Archives for the month of: November, 2005

My blog is being an asshole

November 27, 05 //
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Last night, I wrote a substantial part of the next (and, I hope, last) installment of my Replacements saga. I was going to make it a page rather than a post (it’s a somewhat trivial difference in the WordPress world, but pages don’t necessarily get featured as the newest entry on the main blog page, which I thought would be a nice way to tuck the saga away for anyone who wants to read it without boring anyone else with it), and when I tried to save it, I got an error message. ARRRGGGHH. I couldn’t face rewriting it tonight, so it will have to wait till I’m in the mood again.

Then, just now, I started and finished a long, quite trivial post about my weekend thus far that was noteworthy only in that it actually discussed knitting—not just knitting in the abstract but my knitting, with links to some scrummy yarn that I just ordered (in the blue color shown, though the photo doesn’t do justice to all the variegations in the yarn) so that I can make this sweater, which will be my first full sweater. (I’ve made a shrug—basically just sleeves and a back—but not yet a whole sweater.) I also went on and on about my acquisitiveness lately, and none of it would have been very interesting to anyone else, probably, but I had fun writing it. And when I went to publish it…yup, error message again.

Sort of a metaphor for my weekend, which as usual has been a story of good intentions and poor execution. I haven’t been completely useless: I did—finally, after over a year of good intentions—start to work on decluttering our spare bedroom. There’s still a long way to go, but there’s something so encouraging about just taking those first steps that I think I can actually envision finishing it now. And on Saturday night, Bill and I did something we rarely get around to doing: went to the movies. We saw “Good Night, and Good Luck,” which was beautifully done, from the cinematography to the performances, and further affirmed my growing conviction that George Clooney really ought to run for president. I also got a fair amount of knitting done. I’m working on two projects simultaneously: a blanket (the first of two) for Siamese Rescue’s shelter blanket program, and a hood/cowl type of thing for the allegedly impending winter weather. (It’s 60 degrees or so here today, so who knows if I’ll actually need the thing, but it’s my first project on circular needles, and I’m enjoyng the process enough that I don’t really care about the finished product.) I’m making the blanket from a pattern that I created myself, something I never dreamed I’d be able to do. I still haven’t done it, of course—I won’t feel proud of it until I’ve actually finished it and made it work. But it’s been fun to try.

To counteract my recent bout of acquisitiveness—I’ve been bidding on eBay for two new objects of obsession: millefiori Venetian glass beads, and a very specific style of Levis that are the most flattering jeans I’ve ever owned—I also put a bunch of CDs and knitting books up for sale on Amazon, and arranged my first ever knit swap, trading a knitting book that I don’t expect to use for a pair of Addi Turbos in an unusual size. So I’m feeling slightly guilty about my spending sprees, but at least I’m clearing some stuff out to compensate. I don’t know where this millefiori obsession came from (“Cash in the Attic,” probably), but I think I’ve satisfied the urge for now, having bought a pair of inexpensive and gorgeous millefiori earrings on my new favorite site, Etsy.com, and a really cheap, beautiful pendant on eBay. The jeans obsession comes from the fact that, just as Trinny and Susannah promised, I put on this particular style and immediately gained two inches in height and lost 15 pounds. I figure once you find anything that suits you that well, you have no choice but to stock up on them. Er, right?

Things I haven’t done this weekend:
1. Gone to the gym every day as planned. I have sort of an excuse there, though: my personal trainer had me try something new at our second-to-last session on Friday, and I haven’t been able to walk properly since, much less exercise. I’m going to try to do some stretching and Pilates-style toning this evening, and maybe walk on the treadmill if I’m feeling ambitious, just to get the kinks out of my muscles, but a serious workout will have to wait until tomorrow or Tuesday.
2. Done any work work. There’s some preparatory reading I need to do before tomorrow morning, so that’s how I’ll be spending my evening tonight.
3. Go to the brand new Ace Hardware over by the grocery store and pick up some wallpaper remover and something to score the wallpaper with. Our house is coated in dated, ghastly wallpaper, and I’m hoping I’ll be able to get rid of it with the nasty chemical liquid remover rather than resorting to the heat gun. Heat guns scare me.
4. Burn CDs for Mark and Ken.
5. Block the above-mentioned shrug and sew up the sleeves so that I can actually wear it.
6. Color my hair…but I think I can get another week out of it before I start getting the skunk-roots effect.

But hey, I cooked Thanksgiving dinner, I worked on the spare bedroom, and I did lots of knitting. That has to count for something, doesn’t it? (Doesn’t it? Please?!)

Thankfully

November 23, 05 //
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I’m going to save most of my navel-gazing reflection on 2005 for the end of the year, because there’s still some 2005 left, but I’m feeling pretty reflective on this Thanksgiving eve. Maybe it’s the little cat’s-eye reflectors that I have attached to my edges. (Ouch, sorry, couldn’t resist that particularly atrocious pun.)

Nah, it’s just that Thanksgiving has always been my favorite holiday, partly because it comes at a time of year that I love, partly because it’s a no-gifts holiday (I love getting gifts, but I don’t like the stress of trying to continually top the previous year’s gifts, plus I always feel a little guilty at all the bounty I receive on birthdays and at Christmas/Chanuka—though I absolutely love getting presents, always have and always will—as St. Teresa of Avila said, “Anyone who gave me so much as a sardine could have the world from me”), and partly because it was traditionally my favorite family gathering. My mom and her sister used to trade off Thanksgiving-hosting duties, but by the time I was entering my teens, things had settled into a pattern of my mom making Thanksgiving and my aunt making Passover. (That’s how we refer to it in my family: “making” the holiday, i.e. having people at your house and doing the cooking.) My mom was a wonderful cook, and I don’t mean that in the sense that everyone’s mom is automatically their favorite cook; my mom just had a flair for making relatively uncomplicated food that tasted great and always turned out right. (She had some not-so-successful experimental phases in the ’60s, it’s true, when my parents did a lot of entertaining, but those were aberrations; her tried-and-true recipes were all splendid.) And my aunt and uncle and their family—two boys and a girl, just like my family, except with the age order reversed (I’m the youngest, my cousin Debbie is the oldest), and all matched neatly to us in age—were the relatives I was closest to growing up, for various reasons. So Thanksgiving at our apartment was festive and loud and full of good conversation, excellent wine (my uncle is a collector), and enormous quantities of superb food.

I can’t remember the last time I didn’t go home for Thanksgiving, even though in the past five or so vacation-deprived years, going home has meant flying in on Thanksgiving day and flying out on Sunday, which is always exhausting. It will be weird not to be there, and I’m sure I’ll miss it, but then again, since my mom died (in 2002), Thanksgiving has been a little bittersweet anyway, because I’ve felt her absence especially keenly at this time of year. I feel my mom’s absence every single day, of course, and I expect I always will, but all of my Thanksgiving memories are wrapped up with thoughts of her, and although the past few Thanksgivings (one at my aunt and uncle’s house, two at my brother and sister-in-law’s) have been wonderful, happy, warm occasions filled with the same good food and good company as the ones I grew up with, they’ve been just a little less meaningful without my mom. But it will still be weird not to be there.

But maybe it will be the start of a new tradition, one of my own making. This year I’m going home around Christmastime instead, and tomorrow I’m cooking Thanksgiving dinner (of a sort—no turkey, since I don’t eat meat and I can’t really cook a whole turkey just for Bill) for the two of us, which I’m looking forward to. Bill and I have different eating habits and schedules, so we don’t often sit down to a home-cooked meal together, and I’m looking forward to that, as well as to the actual cooking. I’m a decent cook myself, having learned well from my mom, and though I know how to make all the standard Thanksgiving side dishes, I’ve never actually done it. I’m expecting it to be fun, especially since we just got a nice new stove that is vastly superior to the one it replaced merely by virtue of the fact that it actually works.

And I’m feeling particularly grateful this year, feeling like I have a tremendous amount to be grateful for. It’s been a fairly eventful year, in mostly good ways, and I feel incredibly lucky to have been able to leave a horrible, soul-sucking job situation for one that I enjoy and am challenged by and am learning from and just generally getting a kick out of. I feel hugely grateful that I have as many wonderful friends as I do, including some new ones (like my St. Louis pal Chris, one of the finest people I’ve met in ages, and my wonderful co-workers, to mention just a few) and some not-so-new, very much loved ones and some with whom I’ve gotten back in touch. I’m grateful that my little foray into my past (which has mostly receded back into the past again now, and maybe that’s as it should be) has been almost entirely positive—one part maybe wasn’t such a good idea, on balance, but even that was far from a disaster, and the rest was a delight. I’m grateful that I got to see my treasured and stalwart friend Tim last weekend, for the first time in five years. I’m grateful for the Twanggang and for the privilege of getting to work with them on Twangfest. I’m grateful that my immediate family is healthy and thriving and that my two beautiful nephews are turning into such terrific young men. I’m grateful not to be in the grip of the profound depression that was just beginning to take me over at this time last year. I’m grateful that there are so many things, from music to knitting and beyond, that give me pleasure every day.

Hell, I’m just all around grateful to be here on the planet, healthy, in good spirits, married to a great guy, surrounded by my precious cats without whom my life would be so much less, warm and safe and with more than enough to eat and a roof over my head. I hope all who are reading this have much to be grateful for too…oh, yeah, and if you’re reading this, odds are you’re one of the people I’m grateful for too. So thanks. And happy Thanksgiving.

When bad band names…

November 21, 05 //
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…happen to good bands: Exhibit A, the atrociously named but thoroughly delightful band the everybodyfields (lowercase theirs; also ugh). I was put on to this trio from Johnson City, Tennessee, by an online friend whose taste frequently meshes with mine, and he was absolutely on target this time. I bought their first album, the annoyingly titled “halfway there: electricity and the south” (again, stupid lowercase theirs), a couple of months ago, and I’m eagerly awaiting the arrival of this year’s “Plague of Dreams.”

So what do they sound like? Well, I don’t like to use the largely meaningless term “Appalachian music,” though it could perhaps be more fairly applied to them than to other young bands who have been saddled with the term, since they are actually from the region. But it’s still a pointless and overloaded term, so I’d prefer to call them an alt-country band (to apply another completely useless term) with strong old-time and folk influences. Their songwriting is quiet but powerful, not at all frail or delicate, and their musicianship is solid, especially their excellent dobro player’s work. The frontpeople, Sam Quinn and Jill Andrews (who I think are a couple, but I’m not sure; haven’t really gotten into the cult of personality* with them yet), both sing, and I’ve always been a complete sucker for boy-girl harmonies; if I could be in a band, I’d want to share vocals with a male singer. I wouldn’t say either of them is an extraordinarily gifted singer or anything, but they both have clear, lovely voices (and they sing on key, always a plus in my book), and they complement each other extremely well. They’ve got a little bit of that dreamy atmospheric thing I’ve been going on about recently, but it’s more a stillness, a peaceful quality to their music, rather than anything airy or trippy. They sound like a lazy autumn afternoon in the countryside, I guess.

And it wasn’t until today—maybe the sixth or seventh time I’ve listened to the record—that I noticed how much they remind me of Gillian Welch and David Rawlings. They’re not derivative of Welch and Rawlings at all; I wouldn’t even necessarily assume they’re influenced by them. But they’re mining similar territory, and they’re quietly, distinctively memorable and affecting in much the same way. I’m finding that a number of my favorite records this year (e.g. British Sea Power, Brakes, Stars) are ones that I enjoy and admire tremendously but don’t feel especially passionate about, but if the everybodyfields’ new one is as good as their first, it could wind up quite high on my list precisely because it inspires real passion in me, just as the first one does. (Which is a little odd, since a lack of passion is the thing that keeps me from truly loving, rather than just admiring, much of Gillian Welch’s work—not “Revival,” which is a record I’ll always be passionate about, but most everything else.)

My friend Steve got me listening to a good band with a good name this past week, too: the Morning After Girls, from Australia. (They have an actual girl in the band, which somehow makes me like their name better.) Further investigation is warranted, but so far they strike me as a great moody melodic punkish dark-rock band. Pretty sure I’m going to have to order their new record from Australia, since there’s no projected release date for it here.

[A meta note: I realize the blog has been a little sparse and dull lately, for which I apologize. Work has been occupying most of my waking hours recently, and it looks like it's going to be that way for a while. Not that I'm complaining, because I continue to love what I'm doing, but it does make it hard to marshal the thoughts that are buzzing around in my head in a coherent way. So those thoughts are popping up in my dreams instead, mostly. I've been thinking a lot about a line from a Lori Carson song that I've probably quoted before: "Heat hangs in this room/Like pictures on your wall/Of other lives/Do you mourn them all?" It's not that I'm mourning past versions of me, not at all, but some of them have been visiting me unexpectedly (though maybe predictably, given my recent forays into playing with my past), and I'm wondering if other people carry their old selves with them much of the time, and if so, how they deal with it. But that's about as far as I can get on the introspection front tonight, with a 7:00 a.m. appointment with my trainer looming and another hour or so of work to do.]

*The cult of personality is something that’s all but disappeared for me since CDs replaced vinyl. It used to be that if I like a band, I knew the names of all of the band members and had memorized the band’s basic biography; if I really liked a band, I’d go beyond that and start gathering whatever trivia about them that I could find. (And if a band completely took over my life, as has happened only a few times, I became a font of information about them; heck, I can still tell you things about Paul Weller, for example, that there’s just no good reason for me to remember.) Nowadays that just hardly ever happens. The Delgados are pretty indisputably my favorite band of the last ten years (as long as I don’t include artists who are largely band-independent, i.e. Jay Farrar, Scott Miller, and Robbie Fulks), and yet I still have trouble remembering all of the core band members’ surnames, much less any part of the names of the various side personnel. I was a Grand Champeen fan for a good two years before I knew all of their last names for sure, and for the first year or so, I had a terrible time even remembering Channing’s first name, for some reason. I can’t even tell you some of the Delgados’ song titles, or in some cases, which record a particular song is on. And those are major favorite bands of mine; I couldn’t even begin to come up with the names of the members of bands I’m less passionate about. I blame this all on CDs, because I just don’t pore over CD inserts the way I used to over LPs. It’s probably a product of aging, too, and to a lesser extent, of not automatically focusing on a cute boy in a given band, since I so rarely do that anymore. (I’m not saying I never do it, I just don’t do it as often. It used to be pretty much a given. I remember that in the stretch during the late ’80s when I listened to almost nothing but American Music Club (Soul Asylum were practically the only exception), I was curiously proud of the fact that I didn’t have any girly interest in any of the members of AMC…which is why it particularly annoyed me that Eitzel, with whom I was reasonably well acquainted through a mutual friend, thought I had a crush on him. Yeesh. As if. But I digress.) I don’t think it’s a bad thing that in most cases, the music interests me more than the personalities; it’s just odd, and I’m still not fully used to it even after more than a decade of CD-buying rather than LP-buying.

A quick NP list

November 16, 05 //
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I’ve been listening to so much old stuff lately—mostly Sandy Denny and the Delgados*, though not at the same time—that it’s refreshing to have spent the last couple of weeks mostly focused on new records, at least enough so to come up with a brief pimp list. We’ve hit that pre-Christmas point in the year when not much interesting new stuff is coming out, and I’m using that as an opportunity to catch up on records I bought earlier in the year and haven’t listened to enough yet. But here are three recent acquisitions that are floating my boat in a big way.

1. Bettye Lavette, “I’ve Got My Own Hell to Raise.” First of all, a rule of thumb: if you come across a vintage soul comp and the artist’s name is Bettye with an “e” at the end, it will be good. That’s because (unless there are more soul singers out there named Bettye in whom there has recently been a revival of interest) it will be by either Bettye Lavette or Bettye Swann, two very different but equally compelling soul singers who got their start in the 1960s. Swann retired in the 1970s; Lavette is still going strong. There was a superb Bettye Swann retrospective released last year by the wonderful people at Honest Jon’s Records, and I hope someone will do an equally definitive comp of Bettye Lavette’s career one of these days. In the meantime, though, Lavette has released a fine new record of covers of songs by female artists ranging from Joan Armatrading to Rosanne Cash to Fiona Apple. It’s not a perfect record, but the high points are extremely high. Her version of Aimee Mann’s “How Am I Different?” is utterly magnificent.

2. The Clientele, “Strange Geometry” (and others). I’m all fired up about this band at the moment, though “fired up” is an incongruous phrase to use in connection with a band whose sound is not exactly fiery. The Clientele (terrible name) are not a new band; they’ve been around since the late 1990s, I guess. But I only found out about them this year, and it took me a few months to get around to grabbing their records from eMusic. I finally did the other night, and I spent all day yesterday listening to them. I’m not sure when I developed a passion for swirly, dreamy, lush, atmospheric pop, but it’s a relatively recent development, so I’m still excited when I find another band that scratches that itch, and the Clientele do so very effectively. Gorgeous, gorgeous stuff. So far, I’ve mostly just been letting the sheer sonic beauty of the songs wash over me, though occasionally a sad yet witty lyric will catch my ear. (Sad but not mopey, I should add; generally, I’m not so much for the mope.) It’s possible that I’ll end up preferring their previous album, “The Violet Hour,” to this new one, but it’s too early to say. In any case, an adjustment will definitely have to be made to my top ten list.

3. Gary Allan, “Tough All Over.” There’s a defense-of-mainstream-country post that’s been forming in my head recently, but I’m going to have to wait until the bad taste left by last night’s thoroughly ghastly CMAs has dissipated before writing it down. For now, I’ll just note that I like lots of mainstream country, though not a lot of the stuff that gets played on country radio and honored at the CMAs. (God, that show was just wretched last night. I haven’t watched the CMAs in a couple of years, and now I remember why; this year’s version was possibly the worst I’ve ever seen. Billy Joel and Shania Twain, Elton John and Dolly Parton: together again, and with any luck, never again. I’m still shuddering. But I digress.)

Anyway, Gary Allan is one of my very favorite mainstream country artists. He’s got this voice that…well, I’d borrow my friend Deborah’s description of its effect on her, but I think I need to ask permission first, so I’ll just borrow a phrase from Sam instead and say that his voice makes me want to undress. It grabs me on a visceral level that I can’t even describe adequately. He still hasn’t quite made the record I want him to make, but that’s okay. His previous record, “See If I Care,” came close, and so did 1999’s wonderful “Smoke Rings in the Dark.” And so does this new one, which, like all of his records, features a dud or two but is nonetheless a very impressive achievement. I hate to use stupid rock-crit clichés like calling a record “brave,” but this one really is quite brave: Gary’s wife, the mother of their six children, killed herself last year, and he addresses the aftermath of that horror head-on on several songs on this record—including songs that he wrote, like “Putting My Misery on Display,” “Puttin’ Memories Away,” and the devastatingly good “I Just Got Back from Hell,” but also on other songwriters’ songs, like “Promise Broken” and “Ring.” It all combines to make a very affecting and powerful record that also sounds great and can be appreciated and enjoyed without any knowledge of the backstory. And that voice…yow.

Oh, and one more, because it occurs to me that I haven’t really said much about it, even though it’s my undisputed #1 record of the year:

4. Son Volt, “Okemah and the Melody of Riot.” Because it’s fierce and passionate and exciting, and it rocks, and I get more out of it every time I listen to it. Seeing the band live really made me appreciate some of the songs that hadn’t fully grabbed me, like “Who” and “Atmosphere,” and the songs that I loved right off the bat, like “Jet Pilot” and “Bandages and Scars” and “Medicine” and “Ipecac,” still never fail to excite me. I loved “Terroir Blues” and Jay’s magnificent, underrated soundtrack for “The Slaughter Rule,” and I’ll be perfectly happy if he does more acoustic stuff in the future—but that doesn’t mean that it isn’t absolutely thrilling to hear him rock out again. No new record I’ve heard this year comes close to this one.

*I’ve been mourning the Delgados particularly acutely lately, and I may have a little homage to them coming up, not sure yet. I just hate the fact that I will have to spend the rest of my life without the prospect of a new Delgados record to look forward to.

Where have you been?

November 11, 05 //
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I can’t decide if this is cool or depressing. Both, I guess. On the one hand, it’s a neat idea, but on the other hand, it makes me realize how few places I’ve been. Maybe I should have been more diverse in my travels back when I was younger and had more free time and fewer encumbrances, instead of going to London every time I had enough money to travel. But then again, if I could take a trip anywhere in the world tomorrow, I’d be on a plane to London again. With a detour to Ireland this time.

(My dad’s version of this map would be a whole lot more interesting. He’s been almost everywhere.)




Create your own visited country map.

So what does your map look like?

One definition of weird

November 8, 05 //
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When I left the office tonight, it was 77 degrees, at 5:45 p.m. In November.

The weirdest part was that I had been wearing my beloved cable hoodie from Costco all day at work, and when I got outside I had to take it off. That’s just goofy.

Yeah, I’m more susceptible to weather than most, I guess. I blame it on Austin—I don’t remember ever being particularly sensitive to weather until I lived there and endured six months of summer a year, an eleven-day heatwave during which the daytime temperature never went below 100 degrees (and I moved halfway through it to an uninsulated house), and the clincher, a week of upper 90s in February. Gak.

Ever since then, I’ve been an impassioned hater of summer. Especially when it reappears in November.

Bookmania!

November 7, 05 //
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Okay, maybe “mania” is a little bit of an overstatement. I don’t read nearly as quickly as I used to, and I don’t seem to have had much time to read lately, so this list contains only a paltry four books. But in my defense, the book I just finished—the third one on the list below—was something like 550 pages long. (Actually, 560. I just checked.) And the other three are nonfiction, which always takes me longer to read than fiction does (especially since I go through long stretches during which the only fiction I read is Brit-chick-lit and mysteries. Intelligently written mysteries, mind you—and the next time I’m reading one, maybe I’ll do a roundup of the Best Mystery Writers According to Me—but still not huge brain challengers.)

Anyway. With no further excuses, herewith four books that have floated my boat recently.

1. Thomas Frank, What’s the Matter with Kansas?. I have now officially determined that I am not, in fact, the last leftist in the Yew Ess Ay to read this book, but I still wish I’d read it sooner. Yeah, Frank tends to reiterate his points just a little too much, and yeah, I’m in fundamental agreement with Michael Bérubé’s criticisms of Frank’s assessment of the culture wars. But it’s still a terrific book, and since I’m right next door to Kansas, it was an especially interesting read for me. And Frank is a skillful and engaging writer. (I love nonfiction books that have notes that are every bit as worthy of reading as the text itself.) It won’t exactly cheer anybody up, but it’s a very cogent analysis of some of the reasons that so many regular ‘muricans vote against their economic self-interest and how the wingnut establishment, political and journalistic, make sure they keep doing so.

2. Jonathan Kozol, The Shame of the Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America. Considerably less likely to cheer anybody up, but an essential and deeply disturbing read. Kozol comes up with so many statistics and so much research that it would be almost impossible to dispute his arguments about the state of public education and the effects of de facto resegregation on minority students in poorly funded schools. He exposes the No Child Left Behind program for the sham that it is and points out the essential cynicism at its core. And he brings to life some exceptional children who are, in fact, being left behind by the resegregation of public schools. A good polemic can be a real inspiration to its readers, and that’s exactly what this book is, an excellent and impassioned polemic, like his other books; Kozol isn’t a particularly good prose stylist, but he doesn’t have to be, because what he has to say is so compelling by itself that his plain writing style works just fine. It’s a massively frustrating read, because you want to do something, anything after reading it, and it’s not clear what any one individual can do, particularly one who, like me, doesn’t have kids. And sadly, I wasn’t terribly surprised by any of Kozol’s facts and statistics—just disappointed and troubled.

3. Audrey Niffenegger, The Time Traveler’s Wife. I admit that I had to get past my knee-jerk snobbery when I got the paperback edition of this magnificent debut novel out of the library and saw that it was both a Today Show Book Club choice and a People magazine book of the year…and you should too, because it’s a really remarkable book. Clare and Henry are a Chicago couple, eight years apart in age. He’s a librarian, she’s an artist. They are normal (I use the word here in the sense of “more or less like me,” not to mean “ordinary”) intelligent people with good taste in music and books and food and friends…and oh yeah, Henry just happens to time-travel, unpredictably and uncontrollably, both backward and forward in time; he sometimes even meets an older or younger version of himself. (He has “chrono-displacement disorder,” which the author treats as a real syndrome.) Clare first meets him when she is six and Henry is in his forties (since he hops around so much in time, he is sometimes much more than eight years older than she is), in the meadow near her family’s house in South Haven, Michigan, and he writes down all the dates when he will return. He’s reluctant to tell her much about what’s going to happen in their future, but she eventually learns that they’ll get married. It’s a love story. The story jumps around in time in somewhat the same way that Henry does, and all of it is delightful, though some of it is also heartbreaking. Niffenegger is a terrific writer; it’s hard to believe that this is her first novel, because she’s so skillful and her writing so fluent. (And her pop-culture references rang very true to me; I suspect she’s not far from my own age.) It’s a little sentimental, and the time travel doesn’t hold up to extremely close scrutiny, but that doesn’t matter, because the characters are so charming and so real (flaws included) and the story is so full and rich. One of my favorite novels in a long time.

4. Laura Mac Donald, The Curse of the Narrows: The Halifax Disaster of 1917. This is a qualified plug, because I’m only 125 pages or so into the book. (But I read all 125 of those in the space of a few hours yesterday, and I can’t wait to get back to it tonight.) It’s about a 1917 disaster that was completely unfamiliar to me, probably because I don’t know much about Canadian history: a giant ship carrying large quantities of highly combustible explosives and gas was plowed into by another large ship in the narrow and dangerous channels of Halifax Harbour in Halifax-Dartmouth, Nova Scotia. The explosion and subsequent tsunami killed 2000 people in a city with a population of about 60,000, left 9000 people homeless, and did hundreds of millions of dollars worth of damage. I don’t know why, but I’ve always had a thing for shipwreck stories (and natural-disaster stories too, though it’s hard to imagine being able to enjoy a pure natural-disaster story right now, so soon after Katrina), and this is a remarkably good one. Mac Donald is kind of a clunky writer, but not so much so that her writing gets in the way of the story, which is so remarkable (not least because it’s amazing that anyone survived to describe the incident) that it almost tells itself.

I’m not sure what I’m going to read when I’m done with Curse of the Narrows. I have a smallish stack of books that I actually bought—something I prefer not to do with fiction—including some Brit-chick-lit, a mystery, a nicely boxed set of The Chronicles of Narnia (I still hope to re-read at least the first one before the movie comes out), and one of my three* favorite books of all time: Graham Greene’s Brighton Rock, which I haven’t read in at least ten years. I might read that one first, unless I pick up a bunch of random books at the library, which is what usually happens.

Oh, and an NPIMH (that’s “now playing in my head”): The traditional song “Moorlough Shore,” as sung by Caroline Lavelle. I’m familiar with this song because it was played repeatedly and to excellent, haunting effect on “E-Z Streets,” one of my favorite TV shows of the last decade or so, and one of the darkest ever. The Trio channel read my mind and added it to their “Brilliant But Canceled” series last fall, so I got to see most of it again for the first time in ten or twelve years or so. It didn’t make quite as strong an impression on me the second time around (probably because I’ve since seen even darker shows, like “The Wire”), but it was still very powerful…even though the idea of Ken Olin (who looks remarkably like my oldest brother, at least in some shots) as an Irish Catholic is pretty comical. Anyway, the pilot was on again a few weeks ago, and I was finally able to catch enough of the lyrics to the song to make a reasonable Google search out of it. I tracked the song title down that way, and then looked the song up at Allmusic.com, which listed only three recordings of it. A little trial and error led me to the correct version, by Ms. Lavelle, an English cellist and singer of whom I was previously unaware, even though she’s sung with Massive Attack and I was something of a fan of theirs for a while. Some reviews compared her to Enya (yikes!), but then I saw others that explained why that wasn’t a reasonable comparison, so I bought a used copy of “Spirit,” the CD that “Moorlough Shore” appears on. Most of it is a little too trippy and ethereal to qualify as My Thing (though mercifully, she doesn’t sound anything like Enya), but I’ve been listening to “Moorlough Shore” over and over and over again. She has a beautiful, dusky, low voice, and the weird cello and her eerie vocal make it a very distinctive and completely haunting treatment of a traditional song. She’s got a record on eMusic that has more of the traditional stuff, so I might grab that, I guess. Not sure I’ll ever become a real fan, but the CD was well worth the purchase price just for the one song alone.

*One of my three favorite books of all time is actually three books, so I guess I should say my favorite five books of all time. The three are the books in Edna O’Brien’s “Country Girls” trilogy: The Country Girls, The Lonely Girl, and Girls in Their Married Bliss. (Just typing the titles makes me want to read them again.) And the remaining one of the five is Jane Smiley’s A Thousand Acres. In case anyone was wondering.

My iPod is trying to break my heart

November 2, 05 //
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I was listening to the iPod at work today, something I don’t do nearly often enough, and it was hitting me with long strings of favorites, as though it knew I was in the mood for the musical equivalent of comfort food. (I didn’t know I was in that mood, actually, since I woke up feeling fairly chipper, but the iPod always knows.) It started out with a dazzling three-in-a-row of Elvis Costello, the Who, and the Jam, but then it started getting into the heart-tugging stuff. A few songs later it played my single favorite Pogues song (“Thousands Are Sailing”—coincidentally, one of the rare Pogues songs that Shane McGowan didn’t write), followed shortly by my favorite Caitlin Cary song (“Fireworks”), and so on. And then it pulled out the big guns: two older Sam Phillips songs in a row. The first was “Go Down,” from “Cruel Inventions,” not my favorite song on that record, but a pretty great song anyway. And then “Strawberry Road.” I know I wrote about that one recently here, but I have to reiterate what an astonishing song it is. Possibly one of my favorite songs of all time. I’ve already quoted one of the killer lines, but for some reason I’d forgotten this one:

“Pain is sharper
When I suspect
That true love runs
Looking for us
Like a lion in our dreams”

And weirdly, all those songs pulling on my heartstrings started to alter my mood—I started feeling sad for no good reason. That almost never happens to me. When I’m already down, music either improves my mood or distracts me from it, and when I’m in a good mood, even the saddest songs are pleasurable. So this was a rare experience, and a little worrisome.

Fortunately, Scott Miller’s entirely silly “Good Morning, Midnight,” from the live acoustic record the name of which provides the tagline for this blog, came on, and Scott’s long, entertaining introduction to it cheered me back up again. And then I turned off the iPod for a while. I have enough trouble staying in a decent mood without outside stimuli—particularly outside stimuli that are supposed to make me feel better—contributing to the problem.

The world at night

November 1, 05 //
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(I was going to do an NP list tonight consisting entirely of books, but I got sidetracked by work and other distractions, so maybe tomorrow night. For now, I’ll just do one of my periodic plugs for Michael Bérubé’s blog, which was typically, and brilliantly, on target yesterday. Oh, and it’s opening night of the NBA season tonight—yay, Charles and Kenny and E.J. back on my TV!—which means a basketball post is just around the corner.)

So with the clocks falling back this past weekend, it’s suddenly dark when I leave work, around 5:30-6:00 p.m. And when I get up at 5:45 a.m. on Thursday to go meet my trainer for the first of five sessions that I splurged on, I suppose it will be dark then too.

And that’s fine with me. Yeah, I know, most people hate the lack of daylight, but I love it, especially in the evenings. (My eyes don’t entirely love it, because I don’t see all that well at night, and the drive home in the dark can sometimes be a little bit unpleasant as a result…but the rest of me loves it.) I find the endless summer evenings oppressive, much as I find everything about summer oppressive, and the way the lasting light makes other people more public and more visible always annoys me. I’d rather have shorter days and longer nights.

Last night when I left work, the last traces of what must have been a beautiful sunset were still visible, and it was just cold enough, not uncomfortable at all, and the world looked so lovely, even the world as defined by the parking lot behind the old, nicely restored Freight House complex (all restaurants now, and cobblestones and brickwork) and the tracks and the old, also beautifully restored Union Station on the other side. (I love the neighborhood that my office is in; it’s an actual urban neighborhood, not fully gentrified yet and filled with interesting things to look at during those rare lunchtimes when I actually leave the office.)

It’s like a cocoon, this mid-fall darkness, and even more so in a real city. It brings back all sorts of vague but pleasant memories from childhood—driving home from my aunt and uncle’s house in White Plains and watching the scenery gradually change from big, comfortable houses to smaller, more ramshackle ones, to Co-op City and then the smaller buildings of the Bronx, to the decrepit buildings at the north end of Riverside Drive and finally to the elegant townhouses and stately prewar apartment buildings close to home—and all of those different places lit from within and looking like refuges from the windy, chilly outdoors. When I was a teenager, and then much later, when I lived in Park Slope, I used to love walking around in the late fall and early spring and glancing into the brightly lit windows to see the worlds inside of them. (I love it when people in the city leave their blinds or curtains open—not in any creepy way, of course, but just because it’s fascinating to get that five-second glimpse into somebody else’s life.) There’s something ineffably comforting about being outside but surrounded by the indoors, and I feel it most keenly at this time of year. In the heart of winter, I just want to get back to the other side of those windows and warm up, and in the summer I usually don’t want to leave the indoors at all, particularly here in the land of insufferable summers and ubiquitous central air conditioning. But this time of year is my time.

It’s also the time of year when I’m most homesick. New York from September through December is a blissful place to be. It hits me again in April and May, particularly in years when it gets hot in early May here, but it’s most powerful in the last months of the year. Some of it is nostalgia for a New York that no longer exists, but I still love New York, sanitized and chain-stored as it is, in the fall, and most especially at the holidays, when it’s overflowing with tourists and grouchy, weary Christmas shoppers but still beautiful, still breathtaking. Going home at Christmastime this year, for the first time since I left at the very end of 1999, will be bliss. (I hope.)

And yeah, I start to feel a little bleak sometime in January, when I haven’t seen daylight on a weekday for six weeks or so. But that’s the thing about this little cocoon of daylight savings time-deprived darkness: it doesn’t last all that long. By the end of January, the daylight is lasting noticeably longer and the darkness is starting to lift. I think it has to work that way; otherwise, no one would survive February.