R.I.P. Hootenanny

It appears that the word "hootenanny" is one of several that were struck from the dictionary last year. We will now have to call them something else.

Such as "acoustic music/song-singing get-together on a porch in Arkansas that was amazing fun until Jeremy picked up his banjo and ruined it but then the pipes and whisky made up for it once he stopped."

Or maybe something a little shorter. I think "front porch shindig" might do.

Better suggestions?

An Almost Mugging

As you may or may not know, my youngest brother David is in Italy for the semester. A few days ago he was at the train station in Sienna, and he was headed to the W.C. before he got on the train. On his way to the W.C., someone grabbed him violently and started shaking him, at which point David freaked out because he thought the Gypsies were coming to kill him. Then, just when he was getting ready to fight for his life, his attacker started laughing hysterically and released him. When David turned around he was shocked to see the Ruskie. Apparently, the Ruskie's job is in a slow period so he's in Italy for a month. David is showing him around Florence today.

Hybrids

Not the cars. Here's a thought, though: take one part of a story, and insert it in another.

Examples:
Clyde from An American Tragedy goes to England, and meets Elizabeth Bennet of Pride and Prejudice. She gets pregnant, and he pushes her out of a canoe to her drowning death.

Captain Ahab visits Mary Austin in Land of Little Rain. They wander the desert together, and Ahab attempts to destroy the Grand Canyon by filling it in. He dies flinging himself into it. Alternate: Moby Dick visits Mary Austin in Land of Little Rain and dies promptly, filling the desert with the smell of a rotting albino whale corpse.

A slight shift:
Environmentalists and Pentecostals exchange epistemologies. Pentecostals oppose dancing because there is a global shortage of it, and it is contributing to climate change. Environmentalists oppose SUVs because God might.

Any more ideas?

Happy Birthday Mr Stevenson

I do not remember when I first read Treasure Island. What I remember is rediscovering it. One day at my grandmother's house when I was ten or twelve I uncovered a set of books while nosing about. There were several classic titles in the set, but I immediately seized Treasure Island because I had read it before.

When I opened it, however, I remember that I felt cheated. This edition was full of wonderful, colorful illustrations. Nothing at all like the poor line drawings in the book I had checked out from the library. But not only were they wonderfully done, as I reread the the story that afternoon, I discovered they were accurately done. They depicted the scene as it was actually written.

This simple fact commanded a tremendous respect from me as a young boy. I felt that Mr Wyeth, in contrast to most illustrators, was doing his job. He was painting the image that Mr Stevenson had imagined when he wrote the story. His illustrations didn't fight my imagination; they complemented it.

In reading the story, I knew that Jim climbed up into the rigging and Israel Hands was after him. I knew also that Jim had two pistols and Israel Hands had a knife called a dirk. But the rest of the image was fuzzy. I had never seen a tall ship. I didn't really know how to picture it in my mind's eye. But once I saw Mr Wyeth's illustration, I knew. And I feared for Jim more than ever, for he was truly in a precarious position. I could see it.

Of course, Jim escapes, but it still bothers me whenever I see him with just one pistol. That's not the way the story goes. Any fool who can read knows that.

Lately

I have been tinkering with this mix for over a year now. It began as a simple compilation for country driving, an excuse to put a couple of songs about Elvis on the same disc. The roadtrip that originated the first draft is long past, but the idea has lingered with me. In my mind, it has now evolved into a strange meditation on remembering and reimagining parts of my father, my father-in-law, and my grandfather in the face of love and loss and death.

My Old Man
.... . ... . ... . ....
Volume 1
1. Main Title Theme : Bob Dylan
2. One Life Away : M. Ward
3. He Was the King : Neil Young
4. Elvis Presley Blues : Gillian Welch
5. My Winding Wheel : Ryan Adams
6. Wagon Wheel : Old Crow Medicine Show
7. The Cuckoo : Hem
8. Poison Cup : M. Ward
9. Turkey Chase : Bob Dylan
10. Harrisburg : Josh Ritter
11. Things that Scare Me : Neko Case
12. Dusty Boxcar : Gillian Welch
13. The Hardest Part : Ryan Adams
14. You Don't Make It Easy Babe : Josh Ritter
15. The Coo Coo Bird : The Be Good Tanyas
16. Trampled Rose : Robert Plant & Alison Krauss
17. Old Man : Neil Young
18. I Taught Myself How to Grow Old : Ryan Adams
19. Knockin' on Heaven's Door : Bob Dylan
. ... . ... .
Volume 2
1. To Be Young (Is to Be Sad, Is to Be High) : Ryan Adams
2. Chinese Translation : M. Ward
3. I've Been Everywhere : Johnny Cash
4. Rollin' and Tumblin' : Bob Dylan
5. White Freightliner Blues : Gillian Welch
6. Oh My Sweet Carolina : Ryan Adams & Emmylou Harris
7. Lawrence, KS : Josh Ritter
8. Bob Dylan's Dream : Bob Dylan
9. I Dream a Highway : Gillian Welch
10. I Hear Them All : Old Crow Medicine Show
11. I Want to Sing that Rock n' Roll : Gillian Welch & David Rawlings
12. To Go Home : M. Ward
13. Empty Hearts : Josh Ritter
14. Pearls on a String : Ryan Adams
15. Black Eyed Dog : Nick Drake
16. Dead Man : M. Ward
.... . ... . ... . ....

If you want a copy let me know. I'd be happy to send you one.

The Pooh Also Rises by Alan Coren

A.A.Milne gets an Ernest Hemingway makeover in this extract from the new anthology celebrating the brilliant humorist and Times columnist, who died last year.



It snowed hard that winter. It was the winter they all went up to the Front. You could get up early in the morning, if you were not wounded and forced to lie in your bed and look at the ceiling and wonder about the thing with the women, and you could see them going up to the Front, in the snow. When they walked in the snow, they left tracks, and after they had gone the snow would come down again and pretty soon the tracks would not be there any more. That is the way it is with snow. Pooh did not go up to the Front that winter. Nor did he lie in bed and look at the ceiling, although last winter he had lain in bed and looked up at the ceiling, because that was the winter he had gone up to the Front and got his wound. It had snowed that winter, too.

This winter he could walk around. It was one of those wounds that left you able to walk around. It was one of those wounds that did not leave you much more.

Pooh got up and he went out into the snow and he went to see Piglet. Piglet had been one of the great ones, once. Piglet had been one of the poujadas, one of the endarillos, one of the nogales. He had been one of the greatest nogales there had ever been, but he was not one of the greatest nogales any more. He did not go up to the Front, either.

Piglet was sitting at his usual table, looking at an empty glass of enjarda.

‘I thought you were out,' said Pooh.

‘No,' said Piglet. ‘I was not out.'

‘You were thinking about the wound?' said Pooh.

‘No,' said Piglet. ‘I was not thinking about the wound. I do not think about the wound very much, any more.'

They watched them going up to the Front, in the snow.

‘We could go and see Eeyore,' said Pooh.

‘Yes,' said Piglet. ‘We could go and see Eeyore.'

They went out into the snow.

‘Do you hear the guns?' said Pooh.

‘Yes,' said Piglet. ‘I hear the guns.'

When they got to Eeyore's house, he was looking at an empty glass of ortega. They used to make ortega by taking the new orreros out of the ground very early in the morning, before the dew had dried, and crushing them between the mantemagni, but they did not make it that way any more. Not since the fighting up at the Front.

‘Do you hear the guns?' said Eeyore.

‘Yes,' said Pooh. ‘I hear the guns.'

‘It is still snowing,' said Piglet.

‘Yes,' said Eeyore. ‘That is the way it is.'

‘That is the way it is,' said Pooh.

Rural Reading

Yesterday morning, as I was reading up on the recent Nobel Laureate, I noticed that one of his books that had actually been translated into English was printed by David Godine, a small, fiercely independent publisher based in Boston. They consistently keep a clever list of vaguely obscure works in handsome, durable editions. Once I saw the book's cover, I remembered that we stocked it at the SJC Bookstore, which in turn made me recall several titles by the same publisher which we did not stock. In our move, however, I completely forgot about them. So, in the late afternoon rain I went downtown to the Ann Arbor Public Library and checked out First Person Rural, a collection of essays by "sometime farmer" Noel Perrin. Although they were written for a couple of country magazines and the New Yorker in the seventies, they still offer sound farming advice for the uninitiated.

This morning, after I fixed Melody's lunch and she left for work, I sat down with the rest of the coffee and read the whole thing through by noon. As Mr Perrin extolled the various pleasures of agrarian life, I laughed out loud more than once. For example, he opens "Buying a Chainsaw," with this paragraph: "If I were to move to an old-fashioned farm, everything quaint and hand made like a scene from Old Sturbridge Village, and could bring just one piece of modern machinery with me, I wouldn't hesitate a second. I'd bring my chainsaw. It's noisy, it's dangerous, it pollutes the air -- and I love it." He then goes on to describe what constitutes a good saw, how to buy one, and why you inevitably need a good serviceman. I probably like the essay as much as I do because it reminds me of other amateur farmers I know, perhaps especially Dr Garner. The next essay, however, is even better. He describes how, after much trial and error, he arrived at the perfect fencepost. This is what he suggests:

First learn to recognize all the trees you have. If you don't already know how to chainsaw, learn to. Then start looking for stands of young trees that need thinning. In the absence of cedar, wild cherry or tamarack is best, though both hemlock and white pine will do. ... If you're smart, you will have cut all these posts where you can get pretty close to them with a pickup truck, which you now drive out there. Bring your wife (or husband, or unsuspecting houseguest) and an extra pair of ear protectors. Open the tailgate and load the first three or four posts in the back of the truck. While he or she holds the first post steady, you sharpen it with your chain saw. This amounts to cutting a slice off each side the full length of the chain saw blade, getting the victim in the back of the truck to turn the post 90 degrees, and cutting off two more slices. The whole procedure takes less than a minute. It leaves, incidentally, a pile of fluffy shavings, which children find irresistible.

Of course, now that I know how to make a fencepost, all I need is some land and a little livestock.

Wild trampings and the Great Tim Ernst

Some of us know Tim Ernst as that great wild thing of Arkansas' Ozarks. The man who steps from mountain top to mountain top, photographing marvelous things and writing the finest trail guides yet to be written in the English language. The man who puts mile markers on trails, and lets you know, in tenths of miles, how far it is to the next reliable water source.


And the area of the country his trail goes through is without a doubt one of the finest, and the trail one of the least traveled in America. At any rate, National Geographic just published a writeup on the Ozark Highlands Trail, and you can read it all here: http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2008/10/ozark-trail/white-text

A Thesis Waiting to Be Written

This is primarily aimed at Jeremy, for whom it is most appropriate. A few days ago we were listening to Gillian Welch's album Revival in the car on the way to church. I was reflecting on the fact that Welch's songs, despite their recent origin, fit so well into the tradition of American folk songs. One of the primary reasons for this, I concluded, was that they treat the afterlife (Heaven, particularly) well and often as a subject of hope. For example, from Orphan Girl: "When he calls me, I will be able, to see my family, at God's table / I'll see my mother, my father, my sister, my brother / I'll be an orphan no more." That this is a vital and healthy longing, mostly forgotten by our society, is what I'll contend. Why it's presence in the tradition of American folk music? One could say that it was simply the poverty and deprivation in which much of these songs were written. But that doesn't answer the question of why these songs still ring true, still touch us at a profound level. Perhaps it's because they feed some spiritual hunger in us that ultimately cannot be dismissed. These songs lack busyness, they order our perspective, and place us under the aspect of eternity, where our longings are most deeply stirred. "I will know my Savior, when I come to him / By the marks where the nails have been."

Being For the Benefit of Mr. Byte

I don't know whether any of you heard this, but Google has announced that it will scan and make publicly available the archives of most newspapers world-wide, beginning with The New York Times and The Washington Post and ending, this side of the Atlantic, with America's oldest still in-print newspaper, the The Quebec Chronicle-Telegraph (started in 1764). The scans will basically replace microfilm, you can access them for free from anywhere, and they'll be searchable.

At the risk of offending my Luddite fan base, I think this is a good thing, much like Google's earlier project of digitizing books.

Personally, I hate reading books on computers and am not at all a fan of e-books and the like. Count on me to buy the hard copy as long as they still make them. But the book project had an unintended consequence that really brought home to me the value of this kind of thing.

When Google started their book scanning project, they scanned pretty much all books they could find. This created a big uproar in publishing because authors obviously wanted to be paid for their work, and Google's offering is free. The publishers won. Because of copyright laws, Google can't make the full text of any book available that are still under copyright protection. Right now that would be anything published after 1933 and/or anything that writers who published before then renewed the copyrights on.

And here come the good news: Instead, Google has been focusing on scanning old books, especially from the 19th century into the 19-teens. And that means that for my academic projects, which delve back into major sources from the 1750s through 1890s that maybe three libraries in the world have a copy of and that I could never get my hands on without traveling to Prague or Budapest or London or or Vienna or Berlin (I know, darn) or at least Cambdrige, Mass., I now have the option of reading those books... on my laptop, thirty seconds after I found out I needed to look at them.

And that, my friends, even with its regrettable side-effects and limitations, is pretty darn great.