dfan says

One of my projects this year is to read a bunch of the books sitting on my bookshelves that I have heretofore ignored. I never buy a book I don’t intend to read, but often something else takes precedence and I never get around to reading it. Until this year, that is, I guess.

I read At Swim-Two-Birds, “O’Brien’s” (it’s a pseudonym) most famous work, around a decade ago, and didn’t really get it. As I recall it’s very postmodern (far ahead of its time, in 1939), with stories within stories and various fictional and mythical characters careening back and forth between them. I read the whole thing in kind of a daze and nothing about it really stuck. But a friend with whom I share many tastes said I had to read The Third Policeman, and so I bought it, and now have finally read it.

It’s pretty weird too, though easier to take in than At Swim-Two-Birds; at least it has a linear plot. An unexceptional (except for having a wooden leg and being a murderer) man suddenly finds himself in an odd environment with at its center a police station whose inhabitants seem to be interested in pretty much nothing but bicycles and the afterlife. When I put it like that it sounds kind of odd, and you know what, it is. He has a bunch of strange adventures and strange conversations, and the book actually sort of goes somewhere in the end, which was kind of a surprise after the first 180 pages.

Halfway through it I realized “Hey, this reminds me a lot of Alice In Wonderland”, and apparently I am smart, because this is what the scholars say too, although because they have Ph.D.s in literature they seem to say “Menippean satire” instead of “Alice In Wonderland”, or so I gather from a brief jaunt through the web.

The book is actually frequently hilarious in a verbal Monty Python kind of way. You will perhaps understand my comparison when I inform you that much of the humor involves the attempt to have logical conversations with policemen who are unable to understand any concept unless it is framed in terms of bicycles. I found the funniest parts of the book to be the narrator’s ongoing earnest attempts to relate his situation to the life and writing of the fictional de Selby, the most moronic philosopher who ever lived, complete with extensive footnotes detailing the history of scholarly investigations of his work. Your mileage may vary.

As usual when reading classic novels, I totally enjoyed it on the surface, while undoubtedly missing a lot of the interesting stuff that lurks beneath. I could tell that a lot of what was going on was probably referencing and making fun of contemporary scientific and philosophical fads, but as the “contemporary” in question was 70 years ago, it was less pointed to me than I’m sure it was at the time.

P.S. When I finished this supposedly obscure book, I headed over to Amazon to read what I figured would be 3 or so reader reviews. There were 79. Apparently, a couple years back one of the characters on Lost was reading it, so all the fanatics had to immediately buy it and scour it for clues. Hey, if it gets people to read classic postmodern literature, I’m all for it.

I just finished watching Bruce Springsteen perform at the Super Bowl halftime show (and I’m not a big Springsteen fan, but that was a pretty great halftime show). Anyway, it got me thinking: Bruce Springsteen has sold millions and millions of records, and he has a ton of cred as an Important Artist and all, but I can’t think of any major bands that follow in his footsteps. It seems very weird for someone so big both commercially and artistically to not have a slew of imitators.

Am I wrong? Is it more common than I think for an artist of his stature to stand so alone?  Or am I missing a big group of Young Springsteens?

I’ve read most of the Jack Vance that’s in print in the US, and some that isn’t, which means that in order to read more I have to either track down out-of-print books or read his grade-B material. This is the latter. It’s published as two novels, but it’s really one novel ripped into two halves; Ports of Call ends abruptly, without even a cliffhanger, and Lurulu picks up where it left off. (They were published six years apart, in 1998 and 2004, which makes for entertaining reading as one watches people at the time being irritated by the first book cutting off without warning.)

It’s the last thing that he wrote, except for supposedly an imminent autobiography – he’s over 90 and blind now – and it kind of shows. Throughout most of it, a bunch of buddies planet-hop in their space-yacht without any real structure, having the usual Vancian adventures with the wacky cultures of each planet, which are distinguished from each other mostly through the color of their hats, the name of their local beer, and the relative ferocity of their haggling.

This may not sound like much fun, and most of the reviews I’ve read have been rather negative, but although not much happens from page to page, most of the individual pages are a lot of fun, just because Vance’s style is so awesome. If you’re not already sold on Vance, this is not the place to start, but if you’re already a fan, you’ll probably get more pleasure out of it than a quick browsing of reviews would lead you to believe.

My recent chronological voyage through the XTC back catalog, and excitement at hearing many early songs I hadn’t listened to in ages, got me thinking about some aspects that much of my favorite rock music has in common. I like to think of myself as having pretty varied tastes, but it’s true that a certain class of music is just about guaranteed to tickle my fancy.

I was going to call this Idiot Savant music, but that name is both not all that accurate and I guess kind of derogatory.

Here is my basic set of criteria for a band to belong to this category:

1. A high level of musical inventiveness that appeals to me in a music-theory-nerd sort of way, such that I could explain to another theory-literate person what is interesting about it.
2. A corresponding lack of ability of the artists to explain their methods theoretically.
3. A high level of ROCK.

Point 2 is what prevents pretty much any prog rock from falling into this category (although some of my favorite rock music still scores high in points 1 and 3, like Led Zeppelin and Red-era King Crimson). But point 1 is important too, and is what prevents me from getting similarly excited by artists like Daniel Johnston or Jad Fair.

Artists who I love and who I’d more or less place in this group include:

• Early XTC (you will see the word ‘early’ a lot)
• Early Pixies
• Early Throwing Muses
• A lot of Guided By Voices / Robert Pollard
• Captain Beefheart
• The Minutemen, perhaps, but I feel like they understood what they were doing more

Generally the bands eventually start figuring out what they’re doing and slide out of this category.

The Fiery Furnaces are sort of on the line. I have the feeling that Matthew Friedberger is pretty aware of the techniques he is using, but he deploys a lot of them so charmingly ham-handedly that it has the same sort of effect.

When I read about these bands, often one of the members is quoted as saying something like “We thought we were making poppy dance music and would shoot up the charts!” Which is pretty much the point.