjo almost everything is upbeat.

The parties at their house must be a hoot.

[READ: January 21, 2018] “Active Metaphors” and “Death By Icicle”

“Active Metaphors” is one of Saunders’ funniest pieces that I’ve read.  And whats strange about that is that it was an essay published in the Guardian newspaper.

There are two headings: “Realistic Fiction” and “Experimental Fiction”

“Realistic Fiction” begins with the narrator in a biker bar.  He overheard two bikers, Duke and StudAss discussing these two types of fiction. –they’d purchased their “hogs” with royalties from their co-written book Feminine Desire in Jane Austen.  There was some verbal sparring during which they threw Saunders out a window “while asking questions about F. Scott Fitzgerald’s fallen American utopia.”

The narrator explained his theory of realism to them–everything happens the way it actually would and then suggests that maybe a central metaphor would help define things.  There’s an impotent farmer and every time he walks past the field, the corn droops.  An active metaphor like this helps the reader sense the deeper meaning of the story.

As they ride off with him on their hog, the bikers use some great professorial language–the end is hilarious.

“Experimental Fiction” tells a story in which aspects of reality are exaggerated or distorted “in such a way as to put the reader off the story and make him go watch a television show.”  Rather than saying that Bill arrived at the store you could write “Want buy to arrived as he rain started it Bill Bill Bill, the milk.”   Or instead of using the word “table” you could write “the flat plane of ebony…the nonwhite spatial expanse on which one can put things.”

An experimental story could end in such a way where you ask yourself, “Am I missing the last page?”

“Death By Icicle” is an excerpt from an interview with Patrick Dacey from BOMBlog (from BOMB Magazine)

No dount the interview is longer, but this excerpt focuses on a question which I feel he drifts away from pretty quickly to answer a more important question.

Dacey asks him if there are things he keeps trying to do although he might feel that he can’t do them.

Saunders says, it’s not like he has a three hundred page sincere novel waiting to finish.  But he does take stock of his career and says “you haven’t started on the big stuff yet–where is my epic–although it probably just midlife crises.”

Then he tells an anecdote about walking through Rockefeller Center.  He was walking past that Chocolate shop at Christmas time and found himself getting a thrill of the exact variety he used to get as a kid when he realized that XMas vacation was looming : “kind of this presents-are-coming, freedom-is-approaching, life-is-so beautiful leaping of the heart.”

He wondered if it would make a good story.  He thought he could write about that same feeling.  It was exciting until he felt a blowback feeling of discomfort–he felt insecure about letting that moment of positive energy just stand there.  He thought he would have to have an icicle impale the man or maybe set it in an amusement park to defuse it somewhat.

But why think this way?  Dickens and Tolstoy would have let it stand.  If they had to complicate it, they would wait hundred so pages.

So he wonders why he needs to have the “obligatory-edgy.”

He’s concerned about this because he felt that the edginess that he first stared adding to his stories is what made them interesting. So he was reluctant to remove it for fear of stepping backwards.

This follows up with a wonderful sense of new writers and of the whole Ironic Detachment of our culture

Sometimes when I read new fiction I feel that the writers of it, myself included, have a somewhat dysfunctional relationship with our own culture. I don’t mean we disapprove of it. I mean we have absorbed so much habitual disapproval of it that we are no longer able to see it, and therefore are unable to disapprove of it properly. How can you disapprove (or approve) of something you no longer see? If your palette of possible modes of representation has been habitually narrowed and restricted (to the edgy, the snarky, the hip, etc.), if that palette has been shorn of, say, the spiritual, the ineffable, the earnest, the mysterious—of awe, wonder, humility, the truly unanswerable questions—then there isn’t much hope of any real newness there. Are the very real pleasures of being an American in 2011 underrepresented in our fiction? Are the very real terrors of living in other, less functional cultures adequately taken into account when we critique our own? If America is sick, what is the exact nature of the illness? Beyond that, are we taking as much pleasure in the sensual as we should be

Of course, in the end, the most interesting story is what you should go with.