Folk culture is the culture of ordinary people, often in difficult circumstances. It is culture for everyday use—the way work is done and knowledge is shared and meals are cooked and music is made. The songs emerge from work and play, often in commemoration of fundamental events and relationships—birth, childhood, friendship, rivalry, romance, school, marriage, illness, and death.
Author:
A review of A Regicide by Alain Robbe-Grillet
For a novel written in 1947, half-heartedly revised in 1957 and finally published in France in 1978, A Regicide is a disconcertingly contemporary read. Moreover, it is possible to place your finger on exactly why this is so: Robbe-Grillet’s frequent descriptions of nature, of plants and insects and coastline, as fragile and precarious: that’s what strikes home. The island kingdom where an assassination (imagined? actual?) is played out is battened by tempests, beset by drought. Seasons are awry.
Country and Classical: Tomorrow Is My Turn by Rhiannon Giddens
Rhiannon Giddens’s album Tomorrow Is My Turn is a wonderful collection, and very, very impressive, featuring the songs “She’s Got You” and “Up Above My Head” and “Black Is the Color.” Rhiannon Giddens is an artist who brings a vibrant sense of moment and tradition. It is rare for a singer to be engaged by both classical and folk music but that is the sensibility of Rhiannon Giddens. She is a marvel.
A review of The Gestapo by Frank McDonough
In popular imagination, in films and on TV, the Gestapo are generally portrayed as brutal and sadistic thugs. While this is not entirely false – ‘enhanced interrogations’, to use the euphemism, did occur in certain instances – it is misleading when we look at how the Gestapo operated in Germany (the Altreich) itself.
Humor, Intelligence, Passion: Sermon on the Rocks by Josh Ritter
On Sermon on the Rocks, a remarkably fun and satisfying album, Josh Ritter creates an airy atmosphere—beautifully mysterious and sensuous—for “Seeing Me Round.” The sound throughout the album is clear, vibrant, particularly in “Seeing Me Round” and “Where the Night Goes,” about the possibility of romance, in which voice and instrumentation are precisely delineated and warm.
A review of La Di Da Di by Battles
Battles hasn’t been the same without Tyondai Braxton. As much is obvious when you listen to Tyondai’s 2009 Central Market, a haunting homage to Stravinsky’s Ballet Petrushka and the 2008 market crash, beside Battles’ 2011 album, a year after he left, Gloss Drop. Their first album, Mirrored, showed quirkiness that demanded serious attention. More Aubrey Plaza than Zooey Deschanel. Now Battles returns with La Di Da Di, an album as benign as its name, hovering between considerable monotony and death throes.
A review of Review of Odd Beauty, Strange Fruit by Susan Swartwout
From Louisiana to Honduras, Susan Swartwout covers much ground in her poetry collection, Odd Beauty, Strange Fruit. The collection is billed as a gothic take on Southern culture, and in some aspects it is, but there is more here than meets the eyes or first reading. The collection also tells a family’s history and the impact of this on the life of the individual who tells it.
The Story of the Lost Child by Elena Ferrante
The four novels making up the “Neapolitan” quartet follow the entwined lives of Elena Greco and Lila Cerullo Carracci, from elementary school in the 1950s to Lila’s disappearance at age sixty. The Story of the Lost Child, the fourth and final volume, presents Elena and Lila in mid-life, both back in their crime-ridden impoverished neighbourhood. Their friendship, never harmonious, continues to go up and down until a tragedy and a sad aftermath change things.
A Conversation with Jackie Copleton
The author of A Dictionary of Mutual Understanding talks about her new novel, about her interest in Nagasaki, about why she chose to explore this history through the lens of a family, about her research and what surprised her, about her novel’s structure, about the challenges of creating a character whose time and culture are so different, about the use of Japanese words, her title’s meaning, about how the lessons learned from that time resonate in our current political climate, and lots more.
A review of Overcoming OCD by Janet Singer and Seth J Gillian
Not only does Overcoming OCD provide advice, support, and hope to parents, but it also talks to some of the struggles that OCD puts on other siblings, the pitfalls to watch out for in certain types of treatments, things (like enabling) to be careful of, and above all, the importance of remaining positive even when the situation looks intractable.