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Archive for the ‘Jonathan Franzen’ Category

Zadie Smith–2 book reviews (Harper’s, June 2011)

Posted in Book Reviews, Books about writers, David Foster Wallace, Essays, Harper's, Joan Acocella, Jonathan Franzen, Paula Fox, Research, Scholarship, Tindersticks, Zadie Smith on June 20, 2011| Leave a Comment »

SOUNDTRACK: TINDERSTICKS-BBC Sessions (2007).

Another great entry in the BBC Sessions series, this collection of 26 recordings, shows the band in fine form.  This works as a pretty excellent Greatest Hits collections (and surprisingly for a BBC Sessions recording there is only one duplicate song).

On the other hand, there’s not a whole lot of difference between these recordings and the originals.   Some notable exceptions include “Traveling Light” and “Buried Bones” which do not feature the female duet.  “Her” is also notably different since it’s on piano and not guitar.

But I have no criticism about the quality of the recordings. The band sounds wonderful.  Staples’ voice is great and the orchestration is perfect.  And, of course the recording quality is superb (as are all of the BBC sessions that I have are).

If you have the Tindersticks records already, there’s no compelling reason to get this set, but if you’re a fan of the band, it’s nice to have some slightly different versions of these great songs.

[READ: May 18, 2011] 2 book reviews

This month’s review is of two books.  The first is Paula Fox’s new book, News from the World: Stories and Essays.  (The book is also reviewed by Joan Acocella in The New Yorker, May 16, 2011 issue–she takes a much different angle than Zadie, and has a lot more biographical background, so the reviews work in conjunction very nicely).  I don’t know Fox (although perhaps I should, she has written a number of adult books and tons of children’s books), but Fox’s Desperate Characters has been championed by Jonathan Franzen and David Foster Wallace.

Fox sounds like an interesting character (her father was “a writer and a drunk”) and her granddaughter is Courtney Love.  And Zadie asserts that Fox has cultivated self-control and empathy and (in Fox’s own words) “a living interest in all living creatures.”  And in this new collection the interest spreads across fiction, memoir, lecture and essays (with no formal distinction between genres).

Although Zadie is fond of Fox (especially her fiction) she’s harder on Fox the essayist.  She suggests that many of Fox’s essays seem to boil down to the cliché: things were better back then.  But Zadie does make her fiction sound wonderful.  Acocella’s review is similar, saying that no one should start reading Paula Fox with this collection–the reader should go back and start with Fox’s earlier, better works. (more…)

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New Yorker essays about 9/11 after the death of Osama bin Laden (New Yorker, September 24, 2001)

Posted in Ahron Appelfeld, Airlines, Amitav Ghosh, David Foster Wallace, Death, Denis Johnson, Donald Antrim, Essays, Fears, John Updike, Jonathan Franzen, New Yorker, Rebecca Mead, Religion, Roger Angell, Susan Sontag on May 12, 2011| 3 Comments »

[READ: September 24, 2001 & May 9, 2011] Talk of the Town

After 9/11, I read everything about the incident (like the multiple comics that came out).  About a week after 9/11 my friend Al and I went down to Hoboken and absorbed the decay (and I can’t help but wonder if that’s why I’ve developed adult asthma).  My 9/11 story is no more compelling than anyone else’s and may even be far less compelling (you can read a snippet at Al’s blog, should you care to).  Anyhow, when this issue of The New Yorker came out (with the amazing cover that you can’t really see here–the towers are in a shiny black that reflects the light), I read all of these accounts and recollections.

I came upon them again recently when I was doing a New Yorker search for Jonathan Franzen.  I recently read all of his New Yorker entries, but when I saw that he had one that was part of this 9/11 issue, I decided to put it off.  It was reasonably close to the ten-year anniversary of 9/11, and I told myself I’d wait until then to reread and see what I thought.

And then President Obama gave the order to capture and kill Osama bin Laden (hooray!) and that seemed like a far more propitious reason to go back and re-read these articles.  Now I can feel a bit lighter about the whole thing (just a bit, but a bit can be a lot).  And so, here’s a somewhat facile reaction to these reactions.

I’ll preface by saying I can’t imagine what it must have been like to write something, anything at that time.  Some people respond well to pressure and tragedy and perhaps that’s what happened here.  I can’t help but wonder how paralyzing it must have been for other writers (as it was for most people).  So that these writers had the wherewithal to write anything coherent is pretty amazing.  And the fact that the could express the range of emotions that they do is extraordinary. (more…)

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Jonathan Franzen–“Farther Away” (New Yorker, April 18, 2011)

Posted in All Songs Considered, Birds, Books about writers, Daniel Defoe, David Foster Wallace, Death, Essays, Fears, Guitar Player, Harper's, Jonathan Franzen, KEXP 90.3 FM--Seattle, WA, Memoirs, Nature, New Yorker, Orson Scott Card, Sarah Vowell, Smarty Pants, Sonic Youth, Suicide, Thurston Moore, Travel on April 18, 2011| 4 Comments »

SOUNDTRACK: THURSTON MOORE-in studio at KEXP, March 11, 2008 (2008).

This interview was headlined ‘Thurston Moore: Not a “Real Guitar Player”?’ which is pretty funny.  The Sonic Youth guys have been defying conventional guitar playing for years.  And then in 2008 Thurston put out a solo album called Trees Outside the Academy, a beautiful delicate album of acoustic guitar songs.

The interview covers this very subject and concludes that maybe back when they started he wasn’t a guitar player, but now, 25 years later, he certainly is.  Moore is charming and funny and relates a very amusing story about being on the cover of Guitar Player and then embarrassing himself in front of one of his idols.

But this download is all about the songs.  Thurston (and violinist Samara Lubelski–who plays great accompaniment, but doesn’t really get any on air time to speak) play four songs from Trees: “Sliver>Blue,” “The Shape is in a Trance,” “Frozen Gtr” and “Fri/End.”  He sounds great in this setting, especially under close scrutiny.  I’d always assumed that there was a lot of improv in the SY guitar world, so to hear him play these (admittedly not difficult) songs flawlessly is pretty cool.  I actually wondered if he’d be hesitant (he admits the acoustic guitar is a fairly new thing for him), but not at all (although he says he screwed up on a chorus, but I never heard it.

It’s a great set and its fun to hear Thurston so casual.

[READ: April 14, 2011] “Farther Away”

The subtitle of this essay is “‘Robinson Crusoe,’ David Foster Wallace, and the island of solitude.”  As with Franzen’s other recent essays, this one is also about birding.

Franzen explains that he is hot off the work of a book tour (for Freedom) and is looking for some solitude.  He decides to travel by himself to the island of Alejandro Selkirk, a volcanic mass off the coast of Chile.  The island is named after Alexander Selkirk, the Scottish explorer who is considered the basis for Robinson Crusoe.  As such, Franzen decides to travel to the remote island, decompress and read Robinson Crusoe while he’s at it.  The locals call the island Masafuera.

I haven’t read Robinson Crusoe as an adult, so I don’t know the ins and outs of the story.  Franzen has a personal resonance with the story because it was the only novel that meant anything to his father (which must say something about Franzen’s father, no?).  The upshot of what it meant to Franzen’s father was that his father took him and his brother camping a lot as a way to get away from everything.

However, for Franzen, on his first experience of being away from home for a few days (at 16 with a camping group), he had terrible homesickness.  He was only able to deal with the homesickness by writing letters.

When he arrives on Masafuera, Franzen’s writing really takes off.  He has some wonderful prose about this treacherous space.  Although he comes off as something of a yutz for relying on a Google map to learn about the terrain and for bringing an old GPS which has more or less run out of battery. (more…)

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Jonathan Franzen–“Hissing of Summer Lawns” (New Yorker, October 11, 2010)

Posted in All Songs Considered, Essays, Funny (ha ha), Jonathan Franzen, New Yorker, Summer, The Fun Years on January 20, 2011| Leave a Comment »

SOUNDTRACK: THE FUN YEARS-“Breech on the Bowstring” (2010).

This album (with the awesome title), God Was Like, No came in at number 5 on Viking’s Top Ten.  It is a kind of ambient music, except that the notes are a fast staccato instead of long-held notes.  According to the radio show, the band consists of just guitar effects and turntables (another duo!).  In the beginning of the song, it’s impossible to tell which is which with these noises.

The music is quite pretty if slightly unsettling.  Over the 7 minutes of the track, you can feel it building and building, getting louder and louder, without really changing the dynamic all that much (except you can hear more and more details in the music).  Although by the 6 minute mark, the noise tends to overpower the nicer earlier music and the wall of sound become more and more ominous.

It takes a couple of listens, but it gets better and better with each one.

[READ: December 30, 2010] “Hissing of Summer Lawns”

Just when I think I’m done with Franzen, he drags me back in.

This one page anecdote in the Something Borrowed category is actually the shortest of all of them.  It continues with my favorite aspect of Franzen’s writing: his young adulthood.

In this case, he talks about his struggling years, when he would borrow people’s houses.  He house sat for a professor who was on vacation and wanted someone to make sure their son didn’t party while they were away.  The son, who showed up after a couple of days, put Franzen in his place with a blistering stare.

But the main part of the story comes when he agrees to house sit for friends.  His only real duty was to mow their lawn which he immediately neglects to do.  Soon the lawn is out of control.  And worse, when he finally goes to cut the jungle, the lawn had been infected by earth-burrowing hornets. (more…)

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Jonathan Franzen–“Agreeable” (New Yorker, May 31, 2010)

Posted in All Songs Considered, Art Brut, Jonathan Franzen, Violence, Virginity (Loss of) on December 30, 2010| Leave a Comment »

SOUNDTRACK: ART BRUT Live from the 9:30 Club, November 29, 2007 (2007).

I’ve really enjoyed Art Brut’s two albums.  They are funny but they are not jokey.  They also rock really hard with wonderful, angular punk.

Sometimes I’ve felt the albums are a little bit…shall we say…perfect.  They are very tight and polished on record (which actually serves the records very well).  But I wondered what a live show would be like for them.

And I’m delighted to say that their live set is more shambolic than their records.  The shambolicness suits them very well, because they are clearly a lot of fun live.  As you might expect from the vocals on the records, Eddie Argos is practically a ringleader on stage.  He has playful funny banter; I love the way he introduces almost every song with “Are you ready Art Brut?”

I was also quite delighted with the way he introduced every band member with a song that he was the first musician on.  It allowed for spreading out the various interruptions of the music and really kept the flow.

Some of the guitar bits sound muddied (and I have to admit the recording level is a little lower than I would like–or maybe that’s the radio I’m playing it out of), but again, that adds to their punkier stylings.  But my favorite song “My Little Brother” sounds like it’s on fire!  The band plays it magnificent and the bass sounds amazing.  I was surprised that my second favorite song “Formed a Band” was more or less tacked on as a segment of the final track, but it works well in that location.

Perhaps the most surprising thing was the “drum solo” at the very end.  I kept expecting Argos to tell him to knock it off.  It’s a great live show.

The end of the show includes an interview with Eddie Argos and the singer from The Hold Steady (Art Brut opened for them on this tour).  The questions are mostly for The Hold Steady, but there’s enough or an Art Brut fan to keep listening all the way through.

[READ: December 15, 2010] “Agreeable”

So this is the final work that I printed out from the New Yorker by Jonathan Franzen.  And this means that I am done reading short Franzen works (actually, there’s one other piece that was available in Harper’s but I’m going wait on that one for a while).  Starting sometime in 2011, (although not right away) I’m going to begin reading his novels.

So, I assume this story is also excerpted from Freedom.  It concerns the same character as in the previous short story, “Good Neighbors” although she is not yet Patty Berglund.  She is still Patty Emerson and is a jock in high school.  Tying this in to yesterday’s story, Patty was an outcast even in her own family.  She was taller than all of her siblings and was much more athletic and aggressive.  Her mother had little time for her (she loved her artsy other daughters) and her father, a defense attorney, was often too busy for her.

The interesting set up of the story comes when we see her as a young girl.  She is, as mentioned, an outcast in her own family, and it seems that her father is quite a joker, often at her expense.  As a defense attorney, her father deals with many clients who are guilty and he is not above mimicking them to his family.  And this carries over when it comes to Patty as well.  He mocks her intellectual gaffes in front of everyone. And it’s unclear whether this is an odd way of showing love or just a nasty thing to do (well, it is nasty, but it’s unclear if it’s a clumsy attempt at affection). (more…)

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Jonathan Franzen–“Good Neighbors” (New Yorker, June 8 & 15, 2009)

Posted in Jonathan Franzen, Marriage Trouble, Minnesota, New Yorker, Tiny Desk Concert on December 29, 2010| 2 Comments »

SOUNDTRACK: PHOENIX-Tiny Desk Concert #60 (May 18, 2010).

I’m really enjoying these Tiny Desk concerts.  They’re sort of unplugged, but even less so, because they just don’t give the band room enough for more than guitars and small accessories. If you watch the video, you can see that they are literally in someone’s office!

This set comes during Phoenix’s American tour of Wolfganag Amadeus Phoenix.  They play four songs: “Lisztomania” “Armistice” and “1901” from the album.  The big surprise at the end is a cover of Air’s “Playground Love” from The Virgin Suicides.  (I can’t confirm this, but the page notes say that Phoenix (or at least the singer) was involved with the original).  All four songs sound great.  Even though the album is very electronic and very keyboard heavy, these simple stripped down acoustic versions show how wonderful the songs are.  And of course “Playground Love” is a wonderfully unexpected treat.

[READ: December 14, 2010] “Good Neighbors”

This is one of the final two pieces by Franzen that are from the New Yorker.  This (and the other) is a short story that I am fairly certain is an excerpt from Freedom.  I believe that the main character of this piece is in Freedom, but I don’t know if this passage (or story arc) is in the book.  (I’ll be reading Freedom sometime in 2011).

It’s nice to get back to Franzen’s fiction after reading so much of his non-fiction; I am forever more of a fan of fiction than non-.  This story is about Patty Berglund and her family.  They were the first white family to move to the Ramsey Hill section of St. Paul, Minn.   Despite the abuse that her family took, they stuck it out and built up their home, investing their life into it and the community.

Slowly, the neighborhood grew more affluent (ie., white).  Yet for all of Patty’s pioneering work, she was never widely embraced by the new community members.   She was accepted, of course, and people wouldn’t say anything bad about her, but she never opened up enough  for people to feel they really knew her.

And that may be the moral of the story. (more…)

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Jonathan Franzen–“Emptying the Skies” (New Yorker, July 26, 2010)

Posted in Birds, Canadian Music, Culture Shock, Death, Essays, Futility, Jonathan Franzen, Nature, New Yorker, Tokyo Police Club on December 24, 2010| Leave a Comment »

SOUNDTRACK: TOKYO POLICE CLUB-“Bambi” (2010).

I loved the first couple of Tokyo Police Club albums, but I missed this one when it came out.  My friend Al said it was one of his favorite albums of the year and that this song was one of his favorite songs.

I was disconcerted when I started listening to this because TPC is all about short, heavy, punk blasts of music.  And this song starts with…keyboards.

But it’s clear that this is still TPC, just with new bits and pieces added.  The keyboards are strangely out of pitch–they sound off somehow–and they add these bizarre little accents to this super catchy song.  The aggressive punk guitars are gone, but the attitude remains and this is a fantastic tune. One that I’ll listen to a lot more.

[READ: December 8, 2010] “Emptying the Skies”

I didn’t think it would happen, but I reached my Franzen saturation point with this article.  This is his third article about the disappearance of birds.  Originally, these articles came several years apart, so they wouldn’t seem so overwhelming.  But reading them all within a few days of each other, I’ve about had it with the doom and gloom.

These articles are devoid of Franzen’s usually charm and wit.  Obviously, a story about the disappearance of the earth’s birds should not have charm and wit, so he did his job well.  But man, I’m overwhelmed by the devastation of Europe’s migration paths.

The essay looks at three Mediterranean countries and their (reprehensible) attitudes towards birds: Cyprus, Malta and Italy. (more…)

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Jonathan Franzen–“The Way of the Puffin” (New Yorker, April 21, 2008)

Posted in Belle and Sebastian, Birds, Consumerism, Culture Shock, Essays, Futility, History, Jonathan Franzen, Nature, New Yorker, Travel on December 21, 2010| Leave a Comment »

SOUNDTRACK:BELLE AND SEBASTIAN-Live in Glasgow, TODAY! December 21 at 4PM eastern: NPR simulcast (2010).

It’s very rare that I have news before it happens, especially on this blog. But I do. Today at 4PM Eastern time, NPR is simulcasting Belle and Sebastian’s live show from Glasgow.

I don’t know if it will be downloadable (I do know that I am at work…boo!).  But I have to assume it will be pretty great.

Get details here.

[READ: December 6, 2010] “The Way of the Puffin”

After a few years away from lengthy New Yorker articles, Franzen returns with this 13 page (!) article about China.  The last article that we saw from Franzen was about his birding passion.  That passion has not subsided at all, and his co-passion of environmentalism is what sends him across the globe to the Yangtze Delta.

Franzen receives a Puffin-shaped golf club head cover, which he finds quite adorable.  But when he sees that it’s made in China, he wonders about the environmental impact of this adorable item.  He calls the company that makes the puffins (Daphne’s Headcovers), and is told that they use environmentally conscientious Chinese labor.  She also tells a (heartwarming) story about karma and how a good deed will get repaid manifold.  She tells Franzen about the workers in China and invites him to go check them out.  This leads to Franzen’s most “reporter”-like piece, and probably his least personal.

At first I wasn’t that interested in the piece.  I feared it was going to be a long slog through environmental degradation and depression.  And while it was that, Franzen also humanizes the story through the efforts of that rarest of birds: the Chinese environmentalist. (more…)

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Jonathan Franzen–“My Bird Problem” (New Yorker, August 8 & 15, 2005)

Posted in "Weird Al" Yankovic, All Songs Considered, Birds, Death, Essays, Jonathan Franzen, Marriage Trouble, New Yorker, Phoenix, Public Image Ltd, Radiohead, Sharon Van Etten, Superchunk, The New Pornographers, Tom Waits, Unlikable main character on December 16, 2010| 1 Comment »

SOUNDTRACK: NPR Live Concerts from All Songs Considered (Podcasts).

For a couple of months now I have been exploring the All Songs Considered Podcasts.  I recently stumbled upon a link to a whole slew of Live Recordings that are available for free.  All of them are available for listening and most of them are available for downloading.

Some of the recordings seem to be acoustic in-studio sessions that last about 15 minutes (called the Tiny Desk Concerts), but there are many which are full concerts recorded from the soundboard.  I happened upon this site because of a 2008 Radiohead show which runs just over 2 hours.  Some other full concerts (most of which are recorded at the 9:30 club in Washington D.C. include: Superchunk, Dinosaur Jr., New Pornographers, Public Image Ltd., Tom Waits, and a whole bunch of shows from SXSW.  The Tiny Desk shows include “Weird Al” Yankovic, Phoenix and my new discovery Sharon Van Etten.  And there’s even videos of many of the shows, too.

I’m pretty excited to have discovered this, as there are a surprising number of great shows available here (as I’m scrolling to the bottom of the list, I keep finding more and more bands that I like).  And all you need is to download iTunes to hear them (and if you’re a geek like me, you download Audacity and insert track numbers for ease of cataloging).

[READ: November 21, 2010] “My Bird Problem”

Of all of the Franzen non-fiction pieces that I’ve read, this one has been my least favorite.  And one of the reasons for that is that it made me feel kind of uncomfortable.   Not because of the main content of the article (bird watching) but because of some of the personal information that he (as per usual) included in the article.

The first uncomfortable part concerns his at-the-time-wife.  It feels the like he is including information that seems like he would have needed her permission to write (especially since we know who he is and therefore know who she is,  I can’t believe she would give it).

The second thing was just how misanthropic Franzen is.  When he goes out into the woods to look for birds, he finds that the mere awareness of other people sends him into a fury.  (“Oh no, were those human voices coming up behind us?”).  And while I’ve certainly felt like that, to see it in print and to see it so often is more than a little unsettling. (more…)

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Jonathan Franzen–“The Retreat” (New Yorker, June 6, 2005)

Posted in Dar Williams, Drugs, Essays, Funny (ha ha), Jonathan Franzen, New Yorker, Nostalgia, Religion on December 10, 2010| 1 Comment »

SOUNDTRACK: DAR WILLIAMS-“Teen for God” (2005).

Dar Wiliams has a new disc in which she revisits her old songs (by herself and with guests) and which includes a bonus Greatest Hits disc.  I have listened only once to the disc, but it includes this song which fits perfectly with this story.

Williams has always been an excellent lyricist.  Her rhymes are strong and her descriptions and ideas are first-rate.  Normally, her songs are emotional and intimate, although this one is less so.  It’s serious and funny at the same time.

It begins with a teen at the Peach Branch Horse and Bible Camp where she’ll “pray for the sinners and their drunken car wrecks and vow that I’ll never get high or have sex.”  It’s interesting to compare this song and the implications of the teens for God circa 2005 vs what Franzen is talking about circa the early 1970s.  And it’s fascinating, and rather depressing frankly, how much more conservative times have gotten since then.

What really sells “Teen for God” are the final few verses, where we realize that we shouldn’t take too much of what the teens pledge to be long-lasting (like so many things that teens believe). “You gotta help me, God. Help me know four years from now I won’t believe in you anyhow and I’ll mope around the campus and I’ll feel betrayed all those guilty summers I stayed”

And all of this existential religiousness is set to a perky folk rock song.  The “Teen for God” chorus hits a perfect delayed chord, and is a wonderful singalong.  Perhaps even at a campfire.  On a retreat.

[READ: November 18, 2010] “The Retreat”

This essay is about Franzen’s childhood (always a good source for his stories) when he joined the hippie “Fellowship” at First Congregational Church.  Franzen is older than I am by a  few years, so a lot of things that he writes about from his childhood are things that I knew a little about or caught the tail end of.  So, in this case, I recall my church having Saturday night folk masses, where everyone played acoustic guitars.  I loved it and my parents hated it; when I recently asked a neighbor if they still do that she laughed at me and said they’d stopped it like 25 years ago.  Which explains a lot.

Anyhow, the article discusses an upcoming retreat that the ninth graders would be taking with the other older Fellowship students.  Franzen was a big fish in the 8th grade Fellowship but was a little nervous about the older group.  He loved retreats and wanted to go but didn’t think his parents would approve.  Luckily for him, his parents were in Europe at the time.  [This seems to be some kind of thing that parents did in the 70s–go to Europe for an extended period while the kids stayed home.  My parents never did, mind you, but some seemed to.] (more…)

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