Book Review: I Curse the River of Time

I Curse the River of Time - Per Peterson

The pace of Per Peterson's I Curse the River of Time is incredibly misleading. The story of immature grown man facing the coming death of his mother is told in three different time frames. The novel slips easily between each and it doesn't feel necessarily important which one the reader might be in.

I say that the pace is misleading because it forever feels as if nothing is happening. The story is told with such a vague melancholy, the words and phrasing soft and slippery, such that you find that you've read many pages without noticing and without anything significant happening.

The book comes off slight, but the mood of it is so pure, so specific that the impression left is significant. This should not imply that the novel is shallow. Indeed, as should any book that is at its core about death, it gets deep.  On the subject Peterson writes, "the very instant when you know that now comes what you have always feared, and you suddenly realize that every chance of being the person you really wanted to be, is gone forever, and the one you were, is the one those around you will remember."

While I Curse the River of Time is much different from Out Stealing Horses, it is well worth the easy read.

Book Review: A Good Man Is Hard to Find

A Good Man is Hard to Find and Other Stories - Flannery O'Connor

Flannery O'Connor ranks among my favorite authors and rereading her collection of short stories A Good Man is Hard to Find was a great pleasure. O'Connor manages to be both profound and shocking with every story. Some of the turns the stories take seem almost cliche now because of how often they are cited and reused. Still, it remains a requirement to study the craft and skill in these stories.

I do not see O'Connor, though, as a Christian writer. Much is made over the moments of grace in her stories. I understand it, but I think they are as common as the epiphanies in Joyce's stories. Each story has a moment where things turn, where a character has an opportunity to change, to react, to accept. These moments of realization and their aftermath are usually what make a story resonate with a reader. We wonder, maybe only subconsciously, if we would have reacted the same. Would we, as the grandmother in the title story, sought some sort of redemption from the man we know is going to kill us? Would we have the same prejudices as Hulga in "Good Country People" that allow her to fall victim to the bible salesman? What persists for the reader are the wrong choices, the opportunities missed. Each character is complicit in his or her fate.

I don't see this as Christian. I might, instead, argue that its existential, It is through one's actions that he or she exists. The decisions these characters make make them who they are and lead them to their fate.

You should know I love these stories. And if you care a lick about the craft of fiction, your copy should be as well worn as mine.

Book Review: Pride and Prejudice

Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen

There is a long list of books weighing on my conscience. That list of books that I should have read by now. And after the enjoyment I got out Jane Eyre, I thought Pride and Prejudice should be the next to cross off that list. And, though I'm happy to have removed another from that long list, the experience was far from pleasurable.

Pride and Prejudice is the superficial tale of Lizzie Bennet's quest to be married to the abominable Mr. Darcy. She resists, she is willful, but Jane Austen shows us that this was a mistake of prejudice. She was mistaken in her judgement and should, therefore, accept her suitor.

There are a slew of other marriages in the book, some more appropriate and fortuitous than others. But have no doubt, Pride and Prejudice is centered around the marriage plot. Sure, there is critique of the "condescension" of the upper classes, as there is of the pride there is in all of us that allows us to form unfounded judgments of others. Subject matter aside, there is nothing to make this book enjoyable.

The writing itself is dull and without any discernible style. Where Austen does exhibit skill is in characterization. She draws her characters distinctively, even if much of that distinctiveness comes from the prejudicial perspective of other characters.  Lizzie's father is a distinctive, though secondary character. He is used to deliver some of the novel's best critiques, all with a point of view belonging to the character.

Her father, captivated by youth and beauty, and that appearance of good humour which youth and beauty generally give, had married a woman whose weak understanding and illiberal mind had very early in their marriage put an end to all real affection for her. Respect, esteem, and confidence had vanished for ever; and all his views of domestic happiness were overthrown.... To his wife he was very little otherwise indebted, than as her ignorance and folly contributed to his amusement. This is not the sort of happiness which a man would in general wish to owe his wife; but where other powers of entertainment are wanting, the true philosopher will derive benefit from such as are given.

I cannot see what has forced Pride and Prejudice to persist on these lists of classic novels. I'd have been happy to skip it. But I can at least take pleasure in the bold line that crosses out the title.

20 Essential Albums: The Winners and the Runners-Up

My life has been changed by many, many great albums. Some have found a special place because of the memories associated with them, the particular time in my life they became important. Others are just so musically brilliant and honest that they deserve as much attention as as they can get. To recap, here's the full list of my 20 essential albums, plus more that nearly made the cut.

The Winners
The Head on the Door - The Cure
Shabooh Shoobah - INXS
The Nymphs - The Nymphs
OK Computer - Radiohead
Bakesale - Sebadoh
Goat - The Jesus Lizard
Rubber Soul - The Beatles
In the Flat Field - Bauhaus
Daydream Nation - Sonic Youth
Bone Machine - Tom Waits
Bleach - Nirvana
Rid of Me - PJ Harvey
Either/Or- Elliott Smith
First and Last and Always - The Sisters of Mercy

Way to Blue - Nick Drake
Surfer Rosa/Come on Pilgrim - The Pixies
The Smiths - The Smiths
The Vortex Flower - Space Team Electra
Love - The Cult
Nothing's Shocking - Jane's Addiction

The Runners-Up

There are many albums that probably deserved to be on this list.  Here are some of them:

13 Songs - Fugazi
Are You Experienced? - The Jimi Hendrix Experience
Check Your Head - Beastie Boys
Closer - Joy Division
Darklands - The Jesus and Mary Chain
Disintegration - The Cure
The Doors - The Doors
Dry - PJ Harvey
Elastica - Elastica
Express - Love and Rockets
Facelift - Alice in Chains
Gish - Smashing Pumpkins
Goo - Sonic Youth
Hee-Haw - The Birthday Party
I Think I’m Gonna Be Sick - Dandelion
Junk Culture - Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark
Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me - The Cure
ListenLike Thieves - INXS
Low-Life - New Order
Louder than Love - Soundgarden
The Man Who Sold the World - David Bowie
Nocturne - Siouxsie and the Banshees
Purple Rain - Prince and the Revolution
Rain Dogs - Tom Waits
Reckoning - REM
Revolver - The Beatles
Some Great Reward - Depeche Mode
Unknown Pleasures - Joy Division
Velvet Underground and Nico - The Velvet Underground
Violent Femmes - Violent Femmes
XO - Elliott Smith

20 Essential Albums: Nothing's Shocking

Nothing’s Shocking - Jane’s Addiction

Jane’s Addiction’s second album Nothing's Shocking may have been released in 1988, but it didn’t come to my attention until sometime in 1990.  The flamboyance of singer Perry Ferrell and of the guitar playing of Dave Navarro was perfect for the times. I played the record frequently for several years, each of the songs encouraging the brashness required to rebel against conformity, an enticement to live life outside the standards.

Of course, anything this good is somewhat diminished when everyone seems to like it. But it doesn’t stop songs like “Mountain Song” from being phenomenal.  Like most good alt-rock, the bass plays a central role, the guitar rolls and slides over the top, and the vocals sound like a full-throated provocation. And we can’t ignore the ever-present “Jane Says”. An acoustic stand-alone, the song sounded like something different, like life in another town, where people are more laid-back, and there’s no such thing as convention.

Jane’s followed this up with Ritual de lo Habitual, another great album with perfect singles and even better epics, like the masterpiece “Three Days.” For me, Nothing's Shocking  lasts; it was the one that carried me through three or more residences and in and out and back into the same relationship in the early 1990’s.  A great album today, it will still take me back to those days when the weather’s hot and I want to have a few choice words with the rest of society.

20 Essential Albums: Love

Love - The Cult

The cover of The Cult’s second album Love struck me as purposefully sinister, satanic maybe, when I first saw it in the mall record store.  And then my best friend brought the record home.  The music was sinister, but in a good way.  The bass throbs and the guitars play in the high frequencies only.  It was heavy metal for the goth set.

The singles from the album, released in 1985, were in frequent rotation at the underage dance clubs we used to go to.  The fortune cookie smell of the fog pumped into the room, the lights flashing, dancing with your eyes half-closed.  Listen to “The Rain” and you’ll know what I mean.  Close your eyes and you can see the strobe lights flashing.

But the record isn’t just good for those sorts of memories.  It still stands up as a classic.  Though “She Sells Sanctuary” is overplayed now on retro radio. The combination of straight-ahead rock elements with darkness of gothic rock was one I would continue to search for in new music. The Cult moved to just straight-ahead rock with their next release, Electric in 1986.  It was a great record if you were also a fan of AC-DC, but it was all downhill for The Cult after this.

20 Essential Albums: The Vortex Flower

The Vortex Flower - Space Team Electra

I had the benefit of knowing the members of Space Team Electra and maybe that makes me a little bias. I knew them when they went by the name Dive, hung out with them, played shows with them.  I probably still would have liked them even if their music hadn’t been this good.  But it was awe-inspiring. To put it mildly.

The Vortex Flower came out in 1998, long after I’d seen them the first time, after they’d dropped some of the songs I’d liked best live.  But the album was no let down.  From the first strums of “Shadow” as the drums come in, Space Team Electra proves to be force.  The songs transcend and sore, dripping and dreamy, loud and pounding.

Of course, Space Team Electra would not be the same without the voice of Myshel Prasad. Listen closely to “Luminous Crush.” From the first line, “I’ve seen an angel lose his wings in flight before,” she sings softly, gently, as if it is only the two of you in the room.  But by the time the chorus comes on, she’s loud.  She has something important to declare when she sings “I tried to give my heart and soul and mind away / but you don’t understand a single word I say.”  Whomever she is singing to should really regret that.

I would take another twenty albums that sound like The Vortex Flower. Space Team Electra did put out another full-length, The Intergalactic Torch Song, but it would hard for anything else they would do to sound like this.  I’d been happy to listen, though.

20 Essential Albums: The Smiths

The Smiths - The Smiths

The Smiths’ singer Morrissey gets tagged as mopey, but the music here on the their first album, the self-titled The Smiths (1984) is not that depressing. Okay, there are lines like “slap me on the patio/I’ll take it now”, or “I need advice / nobody ever looks at me twice”. This album was the reflection of all the agony associated with an adolescent’s anxiety over girls and the general disinterest of the world.  Best played on a cold winter’s day, while sad about something.

While “How Soon Is Now?”, from the Smiths’ second album Meat Is Murder, became the big Smiths hit, it was a one off.  This album, with its arpeggiated guitar chords, was more typical. It was really was Morrissey, and his lyrics, that made this album.  The stories in the words inspired me to sit down and sort out the words to all of the songs. Somewhere in my closet a notebook is hiding that has them all scrawled out in blue ink.

The stand out track here has always been for me “Hand In Glove.”  Musically, the song is upbeat. No descending bass lines, no echoey guitars or vocals sung through murky depths.  Yet, sing along and you won’t really be uplifted. Morrissey sings, “And if the people stare, then the people stare / oh, I really don’t know and I really don’t care,” and “For the good life is out there somewhere / so stay on my arm you little charmer / but I know my luck too well / and I’ll probably never see you again.” Good stuff. Don’t let your mom listen too closely.

Book Review: Goodbye, Columbus

Goodbye, Columbus - Philip Roth

First, I should admit that I didn't know that Philip Roth's Goodbye, Columbus is a book of stories.  It was disappointing to realize this after being so drawn into the characters and narrative of the title story.  Thankfully this story, of a young Newark man's  involvement with a wealthier girl from Short Hills, makes up nearly half of the book's pages.

The book is more about Jewish-ness than any of Roth's novels I've read previously. Even Portnoy's Complaint, centered around a Jewish boy's upbringing, is more about coming of age that it is about being Jewish.  I am not Jewish, but this lack of connection with the text does not leave me feeling disconnected from the stories.  Roth has an ability to draw me in, to get me involved, that overcomes an unfamiliarity with any of the subject matter.

It is easy to think of any of the masters like Roth as stodgy. The enduring success seems like a product of conventional storytelling. Roth, though, always surprises. And does it well. The title story is conventional, the close third person and subject matter all standard. Other stories, though, venture further afield. Other characters are less standard stock, and Roth takes us there with them.

While Goodbye, Columbus will not be one of my favorites, or even one of my favorites Roth books, it has only further convinced me of his abilities.

20 Essential Albums: Surfer Rosa/Come on Pilgrim

Surfer Rosa/Come on Pilgrim - The Pixies

Before “Where Is My Mind?” appeared in Fight Club and commercials and covers, The Pixies’ double-album CD Surfer Rosa/Come on Pilgrim was a fantastic record. Maybe it’s because I didn’t go to college straight out of high school, but the term “college rock” has never meant much to me.  But is a term that inevitably arises when discussing the Pixies.

The album came out of the many that were dumped on me by friends that worked at Denver’s Wax Trax record store. Surfer Rosa, originally released in 1998, was paired with the EP Come on Pilgrim, and released on CD in 1992.  For me, the album was the soundtrack to a hot summer spent in a dusty garden-level apartment. Not college.

For all the depth and darkness in my favorite music, this record is remarkable carefree. Fun, even. There’s no reason to doubt why “Where Is My Mind?” has become a popular song, but the album to me was more characterized by songs like “Cactus” and “Vamos.” Everything about the album is little quirky, including the lyrics with lines like “If we get bored we’ll move to California,” and “Run outside with your dress all wet and send it to me.”

The Pixies have some good songs on some other albums, but none are as good as those here.

Book Review: Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It

Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It - Maile Meloy

One of the New York Times Book Review Best Books of 2009, Maile Meloy's collection of short stories Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It, is so full of adultery that one might think it belongs to a different generation.  It would be easy to believe that each of these stories was written in the 1970s. Broken families, naked adults in hot tubs, it's all here.

Subject matter aside, these are good stories, adequate in the story telling, creative in their invention, the variety of situations. Where they fail for me is in the amount of exposition.  So much here requires or is given explanation, separating the reader from the story, from our own discovery, that I wanted to take a pen to the book and strike whole paragraphs.

It may very well be that I am sensitive to this issue, conscious to try and avoid the same thing in my own writing. It may be as well that I favor the stripped-down storytelling of Raymond Carver. I am willing to forgive a lot in a novel, but in a short story I don't expect to be removed from the action to be offered an explanation of something that could be made apparent within the story itself.

20 Essential Albums: Way to Blue

Way to Blue - Nick Drake

It is generally a good idea to ignore an artist’s biography when considering the art itself.  But the sadness in the songs of Nick Drake is only made stronger, more profound, when we learn of the difficulties Drake had in the world. Difficulties that would lead him to take his own life. The songs on the compilation Way to Blue, released in 1994, give off the sense of someone not fit for living in the outside world, but someone still trying to express himself in it.

The songs here come from three albums recorded in the early 70s, obvious with the overuse of strings on some of the songs. Without Nick Drake there would be no ElliottSmith, no Iron and Wine, no Bon Iver. Sure there’s the typical acoustic, singer-songwriter sense from the era, but the breathy vocals, the reflection, set the way for some of the alternative singer-songwriters of today.

Nick Drake was barely known outside of England when he was alive, but with this release he earned a lot of attention in the US.  “Pink Moon” appeared in VW commercials, other songs appeared on movie soundtracks, “Northern Sky” was my wedding song. But look to a song like “Black-Eyed Dog” to get a sense that goes deeper than the popular settings around the more familiar songs.  Drake’s voice is strained, the guitar sounds like the empty room in which it is played, as he sings “growing old and I wanna go home / growing old and I don’t wanna know.”

20 Essential Albums: First and Last and Always

First and Last and Always - TheSisters of Mercy

The Sisters of Mercy’s first full-length album First and Last and Always, released in 1985, has been played so often in my life that I cannot even recall when it first came to my attention. What I do know is how influential the album was, how the driving beat of a song like “Walk Away”, or the space and emotion of “No Time to Cry”, reached a particular strain of my own emotion.  The music expressed something that I was unable to express.

This is late-night driving music, something played loud in the next room.  Characterized by a bass that sets the course of the song, drums that keep the quick pace, twelve-string guitar that gives the songs depth, and an electric guitar that comes in high and thin.  And then there’s the thickly reverbed vocals of Andrew Eldgridge.  The song “Logic”, titled “Amphetamine Logic” on other releases, while not as strong as the singles mentioned above, is true Sisters’ style, complete with lines like “Nothing but the knife to live for / one life all I need / give me one good reason / give me more amphetamine logic.”

20 Essential Albums: Either/Or

Either/Or - Elliott Smith

Elliott Smith really came to my attention when he appeared on the soundtrack to Good Will Hunting in 1997, which prompted me to get his second album Either/Or, released that same year and on which two of the soundtrack songs also appear.

I felt an affinity for the quiet reflection in these songs, the strong emotion held close.  My appreciation of Elliott Smith represented some sort of maturing. No longer did I require the loud volume, the large living of my earlier years. Of course, the melancholy that appears in much of my favorite music is here as well.

It is easy to appreciate the simple instrumentation on the album, the reserved drums often holding back during the verses, acoustic guitar as the basis for everything, and an electric guitar only showing up once in a while.  “2:45 AM”, one of my absolute favorites, is a good example.  The whispered vocals over a quietly plucked and strummed acoustic.  The turnaround that rests before beginning again.  Then, three versus in, the drums show up, and you nod your head as Smith sings “Been pushed away and I’ll never come back” before the song fades away.

20 Essential Albums: Rid of Me

Rid of Me - PJ Harvey

Maybe it’s wrong to single out PJ Harvey as a female rocker, but there are so few, and none like PJ Harvey. She’s got guts, but you’d never mistake her music as anything else but female.  It is this distinction that gives her music a unique character.  When she sings “lick my legs / I’m on fire / lick my legs / of desire,” in the album’s title track, Rid of Me, it’s not sexual--it’s threatening.

It’s not just her lyrics, not just her voice that ventures from a whisper to falsetto to raw-throated belting, it is also the drumming, off-kilter and often surprising, and also the guitar playing that explodes at times.  And still there is space in these songs, the sound of an empty room, a feeling of agony and indecision.

Released in 1993, Rid of Me was important to me for many reasons that can’t be explained here.  But no matter the variety of memories associated with this album, it still stands on its own and sounds damn good loud.

20 Essential Albums: Bleach

Bleach - Nirvana

Nirvana’s Nevermind came too late.  It’s big, Butch Vig production was good for radio play, but it was the simple raw sound of 1989’s Bleach that was Nirvana. I was just 21 when I was listening to Bleach constantly. It was loud and dirty. The guitars overly distorted, the drums slamming the cymbals with vigor, and there was Kurt Cobain screaming “give me back my alcohol.” How could I not like this record a lot?

This was grunge as I knew it. Along with albums like Soundgarden’s Ultramega OK and Screaming Trees’ Buzz Factory, the Seattle sound was high volume distorted guitars, with the occasional break to a clean guitar.  Then Pearl Jam came along and, though I liked Ten, they ruined everything.  Grunge was darker, angrier, and just more honest. It reflected the angst of the particular age and the depression that arises when it rains 300 days a year.

Like much of what I discovered, and loved, in the early 90s, Bleach represented an extreme.  It was the sound of something inside stretching out and trying to become real in the outside world. It was a good soundtrack for the reckless driving of the pizza driver I was at the time, and of the late, late nights of that time as well.

Book Review: Intruder in the Dust

Intruder in the Dust - William Faulkner

I have said before (and often) that I think an author's biography should stay separate from one's reading of a text. Yet, while reading Intruder in the Dust, I began to wonder how much William Faulkner was drinking at the time of its writing.

The novel is a story of racial injustice in the South that continues some eighty years after the Civil War. After being rescued as a boy by a black man, Lucas, from an icy stream, Chick, now 16, harbors a resentment over his indebtedness to Lucas. When Lucas is jailed and in danger of being lynched over the murder of a white man, Chick's debt is called. He must prove his innocence by digging up the body of the murdered man.

Unlike much of Faulkner's work, the story is told with a consistent timeline. It is still told in a loose, modernist style, reminding us how much Faulkner has in common with Virginia Woolf or Joyce's Ulysses. It can be difficult at times to discern the narrative from the stream of consciousness. Indeed, in the late sections of the novel, this style takes over for extended passages. What makes it worse, though, it the preachy-ness of these passages.

Faulkner carries a moral indignation about the continued maltreatment of blacks in the mid-century South, and the overcompensation of white guilt, and voices it loudly in passages like this:

to defend not Lucas nor even the union of the United States by the United States from the outlanders North East and West who with the highest of motives and intentions (let us say) are essaying to divide it at a time when no people dare risk division by using federal laws and federal police to abolish Lucas's shameful condition, there may not be in any random one thousand Southerners one who really grieves or even is really concerned over that condition nevertheless neither is there always one who would himself lynch Lucas no mater what the occasion yet not one of that nine hundred ninety-nine plus that other first one making the thousand whole again to repulse with force (and one would still be that lyncher) the outlander who came down here with force to intervene or punish him....

Passages like this led me to question Faulkner's drinking at the time he wrote this novel. What was one of the most coherent and simply enjoyable of Faulkner's novels is challenged by this preaching. And yet it will rank high on my list of the best of Faulkner's novels.

The Perpetual-Motion Family

I wonder if the hectic nature of my life is simply perspective. It "seems" busy when it really isn't. There always seem to be things to do. Things in the calendar everyday. And there is always a certain pace in the house, maintained by many voices and many footsteps. There perpetual-motion machine that is our house. The respites are few and limited in duration. The hours between their bed and mine. The fleeting, momentary escapes.

But if this is life, if this is the baseline, then "busy" would mean something more than it does now. Busy would have to refer to those bits when the activities do not cease, continuing and overlapping in succession.

Keeping busy with The Three

Does this perspective shift allow for some sort of relief? Would this stop me from answering, whenever the question of how things are going arises, that things are hectic? Would--should--this allow me to pick up the book I'm reading whenever the spare moment materializes? Or, will I continue to believe that I, too, must always be in motion? Using every moment.

Even now, stealing this time to write, my leg twitches as if I should be doing something.

20 Essential Albums: Bone Machine

Bone Machine - Tom Waits

There may be better albums by Tom Waits.  In fact, Swordfishtrombones and Raindogs are better albums.  Bone Machine, though, was Tom Waits to an extreme.  The traditional Tom Waits songs are here, perfect melodies, strong chorus, the sorts of songs that get covered by commercial crooners, but counteracted by the gravel in Waits’s voice. It is the boldness of the other songs that makes this album essential.

It is easy to imagine these songs banged out in some barn, with anything handy used for percussion, the guitar amp with a hole in it, and the vocals recorded through a vintage mic. There is something to be appreciated in the creation of really great songs that reject everything conventional. The songs represent a casualness, a relaxed freedom, even when done with passion in songs like “Such a Scream” or songs that come off like work songs, as “Jesus Gonna Be Here.”

For me, Tom Waits was what to listen to when all else seemed too typical, when nothing else fit.  It sounded like independence and individuality.

20 Essential Albums: Daydream Nation

Daydream Nation - Sonic Youth

I bought Sonic Youth’s Daydream Nation from the Columbia Record Club, when they were running a special on double-record sets. I’d known Sonic Youth from songs of their earlier release Evol and decided to take a chance on this one (I had to fill my quota anyway).  The album is like a dream, guitars rattling or dying away into a tepid dream. The album’s opener “Teenage Riot”, the most popular song from this record, begins with the steady strumming, where you can actually hear the strings, before breaking open to the fast pace of most Sonic Youth material.

There is something in the atonality, just the wrong notes struck at the right time, that seems to characterize a particular way of life, a particular attitude.  “Candle” does this well, with verses that are calming and emotive, but with breaks where guitars screech and drums bang before the song turns around again.

Sonic Youth would go on to release Goo two years later in 1990, with songs more song-oriented and more popular. And Dirty a couple years after that is in the same vein.  These albums are great as well, but sometimes it is the initial entrée into an artist’s work that stays with you.

20 Essential Albums: In the Flat Field

In the Flat Field - Bauhaus

It doesn’t get darker than Bauhaus.  In the Flat Field, their first full-length, opens fast big and loud, with “Dark Entries” and lines like “Puckering up and down those avenues of sin.” The sound leaves little doubt that this is something different. Abrasive and disturbing. Expressing a life one can only hope to avoid. Yet, still, Bauhaus captures something dark inside, something that demands expression. And it comes with the benefit of shocking and offending others (especially parents).

And it gets darker with the second track “Double Dare”, with Peter Murphy entreating the listener, “I dare you / to be real.” I found this music frightening at first listen.  Wondering why someone would create something so dark, so sinister sounding.  But, in my sophomore year, I remember coming home from track practice to sit, exhausted, in my basement room, and listening to Bauhaus.  The music came over me like an hallucination, like a trance that lasted until the cassette player stopped.

Later, in my late teens and early twenties, this music began to reflect a darkness that I knew. And now, with the darkness replaced by light, the mood is occasionally just the right one for the music of Bauhaus.

Book Review: Home

Home - Marilynne Robinson

The first hundred pages of Marilynne Robinson's Home are boring. Disappointing. Having thoroughly enjoyed her novel Housekeeping, I wondered how this novel could be so dry and shallow. Glory, a grown woman, having some unmentioned embarrassment, has returned to the home of her youth to look after her aging father. These first hundred pages are filled with descriptions of life in the house now and reflections of life in the house when she was young. And then one of her brothers returns home and the story becomes deep, rich, and finally compelling.

Jack was the outcast, the one of six or seven children who set himself apart. The anxiety of his appearance is palpable. The father feels he did wrong by his son, obviously failed him in some way that led him to be so distant and to get himself into the trouble that followed him into adulthood. Glory, some years younger, had held a magical sort of notion of her older brother, believing she always had some connection to him.

Jack has also suffered some embarrassment, or many of them, including jail or prison, alcoholism, homelessness, and some sort of current entanglement with a woman with whom he hopes to reconcile. He is awkward, embarrassed by who he is, socially inept in a way that Robinson makes real. Not only do you sense his sorts of fits and starts in trying to be a good son, a good brother, someone deserving of respect and maybe forgiveness, but Glory's embarrassment for him is also strongly felt. She wishes he could get over it all and just relax, she feels bad for him, but she is also embarrassed. Maybe for the respect she has always had for him.

It turns out that Jack is concerned about his soul. With his father and his father's best friend both clergy, the novel is heavy on theology. But never to the point of turning away the heathen. Jack is looking for help, knows his scripture, but can't bring himself to believe it.

The conversations in the novel surround grace, predestination, salvation, and perdition, but at the bottom of it all is the idea of identity. Each of the novel's main characters suffer from a lack of understanding of whom they have become. They have difficulty knowing how they got from who they were to who they are. And how far off who they are is from who they they would prefer to be.

And all of this is carried with enough tension, enough action to keep the reader moving along. Enough of everything to make up for the failings of the first hundred pages.

20 Essential Albums: Rubber Soul

Rubber Soul - The Beatles

I can only assume that The Beatles’ Rubber Soul must have been played a lot when I was a child.  Hearing it sometimes I can imagine playing on what seemed then like a wide expanse of carpet.  And still, the album became important to me across many eras of my adult life.

Rubber Soul is socked full of singles, songs we know well from a variety of settings. Together, though, they form an album that is at times earnest and joking at other times. No one should believe that they could sing “Beep beep, beep beep, yeah” without a tongue in their cheeks.  Often it is the backing vocals that reveal the sarcasm in the pop songs.  The songs are so well crafted and yet they seemed to sing of a life that was still to come, at least hearing the songs as a youth.  Hearing lines like “Carve your number on my wall / and maybe you will get a call from me / if I needed someone” conjured an adulthood of entanglements and emotions that could only be imagined.  Even as an adult, it is as if The Beatles have packaged a variety of elements from your life into a perfect pop song, with the backup vocals going “Aaaahhh, ah, la la, la lala.”

20 Essential Albums: Goat

Goat - The Jesus Lizard

One the elements most essential to good alternative music is the role of the bass guitar in the music. Certainly in the music of The Jesus Lizard, the bass plays the role of the rhythm guitar.  It is what propels the songs, with the guitar sliding over the surface.  Oh, and then there’s David Yow’s singing.  Sometimes the music is about more than the “quality” of the vocals.

Goat is another album that deserves to be played loud. Put on “Nub” when you need a little motivation, or “Monkey Trick” when you need to combine a driving rhythm with the occasional scream.  Another 1991 release, Goat was an antidote to Pearl Jam.  The music coming from a place more honest and raw.  Like a open wound of some sort.

I’ve probably seen The Jesus Lizard live more times than any other band, not only because the sound translates well live but because of David Yow’s onstage antics. Sometimes abandon is exactly what is called for. Live or just loud, The Jesus Lizard makes you feel like throwing yourself against the world like a stage dive.

20 Essential Albums: Bakesale

Bakesale - Sebadoh

         
Sebadoh’s album Bubble and Scrape came to me through a borrowed cassette tape from a close friend and, though there a great songs there amidst the noise, it was Bakesale that became the important album.  It helped that Sebadoh gave up some of the pure noise that infected their previous efforts, but Bakesale showed it was okay to write sensitive indie rock.  It was 1994; maybe it was emo before emo became a thing.

         
The guitars on the album are loose, maybe a little out of tune, barely distorted. The drums often shuffle with a backbeat that would come off as funk in another setting.  And Lou Barlow’s voice is thin and plaintive. When he sings “There's nothing wrong with the need to please,” you believe him.  And there’s a song like “S. Soup”, led by the band’s Jason Lowenstein. Loud and harsh, the bass up front, the song makes you agree with the lines “Crazy people are right on / crazy people are right.”

Book Review: Falconer

Falconer - John Cheever

How much context should we bring to a novel? Should we consider the writer's other works? Should the author's biography inform the reading of a particular novel?

I would like to read a book independent of its context. While the text may have an historical context that comes from without, what we should care about is within the text. Yet, when I read John Cheever's Falconer I couldn't help but consider the author's other work. The novel is so different from what I think of as John Cheever.

The novel centers on an upper-middle-class heroin in Falconer prison for murdering his brother. Other than the upper-middle-class part, there is little in common with the characters that inhabit most of Cheever's writing. But it goes beyond the setting and the protagonist. The writing itself is loose, casual, colored with flourishes. At times it is brutal, infused with violence and obscenity, and at others it is dreamlike, fantastical.

Falconer is not a suburban novel. It is a prison novel, filled with the things that make up prison life. Shocking, naturally, but even more shocking in contrast to Cheever's other work. At the same time, it never feels like the other is trying to shock us. He doesn't show us the violence and sex in order to make us gasp about the awfulness of it or to prove that he can shock. Falconer is given to us from the point of view of a character who has, in a way, given up. He is not shocked by what comes his way. Not resigned, but not amused. He doesn't completely accept his fate, but his attempts at change are only derived from desperation. Even when he experiences strong emotion, he seems to be documenting it in order to make it true. At the novel's ending, he has gone through change and maybe we can believe that he is capable of the emotion he describes, but he is so over the top that we can help but doubt him.

In all, context or not, more like Denis Johnson than John Cheever, the novel was a good read.

20 Essential Albums: OK Computer

OK Computer - Radiohead

I’d known Radiohead from the singles off their first two albums, the second album The Bends even became a favorite, but it was 1997’s OK Computer that revealed the band’s art.  On first listen, it was “Climbing up the Walls” that got my attention.  Thom Yorke’s falsetto, the atmospherics, and then feeling like we’re waiting for storm clouds to break open. But is probably the album’s second track “Paranoid Android” that is Radiohead to me. The song has everything. Starting with acoustic guitar and a clicking rhythm and a lead guitar that finds its way in through the back of the head. And when the storm clouds open here, the listener is beaten, pushed and pulled, and finally let go again. Indeed, the song’s bridge leaves us to float in some sort of psychedelic dream.

            The album sounded like a culmination of everything that came before, all the music I’d ever liked. Indeed, it came into my life in the same sort of era. When everything felt like it was coming together, like things were making sense. A time when you can appreciate the troubles you’ve been through, even relish them somewhat, in order to appreciate the life that has come out of all of it.

Book Review: For Whom the Bell Tolls

For Whom the Bell Tolls - Ernest Hemingway

Taking place over three days during the Spanish Civil War, For Whom the Bell Tolls follows an American and a loose band of guerrillas as they prepare to play their part in a coming assault on the fascists. Three days is a short amount of time, especially for Hemingway. Compared to the rollicking, faster-paced novels like The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell to Arms, the pacing here leads the author to divergences, wanderings that slow the pace. Three days is long enough, though, for the American to fall in love, to hear stories of brutality rivaling a Cormac McCarthy novel, and still maintain a tension that keeps us reading on.

Self-reflection takes place throughout the novel and it isn't the author's strong-suit. Hemingway attempts something that is the antithesis of what what we consider to be Hemingway. When we look at a story like "Hills Like White Elephants," we don't need the reflection to see the tension, to understand what is at stake. In the novel we have pages upon pages of the protagonist in conversation with himself. This is not to denounce self-reflection. My own writing sometimes relies more on this than the abstract unsaid. In this novel, though, it is unsuccessful.

The novel also commits a bete-noire. Some two-hundred pages in, the perspective shifts. We've spent nearly half the novel already following the American and then suddenly we slip into the perspective of a secondary character. We come back, but it happens again, this time into the perspective of a minor character in a lengthy section that takes place away from the main action. I don't know if this was a way to fill in the novel or the result of the author's boredom with the regular perspective and action. It is a pet peeve for me. I hate it in movies, too. Like in a mystery, when suddenly we see a bit of action away from the major character that tells us something that would otherwise be unknown.

There are many things for which the book has merit, but I cannot in good conscience recommend it. Not when there are better Hemingway novels to read.

20 Essential Albums: The Nymphs

The Nymphs - The Nymphs

The only album by LA’s The Nymphs appeared in 1991, at the ascendance of grunge to the mainstream, when I was spending time playing in rock band and spending my evenings living an appropriately rock-influenced lifestyle.  The Nymphs, though, weren't grunge, they were dirty glam.  The sound is of a life lived large.  A sound and a life that demands high volume.  It was music to be played out of open car windows and the way to a night out.

Singer Inger Lorre’s voice sails above guitars that slide along both rough and glossy.  The rhythms, even when playing straight ahead, lay back, everything coming down right behind the beat.  The song “Heaven” does exactly this.  The second guitar slugs along while the lead’s notes fall down, and again Lorre’s voice has to cut through.

Unfortunately, The Nymphs never went on to make another album. And this one is relatively unknown. I would take another dozen albums like this.

20 Essential Albums: Shabooh Shoobah

Shabooh Shoobah - INXS

Named after the sound of the drum beat prevelant on the album, INXS’s Shabooh Shoobah contains a couple of the staples of 80s retro. Both “The One Thing” and “Don’t Change” remain great songs, no matter how they get overplayed today (and appreciated today by people who never would have listened to INXS in the 80s). They showcase the Michael Hutchence swagger, but the album’s deeper cuts reveal the band’s creativity.

The second track of an album is often the most representative of the character of the record. Here it is the case with “To Look at You.” The strong rhythm guitars steps aside to leave space for us to get inside, the drums stagger and shuffle, and Hutchence holds back on his strong voice until the chorus. And it is like this throughout the album. It forms a unique sound that I’ve never heard anyone imitate successfully.

The drums are a lot what makes this album great, but it is the voice of Michael Hutchence (and his swagger) that made INXS one of my favorites. My long hair in the 80s had a lot to do with Mick’s hair during the 1985 Listen Like Thieves era.

20 Essential Albums: The Head on the Door

The Head on the Door - The Cure

Originating in the ‘70s and still going today, The Cure has had a long and varied career in alternative music. And no single album by the group is more representative of everything they have ever been than The Head on the Door. The pop hits are here, the darkness is here, and then there’s Robert Smith’s hair. Released in 1985, The Head on the Door came to me when I was 15 years old. It was easy to like to dance to songs like “Close to Me” and “In Between Days”, but it was the open, atmospheric melancholy of “Kyoto Song” and others that, while never really knowing what the song was about, reached inside. And then there’s “Sinking,” which perfectly captures the sort of depression that can strike someone at 15. When Robert Smith sings “I am slowing down / as the years go by / I am sinking,” over that perpetually descending bass line, you get the feeling that someone knows exactly how you feel.

This album prompted me to reach back through The Cure’s back catalog at the time, unearthing other pop treasures (Japanese Whispers) and true darkness (Pornography). Then 1986 brought the compilation Standing on the Beach and its companion b-side compilation, followed by 1987’s Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me (a close runner-up for this list), and The Cure was solidified as one of my favorite bands.

20 Essential Albums: Introduction

There are great albums. There are influential albums. There are also albums that make us who we are. These are the albums we wouldn’t give up, that we continue to play, and that hold up over the years. These albums that, when heard in the right mood, one can recall a pivotal event or some small memory that is emblematic of the time in which it came into your life.

These are my essential albums. Or at least twenty of them. It is no easy task, to identify just the twenty albums that have made the difference. And how do I limit it to one album by artist over the whole list? Some titles on this list barely won out over rival albums by the same artist.

This is my list. From the albums listened to on weathered tape players carried around to a teenager or even albums played off vinyl by my mother when I was a child, to records discovered in my late twenties, when one stops expecting to be surprised by music anymore. Certainly there have been other albums from the last decade that are often in my rotation, but they have yet to stand the test of time.

These albums are the ones that have made all the difference to me. These are the albums that both reflect and made me who I am.

Over the next several weeks, I will post about each of them, starting with....

My Year in Reading: 2011

Since I didn't finish the book I’m reading last weekend, I have read 21 books in 2011. Not a bad count considering the pace at which I read.

Looking back over the year, I am amazed at the number of forgettable books I read. Maybe it’s because I didn’t immediately sit down and record my impression of every book, or just because the book left no impression, but there are a number books of which I cannot even remember the plot. Aimee Bender’s An Invisible Sign of My Own and Lorrie Moore’s Like Life both fall into this category. I would have expected to like and find inspiration in both, yet nothing remains. Then there are the pairs of books I read by William Faulkner (Sanctuary and Absalom Absalom!) and Cormac McCarthy (The Crossing and Cities of the Plain). I don’t doubt the quality of any of these novels, but over time the stories conflate and each pair becomes a muddle.

The books I read in 2011 are more notable for the disappointments, led in sequence and importance by Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom. The book was so highly lauded, and I was already a fan of The Corrections, so how was I not to like this book? The lack of a coherent arc to the novel is really what did it in. It can be as smart, clever, incisive, clairvoyant as possible and still fall down as a book if you can’t convince me that I need to read the next page.

But Freedom wasn’t the only let down. Add to it Jennifer Egan’s The Keep (reminiscent of Stephen King, but too childish and novel for its own good), David Vann’s Legend of a Suicide (retelling the same story in different ways and with different facts isn’t exploration--it’s confusion), and Richard Yates’s Disturbing the Peace (like John Cheever at his most matter of fact and least insightful).

And then there were the surprises. Jane Eyre proved to be much better than expected. Zadie Smith’s White Teeth proved to me that a book can be a dramatically different setting and culture than my own (and even my own interests) and still be a fantastic book to read. Indignation proved that, despite the failings of Everyman and The Humbling, and other recent novels, Philip Roth still has it in him to write a great novel. And John Cheever’s Bullet Park, thought it was as dull at times as Cheever can be, showed the impact of a sudden, simple action and the well-laid phrase. It has the best final paragraph that I have ever seen.

The best books I may have read this year were two short story collections that didn’t surprise as a whole form. The Stories ofJohn Cheever and What We Talk AboutWhen We Talk About Love by Raymond Carver both revealed everything we think of as typical of each author. Some stories come out as caricature, like people trying to write the Cheever or Carver story. At the same time, there are stories in each that prove the author to be the master we expect.

Despite the masters on the list, it was an unremarkable year of reading. It does inspire a couple of new year’s resolutions. First, to find better books to read in the new year. And the second, to write down at least some thing about each book I read. It’s the least I can do.

The full list:

Freedom- Jonathan Franzen
Like Life - Lorrie Moore
Zombie - Joyce Carol Oates
White Teeth - Zadie Smith
Sanctuary - William Faulkner
Bullet Park - John Cheever
An Invisible Sign of My Own - Aimee Bender
The Keep - Jennifer Egan
The Crossing - Cormac McCarthy
Disturbing the Peace - Richard Yates
Legend of a Suicide - David Vann
Black Water - Joyce Carol Oates
Indignation - Philip Roth
Dusk - James Salter
Absalom Absalom! - William Faulkner
Disturbing the Peace - Richard Yates
Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
Stories - John Cheever
Cities of the Plain - Cormac McCarthy
Women With Men - Richard Ford
What We Talk About When We Talk About Love - Raymond Carver
Cold Spring Harbor - Richard Yates