Red Mosquito

tragabigzanda wrote:But I'm a reformed long-winded creative type myself; I wrote lyrics just like Conner Oberst before I'd ever heard his music.

Steve Albini wrote:Whenever there's active promotion on the part of somebody else, whenever I see somebody all dolled up for a fancy photograph and someone's handing out flyers or whenever there's active promotion for something like that, as an imposition on my day, I hate all those people and I want them to fail. I have a visceral reaction to advertising and promotion. There's just something about salesmanship that grates on me on a very base level and I react very negatively towards it. I want those people to suffer and I want their enterprises to fail.

Simple Torture wrote:The conversations on the past few pages have made me sprout a great big woody.

lennytheweedwhacker wrote:

The Argonaut wrote:I love Dave Eggers. AHWOSG was the first I read and it's great. Zeiroun was stupendous and made me cry. One section of his newest book, Heroes of the Frontier, made me really happy and made me laugh really hard while I was reading it one night before bed. I went back and read the last few pages over again it was so good. I could've read more, but I wanted to enjoy that moment so I turned off the light and laid down. I was thinking about that section, and all of a sudden found myself crying! Just like that. Such a weird experience. I think he's great

you sure do cry a lot

The Argonaut wrote:

lennytheweedwhacker wrote:

The Argonaut wrote:I love Dave Eggers. AHWOSG was the first I read and it's great. Zeiroun was stupendous and made me cry. One section of his newest book, Heroes of the Frontier, made me really happy and made me laugh really hard while I was reading it one night before bed. I went back and read the last few pages over again it was so good. I could've read more, but I wanted to enjoy that moment so I turned off the light and laid down. I was thinking about that section, and all of a sudden found myself crying! Just like that. Such a weird experience. I think he's great

you sure do cry a lot

Maybe the feeling of tears twice a week? A good cry once a month? It's usually not sad-crying or panic-crying or stress-crying or anything. Just crying because something hits me in just the right emotional place. It always surprises me, and if I'm alone I'll lean right into it. It feels really good to cry a little.

Simple Torture wrote:The conversations on the past few pages have made me sprout a great big woody.

Steve Albini wrote:Whenever there's active promotion on the part of somebody else, whenever I see somebody all dolled up for a fancy photograph and someone's handing out flyers or whenever there's active promotion for something like that, as an imposition on my day, I hate all those people and I want them to fail. I have a visceral reaction to advertising and promotion. There's just something about salesmanship that grates on me on a very base level and I react very negatively towards it. I want those people to suffer and I want their enterprises to fail.

durdencommatyler wrote:

Simple Torture wrote:The conversations on the past few pages have made me sprout a great big woody.

Do you have a take on Eggers in general and Heartbreaking Work... specifically?

Steve Albini wrote:Whenever there's active promotion on the part of somebody else, whenever I see somebody all dolled up for a fancy photograph and someone's handing out flyers or whenever there's active promotion for something like that, as an imposition on my day, I hate all those people and I want them to fail. I have a visceral reaction to advertising and promotion. There's just something about salesmanship that grates on me on a very base level and I react very negatively towards it. I want those people to suffer and I want their enterprises to fail.

Spoiler: show

Both Haunted Houses and “No Grace on the Road” expose that thinking about American-ness as some sort of pure, exceptional nature has its limits, both due to the fact that American power constantly struggles against its impotence to exert influence everywhere and that there was more than likely never a “pure” American-ness to begin with. On the surface, the characters in Dave Eggers’ novel You Shall Know Our Velocity! appear to be making the same mistakes: the simplistic views they have of their roles as Americans put them in danger at times, and they admit that they could be doing more harm than good for the people they meet. However, by the end of the narrative, the book’s narrator has a sudden turnaround; he may not express it in these terms exactly, but his revelation can be read as a realization that identity is a process of encounters, not a stable substance.

The novel’s narrator, Will, suddenly comes into a large amount of money and enlists his best friend, Hand, to travel around the world with him to give it away. He has always had the urge to help people, “to engage them and fix things,” especially for people who are fighting to survive, but he has struggled with it due to an “inability, due to the imagined and impossible barrier between myself and these strangers with fumbling hands” (15). As a newly wealthy American, Will sees it as his duty to make the world a better place; but, as their trip faces obstacles and delays, he slowly comes to realize that he is not as exceptional or powerful as he originally believed. He laments: “Nothing we did ever resembled in any way what we'd envisioned. Maybe we couldn't help but make a mess everywhere we went” (226). Will has an inner voice that admonishes him for picking people to give the money to at random: “You do more harm than good by choosing recipients this way. It cannot be fair”; Will shoots back: “How ever is it fair?” (118); the voice goes on to charge that the real motivation behind Will’s trip is to feel and relish the control that the money provides. After a week, he and Hand feel like they have failed, and they go their separate ways. Will’s dejection is over the way that the qualities of the identity he thought he had—a young, energetic, philanthropic, formidable American—seemed to unravel over the course of his journey; he is in a similar head space as Emily in Haunted Houses and the narrator from “No Grace on the Road” are at the end of their tales, and all signs point to his leading the same sort of frustrated, directionless life as those two characters, but this is not the case.

Will’s story gets a pseudo-epilogue that relates one final trip: he travels to Mexico with his mother to attend a wedding. All of the failures of his recent travels are weighing on his mind, and it casts a sour mood over the festivities; that is, until the reception, where he lets loose and joins a group of revelers who jump into a pool half naked. Right before he does so, Will takes off his pants and shoes, both of which “still held currency from a cold and suspicious land” (400); this casting off of the money, which had shackled him to one specific belief in static American identity throughout the novel, is the first sign of the drastic change that occurs on the story’s last page. After his feet leave the pool deck, Will hangs in the air for what seems like forever—or, at least longer than he should have been suspended there. At the moment he hits the cold water, both his heart and apparently time just stop; he says: “Man, I thought that was the end, right there” (400); that is, he thought his life had come to an end. He lives (but only for two more months), but more importantly he has come to terms with the fact that identity is not stable and substance-like; rather, it is a moment-to-moment process of managing the expectations and realities of one’s existence. This never-ending activity is exhausting, perhaps, but Will proves that it is possible, even if he only does it for a short amount of time (the few passages in the book between this moment and his death seem to suggest that he continues to succeed). Such a process is opposed to attempts in the late-twentieth century to “return” American life (both cultural and political; both domestic and international) to a pure, originary form that never existed; although Will’s example is just one way to accomplish this and certainly would be difficult to replicate, it offers a way to navigate and handle collisions between different essentialist views of American identity that do not take the nuances of a constantly shifting, frequently elusive nature into account.

durdencommatyler wrote:I was never talking about sincerity when talking about Oberst. That's a very different discussion, I think. I was talking about his talent as a lyricist and his competence as a composure. In none of that is the discussion of sincerity. I'm happy to talk about that, but up to this point, it has not been part of what I'm saying.

Simple Torture wrote:

durdencommatyler wrote:I was never talking about sincerity when talking about Oberst. That's a very different discussion, I think. I was talking about his talent as a lyricist and his competence as a composure. In none of that is the discussion of sincerity. I'm happy to talk about that, but up to this point, it has not been part of what I'm saying.

I just saw his name come up and remembered we had talked about sincerity a bit; my bad!

Honestly, I'm not that familiar with much of his work. Just a few songs here and there, like I was in a wedding where that one song of his was the first dance.

Steve Albini wrote:Whenever there's active promotion on the part of somebody else, whenever I see somebody all dolled up for a fancy photograph and someone's handing out flyers or whenever there's active promotion for something like that, as an imposition on my day, I hate all those people and I want them to fail. I have a visceral reaction to advertising and promotion. There's just something about salesmanship that grates on me on a very base level and I react very negatively towards it. I want those people to suffer and I want their enterprises to fail.

Steve Albini wrote:Whenever there's active promotion on the part of somebody else, whenever I see somebody all dolled up for a fancy photograph and someone's handing out flyers or whenever there's active promotion for something like that, as an imposition on my day, I hate all those people and I want them to fail. I have a visceral reaction to advertising and promotion. There's just something about salesmanship that grates on me on a very base level and I react very negatively towards it. I want those people to suffer and I want their enterprises to fail.