Making Up For a Lost Week

Hi friends! I don’t know if I’m COVID negative yet (still isolating and masking for the moment) but I am feeling good and all that alone-time resulted in a lot of random thinking. For example, I realized how ableist it is that the word “invalid” means NOT valid. That’s not great for the old self-esteem when you’re laid up in bed. We shouldn’t talk about sick people like that.

And while I was in bed trying to recover from my hacking cough, I was thinking about misunderstood lyrics. I can’t remember which song triggered the thoughts, but the lyrics that most vexed me as kid were from Kenny Roger’s song Lucille. I thought he said he had “four hundred children and a crop in the field.” It just seemed like a lot of children and I understood why Lucille would leave him. Too many kids. What are your best misunderstood lyrics?

Put those lyrics in the comments, please.

When I had my first blog, people commented all the time on my posts, and engaged in a dialogue about the subject with me and other readers. One time, my (former) dentist’s wife posted a response to a bad review I gave of her husband’s office. Then another reader logged in to add their voice to mine in criticizing the dentist. Those really were the days. Since social media supplanted blogs, people do not comment on my posts anymore. It’s weird and I miss it.

RIP Steve Albini

You know who probably commented on blogs a lot? Steve Albini. And now he’s gone. It’s a huge loss. Being in the music scene in Chicago, he was unavoidable. My first encounter with him was through his Baffler essay “The Problem with Music”. The whole essay is worth a read, but the lede gives you a taste of Albini’s prose as well as the thesis of the essay.

WHENEVER I TALK TO A BAND who are about to sign with a major label, I always end up thinking of them in a particular context. I imagine a trench, about four feet wide and five feet deep, maybe sixty yards long, filled with runny, decaying shit. I imagine these people, some of them good friends, some of them barely acquaintances, at one end of this trench. I also imagine a faceless industry lackey at the other end, holding a fountain pen and a contract waiting to be signed.

Nobody can see what’s printed on the contract. It’s too far away, and besides, the shit stench is making everybody’s eyes water. The lackey shouts to everybody that the first one to swim the trench gets to sign the contract. Everybody dives in the trench and they struggle furiously to get to the other end. Two people arrive simultaneously and begin wrestling furiously, clawing each other and dunking each other under the shit. Eventually, one of them capitulates, and there’s only one contestant left. He reaches for the pen, but the Lackey says, “Actually, I think you need a little more development. Swim it again, please. Backstroke.”

I didn’t love Albini’s early bands. Big Black was too loud and dick-forward and Rapeman, well, the problem is right there in the name. But his critique of capitalism, of “selling out,” was formative beyond words. I reacted to “sell outs” like they had in fact swam through a trench of shit to produce their art. I have a more nuanced view now, but there’s a piece of me that still recoils at certain artistic endeavors.

By the time Albini formed the band Shellac, I had come to appreciate noise rock, although the album At Action Park goes beyond “noise rock.” It’s one of the best rock albums I’ve ever heard.

The Problem With Music and At Action Park are only two of the best contributions Steve Albini gave to this world. The third contribution that has made an impression on me is his personal growth. In the past couple years, Albini became very open about his mistakes. My friend Eric at Rangelife put it best:

But he wasn’t just another old white man with calcified biases. Like a lot of young guys making punk art in the 1980s and 1990s, he played loose with racial and sexual slurs for ironic shock value. In later years, instead of bitching about “PC crap” like Jerry Seinfeld or Ricky Gervais, he came correct and apologized for all he couldn’t see and didn’t understand from his position of privilege.

Rest in Peace, Steve Albini.

A couple book recommendations

A couple of weeks ago, I admitted that I had never read any Paul Auster. I remedied that gap by picking up The New York Trilogy at Posman Books the other day. So far, I’ve read the first book, City of Glass, and it’s an incredible story. It’s really layered and complex and atmospheric. It’s like a horror story written as noir. Noir horror. Noiror.

I also read We The Animals by Justin Torres, which is called a “semi-autobiographical novel.” I don’t know what that means. It reads like the best that literary memoir can offer. It’s fierce love and anger and the pain of being in a family and being out of that family.

This section isn’t a book review section. It’s an endorsement of short books. City of Glass is 130 pages. We The Animals is 124 pages. I continue to love short books even while I hate short stories. I’ve tried to read Demon Copperhead (Barbara Kingsolver) and The Fraud (Zadie Smith) and GEEZ, get these authors an editor. I can’t even track on the stories because everything is discursive. It’s an affliction shared by many literary bestsellers. No one will tell the Super Authors that not every word is precious.

I just did a quick tour of my book shelves to find a few other short kings to recommend. You’ve probably read most of these. You know why? Because they are totally readable, unintimidating, and memorable. In other words, classics.

Of Mice and Men (107 pages), John Steinbeck

Waiting for the Barbarians (152), J.M. Coetzee

Franny & Zooey (202) and The Catcher in the Rye (214), J.D. Salinger

The Great Gatsby (182), F. Scott Fitzgerald

Housekeeping (218), Marilynne Robinson

The Power and The Glory (219), Graham Greene

The Old Man and the Sea (127), Ernest Hemingway

Brave New World (177), Aldous Huxley

Dharma Bums (192), Jack Kerouac

A Personal Matter (165), Kenzaburo Oe

Notice anything else? They’re all pretty old. Except Housekeeping and Barbarians (both published in 1980), I think they’re all older than me. It’s like publishers decided to stop publishing short novels forty years ago. And have any books become classics in the last forty years? What books published in the past fifty years do you think has or will achieve classics status? Leave a comment please!