Happy Birthday
According to public radio's favorite storyteller, Garrison Keillor, it is the birthday of Alan Lomax. Born in Austin, Texas, at eighteen he accompanied his father, John, who was among the first to travel through the South seeking out and preserving ordinary folksongs. Listen to more at the Writer's Almanac.
While I cannot deny the peculiar genius of Woody Guthrie and Muddy Waters, I must say I prefer the unpolished, impromptu sound of the Millennial Harbingers.
12 Comments:
Yes. You must be thinking to yourselves, "did he ever falsify research?," and I'm not telling you, and he sure as heck didn't publish his first collection before he ever made any research trips. What I will tell you, though, and maybe this is a bit early, as talks are still in a kind of tentative place, is that Reinhardt may be accepting a commission I offered him. You see, every nation has its Homer. The epic is the defining national literature, as Chris Phillips reminded me last Thursday. War epic, ideally. There were some kind of rough attempts at creating the American epic in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, but it was difficult to find publishers, most of them weren't any good, etc. One started with some Incas, and ended up with George Washington being crowned with laurel leaves. At any rate, I'm suggesting that we still haven't had this gap in our nationhood filled. I want Reinhardt to write a war epic for us, using the current situation as the model. I initially thought we could use this new guy Gates as the Achilles figure, but Kelly thinks we ought to just go back to Rumsfeld. But think about it, we could have a dramatic showdown between Rumsfeld and Osama, or Hussein, or al-Zarqawi, or any of those guys. We could use the casting of votes as the catalogue of ships type passage. I ask you all to encourage Reinhardt to accept the commission, and say this to all of those you might point out that Reinhardt isn't 100% American: Homer probably lived in Asia Minor. Reinhardt, think about it.
Although I admire your verve and perspicacity in suggesting that we need a national epic, I don't agree the poem should be set in the present political situation. Doesn't that transgress one of the fundamental rules of epic - that it must take place in the legendary past? Call me crazy, but I'm thinking the CIvil War is just the subject for a national epic. Sure, it's received a little attention in sentimental novels like Gone with the Wind, but it has yet to be cast in true epic hexameters. Reinhardt can still take care of this project - he'll just need to switch fields to American History and spend some time honing his craft (say, 10 years or so). Then, when he's blind from staring at his desk for umpteen hours a day, he can compose the 12 books (or 24 if you like) in his head and dictate them to his preternaturally gifted daughter. This project is no walk in the park. It's going to take some pretty serious sacrifice; but hey, the Muses must be served. Echoing Jeremy and Calliope, I enjoin you, Reinhardt: do it.
Look, I'm all about tradition, but maybe the epic could use some updating. Dactylic hexameter is clearly a neccessity, but I think to really be relative, we need to be a bit more current with our topic. And I'll call these figures of our own time epic heroes.
I refuse to write about the Civil War. That one only matters to people in certain parts of the Old South. Old people, mainly. And I'm not switching to history. I don't compete with Kelly, on principle.
Oh, and my preternaturally gifted daughter will be busy with cheerleading when she's not busy taking med school courses to complement her high school curriculum, I'm afraid.
I'll think about the offer once I see my advance check.
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After pondering the situation a compromise occurred to me, though it may be a moot point since Reinhardt has refused to cooperate with the Muses. Following the lead of Vergil, who in Book VI of the Aeneid allows Aeneas to go to the underworld and see the future glory of Rome, our epic hero could go to the underworld (perhaps situated in Alabama) and see the future glory (?) of our young nation. And, in riposte to our esteemed Reinhardt, to whose reply hyperbole is called for, I propose that the Civil War is not an arcane, outmoded topic for literary exposition. To cite only a few examples to the contrary: E.L. Doctorow's most recent novel, "The March," about Sherman's devastation of Georgia; several books by the Fugitives, who were no mean intellectuals though of a southern stripe; and much of Faulkner's oevre. In fact, I'm not sure there's a MORE literary period of American history than the Civil War. In all other periods the action at home is in response to action abroad - during the C.W., Americans actually had to face up to the carnage of war happening on their doorstep. The Civil War was epic; our current political situation deserves the treatment of no other literary genre but the mock-epic.
The emphasis was supposed to be on the advance check. I'm not much for posthumous recognition.
Jonathan, we aren't even completely sure Homer existed, much less benefited from his work.
Et dans le monde moderne, mon ami, l'art pour l'art.
Too bad I'm not that sentimental.
does anyone remember the phone number for 603?
279-1270. Jeremy's freshman dorm number was 8209. Bizarrely, I can't remember what the number was in Cone. And I can't remember any of my own numbers.
I love alan lomax.
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