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Susanna Harutyunyan–“God Has Passed Through Here” [Armenia] (translated by Shushan Avagyan) [The 2021 Short Story Advent Calendar #14] (2007/translation 2018)

Posted in Alberto Manguel, Armenia, Canadian Content, Christmas, Death, Hingston & Olsen, Religion, Short Story, Shushan Avagyan, Supernatural, Susanna Harutyunyan, The Short Story Advent Calendar on December 14, 2021| Leave a Comment »

SOUNDTRACK:  hiatus

[READ: December 14, 2021] “God Has Passed Through Here”

This year, S. ordered me The Short Story Advent Calendar.  This is my seventh time reading the Calendar.  The 2021 Short Story Advent Calendar is a deluxe box set of individually bound short stories.

As always, each story is a surprise, so you won’t know what you’re getting until you crack the seal every morning starting December 1. Once you’ve read that day’s story, check this link where editor Alberto Manguel is providing daily commentary on each of the stories he selected for this year’s calendar.

This is a dark story.  As Manguel notes:

The vast shadow of the Armenian Genocide, when a million ethnic Armenians were murdered in the Ottoman Empire during World War I, hangs over every Armenian writer today.

In this story a young girl is to be inspected by The Europeans.

The story starts kind of amusingly with The Europeans having a very hard time getting to the Armenian village:

In about twenty minutes, when the highway ends and we turns right.  Then we’ll take the first side road, it’s about fifteen minutes long, after which… No we won’t come to the village yet…but it will be closer. (more…)

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Mia Couto–“The Marine House” [Mozambique] (translated by David Brookshaw) [The 2021 Short Story Advent Calendar #9] (1997/translation 2021[that’s what it says])

Posted in Alberto Manguel, Canadian Content, Christmas, David Brookshaw, Hingston & Olsen, Mia Couto, Mozambique, Short Story, The Short Story Advent Calendar on December 9, 2021| Leave a Comment »

SOUNDTRACK:  hiatus

[READ: December 9, 2021] “The Marine House”

This year, S. ordered me The Short Story Advent Calendar.  This is my seventh time reading the Calendar.  The 2021 Short Story Advent Calendar is a deluxe box set of individually bound short stories.

As always, each story is a surprise, so you won’t know what you’re getting until you crack the seal every morning starting December 1. Once you’ve read that day’s story, check this link where editor Alberto Manguel is providing daily commentary on each of the stories he selected for this year’s calendar.

This is the story of a young person being enamored with an old hermit named Tiane Kumadzi.

The narrator’s parents said to avoid this strange man, but the narrator loved that Tiane saw signs from the world beyond.

One day Grandad Tiane tossed the narrator a piece of wood–it’s what he’d been looking for, he said.  The narrator started looking for more wood and son enough Tiane built a boat==a boat that could walk on water.

The villagers were horrified by this abomination and decided to set fire to it.

The fire seemed to make the villagers drunk–was the wood covered in poison?  And when the smoke cleared, the boat was still intact.

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Homer–“Ulysses and the Cyclops” [Greece] (translator Alexander Pope) [The 2021 Short Story Advent Calendar #5] (8th century B.C,/translated 1725)

Posted in Alberto Manguel, Alexander Pope, Canadian Content, Christmas, Cyclops, Death, Greece, Hingston & Olsen, Homer, Sheep, Short Story, The Short Story Advent Calendar, Violence on December 5, 2021| Leave a Comment »

SOUNDTRACK:  hiatus

[READ: December 5, 2021] “Ulysses and the Cyclops”

This year, S. ordered me The Short Story Advent Calendar.  This is my seventh time reading the Calendar.  The 2021 Short Story Advent Calendar is a deluxe box set of individually bound short stories.

As always, each story is a surprise, so you won’t know what you’re getting until you crack the seal every morning starting December 1. Once you’ve read that day’s story, check this link where editor Alberto Manguel is providing daily commentary on each of the stories he selected for this year’s calendar.

Obviously Homer is a classic–the classic–poet.  But it seemed an odd choice to pick Homer (from B.C. days) when surely there was a more recent Greek writer who deserved some attention.

I’ve read The Odyssey at least three times.  However, I’ve never read it in verse form.   And I found this form to be very challenging.  I was certainly glad I knew the story already. (more…)

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Marcel Aymé–“The State of Grace” [France] (translator Norman Denny) [The 2021 Short Story Advent Calendar #4] (1947/translated 1947)

Posted in Alberto Manguel, Canadian Content, Christmas, France, Funny (ha ha), Hingston & Olsen, Marcel Aymé, Norman Denny, Prostitution, Religion, Seven deadly sins, Sex, Short Story, The Short Story Advent Calendar on December 4, 2021| Leave a Comment »

SOUNDTRACK:  hiatus

[READ: December 4, 2021] “The State of Grace”

This year, S. ordered me The Short Story Advent Calendar.  This is my seventh time reading the Calendar.  The 2021 Short Story Advent Calendar is a deluxe box set of individually bound short stories.

As always, each story is a surprise, so you won’t know what you’re getting until you crack the seal every morning starting December 1. Once you’ve read that day’s story, check this link where editor Alberto Manguel is providing daily commentary on each of the stories he selected for this year’s calendar.

This story was funny but also had a moral.

Set in 1939, we meet the best Christian in all of Rue Gabrielle and indeed all Montmartre.   Monsieur Duperrier was “a man of such piety, uprightness and charity that God, without awaiting his death… crowned his head with never left it by day or by night.”

He was grateful, of course, but his modesty did not allow him to show it off in public.  However, his wife did have to look at it and she was filled with resentment and exasperation.  She was afraid of what others would think of him if they saw him like that, so she encouraged him to sin a little but to lose the halo. (more…)

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Dubravka Ugresic–“Lend Me Your Character” (Crotia) (translator Celia Hawkesworth) [The 2021 Short Story Advent Calendar #2] (1983/translated 1992)

Posted in Alberto Manguel, Atsushi Nakajima, Canadian Content, Celia Hawkesworth, Christmas, Croatia, Dubravka Ugrešić, Funny (ha ha), Hingston & Olsen, Meta, Paul McCarthy, Short Story, The Short Story Advent Calendar on December 2, 2021| Leave a Comment »

SOUNDTRACK:  hiatus

[READ: December 2, 2021] “Lend Me Your Character”

This year, S. ordered me The Short Story Advent Calendar.  This is my seventh time reading the Calendar.  The 2021 Short Story Advent Calendar is a deluxe box set of individually bound short stories.

As always, each story is a surprise, so you won’t know what you’re getting until you crack the seal every morning starting December 1. Once you’ve read that day’s story, check this link where editor Alberto Manguel is providing daily commentary on each of the stories he selected for this year’s calendar.

This story was probably my favorite of the collection.

It was meta- and funny with a feminist slant and a perverse kind of sexuality throughout. (more…)

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Atsushi Nakajima–“The Moon over the Mountain” [Japan] (translator Paul McCarthy) [The 2021 Short Story Advent Calendar #1] (1942/translated 2011)

Posted in Alberto Manguel, Atsushi Nakajima, Canadian Content, Christmas, Hingston & Olsen, Huh?, Japan, Paul McCarthy, Poets, Short Story, The Short Story Advent Calendar, Tigers, Translation on December 1, 2021| Leave a Comment »

SOUNDTRACK:  hiatus

[READ: December 1, 2021] “The Moon over the Mountain”

This year, S. ordered me The Short Story Advent Calendar.  This is my seventh time reading the Calendar.  The 2021 Short Story Advent Calendar is a deluxe box set of individually bound short stories.

As always, each story is a surprise, so you won’t know what you’re getting until you crack the seal every morning starting December 1. Once you’ve read that day’s story, check this link where editor Alberto Manguel is providing daily commentary on each of the stories he selected for this year’s calendar. (more…)

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Primo Levi–“Bear Meat” (New Yorker, January 8, 2007)

Posted in Alessandra Bastagli, Mountain Climbing, New Yorker, Primo Levi, Short Story on August 11, 2021| Leave a Comment »

SOUNDTRACK:  BEN HOWARD-Tiny Desk (Home) Concert #245 (August 9, 2021).

I don’t really know who Ben Howard is.  he is not one of “The Bens” (that was Ben Folds, Ben Kweller and Ben Lee).  For this Tiny Desk (Home) Concert it’s just him and his guitars.  But the blurb suggests the album these songs are from is quite different.

Having spent time with Collections from the Whiteout, Ben Howard’s sonically adventurous fourth album, I was curious to see how he would adapt these songs to the Tiny Desk (home) concert format. So when the opening shot shows Ben in a room alone, an acoustic guitar in hand, it was both an “oh yeah!” and an “uh-oh” moment. Gone were all those textures that he, Aaron Dessner, and a load of talented musicians had worked on, but front and center was that delicate, reflective voice that I love. It’s a voice that, in the recent past, was often swarming in effects and buried in reverb.

Ben plays four songs.  The first, “Follies Fixtures” is on acoustic guitar.

So as Ben Howard opens his Tiny Desk with the album’s opening track, I found myself zeroing in on the oblique and painterly images of “Follies Fixtures”: “Walk with me to the burning spire. / We can count the dеad on Ender’s pyre. / The dusty towns whеre the number’s found / Don’t quite match the missing.”

This song reminds me of Jose Gonzales in this format.

Howard then switches to electric guitar for the rest of the songs.  He adds drum machine for “Far Out.”

“Thanks for having me and allowing me to play the slight variations of songs that I’m forced to settle with at the moment,” Ben says, and with that he kicks on the drum machine …. Watch those fingers on the guitar and hear that tone. “Far Out,” indeed.

His guitar playing is really something in this song, with soft chords and lot so harmonics as well as great use of the low note riffage in between.

“I I Forget Where We Were” is a moody song–he creates soft chords that swell as he sings.

He later premieres a new tune, “Oldest Trick In The Book.”

He laughs saying he just spent the last ten minutes tuning his guitar so we’ll be happy to know he’s in tune.

This song is the slowest with some really deep resonating bass notes (and no drum machine).  It’s fun watching hi play a solo and low notes at the same time with his finger picking style.

[READ: July 15, 2021] “Bear Meat”

This very short story was translated from the Italian by Alessandra Bastagli.

It begins with the comment that spending evenings in a mountain hut after a four- five- or six hour climb is pretty wonderful. The people you find there don’t speak much.  But these clumbers should not be confused with the ones who do speak a lot–hot shot clumbers, extreme climbers.  The adventurers may be worthy but this story is not about them.

The narrator arrived and there were several men there–eating and drinking.  Once the wine began flowing (at that altitude and temperature it is a metabolic necessity) they began talking about their initiation into serious climbing. (more…)

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Claudio Magris–“Curving Time in Krems” (Harper’s, June 2021)

Posted in Anne Milano Appel, Aurora, Claudio Magris, Huh?, Norway, Philosophy, Romance, Short Story, Silja Sol, Translation, Verftet Online Music Festival on July 25, 2021| Leave a Comment »

SOUNDTRACK: SILJA SOL-Verftet Online Music Festival 2020 (April 5, 2020).

In April 2020, Norway’s Verftet Music Festival streamed an online concert:

Get ready for Verftet Online Music Festival, Bergen’s largest virtual concert festival, where we can enjoy great music together. We want to turn despair and frustration into innovation and positivity, and invite everyone to a digital festival experience out of the ordinary – right home in your own living room.

Sadly, most of the performances are unavailable, but this one from Siljia Sol (who is also Aurora’s backing vocalist) is streaming.

She plays ten songs in about 40 minutes, singing entirely in Norwegian.

“Kometen” is a two minute opener.  It has trippy synths and feels like an introductory lullaby.  Silja has an amazing voice, with quite a range.  Here it is soft and childlike.  But “Superkresen” turns into a fully 80s dance song.  It fits perfectly with the totally80s visuals of her set.

“Hatten” continues the bounciness.  This song feels poppier with a quietly soaring chorus.  “Hultertilbult” is more guitar-based and feels more organic.  As does “Ni Liv” which has a more prominent bass line.  This song has nice soaring backing vocals from her guitarist.

I don’t know the originals of these songs at all, but this feels like a restrained rendition.  Not quite unplugged, but perhaps more suitable for watching on your couch.

For “Stemning” she moves to the piano and plays a quiet ballad–her voice is lovely here.

The dancing returns for “Løgneren.”  Throughout these songs, Silja’s voice reminds me of Aurora’s, probably because her voice is essential to all live Aurora songs (and because they are both Norwegian).  With Aurora Silja hits incredibly high soaring notes and she really doesn’t do that in her own songs.  Although she does hit some high notes here.

“Semmenemme” has a more rhythmic approach–with almost a rapping vibe.  “Eventyr” cranks up the guitar more with a nice groove behind it.

“Dyrene” ends the set with the most catchy song of the bunch.  It is more subtle but features some nice soaring high vocals in the chorus.

It’s fascinating listening to ten songs and having no idea (at all) what they are about.  I’m very curious to hear if her recorded output has a more or less 80s vibe going on.

You can stream the set here.

[READ: July 10, 2021] “Curving Time in Krems”

This story was really cerebral and metaphysical. as such it took a really long time to get to the point.  It was also an incredibly long story for what amounts to: boy calls girls he had a crush on and wished he had done so sooner.

The main character is an academic invited to a dinner party in Krems, a city that “resembles Vineta, the city submerged by waters.”  Snow had fallen making the oblivious old town even more deserted.

A woman at the dinner insists that her cousin attended classes with him and spoke about him recently.  He tells her this is impossible as he did not have female classmates.

He figures out that the woman is talking about Nori S.  But Nori was a grade ahead of him and there’s no way she would remember him.

For a seventeen-year-old boy, a beguiling eighteen-year-old girl is more inaccessible than a Hollywood diva is to a professor [that’s a weird simile, there].

(more…)

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Amos Oz–“Heirs” (New Yorker, January 22, 2007)

Posted in Amos Oz, Coronavirus, Haim Watzman, Huh?, Humiliation, Liz Phair, New Yorker, Old Age, Parenting, Quarantine, Short Story, Tiny Desk (Home) Concerts, Tiny Desk Concert, Translation on July 10, 2021| Leave a Comment »

SOUNDTRACK: LIZ PHAIR-Tiny Desk Concert #227 (June 23, 2021).

I loved Liz Phair’s first two or three albums.  Then I got a little bored by her.  And then she went really aggressively commercial (to not so great effect).  This new single “Spanish Doors” sounds a lot like old school Phair but retains some pop sensibility in the super catchy bridge.

Liz Phair’s music was always meant to fill arenas. After a clever sleight-of-hand at the top of this Tiny Desk (home) performance, where it briefly seems we’ve returned to in-person sets behind Bob Boilen’s desk, Phair and her backing band do their best to recreate the kind of set you’d see in a much larger space; everyone plugs-in, turns it up and rocks with an impressive light show.

Phair plays three tracks from Soberish, her first new album in more than a decade.

She starts with “Spanish Doors,” a heartbreaking but hooky portrait of a marriage nearing its end.

It rocks a bit harder here with three guitars (Phair, Connor Sullivan), with lead solos from Cody Perrin.  Liz seems surprisingly nervous here–or maybe her patter is rusty.

She follows with a song against loneliness called “In There.”

It’s a mellow song with snapping drums (Neal Daniels) and rumbling bass (Ben Sturley).  It’s almost sounds like Liz Phair of old but is missing something.

followed by “The Game,” a meditation on the mind games that sabotage troubled relationships.

Liz switches to acoustic guitar for this one–and her guitar sounds wonderful.  There’s some terrific harmonies on this corner which really does sound like old school Liz.

Phair still finds joy and a playful sense of humor in her earliest work, closing her Tiny Desk with a generous version of “Never Said,” from Exile.

I loved Exile in Guyville and listened to it all the time.  It’s great to hear “Never Said” live like this.  When she played a few years ago, I didn’t feel the need to go, but if she played more of these older song (and the newer ones), I’m sure it would be an enjoyable show.

[READ: July 9, 2021] “Heirs”

This was an unusual story in which reality is never fully explained.

A man, Aryeh Zelnik, is resting on a hammock on his porch.  A second man pulls up in a car and heads to the porch.

The story goes into remarkably great detail about the man with his car–how he looks, what he does, even how he smells (not great).

We also learn a lot about the man on the porch.  His wife has left him and now lives in America (the story is set in Israel).  He has moved back in with his mother and is more or less waiting for her to die so that house can revert to him.

The man who arrives in the car, though, begins talking about legal issues.  At first he is very circumspect about what he really wants.

Would it be more comfortable for you if we were to chat awhile longer about [the loveliness of the land here]? Or will you allow me to go straight, without any circumlocution, to our little agenda?

Aryeh Zelnik is suspicious if not downright annoyed by this man who claims to have official business but who keeps avoiding details and calling him Zelkin. (more…)

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Zep, Dominique Bertail–Paris 2119 (2019)

Posted in Bilal Hissani, Clones, Dominique Bertail, Eurovision, France, Graphic Novel, Mike Kennedy, Paris, France, Sex, Teleportation, The Future, Translation, Violence, Zep on May 28, 2021| Leave a Comment »

SOUNDTRACK: BILAL HASSANI-“Roi” (France, Eurovision Entry, 2019).

I was going to be done with Eurovision, but then I read this graphic novel.  And since it was called Paris 2119, it seemed worth tying it to the 2019 French Eurovision entry.

This song is a remarkably powerful ballad sung in both English and French.  It opens with a quiet piano melody as Bilal sings

I am me
And I know I will always be
Je suis free oui, j’invente ma vie
Ne me demandez pas qui je suis

The pre chorus turns minor

You put me in a box, want me to be like you
Je suis pas dans les codes, ça dérange beaucoup
At the end of the day you cannot change me, boo!
Alors laisse-moi m’envoler

but the chorus swells.

I’m not rich but I’m shining bright
I can see my kingdom now
Quand je rêve, je suis un roi

I like the restraint Bilal shows in the chorus, downplaying potential soaring notes with dramatic effect  The second time through the song is bigger, but again, they are downplaying their singing until they comes to the last line

Moi je les cala pas, you can never remove my crown

When they show off what a powerful voice they have by holding that “crown” for an extended note.

The first listen through I thought the song was okay, but a second listen revealed quite a great song.  I am pretty surprised this came all the way down in 16th place.

[READ: May 27, 2021] Paris 2119

I saw this book at work and wanted to read it.  The cover was quite dramatic.  This book was written by Zep and translated by Mike Kennedy.

The story is quite simple.  Possibly too simple.  But its very compelling.

The book opens on Tristan Keys as he heads into the Metro.  He is scanned by a face recognition drone.  The subway is virtually empty asides from tourists, junkies and woman who looks like she is totally zombied out.  She sits next to Tristan and drools.

He arrives at his girlfriend Kloé’s apartment–she is very glamorous.  They have sex and discuss the possibility of having a baby.  But Kloé dismisses it saying that was how babies were born before–not anymore.  But maybe one day they can request a reproduction visa.

Kloé prepares to leave. She is off to Beijing to meet with clients.  She tells him to be careful while she’s gone.  His latest text post has his boss calling him in for a talk about his future as a writer.

When Kloé leaves she climbs in the Transcore machine–a teleportation device that everyone uses.  Tristan will be walking–he says he’ll never get in one of those contraptions. (more…)

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