White-boy blues

So I did the thing last night. What tipped the balance was seeing a couple of pals, including Scruffy, say they'd be there, too. When I arrived (unfashionably early despite missing the bus), he and his friend DM were already there and scooted over to make room for me in a booth we soon ended up abandoning because the performance space was in a different part of the restaurant.

DM, it turned out, was there under somewhat false pretenses, as Scruffy had mentioned only dinner and not a show, but he's very phlegmatic by nature. Scruffy, by contrast, was uncommonly irritable. I'd placed my things on the empty chair next to him so I could sit on the banquette and have a view of the entire room, and for some reason this annoyed him so much he demanded I move them and turned the chair around. They left after the first set.

Well before then, a crowd of bears I know through various connexions had arrived. The singer had also come up to chat with us before the show and responded good-naturedly to my gentle attempts to tease him. By the end of the night, he'd thanked me at least four times for coming to see him play and even apologised for not texting. We again made vague noises about hanging out at some future date; unfortunately, most of his shows are deep in the burbs.

He's got some talent though that was mostly evident during the second set, once he'd loosened up somewhat. He and his band play mostly roots rock and blues, which aren't really my jam, particularly when performed by middle-class white guys. (One of their original songs was literally about the importance of smiling.) But they sounded decent, especially when singing together (and masking the weaknesses in their individual voices) and I most likely would have just wasted the evening fiddling around my phone anyhow.

My only regret is that I wish the food had been better. The trout à la meunière was fine and the green beans were good but the black-eyed peas and rice were overcooked to the point of mushiness. Bread pudding is hard to mess up, but they almost did with a "bourbon" sauce with hardly a whiff of bourbon but a ridiculous amount of cinnamon. So if I go back there, it will only be for the music.

Meascán mearaí

There's always a chance that if I hadn't gone to the concert I would have gotten some reading done. It's just not the way to bet since there's nothing too compelling on my plate at the moment.

I did finish off Embassytown a couple days ago, but I had to force myself to. I knew that a non-linguist like Miéville wouldn't be able to craft a linguistic twist that I'd find fully satisfying but I gave him a lot of goodwill for trying. He squandered some of that by trying to shoehorn his solution into a typical thriller ending so awkwardly that even he felt the need to lampshade it.

The whole nature of the crisis he invents naturally lends itself to a more drawn-out resolution. The breakdown of society--particularly when you're part of a vulnerable minority population--is terrifying enough in itself without needing to be amped up with a grand confrontation. Worse, I felt that it had the ultimate effect of making his alien much less intriguingly alien. It's nice to have an unambiguously happy ending in a scifi thriller, I guess, but a less clearcut resolution would've given the work as a whole more depth and resonance.

Now I'm back to more of a palate-cleanser, Finbar's Hotel. It's a collaborative work between Dermot Bolger, an Irish writer I'd never heard of before, and a grab bag of contemporary authors. Of the six, there's one I haven't read (Jennifer Johnston), two I have read and don't really care for (Joseph O'Connor and Colm Tóibín), and three I rather like (Roddy Doyle, Anne Enright, Hugo Hamilton).

There are seven chapters to the book, so presumably each took one or at least did the heavy lifting. So far, though, the integration is pretty seamless and I don't know their respective styles well enough to clearly say who wrote what. But sleuthing isn't what attracted me to it and it's not what's keeping me interested. It's an easy read with lots of humour (I've LOLed on the shuttle more than once already), which passes the time on my commute but isn't necessary enough to be pull me away from my phone of an evening.

My other throwaway read is Motherfoclóir, a bestselling work from a Gaeilgeoir known primarily for his tweets. I thought it would annoy me somewhat and it does--the number of errors would be shocking if it were any other official EU language, he tries too hard to be amusing, and I don't really care about his adolescent angst--but I also thought I'd learn some fun vocabulary and gain a bit more insight into Irish culture and I have, so it's all good.