If there's one thing I love it's a multigenerational family epic from a different culture, which is an actual genre that I only sortof made up. The thIf there's one thing I love it's a multigenerational family epic from a different culture, which is an actual genre that I only sortof made up. The thing with books like this is they give you a sweeping overview of a wide swath of history in someplace like, say, China - or Korean Japan, or Chile, or whatever - without being a boring nonfiction book. This one traces Chinese history from the Cultural Revolution of the 60s, which was awful, through to the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989, which was also awful.
This of course means a lot of characters, and since Madeline Thien has fallen into the nearly-always-bad postmodern trap of leaping timelines, it's confusing as all fuck and fairly boring for the first half or even two thirds. I got you, though, here's the plot: Kai and Sparrow are best friends and musical prodigies. Kai goes with the flow and Sparrow doesn't. Kai escapes; Sparrow doesn't. Kai & Sparrow's parents are the boring part. There's a third person, Zhuli, who forms sortof a weird love triangle because Kai and Sparrow are mostly in love with each other. The framing story follows their children. There's an imaginary book that's some sort of ineffective metaphor for art and censorship.
By the last part of the book our timelines have simplified and we're into Tiananmen Square and it's absolutely gripping, so this is one of those books that's Worth It. I didn't really know about Tiananmen Square. Did you? I guess I thought it was sortof like Kent State, you know? That was terrible; two people got killed. Well, it wasn't like that. Estimates are as high as ten thousand murdered. The weird thing about that iconic image
[image]
...that really happened, but the lesson of Tiananmen Square is the opposite of the image.
When you read about horrors like the Cultural Revolution, entire generations of entire countries smooshed, you wonder how injustice on such a large scale happened. It seems so obvious. Didn't everyone just...resist? Why do huge masses of people participate in systems that are bad for them? Well, partly it's that sometimes the government murders them by the thousands. But some people collaborate in their own oppression, as working-class whites are doing in the US now. And it's good to be reminded that they do, for whatever reason - one is tempted to think it's because The People are generally, perhaps, shitheads - and that means that the worst scenario you can think of is always a real possibility.
Madeline Thien is one of those comet geniuses who can fire off insights about Chinese symbols and music that twist your head right around. She goes off on a tangent about how the nature of Chinese characters makes time vertical and life horizontal for them and you're like fuuuuuuck, why aren't people like you ever at my parties? It's nice to have her as a guide through all these dark times. I made a Spotify playlist with all the music she talks about here - I hope you like Shostakovich, and if you don't know who that is then buckle up because he's like
[image]
You can listen to it to spice up the first 300 pages of this book, the part where you're all who the hell is this again and which timeline are we supposed to be in. After that Thien will bring the drama all by herself. It'll be awful....more
Styron gets knocked for two reasons. The first is that he's an appropriater: in his Pulitzer-winning Confessions of Nat Turner, he appropriated the faStyron gets knocked for two reasons. The first is that he's an appropriater: in his Pulitzer-winning Confessions of Nat Turner, he appropriated the famous slave revolutionary's story, and here he's taken the Holocaust. As he's neither black nor Jewish, some black and Jewish people are like wtf are you doing with my history. The second knock is that he writes clear and exciting prose with a lot of fancy words, leading Martin Amis to call him a "thesaurus of florid commonplaces."
"In my career as a writer," says Stingo, Sophie's Choice's narrator, "I have always been attracted to morbid themes - suicide, rape, murder, military life, marriage, slavery." (I love that marriage is just slipped in there.) Stingo is about to write a novel about Nat Turner, so it's not a stretch to call him a stand-in for Styron. James Baldwin, a friend and defender, said that "He writes out of reasons similar to mine - about something that hurt him and frightened him."
What hurts and frightens Styron is evil, and Sophie's Choice is about evil. He's shaken by the reality of it. Stingo figures out exactly what he was doing on the morning that Sophie arrived at Auschwitz: eating a banana on a beautiful day in North Carolina. This is his point, repeated often: at any given moment, while you're living your mundane life, someone in the world is capable of the deepest evil. American slavery looms over the story. Styron would like us to remember that we're sitting around in a country built on genocide, acting all horrified about what Nazis did. Stingo is supported in part by a treasure found in an ancestor's basement; the treasure is the proceeds from the sale of a slave.
The third character in the book is Nathan, Sophie's lover, and he embodies this human schizophrenia literally. He's unstable: often charming, occasionally careening into violent madness. (view spoiler)[He turns out to be a paranoid schizophrenic. (hide spoiler)] Here's humanity according to Styron. In the end, (view spoiler)[Sophie commits suicide with Nathan. (hide spoiler)] Did I mention that this book is a bummer?
What was happening that morning as Sophie, our destroyed heroine, arrived at Auschwitz was the deepest evil Styron can think of. You probably know what the choice was, right? I'd never read the book or seen the movie but I've been using it as a joke for years: "Should we get burritos or fried chicken for lunch?" "Oh no, this is like Sophie's Choice." The ending of this book upset me so badly that I feel awful for ever making that joke. I've rarely been so crushed by a novel.
Styron is less interested in Sophie's choice than in the fact that she was forced to make it. Here's the worst thing in the world, he says. Styron didn't make the choice up; he got it from Hannah Arendt, who says she got it from Camus. But could it happen? Of course it could; if we can't prove this exact story, we have ample proof of stories like it. Who could do it? Could you do it? Could someone be doing it right now?
Styron believes that evil can happen anywhere, any time, to anyone. It could be happening now, as you read this review. Maybe you're eating a banana. You are not intrinsically better than slaveowners or Nazis. You're lucky that as yet you haven't had to decide whether to resist or submit. He asks:
The query: "At Auschwitz, tell me, where was God?"
And the answer: "Where was man?”
Styron would like us to make sure we're prepared to be there....more
I remember when I first heard The Roots. My singer put this new group from his hometown on and our whole band all just sat in his apartment playing wiI remember when I first heard The Roots. My singer put this new group from his hometown on and our whole band all just sat in his apartment playing with his pet hedgehog, silently, listening to their entire first album. I remember a few quiet "holy shit"s during Dice Raw's breathless tightrope act of a freestyle. We all felt that something had changed. Finally, someone had made live hip-hop work.
Questlove talks about his own formative musical experiences in his memoir. He's around the same age as me, so we have some of the same touchstones. He talks about how the sonic assault of Public Enemy's Takes A Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back, which has still never been matched, "filled my head. It enlarged me." I had that moment with PE too, lying on a hotel bed with headphones on just, like, holy shit, these guys are so far beyond that they've reinvented notes.
He also talks about how puzzled he was when he first realized white people were getting into rap, and, well, I was there for that too. Hi!
So a lot of this book is about music, and how Questlove feels music, which is very deeply, and he's one of a very rare breed of people who can explain in words why music is so important to them. You don't have to be a fan of rap or deep Stevie Wonder album cuts to appreciate this book, but it doesn't hurt.
But by the second half he's exploring The Roots' place in black culture: the meaning of the black avant garde, black art, black nerds - he repeatedly describes himself as "an indoor kid, with a tendency to fall inward." It's heady stuff and Questlove is a very bright dude; his insights are always on point.
The Roots changed hip-hop when they appeared, and they changed it again as they turned into hip-hop's first band with longevity. They just keep putting out albums: never superstars, which frustrates Questlove, but always present. (As good as he is at making music, he's not terrific at making hits, which is another thing he explores.) That's interesting too, because they had to invent how hip-hop artists can age gracefully. No one had done it before, and honestly almost no one else has done it yet. Where's Public Enemy now? Ice Cube stars in family movies.
I wish he'd talked a little more about their decision to become Jimmy Fallon's house band, because that was another revelation. I was flabbergasted when they took the gig. This seemed like what you do when your career is pretty much over, but here they were at the height of their powers, just...they, like, got a job. It's not that he doesn't talk about it at all. "The thing about working without a net is that if you fall, you die," he says. "It's better to work with a net." Fair point. But there must have been some angst about the concept of selling out that Questlove's not sharing with us. He's trenchant about the question of "What is black enough?" elsewhere in the book: "I have a giant afro. I weigh three hundred pounds. No one, upon first seeing me, thinks I'm not black enough. And yet, in interviews, I'm still going through that whole speaks-so-well syndrome." And then they go to work for the whitest dude on the planet. But a net's a net.
I met Questlove once, at an early gig of theirs. They'd just blown me away with the best hip-hop show I'd ever see. They did a medley of rap classics during their second set that, I now see, paved the way for their quickfootedness as Fallon's house band. I was all stammering, afterwards. "I, oh, man, I love your music." Questlove did not care. Only now do I realize that gaggles of skinny white dudes came up and raved about his music after every gig; I was not actually onto anything new here. Questlove knows how good his music is.
It's very, very good, and this is an excellent book about it. Obviously I made a playlist for you featuring many of the songs he yells about over the course of it. There are a few Roots tracks here too - their bigger hits and some of my personal favorites. My favorite track of theirs is off their third album. It's called Dynamite! "We got a doctorate in col rockin' it" says Tariq in one of the best single lines ever written. And yes, sirs: yes you do. Here is the thesis....more
I'd like to read a history of music. A huge book that would take a year to read. A focus on classical would be fine. Anyone know such a thing? I'd like to read a history of music. A huge book that would take a year to read. A focus on classical would be fine. Anyone know such a thing? ...more
Bel canto means "beautiful song," and Anne Patchett wanted to write a melodrama. Big emotions, big events, like an opera. The plot of her book seems aBel canto means "beautiful song," and Anne Patchett wanted to write a melodrama. Big emotions, big events, like an opera. The plot of her book seems allegorical; it's certainly not realistic, which makes it a surprise that it's based on real events. She was inspired by the Japanese embassy hostage crisis of 1996, during which a number of diplomats were taken hostage for a remarkable 126 days. She thought - I'm taking much of my information from a terrific interview at the end of the book - she thought, "You know what this story needs is an opera singer," and here we are.
What she's carved out of this lengthy hostage crisis is a utopian society: the have-nots forced to coexist with the haves in a world where art is the only diversion and the unifying force. As in the real-world crisis, people of many nationalities are gathered together. There's a translator who serves as witness. Love is found. They make beautiful songs. It's like a more hopeful take on John Fowles's The Collector.
Looming over it all is the suspicion that this probably won't end well, and it's to her credit that (view spoiler)[toward the end she actually had me half-convinced she was going to write a way out of it. (This is before I realized that it was based on a true story.) Even more surprising, I wouldn't have minded: I liked her characters so much that I would have taken any cheap excuse to see them live. They don't. The eventual "rescue" is sudden and agonizing. (hide spoiler)]
It's a beautiful song, and this is the best book I've read in a while. ...more
Dynasty in India is what this book really is, for all its allusions to Victorian novels. But sure, yes, it's longer than War & Peace, ensuring its plaDynasty in India is what this book really is, for all its allusions to Victorian novels. But sure, yes, it's longer than War & Peace, ensuring its place on the Books Your Friends Didn't Finish list:
And it shares with War & Peace a panoramic, many-charactered view of an entire society, against the backdrop of real events - here, the 1951 abolition of the feudal Zamindari system, and the taut relationship between Hindus and Muslims in post-colonial India, which had just divided itself in two in order to pack most of its Muslims off to Pakistan.
Vikram Seth's real love is for Jane Austen, though, and the major plot is pure Austen: whom will Lata Mehra marry? The suitors include ambitious Haresh, who reads pessimistic Hardy; the poet and Seth stand-in Amit Chatterji, who (along with Lata herself) reads Austen; and the Muslim Kabir, who is in no way suitable and does not read novels (but he does act in Shakespeare's Twelfth Night).
The other major plotline involves the growing up of Lata's brother-in-law Maan Kapoor, who has an affair with musical courtesan Saeeda Bai. These two families, the Mehras and the Kapoors, twine together throughout the book, along with the Chatterjis and the Muslim Khans. It can get confusing. Here are the major characters:
MEHRAS (Rupa & dead husband) Arun (business douche) -> Meenakshi Chatterji daughter Aparna Varun (milquetoast) Savita -> Pran Kapoor Lata
KAPOORS (Mahesh and Mrs.) Pran (professor) -> Savita Mehra Maan (Saeeda Bai, best friends with Firoz Khan) Veena -> Kedarnath Tandon the shoe guy son Bhaskar is good at math
KHANS (Nawab Sahib of Baitar) Begun Abida Khan, sister-in-law politician Zainab (daughter) Imtiaz Firoz (into Tasneem, Saeeda Bai's younger sister; best friends with Maan Kapoor)
CHATTERJIS (Justice & Mrs.) Amit - poet Meenakshi (a shitty person) -> Arun Mehra Dipankar (the religious one) Kakoli (silly but fun) Tapan (nobody cares about Tapan)
EVERYONE ELSE Saeeda Bai the singing courtesan & her sister Tasneem - (view spoiler)[not a real sister (hide spoiler)] LN Agarwhal (incompetent politician) Raja of Marh (asshole with gay son) Dr. Durrani (Muslim mathematician) Kabir Durrani (potential match for Lata) Haresh (ambitious shoemaker, potential Lata match) Malati (Lata's best friend)
Whew. There are of course family trees at the beginning of the book that you should bookmark. My book club has also put together a glossary that may help you. (Thanks Kaion!) And I even made a Suitable Playlist on Spotify! It contains many of the songs mentioned in the book. The "Rise traveler, the sky is bright" song is "Uth, Jaag, Musafir."
That's a lot of stuff, and this is a lot of book. It'll fully immerse you in Indian culture, which is neat. It's not difficult; it's still a soap opera, with lots of gossip and plot, and Seth writes cleanly. I found it hard to put down when I was reading it, but sometimes hard to pick up again when I wasn't. It didn't really grab me in an "I can't wait to keep reading" way until around 75%. But I really liked it. Nothing wrong with an Indian Dynasty....more
It's been a long time since I read this, but at the time I thought it was one of the better books about music I'd read. Certainly gave me a new apprecIt's been a long time since I read this, but at the time I thought it was one of the better books about music I'd read. Certainly gave me a new appreciation for the Trout Quintet. Which is different from the Trout Mask Replica, but just as good....more
When you read an author for the first time, you look for him. Where is his perspective? Is he in this protagonist? Does he like this protagonist? Are When you read an author for the first time, you look for him. Where is his perspective? Is he in this protagonist? Does he like this protagonist? Are you and the author in agreement about what the protagonist is like? If you're not, the book will annoy you sooner or later. I don't like Open City's narrator. Julius is pretentious and self-aggrandizing.
Each person must, on some level, take himself as the calibration point for normalcy, must assume that the room of his own mind is not, cannot be, entirely opaque to him. Perhaps this is what we mean by sanity: that, whatever our self-admitted eccentricities might be, we are not the villains of our own stories. In fact, it is quite the contrary: we play, and only play, the hero, and in the swirl of other people's stories, insofar as those stories concern us at all, we are never less than heroic.
Julius casts himself as the hero in this story. He tells us about the time he saved a drowning boy. He heroically catches some plastic sheeting about to fall onto a young mother. But there are weird gaps in his narrative. He skips some parts; he seems unclear on some events.
An open city, like Brussels in World War II, is one that's abandoned defensive efforts. March right in and take over; please don't shoot anyone. Julius is an immigrant psychiatrist of Nigerian / German ancestry who likes to take walks through New York City. People seem to enjoy telling him their stories. Their stories always seem to include violence, alienation, pain. No one was born here. Cole says he "wanted to capture a little bit of that siege mentality and that sense of invasion happening on several levels, historically, psychologically." New York is constantly invaded. It offers no defense, but it inexorably assimilates. It's like The Blob. I don't think this metaphor completely works for Cole, but I get it.
I don't know if you got the idea from the quote above, but Cole's writing is incredible. It's so pellucid that I had to look up that word in order to use it. It's distinct, transparent, graceful: Cole never says more or less than he needs to. It's astonishing that this is his debut(-ish) novel. It won a ton of awards, and deservedly. I suspect that Teju Cole is sortof a big deal....more
David Byrne is our great charlatan. He stands up there twitching and tweaking and exhorting, like an amateur weatherman who thinks too much about his David Byrne is our great charlatan. He stands up there twitching and tweaking and exhorting, like an amateur weatherman who thinks too much about his hands. Like a caricature of an amateur weatherman. Like a snake oil salesman. He speaks in tongues. "You may tell yourself, 'This is not my beautiful wife,'" he suggests insidiously. "Take a look at these hands. I’m a tumbler." Behind him the Talking Heads hijack Afropop, hip hop, funk. They are extremely funky. Years before Graceland, the Heads were sampling world music. (Later when a solo Byrne makes it explicit with Rei Momo, it’s like a comedian explaining his joke; I lose interest.)
In Stop Making Sense, the greatest concert video ever filmed, the Talking Heads both celebrate and subvert the act of performing. Their great magic trick is that they can make ironic performance art about rocking out, but also legitimately rock out, at the exact same time. The opening scene, Byrne toddling bug-eyed onto a bare stage with his boom box to squawk his way through Psycho Killer, is iconic - but as musician after musician is wheeled on to join him it gets bigger, and impossibly big and, finally, some sort of religious experience.
[image] He's tense and nervous and he can't relax
The Heads’ ecstasy has always been both sincere and calculated, and when David Byrne self-diagnoses with some sort of Asperger’s, a few chapters into How Music Works, you nod. I don’t love throwing these terms around willy nilly, but it’s a big spectrum and he certainly does like analyzing patterns. The thing about having an immense gift and spending your life analyzing it is that you come up with some weird ideas, and here they all are in this book, which is almost always fascinating. Music evolves in response to the space it’s played in. A building is an instrument. Animals evolve their calls to different spectrums so as not to get in each others’ ways. "Albums" are a recent and unnecessary invention.
The danger with aging artists is that they’re the same as aging everyone else: lost in a world that’s moved on without them, scared and confused and rambling about the good old days. To his immense credit, Byrne largely avoids the deathtrap of nostalgia. The death of the music industry is a good thing. The new sounds coming out of computers, bearing no relationship to any acoustic chamber, are exciting and valid. My favorite example is the skittering fka twigs. What are these noises? Byrne has an essentially radical, proletarian soul. He doesn’t believe in "high art." Why, he asks, is the government subsidizing opera because not enough people want to pay for it? Maybe we just don’t like opera very much.
We agree on the necessity of new music. When you hear music from your adolescence, you're transported back to that time. If you don’t continue discovering new music then what, in years to come, will bring you back to now? And if nothing does, what have you lost? Music defines and celebrates phases of your life. If I were to give you three pieces of advice, the third would be to find new music.
The Talking Heads were part of one of the all-time great scenes: CBGB’s in the early 80s. Blondie and Television were there, too. Byrne spends a chapter analyzing what it was that made CBGB’s an incubator for such a scene, looking for patterns. He mentions as a living example Barbes in Park Slope, Brooklyn, where my wife and I used to spend a lot of time before we had a kid and left the city and bought a "lawnmower."
I was surprised to realize, as Byrne ticked off the qualities that make a scene a scene, that each and every one was true of Denver’s mighty Herman’s Hideaway, where I played regularly as part of a band called Flex Luther in the early aughts. The bands kept the door money. Musicians always got in free, as soon as the door guy learned (shockingly quickly!) to recognize you, for cross-pollination. Disparate acts were frequently thrown together, particularly on Hermans’ raucous New Music Wednesdays. The atmosphere was scrubby and anything went. As half-assed as it all felt at the time, we were a scene after all. Why didn’t we all get famous? Well, one of us did (we all thought they sucked, lol) but the rest of us, I’d argue, just weren’t good enough. I was no David Byrne, let me tell you.
[image] Here's a rare shot of yours truly with hair
But it’s nice to realize how many things Herman’s was (and possibly still is) doing right. We all certainly had a good time. When I listen to some of those bands - Yo Flaco,Irie Still - I’m transported right back to that foul-smelling green room in the basement and our endless conversations about how to make the next gig different, subversive, memorable. I hope there are bands down there right now inventing something as iconic as David Byrne and his herky-jerky boombox. Someone’s got to be our next great charlatan. I can't wait to hear it.
So tell me, you there, hi! What new discovery are you listening to right now? It doesn’t have to be new new, just new to you. For me it’s Big Thief, who sound like they're about to fall out of a tree....more
Tennessee Williams called Carson McCullers' major theme "the huge importance and nearly insoluble problems of human love."
Well, so here's a book abouTennessee Williams called Carson McCullers' major theme "the huge importance and nearly insoluble problems of human love."
Well, so here's a book about lonely misfits for whom things work out poorly. But really pretty and moving. And McCullers has a bottomless capacity for empathy: it's not like she thinks everyone is terrific - she certainly sees her characters for the sometimes deeply flawed people they are - but she shows them to you with clear eyes and loves them anyway. This is nice work.
Also one of the best books about music I've ever read, joining recent read Howards End....more
In the early 1900s Virginia Woolf and James Joyce are competing to see who can get deeper into the human brain, writing elliptical dense masterpieces In the early 1900s Virginia Woolf and James Joyce are competing to see who can get deeper into the human brain, writing elliptical dense masterpieces that sought to reproduce living thought processes, and meanwhile in France an asthmatic, closeted weirdo named Marcel Proust locked himself in his bedroom for ten years and wrote down an entire life from the inside out. Not his life, not exactly, but a life. He had to self-publish the first volume because everyone was like wtf is this. All seven volumes ended up taking 3,200 pages, which for comparison is about 3/4 the length of the Harry Potter series. Proust would have been a Hufflepuff.
[image] Proust's creepy cork-lined bedroom
Proust describes everything beautifully...and I do mean everything. When he's describing something that you care about - books, say, or love, or music - it's pretty great to read. When it's something else - flowers, medieval painters, more fucking flowers - it gets a little boring. So next time you hear people arguing about Proust, and one person says he's one of the most gorgeous writers ever, and the other person says he's boring, they're both right.
[image] Proust feeling sorry for himself
For the basic idea, see this video of the All-England Summarize Proust Competition. They do a shockingly bad job of it. Here's the first volume: the narrator goes to bed early and remembers a madeleine; then he hugs a bush; Swann falls in love but she's a bitch. There. Five seconds.
Translation The translation everyone likes is Lydia Davis's for Penguin Deluxe Classics. Each volume of their series is by a different translator, though, and the quality is said to drop off sharply after Davis's v1; in addition, the last two volumes aren't available in the US. Enright's revision of Kilmartin's revision of Moncrieff's original, from Modern Library, gets high marks for overall effect. ...more
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