Handsome Furs is Dan Boeckner (of Wolf Parade)’s minimal side project with his wife. They make really minimal, really great music. They recently did live performance on Radio K, and the station posted video of two new songs. Dan’s one of my favorite musicians working right now for sure.
This band is why I tried to get Cate to play music with me this summer. I think it’d be totally awesome to be in that kind of musical situation, where tours consist of just traveling with the person you love and playing shows at night. Having been in a band with only one other person for most of this summer, I’ve got to say that two-person bands are so much easier to handle in terms of practice and collaboration.
Heidegger blows my mind, but less in the awe-inspiring kind of way and more in the chucks of brain on the floor kind of way.
My first story that I wrote for my fiction class was workshopped on Monday. I’ve spent a lot of time in workshops, so I expected this one to be on the weak side considering the experience of the other folks in the class. I’ve got to say that I’m pretty impressed with how well most of them are doing, though. I fully expected my story to get slammed because it’s kind of sad and I do weird things with punctuation—in a Faulkner way, not an avant-garde, annoying way (at least I hope not)—but everyone really took to it. After two years of only writing papers it’s nice to have a new fiction piece well-received. My professor and I spent a long time talking later on as well, as our time to talk about the story in class was seriously truncated. I like him a lot, and he’s given me some good tips as well as a few writers to check out. We talked a lot about style in particular (especially my being completely stuck on Raymond Carver) and the best way for me to find a good balance of style and substantive story. And now I’m babbling. Suffice to say, I’m happy to be writing fiction again.
Today I had to go by the bookstore to buy a book that I have to read for Ethics class tomorrow (Rosa Parks’ My Story, which seems to be targeted toward Elementary School readers) and ended up getting three other books while I was there: Bertrand Russell’s Why I am Not a Christian, John Gardner’s Grendel (I’ve read his book on writing fiction, in which he constantly referenced this book. I feel like I ought to read it), and an anthology of John Updike’s early stories. I appear to have a serious addiction: not to reading books, necessarily, but to simply owning books. I love them. I love having them. I don’t have much time to read them, but damn it if they’re not lovely.
