Feeds:
Posts
Comments

Archive for the ‘Authors’ Category

James Joyce–Ulysses 17-18 [audiobook 2013–Donal Donnelly and Miriam Healy-Louie]

Posted in Dublin, Ireland, Irish Writer, James Joyce, Language, Marriage Trouble, Prostitution, Sex, Toilets, Word usage on September 27, 2010| Leave a Comment »

[LISTENED TO: Week of September 20, 2010] Ulysses 17-18

The final two Episodes of the Ulysses audio book were a mix of nothing new and massive revelations.

Episode 17, the catechism, doesn’t reveal all that much in the reading.  It’s a fairly straightforward Episode, so there’s not very much in the actual reading that would impact it.  One or two things do become somewhat clearer with the audible emphases but questions like this one are still a beast to unpack:

What counterproposals were alternately advanced, accepted, modified, declined, restated in other terms, reaccepted, ratified, reconfirmed?

Although in Episode 18, Molly says:

he says hes an author and going to be a university professor of Italian and Im to take lessons what is he driving at now

So I guess the Italian lessons plan is settled?  Which gives us some account of Stephen’s future.

But back in 17, this time through I became more aware of the

interment of Mrs Mary Dedalus, born Goulding, 26 June 1903.

So Stephen has been “in mourning” for almost a year.  Is that standard for Ireland at the time?  And how interesting it is that

Rudolph Bloom (Rudolf Virag) died on the evening of the 27 June 1886.

Their parents died on almost the exact same date (different years, obviously).  This is another interesting similarity that is not directly mentioned in the Q&A. (more…)

Read Full Post »

Nell Freudenberger–“An Arranged Marriage” (New Yorker, September 6, 2010)

Posted in 20 Under 40, Barenaked Ladies, Marriage (Happy), Nell Freudenberger, New Yorker, Public Enemy, Religion, Short Story, Travel, Virginity (Loss of) on September 25, 2010| Leave a Comment »

SOUNDTRACK: BARENAKED LADIES-“Fight the Power” (1993).

Public Enemy’s “Fight the Power” is one of the greatest anthems of the late 80s and 90s.  It’s got everything: noise, strength, rebellion great lyrics and Chuck D.  So, what can five white Canadians do with it?

Well, they keep the intensity of the song very strong–even in an acoustic setting–by overloading their version with a whole mess of music.  Between the noisy piano, the occasional sound effects and the fantastic noisy drumming, they manage to really capture what a great “song” this is (as opposed to being a powerful anthem and protest).  Divorced from the awesome cacophony of the original, you realize that it’s really catchy, too.

BNL are usually goofy, and they do put a bit of nonsense in the song (during the Elvis was a hero to most section).  And they clean up one of the words, with a great twist (changing “motherfuck” to David Duke” in “David Duke him and John Wayne).

BNL has been performing this song for years.  Their first version appeared on The Yellow Tape [1991] (a much simpler version with drums, bass and two vocals).  But this version (which as far as I can tell only appears on the Coneheads soundtrack, ugh) is really solid and (aside from the fact that nobody’s voice could ever compare to Chuck D’s) sounds like an good Unplugged version of the track.

[READ: September 14, 2010] “An Arranged Marriage”

Freudenberger is one of the New Yorker‘s 20 Under 40.  I have to say I was (unfairly) surprised that a story written by a woman named Freudenberger was about a woman named Amina who lived in Bangladesh.

Nevertheless, the story was a good one and was an interesting twist on the concept of the titular arranged marriage.  Amina meets George online at AsianEuro.com (after having met several men who were not what they said they were).  Amina (and her parents) had always planned for her to move to America.  Somehow.   She had considered applying for a college degree, but found that even that was prohibitively expensive.  So why not, as the Voice of America radio suggested, find a mate? (more…)

Read Full Post »

Wells Tower–”Love in the Ruins” (Outside, March 2007)

Posted in Alexisonfire, Biking, Canadian Music, City and Colour, Corporate skewering, Death, Natural Disasters, Nazis, Outside, Wells Tower on September 24, 2010| Leave a Comment »

SOUNDTRACK: CITY AND COLOUR-Live @ The Orange Lounge EP (2010).

City and Colour is Dallas Green from Alexisonfire (he’s the one with the good singing voice as opposed to the screamy guy).

This EP contains 6 songs, 4 from his last album Bring me Your Love and the 2 hits from his first album Sometimes.

As with his previous live release [Live CD/DVD], he sings these songs solo.  Each song is done on acoustic guitar.  But unlike that Live album, this disc does not appear to have been recorded in front of an audience.  There is no cheering, no banter, just him and his guitar.

If you’re a fan of Green (and you really like his voice) this is a great release.  There are several spots where he sings in if not acapella, then with very quiet musical accompaniment so his voice is pretty naked.  This is a limited edition EP (apparently) but it’s a really good introduction to the man and his music.

I must say though that I never noticed just how obsessed with death he is!  This recording style really highlights all the times he says death or dead.  Huh.

[READ: September 12, 2010] “Love in the Ruins”

This was the darkest of all of Wells Tower’s Outside magazine pieces.  And although it has some humor, for the most part it was a sad lost-love letter to a city that he once knew.

One year after Hurricane Katrina, Tower went back to New Orlenas to ride his bike.  He had lived in New Orleans for a short time before Katrina hit and he used to ride his bike for long stretches across the Mississippi River levee.  He decided to revisit it to see what it was like after the disaster. (more…)

Read Full Post »

Wells Tower–”My Kushy New Job” (GQ, August 2010)

Posted in Canadian Music, Corner Gas, Craig Northey, Drugs, Essays, Fears, GQ, Odds, The Kids in the Hall, Travel, Wells Tower on September 23, 2010| Leave a Comment »

SOUNDTRACK: Odds-nest (1996).

My friend Amber from Vancouver copied this disc onto cassette for me sometime around when it came out.   I had heard “Heterosexual Man” when it was a minor novelty hit in the early 90s, but Amber wanted me to hear more from this Vancouver band.

Since the Odds dissolved, Craig Northey has become a proficient soundtrack man (Corner Gas, Kids in the Hall, and much more). But back in the 90s, Northey was simply put, a great pop songwriter (his bandmate Steven Drake was no slouch either).

“Someone Who’s Cool” is a fantastic song that should have been huge: powerful pop with a hint of 90’s rock added to keep it from being treacly.  And, of course, Northey’s voice is great.  There’s nothing particularly notable about it: it’s not whiny or deep or twangy or anything, it’s just a good singing voice (which is kind of unusual these days).

“Make You Mad” and “Hurt Me” have really catchy opening guitar riffs (and are a bit heavier than “Cool,” and yet they feature choruses that are full of harmonies and sing alongs.

“Tears & Laughter” has a jagged, wild guitar sound that, while not overtly heavy or anything, really rocks on this disc. “Nothing Beautiful” should have been a huge indie rock hit, but maybe it was too polished for indie cred.  It’s a great minor key song with, yes, a very catchy chorus.

This was the final Odds record.  It’s a solid collection of songs.  Of course, the band has recently sort of reunited as the New Odds, so we’ve not heard the last from them.

[READ: September 11, 2010] “My Kushy New Job”

This article sees Wells Tower heading off to Amsterdam for a crash course in learning to sell drugs.  He is assigned a two-week job as a dealer in a Dutch coffeeshop.

I’ve been to Amsterdam and I checked out a coffeeshop while I was there, but this article provides more information than I ever knew about them (and suggests that they are trying to spruce up their image since then). It seems that the selling of pot in Amsterdam is still a nebulous area, legally.

Shops can only have a certain amount of supply on hand (which means that most stores have offsite premises where they keep their extra stash; they house more than the legal amount and are therefore illegal.  And, technically, the people who transport the stash from offsite to onsite can be arrested up until the moment they enter the shop.  Customers can only by a small amount at time and, strangely enough, coffeshops cannot advertise (more on this later).

Tower finds the whole experience to be far less “woah, cool man” than everyone who hears about the job thinks it will be.  First, he finds that the buyers are really intense (and don’t appreciate how long it takes him to measure a gram of hash).  But by the end, he finds most of them to be simply rude and a little dead inside. (more…)

Read Full Post »

Shane Jones–Light Boxes (2009)

Posted in Books about music, Boredom, Canadian Content, Canadian Music, David Foster Wallace, Fears, Funny (ha ha), Funny (strange), Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Italo Calvino, J.K. Rowling, Odds, Richard Brautigan, Short Books, Supernatural, The Kids in the Hall on September 22, 2010| Leave a Comment »

SOUNDTRACK: ODDS-Bedbugs (1993).

This CD features the minor “novelty” hit “Heterosexual Man” (the video featured some of the Kids in the Hall in it).

This disc feels like a big step forward from their first disc.  It isn’t radically different, but it feels more accomplished and maybe more confident.

The bluesy tracks feel bluesier (“Car Crash Love”), the rocking tracks feel more rocking (“The Little Death”) and the acoustic songs feels more substantial (“What I Don’t Want”/”Fingertips”) with really nice harmonies.

And of course, there’s “Heterosexual Man” a great, funny rocker with a fantastic sing-along chorus.  Odds are still doing poppy, slightly alternative rock, but they’ve simply gotten better at it.

[READ: September 13 2010] Light Boxes

I received this book from the Penguin Mini at BEA.  It’s been sitting on my shelf tempting me since then and I decided that I would give it a read (even though I am anxious to start the two books that are next on my list).  Well, it was certainly a good book to read first as it is even shorter (and faster) than its tiny size suggests (it’s 150 pages).

I’d never heard of Shane Jones before (he’s a poet and this is his first novel), but the premise sounded so intriguing: a small town is experiencing perpetual February (going on some 900 days now).  It is cold and dark and depressing and for many, sunlight is but a distant memory.

And plotwise, the story is interesting: a spirit/god/being (let’s call him February) is playing tricks on the townsfolk to keep them in this state of February.  He convinces them that someone in town (let’s call him February) is causing the perpetual cold.  He also seems to be inspiring the town’s children to go missing.  And all of this is a punishment for men’s attempts at flight: kites, balloons, even birds are now verboten (and the priests enforce the rule). (more…)

Read Full Post »

Wells Tower–”The Tuber” (Oustide, April 2009)

Posted in Dromedary Records, Essays, Futility, John Cheever, Nature, Outside, The Mommyheads, Travel, Van Halen, Wells Tower on September 21, 2010| Leave a Comment »

SOUNDTRACK: THE MOMMYHEADS-“Needmore, PA” (2010).

This is the first single from The Mommyheads’ new Dromedary release Finest Specimens.  The album (which is sort of a greatest hits, but not) comes out next month, but until then you can hear th is new track at a number of places, including the blog largehearted boy (which has all kinds of cool free listens on it).

This is a 7 minute (live) track.  It opens with some cool keyboards.  They feature what I’ve come to think of as Mommyheads style, in which the bass and guitars (or in this case keyboards) play different things that seem unrelated but which work together.  A great chorus pulls it all together.

This live song has about 3 minutes of instrumental jamminess at the end.  It doesn’t really help the memorableness of the song (as you’ve long forgotten the catchy “That’s right” hook by the end of it), but man they sound great jamming together like that: a tight, psychedelic freakout that just builds in coolness.  It’s almost like two songs in one.

[READ: September 11, 2010] “The Tuber”

This essay is about Wells Tower riding the rivers of Southern Florida in a tube.  It’s also about John Cheever’s “The Swimmer.”

One of the things that I like about Wells Tower is that even in his non-fiction, he ties things together with literary substance.  And so, he sets up this adventure as a twisted take on Cheever’s Neddy Merrill swimming the 8 miles of swimming pools in suburban New York: Tower wants to try to tube the rivers of Florida all the way down to the Gulf of Mexico. (more…)

Read Full Post »

James Joyce–Ulysses 16 (1922) [audiobook 2013–Donal Donnelly and Miriam Healy-Louie]

Posted in Big Books, Donal Donnelly, Drinking, Funny (ha ha), Funny (strange), History, Irish Writer, James Joyce, Marriage Trouble, Miriam Healy-Louie, Prostitution, Sex on September 20, 2010| 1 Comment »

[LISTENED TO: Week of September 13, 2010] Ulysses

Episode 15 is a huge one, so I finished up that and 16 this week.

One thing I noted about Episode 15 is that in this section:

THE VOICE OF ALL THE DAMNED Htengier Tnetopinmo Dog Drol eht rot, Aiulella!
(From on high the voice of Adonai calls.)
ADONAI Dooooooooooog!
THE VOICE OF ALL THE BLESSED Alleluia, for the Lord God Omnipotent reigneth!
(From on high the voice of Adonai calls.)
ADONAI Goooooooooood!

the texts that are printed backwards are played as the forward recording flipped in reverse.  It was a cool effect.

I really didn’t enjoy Episode 16 while I was reading it.  I felt it was overly long and perhaps too focused on the mis-named sailor.  Plus, I was really looking forward to Episode 17 (which is my favorite).  But this time, with someone else reading the hard words, I was able to appreciate quite a lot more about this Episode.

Lar’s comments about Skin-the Goat also helped to give some background to this odd character.  And this leads me to a question that I sort of thought about while reading, but which comes up a lot more for me in this listen:  Joyce’s opinion of Ireland and of Irish independence.  The Citizen in the earlier episode was all about the Irish language and Gaelic sports.  And now in this Episode there is a lot of talk about Parnell returning.  Was this all included because it is what old men in Dublin talked in Dublin in 1904, or was it something that Joyce had a vested interest in (even while he was living in Paris where he wrote the book).  [I could investigate this, but that seems like an awful lot of work.] (more…)

Read Full Post »

Lincoln Park–Handle Time (2008)

Posted in Canadian Music, Corporate skewering, Funky Web Sites, Funny (ha ha), Lincoln Park, Luther Wright & The Wrongs, Office Space, Short Books, Steve Martin, Work on September 19, 2010| Leave a Comment »

SOUNDTRACK: LUTHER WRIGHT AND THE WRONGS-instrumentality (2006).

I loved Luther’s Rebuild the Wall, and I kind of thought of him as country, but not really country.  A sort of punky country (his song “Broken Fucking Heart” lead me in that direction, too).

But this album is all instrumentals (hence the title) and it’s very traditional bluegrass/banjo-fueled tracks.   Eleven tracks in all (totaling about 22 minutes).  There’s even a cover of “Yankee Doodle Dandy.”  Listening to this I realized that I like banjo music (not as my favorite type mind you, but certainly more than a little).  Steve Martin (an excellent banjoist himself) once said:

“You just can’t sing a depressing song when you’re playing the banjo. You can’t go– [grins, plays and sings] “Oh, murder and death and grief and sorrow!”

And there’s something to be said for that.  With this fun collection of mostly 2 minutes songs, you’ll smile for twenty minutes or so.  (And the playing is top notch, too).

[READ: September 11, 2010] Handle Time

When I wrote about One Night @ the Call Center, several readers said I must read Handle Time, that it was the consummate Call Center novel and that it was much better than One Night.  So I tried to find it.  No libraries in New Jersey carried it.  And although I could get it at Amazon, there was precious little other information about it.  Well, I finally decided to add it to our library collection (so I didn’t have to pay for it) and to read it for myself.

My first surprise came when the first line of the text has the word embarrassed written in a super large font.  The font is so large in fact that it put a pretty sizable space between the lines of text (that’s called leading).  My second surprise came when I saw that littered throughout the text were a whole bunch of large words and crazy fonts and a bunch of clip art pictures that showed what was happening.  (I was especially surprised when one of them turned out to be Mr Burns from The Simpsons!).

So it turns out that there are different fonts throughout the book, some of them large and crazy, others fancy and scripty.  But the long and short of it is that this book is really only about 50 pages long (I mean I read the entire 188 pages in about 2 hours).

Okay, but what about the content.  Well the plot itself is fairly brief.  Chase gets a job at a call center.  She sits through orientation, begins working, gets demoralized and has a panic attack about her job.  That’s pretty much it.  But really what you read the book for is for the side bits, the comments, the snark, the sympathizing with call center workers.

Except that I’ve never worked in a call center and yet I have experienced many of the things in the novel.  So, this book, much loved by call center workers, could be about pretty much any shit job (except for the part about keeping your numbers up (and the part about not actually helping people because it skews your average handle time)).  But bad cafeterias, microwaves, bizarre HR nonsense, stupid powerpoints, they’re part of any corporate job.  And she does a good job in skewering them, they’re just not specific to call centers.   (more…)

Read Full Post »

Wells Tower–”The Thing with Feathers” (Outside, March 2006)

Posted in Dromedary Records, Essays, Gene Sparling, Ivory-Billed Woodpecker, Nature, NPR/PRI/PBS, Outside, The Mommyheads, Wells Tower on September 18, 2010| Leave a Comment »

SOUNDTRACK: THE MOMMYHEADS-“Day Job” (2010).

This is the final bonus track on Dromedary‘s recently reissued Mommyheads album Flying Suit.

This is probably the most conventional Mommyheads song that I know of.  It reminds me a lot of the music from Late Night with David Letterman.  It swings, it’s jaunty, it’s kind of funny and it has some almost zany guitar work on it.

It is probably the ideal “bonus track” for a band that usually writes quirky, off -kilter songs as it doesn’t sound like it should be on the album, but it is still in the spirit of the rest of the songs.  The jazziness if reminiscent of their other work, but there’s something oddly rocking about this track.  It’s a real treat.

Check the songs out (and buy them) here.

[READ: September 10, 2010] “The Thing with Feathers”

Wells Tower week continues with this article about the thought to be extinct Ivory-Billed Woodpecker.  He mentions humorously in the article that NPR went crazy about the woodpecker when one was seen in Arkansas, and I remember that very well.  There were several pieces about the woodpecker and I was really excited about it.

Hairy Woodpecker

I’m not a serious birdwatcher, but ever since I saw my first hairy woodpecker at my apartment in Boston, I’ve been a huge fan of having birds around. The hairy woodpecker is tiny (and very cute).  Since we moved to a wooded area of New Jersey, I’ve been lucky enough to see a red-bellied woodpecker and, I believe, the even more elusive pileated woodpecker.  We’ve even had flickers in our yard.

So this article sees Wells Tower heading down to Arkansas to talk to the man who claims to have seen the first Ivory-Billed Woodpecker, Gene Sparling.  The man who caused all the fuss to begin with back in 2005.

And this is a great piece of non-fiction.  Tower brings his excellent storytelling skills and describes a trip into the Arkansas woods looking for this possibly extinct bird. (more…)

Read Full Post »

Wells Tower–”Cannery Woe” (Outside, November 2005)

Posted in Dromedary Records, Essays, Nature, New Yorker, Outside, The Mommyheads, Travel, Wells Tower, Yuck! on September 17, 2010| Leave a Comment »

SOUNDTRACK: MOMMYHEADS-“Over” (2010).

Dromedary has recently reissued The Mommyheads’ Flying Suit CD.  And there are three bonus tracks available on it now.

I mentioned Flying Suit a little while ago.  What I really liked about that disc was that it was all over the place and yet remained comfortably within its genre of jangle pop-rock.

This first of three new tracks is just under 2 minutes long.  It has a watery guitar and a propulsive bass, and yet it is still a sort of delicate song.  The vocals, as with the rest of the disc, are soft, with nice harmonies.  It’s hard to get overly excited about the song (as it’s not like a sonic blast of 2 minutes), but it’s nice to have even more Mommyheads.

Bonus track number 2 tomorrow.  Check the songs out (and buy them) here.

[READ: September 9, 2010] “Cannery Woe”

Since I recently read the Wells Tower story in the New Yorker, I remembered that I was going to read his other travel stories from Outside.  I started with this one because it is shortest (1 page).

Tower has a wonderful grasp of storytelling. So even a fairly simple story like this (where really nothing terrible happens) is made quite exciting. And the twist, such as it was, is totally unexpected. (more…)

Read Full Post »

« Newer Posts - Older Posts »