Glen Hirshberg's Blog - Posts Tagged "reading"

And you will know be by my trail of cheese curds I bought from the Iranian guy's cheese shop, across the street from the Romanian grandmotherly type who took time out from chastising and giggling with a Scandinavian woman who can not possibly have been her daughter to sell me Ontario Empire summer apples, as I wound from the Portuguese district, through Little Italy and Kensington market, paused on the Fiko patio for my coffee fix and sat out back in the trees and listened to the Brazilian Birkenstock-Jewish guy in sandals expounding to the pretty Canadian Jew in better sandals about Kabbalah and possession ("Have you ever been possessed? It's inTENSE..."), and then east toward the AGO, in this city so dizzyingly internationalized, it makes Amsterdam feel like Indianapolis...

Sure, writing about music is like dancing about architecture...except when it's this writing. I was scouring my shelves last week, looking for something gorgeous and sad and suffused with color, just to remind me that such sensations existed while I hunched in what has become my personal no-shadows corner of the Jury Assembly Room, and I found this book. Which my dad apparently found for me, in 1998--there's one of his loving little inscriptions in the front--and which got forgotten about in the to-read piles during one of our moves.
Grace Notes by Bernard MacLaverty.
It's about an Irish woman composer dealing with being an Irish woman composer, and also a single mom, and island resident, a lapsed Catholic. Not much happens, except living. Hard relating, sweet and fleeting surprise moments of grace. And then the music comes. This is just a snippet of the description of the first performance of the piece our protagonist spends most of this hushed, beautiful novel dragging out of herself:
"It began with a wisp of music, barely there--a whispered five-note phrase on the violins and she was right back on that beach with her baby. If the audience thought themselves mistaken she would be well pleased. Did I hear that correctly? Like the artist's hand which moves to begin a drawing but makes no mark. Preliminary footering--throat clearing. Then the phrase repeated an eyelash louder. I did hear something...But the pause is longer, seems interminable before the music begins again. Is it over? they should be saying. Or have they not started yet. The phrase repeats a third time on the violas. They sound like violins with a cold. Yes, it has started, that there is something there is undeniable...starting friction has been overcome and now the phrase unravels..."
You can get it at Powells.

If only because it's more a collection of riveting, astonishing beats than a narrative about specific characters, Paul Beatty's The Sellout may not be the best novel I've ever read about maybe the defining American subject (race). It may only be the best writing, I've ever read on this topic, in any genre, period. It's sure as hell the funniest, and there is a fiercely beating heart in there amid the righteous fury and frustration. It's a great, great book, and I can not recommend it highly enough. The Clarence Thomas bit alone, my god...
But be forewarned: this one really pulls no punches, leaves no sacred cows untipped, won't leave any sentient American of any color comfortable in their skin. I mean, check this riff, delivered at the Supreme Court, where our African American narrator is ostensibly on trial for attempting to re-segregate the schools in his disincorporated South Central L.A. neighborhood:
"I'm no longer party to that collective guilt that keeps the third-chair cellist, the administrative secretary, the stock clerk, the not-really-all-that-attractive-but-she's-black beauty pageant winner from showing up for work Monday morning and shooting every white motherfucker in the place. It's a guilt that has obligated me to mutter 'My bad' for every misplaced bounce pass, politician under Federal investigation, every bug-eyed and Rastus-voiced comedian, and every black film since 1968...I understand now that the only time black people don't feel guilty is when we've actually done something wrong, because that relieves us of the cognitive dissonance of being black and innocent, and in a way the prospect of going to jail becomes a relief. In the way that cooning is a relief, voting Republican is a relief, marrying white is a relief--albeit a temporary one."

Maybe the most astonishing thing about the rock music I love most is how many different natural resources can fuel it: you can get there from sexual frustration or fulfillment, bliss or the blues, righteous fury or your right to party, explosion or implosion (by fusion or fission, cold or blazing), remorse or absolution, travel or transformation, rebellion or re-engagement. According to Lester Bangs, all it takes in N-E-R-V-E, though the stuff that sends me takes more than that (but that, too, even if it's the nerve to stay quiet, hold still, which Lester rarely sanctioned).

Even as the music dies (and it does seem to be doing that), spectacular new artists keep surfacing, from soil they mulched and tilled themselves. Like these dazzling people, who seem to have erupted from a whole new source of roaring, sizzling, songful rock rejuvenation: kaleidoscopic disappointment.

In her article for the Nerd Element "Everybody Scares Sometimes" Desiree Guzzetta talks with us scaryfolk (including the entire original Rolling Darkness Revue, Dennis Etchison, Peter Atkins, and me, plus my pals Kate Maruyama and Lisa Morton) about stories that scare us.
My choice is one of Ramsey Campbell's...Could have been many of Ramsey's...