SOUNDTRACK: THE AIRBORNE TOXIC EVENT-Live at KEXP July 23, 2008 (2008).
The Airborne Toxic Event’s “Sometime Around Midnight” was huge back in 2009. It seemed to be on the radio every time I turned it on. The ATE put out a new album in 2011, although I didn’t hear much from it.
This show was recorded in 2008, about a year after their debut (with that song on it) album came out. The set features four songs from the debut. This was the second time that the band appeared on KEXP (the first time they played three different songs from the debut and “Innocence” which I guess must have been their planned single?).
The band sounds very good live, as a poppy yet downbeat alternative band. I could see a number of these songs having been huge. It’s interesting to me that the DJ, who didn’t seem to know the band yet, says that “Sometime Around Midnight” could be on a soundtrack. The fact that he singled that song out is either prescient or they were already pushing that one. Although as I say, they played “Innocence” in both sets so I assume that was supposed to be the breakthrough.
Anyhow, I’m not a huge convert to the band, but this was an enjoyable set. And the band seem like nice guys.
[READ: October 17, 2012] “The Semplica-Girl Diaries”
One never really knows what to expect from George Saunders. This story is a diary. And it started off being very irritating to me because of the voice he chose to write the diary in. “Having just turned forty, have resolved to embark on grand project of writing every day in this new black book just got at OfficeMax.” I hate this clipped way of speaking/writing and I don’t believe anyone would use it. And it never lets up.
The other thing that bugged me about the narrator was that he is supposedly writing the diary for future historians to dig up and discover things about whenever this takes place. And I know that this is a funny trope and that many people imagine that their stuff will be discovered as historical artifacts. And it’s kind of funny in that he wonders “Will future people know, for example, about sound of airplanes going over at night, since airplanes by that time passé? Will future people know sometimes cats fought in night? Because by that time some chemical invented to make cats not fight?” For who hasn’t wondered about what will be around in the future. But these examples (which are preposterous) set a tone which does not match the rest of the story. And that whole future generation trope gets discarded after a few entries. I’m not sure if that’s another joke because he explains things like cars and books but not what Semplica Girls are, but I found it very disjointed.
So the first (obvious) joke is that he says he will write for 20 minutes a day and he misses the very next day. But we learn the situation that the diarist is in–he and his family are in trouble financially. Their car bumper has fallen off, they have huge debt, and their daughter’s birthday is approaching. They had just gone to the daughter’s friend’s house where opulence and grandeur are the norm. This immediately makes the narrator uncomfortable. This is also the first sighting of the SG in the yard.
So the SG are the Semplica-Girls. This aspect of the story is, obviously, completely far-fetched and what… futuristic? alternate reality? that strange world that Saunders imagines is on the radar? (In the interview that accompanies the story he said it was something he saw in a dream). This is the kind of thing that Saunders often does (although he usually uses trademarks): imagining a future that is almost like ours but with some major difference. It’s often funny and certainly disconcerting when things don’t line up as we expect. But it’s a very dark comedy in which Saunders extrapolates possibilities to a very far degree.
I can’t really explain the Girls–they are girls from poor countries with wires in their heads. Their whole purpose is to stand in people’s yards. They are ornaments gone crazy. And they are obviously very expensive. They are an example of what children in poor countries will do to help their families survive (each SG comes with background information and how this experience will help their family).
Without the girls, this story would be a fairly typical one of a husband and father trying to do his best for his family. In a nice twist, he wins $10,000 on a scratch off ticket. But rather than pay off bills, he decides to do something special for his daughter’s birthday (the fact that she wants a strange piece of art (retail $300) for her birthday is humorously glossed over). But rather than buying her a cool present he goes all out and has the yard re-landscaped. Complete with SG.
It was here that the story lost me completely It was such a weirdly impractical gesture that I actually imagined the daughter would come home and be unimpressed. I assumed the story would go in that direction–landscaping the yard if a gift for you not for me. But it doesn’t. Indeed, she loves it and the resultant admiration of the neighbors. It’s their younger daughter who doesn’t love it. And her outrage over the SG sets the end bit of the story in motion where the inevitable bills come in.
This is where the SG part of the story is so hard to parse with the rest of the story. The younger daughter claims to be more outraged about the girls themselves than about the present. And it is through her outrage that we learn all about the SGs. And this part of the story is pretty interesting–the moral dilemma of doing certain things–who is right in their attitude? Even the idea that these SG could exist in the future is interesting, but why marry it to a financial story? I understand the extra fees that they will have to pay, but the whole financial angle of the story is really weird.
The end comes back to practical matters and I have to agree with the wife’s father in his criticisms. Their purchase was so foolish that it’s hard to be sympathetic to them. And that disbelief made me lose sight of the actual point of the story–the SGs.
The end was kind of funny, but as with so many Saunders stories, I wanted the whole thing to be funnier. And in this story in particular, I wanted more. This just felt like a diary with a of pages left blank. And GOD I hated the voice that the protagonist wrote with so much I wanted to scream.
Incidentally, my fellow blogger Karen wrote about this story and I waited to finish the story before reading her review. She loved the story. I feel like she and I have very different experiences with Saunders. She trusts him whereas I don’t. I’ve had a lot of build up for Saunders’ work over the years and I find that I am as often as not a little disappointed by his stuff. I’m not sure what it is, but I don’t often get the joy that I want from him.
Of course, I’ll keep reading him. Just as long as he never ever writes with the same voice that he used in this story again.
[UPDATE: I have just checked and I see that I have enjoyed virtually all of his other stories recently, so I need to lighten up].
Hi Paul – I’ve noticed that for the past 3 or 4 TNY stories we’ve been on different pages. What’s surprising is that I like them and you don’t; usually it’s the other way around. 😉 I’m not sure what it is about this story, but in spite of the annoying style of the diary entries, I got sucked in. Maybe it was feeling like I was over there, with George, sneering at this bozo who’s so concerned about his daughter’s birthday gift and keeping up with the Joneses. What really turned it into a great story for me is how he left the family with the decision at the end, the decision the Semplica Girls’ families face: sacrifice the younger daughter, or be in hock for the runaway Girls forevermore. That final step raised it above a clever curiousity for me.
But I think it is a matter of affinity with an author. I feel it with Saunders, but not with Millhauser or Bolano (at least, not yet). And like you, I keep trying.
ps – you’ve got the story title as “Tenth of December” and date as 2011; that was another great Saunders story (to me) but not this one.
The SG girls are working off a debt by standing it the yard or else, they are getting a payment to send to their families in poor countries because the line is cut allowing the SG to escape the father is responsible for the debt of the SGs. I could be wrong about that, but here is a quote:
“legally obligated to inform us that, per our agreement w/ Greenway, if SGs not located within three weeks, we will, at that time, become responsible for full payment of the required Replacement Debit.”
Of course, the father is complete idiot and totally shallow, but this just reminds status conscious people. The story contrasts between the father’s financial problems and people in third world countries. The reason the SG are in the story is to remind us that while our problem are big, they have bigger ones.
But, there is a lot more to story that will take time to unravel. At first, I thought the narrator was women married to a women due to whiny tone of voice, and his obsession with clothes and appearance. It took a number of readings and time to figure out even the most basic things in the story. How do the SGs work and what is a microline? These things need to be fleshed out in the story. There is one point he is explaining it to his daughter, but still it is not clear. Why the father would want the SGs? He is very status conscious and can only be happy if he is upstaging other people. Maybe this story a cautionary tale about being happy with what you have. At the end of the story he obsesses over the fate of the SGs instead of his own fate. I can’t feel sorry for him either. The only thing that makes him likable is he cares about his children. It is not just that the purchase was stupid and pointless, but his whole world view is stupid and pointless.
Thank you for commenting on the chosen voice for this story. It was horribly, horribly irritating, and I cannot for the life of me understand what it lent to the actual story. This is my first experience with Saunders, and though I found Victory Lap very promising, I can’t say I’ll be dropping any future tomes in my Amazon shopping cart. The complexity of the moral argument here seemed at a level just above a children’s book.
“It not terribly challenging, to say least”.
Thanks, W Craig. Saunders plays with voices all the time, so don’t dismiss him entirely based on one story. But I find him very hit or miss. I know some people adore everything he does, but I can’t give much more encouragement than to see if anything else he’s done grabs you. Or maybe just move on to something you enjoy more–no point in fighting with authors, right 🙂
[…] quotes from the narrator he doesn’t say anything about the weird and off putting style. In my post about that story, I write that I am often disappointed by Saunders, but seeing how I actually […]
Satire is surely supposed to be disquieting? And the form he uses that jars so is intended to jar. It does its job well.
Plus it gives us a real sense of how we live now – there is so much we don’t know, so much we assume, we are so busy doing…well just what everyone else is doing…except better or worse or richer or poorer that we lose sight of things.
Our judgement is suspended, rather as this story asks us to suspend disbelief. Our modern lives are riddled with ugly compromises, greed, selfishness, exploitation that we perpetrate and are perpetrated against us, both known and unknown, that, well, frankly, you just have to laugh…