I Just Read About That…

SOUNDTRACK: JESCA HOOP-Tiny Desk Concert #965 (April 3, 2020).

I really liked the Tiny Desk Concert that features Sam Beam and Jesca Hoop.  So much so that I bought the CD and it made me want to see both of them live.

Jesca Hoop last appeared at the Tiny Desk as a duet with Sam Beam (Iron & Wine) in the spring of 2016. They sang songs from their collaborative record Love Letters For Fire.

This time it is just Jesca and I have realized that I liked her more as an accompanist rather than a lead singer.  Actually, that’s not exactly right.  Her voice is lovely.  I just find the songs a little meandering.

This time around, Jesca Hoop came to the Tiny Desk with just her guitars, her lovely voice, and brilliant poetic songs. She has a magical way with words, and she opened her set with “Pegasi,” a beautiful song about the wild ride that is love, from her 2017 album Memories Are Now.

“Pegasi” is nice to watch her play the fairly complex guitar melodies–she uses all of the neck.  The utterly amazing thing about “Pegasi” though comes at the end of the song when she sings an amazing note (high and long) that represents a dying star.

She wanted to sing it today so it could live on Tiny Desk.

The two songs that follow are from her latest album, Stonechild, the album that captured my heart in 2019, and the reason I reached out to invite her to perform at my desk.

“All Time Low” is a song, she says, for the “existential underdog.”  She switches guitars (to an electric) and once again, most of the melody takes place on the high notes of the guitar.  Her melodies are fascinating.  And the lyrics are interesting too:

“Michael on the outside, always looking in
A dog in the fight but his dog never wins
If he works that much harder, his ship might come in
He gives it the old heave-ho.”

And for her final tune, she plays “Shoulder Charge.” It’s a song that features a word that Jesca stumbled upon online: “sonder,” which you won’t find in the dictionary. She tells the NPR crowd “sonder” is the realization “that every person that you come across is living a life as rich and complex as your own.” And that realization takes you out of the center of things, something that is at the heart of “Shoulder Charge” and quite a potent moment in this deeply reflective and personal Tiny Desk concert.

This word, sonder, came to my attention back in 2016 when Kishi Bashi first discovered it and named his album Sonderlust for it.

The song is like the others, slow and quite with a pretty melody that doesn’t really go anywhere.

I found that after three listens, I started to enjoy the songs more, so maybe she just writes songs that you need to hear a few times to really appreciate.

[READ: March 2020] Ducks, Newburyport

I heard about this book because the folks on the David Foster Wallace newsgroup were discussing it.  I knew nothing about it but when I read someone describe the book like this:

1 Woman’s internal monologue.  8 Sentences. 1040 pages

I was instantly intrigued.

Then my friend Daryl said that he was really enjoying it, so I knew I had to check it out.

That one line  is technically (almost) accurate but not really accurate.

The story (well, 95% of it) is told through one woman’s stream of consciousness interior monologue.  She is a mother living in Ohio.  She has four children and she is overwhelmed by them.  Actually she is overwhelmed by a lot and she can’t stop thinking about these things.

She used to teach at a small college but felt that the job was terrible and that she was not cut out for it.  So now she bakes at home and sells her goods locally.  She specializes in tarte tatin.  This is why she spends so much time with her thoughts–she works alone at home.  Her husband travels for work.  Whether she is actually making money for the family is a valid but moot question.

So for most of the book not much happens, exactly.  We just see her mind as she thinks of all the things going on around her.  I assume she’s reading the internet (news items come and go in a flash).  She is quite funny in her assessment of the world (how much she hates trump).  While I was reading this and more and more stupid things happened in the real world, I couldn’t help but imagine her reaction to them).  She’s not a total liberal (she didn’t trust Hillary), but she is no conservative either (having lived in Massachusetts and New York).  In fact, she feels she does not fit in locally at all.

And wow does she hate guns and the NRA.  She thinks the Open Carry laws are lunacy and she would love all guns to be taken away.  She is just full of statistics about school shootings and home shootings and mass shootings and death.  It can make the book pretty dark at times.

But despite the darkness there is much humor–she is a smart woman, if a little neurotic (or maybe just alive in the early 21st century).  She is also trying her best to be a good person, so she has given up cursing (she says Djibouti every time she steps on a toy truck, for instance).  She also thinks things and then has to correct herself when her mind moves too fast for her thoughts.

When she thinks things about her children (and many other things) that are just so right on (I found myself taking picture of good parts and forwarding them to my wife).

She is also obsessed with Little House on the Prairie and a little less so with Anne of Green Gables, and refers to parts of them constantly.

So there isn’t a lot of plot except when there is.

There is a flash flood and they are stranded at the mall (a house floats down the river on fire!).

Her oldest daughter runs away and spends the night on the street. (since it’s told in her mind this is especially harrowing).  But we learn the details later when she is “remembering” what her daughter told her about the incident.  So it remains in first person stream of consciousness but happened in the past–very we handled.

Interspersed throughout the story are page an a half stories about a lioness and her cubs.  The lioness is living in the area and we watch her mate, give birth and raise these cubs.

It is utterly incomprehensible what this story has to do with then main story until they actually come together near the end (and it is  genius way of dealing with it).

Later, people learn that there is a lioness loose in the area, so the gun nuts and hunters come from all over (even out of state) for a chance to hunt ad kill this poor lioness. So now the narrators gun fears are right in her backyard.

I so very much enjoyed the narrative flow of this story.  You can read thirty pages without even realizing you’ve read that many.  Every time she thinks of a new concept, she says “the fact that” so this phrase is repeated dozens of times per page.  It’s annoying at first, but once you get into the rhythm, it’s like an automatic reset.  The daunting thing of course is that there are no paragraph breaks or chapter breaks so its hard to know when or where to stop.  (Those lioness breaks are kind of nice).

I so much enjoyed the flow and being in her head, that I was totally caught up in the action.  So much so that when the end features and amazingly climatic and intense sequence was absolutely emotional over it.

This book was quite frankly an amazing piece of literature.  Despite its size it is not a difficult read.  And I found her insights to be wonderful.

I have two quibbles with the book though and they are both because Ellmann grew up in America but now lives in England.  In the book the narrator calls GPS “sat nav” which nobody here does and she also says “touch wood” instead of “knock on wood,” which is also a British, not an American expression (although some might say it here).  But aside form that it was spot on–thoroughly engaging and utterly riveting.

I cannot wait to read other books by Ellmann, if they are even half as interesting as this one was.