Beethoven's Wig and the Lyrical Meghan Daum - Page 2

"Music Is My Bag people have a sexlessness to them. There is a pastiness to them. They can never find a good pair of jeans"..."they give their pets names like Wolfgang and Gershwin. Their hemlines are never quite right".

Thesis restated:

"Having a Bag connotes the state of being overly interested in something, and yet, in a certain way, not interested enough"..."a sense that the enthusiasm developed when the enthusiast was lacking in some significant area of social or intellectual life."

The filler is Daum rifting and scaling her way in and out of scenes, paragraphs, images and sentences with a smooth musical hand. If you stop enjoying it for a minute, you might be stunned by her construction - the dead-on detail, the multi-sensory images.

Writing well is a bit thankless. If you write poorly, you're simply not read, or read to be criticized. (I have finished reading painfully poor pieces for the same illogical reason I sometimes tailgate slow drivers rather than pass them - to say bad things about them.) Writing well, on the other hand does not create an equal but opposite reaction. Often, a result of good writing is that readers discuss your content rather than skill -- seemingly indifferent to the hours of labor you invested making the topic presentable on paper. So it's an unfortunate compliment to Daum that while discussing her book with friends, nobody mentioned talent. We had great fun reliving our own misspent youth and love cyber-style, but nobody spoke to her percussive flair with a keyboard. Just as I don't think about the Czech Philharmonic Orchestra when "Beethoven's Wig" bursts from my son's primary-colored tape player.

So that I don't oversell, I searched for pieces outside of her collected essays that were equally tight and engaging but came up short. She has some dry, stilted assignment articles on the web, but the narrative is restrained. You need to be extremely interested in the subject matter to get through them - I wasn't. I don't hold this against her. After all, she needs to make a living. I'll just wait until her day job brings in enough to let her play again.