Sigur Ros-Viorar Vel Til Loftarasa

A while ago I read this great short essay called "Never Do That To A Book" by Anne Fadiman. It was part of a collection of writings that all dealt with the love of books. This one divided readers into two kinds: courtly and carnal. Courtly readers are very formal with their books-they use bookmarks, they never write in them or fold the top corners. Carnal readers, on the other hand, sort of lovingly manhandle their books. They fold them, write all over them, use them as doorstops, hold the place by splaying them upside down at the current page (!), etc. She made carnal readers sound so... I don't know, hot? Haha. I instinctively got almost defensive, because I'd always been a courtly reader. I loved the look and feel of new books, and never wanted to sully them with folds, scribbles, and warped covers. But there was something in the piece that made me reconsider my stance:

During the next thirty years I came to realize that just as there is more than one way to love a person, so is there more than one way to love a book. The chambermaid believed in courtly love. A book's physical self was sacrosanct to her, its form inseparable from its content; her duty as a lover was Platonic adoration, a noble but doomed attempt to conserve forever the state of perfect chastity in which it had left the bookseller. The Fadiman family believed in carnal love. To us, a book's words were holy, but the paper, cloth, cardboard, glue, thread and ink that contained them were a mere vessel, and it was no sacrilege to treat them as wantonly as desire and pragmatism dictated. Hard use was a sign not of disrespect but of intimacy.

Needless to say, she won me over to the carnal side. Since then I've been treating my books like Madonna treats Willem Defoe in Body of Evidence. Actually, no, not quite that, I just wanted to use Body of Evidence in a post. Remember how awful that movie was? Anyways, my most recent tryst has been with the book A Fan's Notes, and I've been folding it up more than an origamist with Tourette's Syndrome (wait, did I just write that? [and does it make any sense?]) So many excerpts just kill me. Here's one I love:

Now I see in that laughter a good deal of desperation and sadness. About to leave the haven of our separate universities and be thrown out onto the brutal free-spinning of the world, as we walked arm in arm through the snow, we carried with us, if only unconsciously, the knowledge that it would be our last holiday together; and we drank and laughed and sneered with the resolute sadness of men who knew that tomorrow we'd be trying to free our own mortgaged Buicks from our own snowlocked drives. That is what most of us ended up doing. I didn't; but I don't question that my friends were right and I wrong, that they were happy and I not, that theirs was the hard and mine the easy way. What always saddened me on confronting them was the surety that had I been foolish enough to bring up "old times," none would have allowed himself a memory of sticking his finger into the vaporous and flaky air and shouting, "Shovel, you f*cking dummies!" A self-destructively romantic man, I accepted our jeering defiance as a pact; forever.

One of the great things about music is sometimes profound emotions can be conveyed without the use of words, or at least words spoken in a language that can be understood. Ten years I ago I heard the album Agaetis Byrjun by Sigur Ros for the first time, and I loved it. It's almost audaciously beautiful, and makes me think in one instant, "What gave these guys the b*lls to think they could pull this record off?" and in the next instant think, "Well, cause they did." The lyrics are half in Icelandic, and half in some language they just made up, but it doesn't matter. When Jonsi sings, "Eee chee oooo oooo eeeeeeeeeh," I'm like, "YES! YES! EEE CHEEE OOOO OOOO EEEEEEEHHHH."

The song I posted is "Viorar Vel Til Loftarasa." When I saw Sigur Ros live and they played this song, my head almost exploded. Listen to the whole thing.