Be afraid. Be very afraid.

If you haven’t known trepidation (a disquieting fear, not the terror found in a book like The Shining) while reading, then you might want to pick up a copy of W.G. Sebald’s Austerlitz. Normally I wouldn’t write about a book while only halfway through it, but I am reading it so slowly that I’m not sure I’ll even finish anytime soon.

I’m not even sure it’s a novel. It is, rather, a meditation on inner and outer decay, on decline, loss, memory, and the gradual effacement of even the most extraordinary of things. I half expect the book itself to vanish or crumble between my fingers while I’m reading. Certainly it reminds me of a book I read earlier this year — Teju Cole’s Open City. Published a decade earlier, Austerlitz (so far) greets us in Belgium as Cole’s novel does, and also in Wales and in London. The settings are intensely and intimately described, yet the novel also seems to take place within Sebald’s memory. There’s a term I’m reminded of: “umwelt” — a German word often translated as “a self-centered world”. Weirdly, I began a short story titled “Umwelt”, also set in London, which has dragged on and on…

And it’s the passages about the inner workings of our selves that seem most familiar. Here, at length, is Austerlitz describing the process of writing and reading:

But now I found writing such hard going that it often took me a whole day to compose a single sentence, and no sooner had I thought such a sentence out, with the greatest effort, and written it down, than I saw the awkward falsity of my constructions and the inadequacy of all the words I had employed….However much or little I had written, on a subsequent reading it always seemed so fundamentally flawed that I had to destroy it immediately and begin again.

As always, things seem connected. Between readings I’ve been listening repeatedly to the first track on what I think what may end up being one of 2011′s more under-appreciated break-up records. The same disquiet stirs.

Go ahead and be my world, and everything will be ok. Just hide there in plain sight, too big to see.

Not Honest. But True.

Throughout this year, between the endless mountains of packed snow and the minutes stuck at the same morning traffic lights, I find myself singing the final chorus of this song over and over, accompanied by my boys on occasion, and other times as if my insides are pouring over the steering wheel. And that gorgeous gorgeous trumpet line…”You let the devil in your home!”

So sad to miss their show here in August.

Typhoon | A Take Away Show from La Blogotheque on Vimeo.

Tags: driving music, The Honest Truth, Typhoon

The guy behind the guy behind the guy

Two beautiful covers, two musical eras. Go see Devotchka live. Generation Derivative, listen up.

Tags: Devotchka, Neil Young, St. Etienne

A Part

My youngest son has hair that is completely different than mine. It is entirely straight; it does not sprout from his head, it simply falls. Hair such as his does not seem to naturally part, and I find myself continually, almost absently, pushing his hair away from his eyes and to one side. It is as if my fingers have become wiper blades on an intermittent setting.

It struck me one day that his hair is not really in his eyes as much as I think. He rarely brushes it aside, and goes about unbothered by the way it hangs. I realized that my brushing away hair that really isn’t in his way is in some respects me filling a need of my own — the need to touch him, to shape him, both literally and figuratively.

Tags: hair, kids

A Slow-Moving Orgy

Choriqueso at Polvo’s. Green Chili Pork taco and the Democrat at Torchy’s Tacos. Micheladas (made w/Negra Modelo, of course) at multiple locations. Uchi sushi. Nepali noodle salad at Farm to Market. Sweet potato fries at Freddie’s. A BBQ pork sandwich with jalapenos.  Home Slice pizza. Those lovely rosemary and salt bagels w/cream cheese in the mornings at Once Over. A slow-moving orgy.

Thanks Austin.

Tags: Austin, bagels, food

A Student of Pakistan

Some years ago, when I was at university, I enrolled in a small class on South Asian history. The class was in fact tiny for such a large subject — only five students — and was the first stand-alone course on the history of the subcontinent ever taught at my school. That awkward and surprising fact aside (the year was 1989, the Berlin Wall would fall and declarations of the end of history would soon abound) the other odd nugget was that the course was taught jointly.  Two professors, B— and J—, one focusing on the history of India and the other on the creation of the nation called Pakistan. Even stranger, I learned that the pair of professors were connected. They shared a home and lascivious rumor had it that they were lovers.

Tags: Daniyal Mueenuddin, Declan Walsh, Granta, Pakistan, University education

Letter from Asturias

I am in Asturias, in Spain. Up in the hills above a town called Santa Marina on a little peak called Pico Los Rozos.  We are staying in a small farmhouse here, composed of three or four buildings of which we occupy a room.  From here the views are extremely pleasant, full of contours and angles and on top of some hills are wind power generators. I notice most of all the silence, so profound that each noise, when it does reach me, is magnified and travels long distances.  The sound of bees and flies and insects of all types, which I think I recall now only from childhood (so much urban living), almost numbs my ears if there are more than just a few buzzing past.  I hear the clanking bells around cows’ necks, but it is difficult to pinpoint the source of the noise, as the wind — a noise in itself — spreads the sonic waves, so that you feel at times surrounded.

Tags: Asturias, Spain

And I’m Going Down…

On occasion you find yourself doing things that seem strange to your notion of yourself. Like drinking a 16oz Pabst Blue Ribbon. Sometimes these strange details don’t bend your mind much, because you’re doing exactly the right thing. Which is to be drinking that PBR at an A.A. Bondy show with other people who clearly know the man’s music, understand that there’s something about what he does that will never signify super-stardom, but is, among all today’s drek, true. Normally when a musician sings and plays with eyes closed I wonder if it’s not a bit too affected. But that understated voice…Bondy, it is clear, is somewhere else when he plays. That somewhere must be a hard place, and I don’t envy him his demons, be they dark as pitch or just a light, gray rain.

There were couples, and singles, and old folks listening. I wished I’d recorded the whole thing in a 360 surround screen, it was that good. I don’t know if this description is accurate, but it hints at a respect for a performer that I haven’t seen in years from an audience. Even between songs people stayed quiet, understanding that spaces are just as much a part of the whole as anything else. And when, during one of those spaces, a woman called out, We love you Scott Bondy, he said exactly the right thing: Thank you, darling.

Tags: A.A. Bondy, R&R Hotel

An Excerpt on Father’s Day

…Freedom, for my father, meant solitude and I think it is safe to say, loneliness. The freer and more independent he became, the more it sunk in that he was isolated from his family and to a certain extent, from life.  There would be no rock, no foundation, to return to, and so, like others before him with that double-edged luxury, he began to travel.

My barbaric yawp

Although Nathaniel Rateliff has left his former band The Wheel behind, he hasn’t lost his capacity for singing outwardly about the inner.  A wonderful new album, In Memory of Loss, is out now and I was lucky enough to catch him at a Brooklyn venue with about 30 others.  The first time I heard the Whitman-esque yawp at that ends this song, I felt as if I was listening somehow to a Native American voice expressing what words can never say.  Extraordinary.  For another version, accompanied by bassist Julie Davis, go here.

East Fairmount Park, Exit 342

Pomegranates

Lest the year turn entirely into banjo-filled wonderment that seems to reflect an America turning inward towards a comforting past image (the genre known as alt.country does feel like it carries strains of populism, doesn’t it?), I managed to make it down to DC9 to catch Pomegranates.  It was a short set, lasting no more than 30 minutes, but a refreshing reminder of what I enjoy about small venues and small bands.  They sounded better live than on mp3 — and at the risk of dating myself reminded me at moments of the Kitchens of Distinction — but what was truly pleasurable was being able to sip a beer or two, listen closely, jostle with nobody, and buy a record (yes, a record) at the end of the show.  Red vinyl, or as they might say, pomegranate vinyl.

Tags: DC9, Pomegranates