I Just Read About That…

SOUNDTRACK: MOUNT EERIE-“Ocean Roar” (Field Recordings, January 3, 2013).

For reasons I’m unclear about, I had been posting about these Field Recordings in reverse order.  So I decided to mix it up for the 2013 releases and do them in proper order–it feels better that way.

This particular one makes you wonder how much work they went to in order to record less than 3 minutes of music.  This Field Recording [Mount Eerie Plays ‘An Absurd Concert To Nobody‘] was taped in the Folger Shakespeare Library’s gorgeous Elizabethan-style theatre in Washington, D.C., just across the way from the Supreme Court.

Mount Eerie is a band I’ve heard of but don’t really know.  I don’t know if this stripped down song is in any way representative.  The band is the brain child of Phil Elverum who sings songs of “life-affirming, death-obsessed mysticism.”

“Ocean Roar” is a smart tangle of words; its alternate stories oddly complement and complicate each other, while telling of lost thoughts and wandering souls. On record, the song chimes with guitars and drums that subdivide the dreaminess, but at the theatre, it’s just Elverum, a nylon-stringed acoustic guitar and touring band members Allyson Foster and Paul Benson singing soft harmonies at his side.

The song starts with them singing some lovely harmonies, they add lovely notes to flesh out the brief song throughout.

“We just played an absurd concert to nobody,” Mount Eerie’s Phil Elverum says, as he faces a sea of empty red seats.

[READ: October 20, 2018] “Flaubert Again”

I have not enjoyed much by Anne Carson–she’s just not my type of writer.

This story also left me flustered.

This is about a writer who seeks to write less and less, not more. Other writers have tried, Barthes, Flaubert, but she hopes to go further.

To be a different kind of novel it would have to abolish things–plot, consequence.  And fully abolish, not just renounce, which is a weak and egoistic attitude.  She felt the pleasure of reading derived from answers withheld.

Such a story would tell itself, have no gaps, no indecent places where she didn’t know what she was talking about.

She gets up and goes into the bathroom where she muses about why she doesn’t take baths (she remembers a time when she was five and bathed in boiling hot water).

The next paragraph begins “At first, the energy required for using her new beak obscured anxieties of question like What to Write? and Who Cares?

What?

Then she writes about her friend Martha who knocked over some coins in the library.  The numismatist glared.

The last few paragraphs grow interesting as she thinks about Martha’s sketchbook–Martha has given up on writing and has taken to drawing.  When they were in Greece together, she sketched water glasses in various places and uses.

The former Nobel Prize winner from Ireland had seen the glass of water being hoisted (by Samuel Beckett in a bar) and there was no pronoun for that, he kept saying.

In thinking about Martha, she thinks of church which reminds her of

a German publisher whom she met who said he not find a non-obscene German equivalent for “She crossed her legs.”  Could this be true?

This story succeeds in eschewing plot and consequence, as well as comprehension and interest.