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Old Moves, New to Me

I read this weekend Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland, and came across a scene with a structure I’ve been noticing a lot lately. Or a kind of structural move I for whatever reason am these days more attuned to. It’s about 23 percent of the way through the novel (thanks, Kindle!). Hans is on a train up to Albany on business, and he opens the gift that Chuck sent him after their initial introduction. It’s a book of old Dutch children’s songs. One gets printed in full, in Dutch. Then this:

Adapting the melody of the St. Nicholas song that every Dutch child hungrily learns […] I hummed this nonsense about pigs and beans and cows and clover to my faraway son, tapping my knee against the underside of the lowered tray as I imagined his delighted weight on my thigh.

End of scene. Right? Hans has been living for a while now across the ocean from his wife and child, and this scene comes at the tail end of a summary of how that time has been spent. It hasn’t been easy, but nor has it been traumatic. Still, the image here, the imagined time spent with his son, is precisely the sort of thing we work toward in our scenes.

Except O’Neill doesn’t end the scene there. The scene shifts to flashback:

The week before, Jake and I had played in his grandparents’ garden. I raked leaves into piles and he helped me bag the leaves. The leaves were dry and marvelously light. I added armloads to the red and brown and gold crushed in the plastic sack; Jake picked up a single leaf and made a cautious, thrilled deposit. At one point he put on his superhero frown and charged a hillock of leaves. Wading into its harmless fire, he courageously sprawled. “‘Ook, ‘ook!” he screamed as he rolled in the leaves. I looked, and looked, and looked. Fronds of his yellow hair curled out from the hood’s fringe onto his cheeks. He wore his purple quilted jacket, and his thermal khakis with an inch of tartan turnup, and his blue ankle boots with the zip, and the blue sweater with the white boat, and—I knew this because I had dressed him—his train-infested underpants, and the red T-shirt he liked to imagine was a Spider-Man shirt, and Old Navy green socks with rubbery lettering on the soles. We gardened together. I demonstrated how to use a shovel. When I dug up the topsoil, I was taken aback: countless squirming creatures ate and moved and multiplied underfoot. The very ground we stood on was revealed as a kind of ocean, crowded and immeasurable and without light.

Blocks of color stormed my window for a full minute. By the time the freight train had passed, the sky over the Hudson Valley had brightened still further and the formerly brown and silver Hudson was a bluish white.

Unseen on this earth, I alighted at Albany-Rensselaer with tears in my eyes and went to my meeting.

It reminded me of a passage in Tessa Hadley’s The London Train which I finished a couple weeks ago and had meant, while reading it, to blog about, but on looking back at the passage I couldn’t recall my original point or interest in it. Continue reading Old Moves, New to Me

All About My Mother

Some “facts”* about Pamela Kay Madden neé Myers.

    • Her favorite flower is the daisy. The daisy? “It’s always been the daisy,” she told me recently. “It’s always been the daisy.”
      She was at one time in the 1980s the president of what was either called “the Ladies Auxiliary of the Herndon Jaycees” or, more regrettably, “the Jaycettes”.
      She read 100 books last year. She read 100 books last year!
      As a child she had a traumatic experience with a chicken or rooster and now we both hate birds.
      She’s a Leo. She’s a total Leo.
      The day after my 10th birthday when only one of my seven invited friends showed up for my party she wrote me a cheer-up rap that she performed over a breakfast of chocolate-chip pancakes.
      One time she was hit on by Joe Theisman neé /THEEZ-man/ and the whole time was having none of it.
      She took me to the J.C. Penney to buy royal blue sweats when I peed my jeans playing a really good game of Super Mario Bros. in the arcade of the Jefferson Mall in Washington, Pa.
      As a Jaycette, she got known for having a knack of taking popular songs and changing the lyrics to be more topically amusing. This led to our sheet-music copy of Johnny Marks’s “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” getting alternate words written in penciled cursive on the score—e.g. Nixon where Vixen was originally.
      She likes to attribute whatever music know-how I have to her private genes. (My dad to my knowledge can’t much carry a tune.)
      I don’t know the color of her eyes but I’d put if forced to my money on brown.
      She grew up in a room without a door.
      Once, after she graduated from California High, she ran off to upstate New York to live with relations, just to not have to be in Coal Center, Pa., anymore. Around that time, also in upstate New York, Max Yasgur let a bunch of hippie kids on his farm to throw a 3-day rock concert where Sha-Na-Na performed “At the Hop”. My mom was not there. “I don’t know,” she told me once when I protested this fact. “It never occurred to me to go.”
      She swears. Once on the phone she said, “Oh shit, Dave!” in anger when I got her good on April Fool’s Day 1997.
      She hates magic. She’s sort of angrily terrified-slash-dismissive of the whole artform.

    • I’ll end here. My favorite story to tell about my mother is this one: Once, way back when I and my two sisters were living at the Herndon house (possibly even my grandfather, too), we were all sitting down to dinner in the kitchen. It’s impossible to fit six people in this kitchen. This kitchen, for instance, was the size of several friends’ walk-in closets. And yet, here’s the memory: it’s a pasta dinner. Assuredly just plain-old spaghetti with tomato sauce. My mother (who, bless her heart, made few if none of my meals growing up) was wearing a white blouse, spelling for herself total danger given the slurpiness and slippery quality of any stringy pasta. She sat down last to the table. She grabbed from the wooden holder I made in shop class at the center of the table a single napkin. She tucked one napkin’s corner into her collar. None of us was eating at this point. Each of us was watching closely. With fine finesse and great, great care my mom spread with steady hands her napkin across her torso, assuring maximum coverage. Satisfied, she tucked in to dinner. We’re at this point all still watching her. To her mouth she brought her fork full of pasta. She took a bite, and the last bit of pasta-tail whipped toward her lips, flipping a light bead of sauce right at her shoulder. It landed millimeters away from the safe side of her napkin’s edge. My mom saw where the sauce drop landed. We all saw where the sauce drop landed. Each of us—Jenny, Shani, Dad, and I—exploded in laughter. My mom hung her head. It was the very best thing that could have happened.

    Such has been the fate of my mother, of all mothers maybe. She raised a brood of whipsmart kids ready to pounce. And she married one too, for better or worse. So now she receives from each of us so much jokey haw-haws because it’s the easiest way we’ve found to mitigate how much we love her, and how hard and heavy this helpless, unending love for her weighs on us every damn day.

    Happy Mother’s Day, Mom. I’ll see you soon.

    —
    * Most facts assuredly misremembered. At least one was just plain made up.

    “Whiskey, Guns, and the Restless Spirit of Richard Ford”

    From the June 2012 issue of Men’s Journal:

    Richard Ford is driving around Memphis looking for barbecue, with his wife, Kristina, a leggy, blond PhD.

    Ford just drove in from Oxford, Mississippi, where he’s teaching a writing class at Ole Miss—filling in for his friend, novelist Barry Hannah, who died in 2010. [. . .] Throughout his career, hes gone to great pains to distance himself from the Southern literary tradition. He gets a headache just thinking about all those post-Faulknerians with their clichés that proliferate like so much Spanish moss.

    For the past 20-odd years, Ford has been the standard-bearer for a certain kind of American literary masculinity. […] But [sic] he’s also a guy’s guy who trout fishes, rides a Harley soft-tail, and knows how to handle a shotgun on a duck hunt.

    He can be ornery, short-tempered, acerbic, profane—but somehow he’s also totally loveable.

    Ford drives on, doing 80 through the Mississippi darkness, south toward home. A few miles later, Kristina directs his attention to a gas station up ahead. Ford looks at the sign, glances down at the needle, and keeps on driving.

    He’s a powerful presence—6-foot-2 and distance-runner rangy, with blue eyes and a lean, wolfish grin.

    Ford gets a kick out of confrontation. When a writer for the New York Times reviewed The Sportswriter unfavorably, Ford took one of her books out to his backyard and shot it with a .38. He then mailed it to her.

    Ford drives like a man who likes to drive.

    [A]fter his mother died in 1981, he decided to commit to Mississippi as his home. He and Kristina bought a big white plantation house, which they ended up selling a few years later.

    Yesterday, The Economist reported that 9,000 jobs in newspapers and book publishing have been lost since 2002. Borders went bankrupt last year, just months after the Los Angeles Times laid off all its freelance book reviewers. Each week The New York Times Book Review receives nearly 1000 books to review. It selects fewer than 30.

    The excerpts above were written by a man named Josh Eells. And then it all got published in a national magazine, who paid him for it.

    The Birth of a Paragraph

    This post is maybe 40 percent good intentions and 60 percent vanity, but this is a blog so what do you expect? I started revisions this morning on the novel I wrote for NaNoWriMo in 2010. I’m using FocusWriter because I like how it fills the screen with nothing but a blank field. Very useful. What I realized as I was going through this morning was that FW holds onto the string of composition steps for a very long time. Longer than Word might. I mean: you can hold ctrl-Z (i.e. Undo) and watch everything you’ve done over the past hour or two fall away, step by step. Then rebuild it with ctrl-Y. Like magic.

    The teacher in me (who just got done teaching a termlong course on improvisation, so I’ve been thinking a lot about what happens in the drafting process) saw an opportunity: record this to show folks your process. I don’t believe anyone cares about my process, but I am always fascinated by others’ processes. So I’m sharing it here.

    Now: had I screencasting software, this’d be a lot easier to share and funner to watch. Instead, all I have is MS Word and Adobe. So here’s a PDF file that I recommend you open in Acrobat Reader or whatever you have, full-screen, set to display one full page at a time. Because each page contains each step of the composition process. So if you hit arrow down, you should be able to watch the paragraph (255 words) develop step-by-step.

    About this graf, all I’ll say is that I wanted to open the book with something nonfictiony and arguably wrong. Like Tolstoy’s Karenina opening. And then somewhere I knew I’d fall into fiction in the middle of a sentence. Early on you’ll see a whole out-of-voice paragraph with the word gradient underlined. This is pasted in from Wikipedia to help me understand how mirages work.

    Anyway, here’s the PDF: Suicide – opening paragraph

    Hardison, O.B. “Binding Proteus: An Essay on the Essay”. Essays on the Essay: Redefining the Genre. Alexander J. Butrym, ed. Athens: U of Georgia P, 1989. 11-28.

    O.B. Hardison, Jr.Who? O.B. Hardison, Jr., former head of the Folger Library who for a long time had a poetry prize named for him. Who knew he was so smart when it came to the essay? That he was so spot-on re the essay’s history, style, approach, and reach? To wit:

    [T]he early essay [of Montaigne and Bacon] substitutes one kind of rhetoric for another. Since the new kind of rhetoric is unconventional and thus unfamiliar, it means … that the early essay seeks to give the impression of novelty. And since the impression of novelty depends on the use of formulas that are unfamiliar and therefore not obvious to the reader, it means … that the early essay seems to create the illusion of being unstudied and spontaneous. It pretends to spring either from the freely associating imagination of the author or from the Draconian grammar of the world of things.

    There is a formula for such a style: … art that conceals art. Montaigne announces: “The way of speaking that I like is a simple and natural speech, the same on paper as on the lips…, far removed from affectation, free, loose, and bold.” The statement is charming, but it is demonstrably false. Both Montaigne and Bacon revised their essays over and over again. The lack of artifice is an illusion created by years of effort. (15-16)

    Given the fact that neither of these guys “could let an essay alone once it had been written,” Hardison argues they proceeded to “muck up” the form they helped invent. “The constant revision implies a change in the concept of the essay from the enactment of a process to something that suspiciously resembles literature,” he writes. Then:

    To turn the essay into literature is to domesticate it.… To turn the essay into literature is also to encourage authors to display beautiful—or delicately anguished, or nostalgic, or ironic, or outraged, or extroverted, or misanthropic—souls or, alternatively, to create prose confections, oxymorons of languid rhythms and fevered images. (22-23)

    In other words, it’s to bring the poor thing into the academy and make it act like a short story (hence memoir) or a poem (hence lyric essay).
    Continue reading Hardison, O.B. “Binding Proteus: An Essay on the Essay”. Essays on the Essay: Redefining the Genre. Alexander J. Butrym, ed. Athens: U of Georgia P, 1989. 11-28.

    Essay Obsession

    There’s a thing in me that wants in writing essays to make every possible connection and to trace things to their deepest roots. It rarely ends well. The standard result is that I take a whole morning tracking leads on library databases and newspaper archives only to discover some old, repeated truth: There Is No Single Truth Of The Matter.

    I’m working on an essay called “Some Daisies”. I neither care about daisies nor know much about them. My approach, then, is to suck up like a Dyson anything Daisy-related I can. Then I filter by interest. (Sorry, Daisys Duck and Fuentes.) Then I process the thing until I find something interesting to write about.

    What’s helped recently is that the U.S.’s first and thus most famous campaign attack ad is called “The Daisy Ad”. In talking about this a friend mentioned the iconic image of a hippie placing flowers in the barrel of guns at the March on the Pentagon in October 1967. I checked and those aren’t daisies. But there’s that above photo of a woman holding a daisy up like a talisman to a line of bayonets. Perfect.

    The Internet these days is such that it took no hard Binging to find this woman’s name, email address, and phone number. I can interview her about the daisy in her hands! I realized a few weeks ago, and did. Yesterday, she replied to my email.

    It was a chrysanthemum. Some girl somewhere had handed her a chrysanthemum.

    Reading this effected in me the same feeling as getting an editor’s rejection email forwarded to me from my agent with a note from her: “Don’t get discouraged!”

    It was only discouraging. An enormous setback.

    Here’s my point: I continue to have this notion that if only I in my looking and thinking can tie heretofore unconnected things to each other some mystery of the universe will make itself known to me, and that in the subsequent written revelation my essay will become good.

    I understand that the above is part of the essay’s bailiwick, that I’m able to bring in to the essay quite word-for-wordly everything I’ve written here so far, that the process of working toward answers or understanding is often the meat of an essay, of the essay, of the attempt. But I won’t do it. I’m becoming less interested in the essay as attempt. I want essays as completion. I want to exercise the courage to be wrong. But amid this thirst for certainty, I’m also continually relearning that set truths are too elusive to pin down adequately in writing.

    My solution: I’m writing univocal essays with someone else, destroying the essayistic I. Hopefully for good.

    Very Good Paragraphs

    From John Seabrook’s “The Song Machine”, an excellent dissection of contemporary pop’s songwriting process in the 26 March 2012 New Yorker:

    Top Forty radio was invented by Todd Storz and Bill Stewart, the operator and program director, respectively, of KOWH, an AM station in Omaha, Nebraska, in the early fifties. Like most music programmers of the day, Storz and Stewart provided a little something for everyone. As Marc Fisher writes in his book “Something in the Air” (2007), “The gospel in radio in those days was that no tune ought to be repeated within twenty-four hours of its broadcast—surely listeners would resent having to hear the same song twice in one day.” The eureka moment, as Ben Fong-Torres describes it in “The Hits Just Keep on Coming” (1998), occurred in a restaurant across from the station, where Storz and Stewart would often wait for Storz’s girlfriend, a waitress, to get off of work. They noticed that even though the waitresses listened to the same handful of songs on the jukebox all day long, played by different customers, when the place finally cleared out and the staff had the jukebox to themselves they played the very same songs. The men asked the waitresses to identify the most popular tunes on the jukebox, and they went back to the station and started playing them, in heavy rotation. Ratings soared.

    This graf is actually the second best one of the piece. The best reads this: “I know. I’m just saying. Pink’s looking for an urban song with a contemporary beat.”

    I mean Jesus get in line, Pink.

    thughts on villainy

    in boardwalk empire, we see all kimds of Nucky situations. he,s getting people jobs, he,s romanicng women, he,s at parties, he,s getting work done. rothstein, our villain, is only seen in his offices working to cinvince lesser men of hi importance. it works very well. rothstein is spared the humanity of being a person with doubts and provlems. all he is is a man who talks proudly and condescendingly about himself while playing pool very well. even the playing of pool! it lways helps in constructing a villain to mke him good t omething mot people are bad at.

    Very Good Paragraphs

    From Peter Schjeldahl’s* review of Damien Hirst’s spot paintings currently on exhibit at Gagosian galleries around the world, in the 23 January New Yorker:

    Duchamp remarked that art is created partly by its maker and partly by its audience. Hirst dumps pretty much the entire transaction into the audience’s lap. The result is art in the way that some exotic financial dealings are legal: by a whisker. Just as no law forbids the sale of bundled credit-default swaps on bundled subprime mortgages, no agreed-on aesthetic principle invalidates paintings that are churned out by proxy and then bid up at auction as fungible commodities. The “Why?” in such matters comes down to a historic, all-purpose, great “Why not?” A sense of frictionless impunity must be exciting if you’re on the supply side of the economy and the culture. If you aren’t, it feels wrong. The deadness of Hirst’s product lines—flipping the bird to anyone who naïvely craves more and better from art—upsets a lot of people. I deem their ire misdirected. Don’t shoot the messenger. Hirst honestly vivifies a situation in which the power of money celebrates itself by shedding all pretext of supporting illiquid values. When, in 2007, Hirst made a media event of fashioning and marketing a diamond-encrusted skull, “For the Love of God,” he as much as shouted the awful truth. (Whether or not the bibelot sold and, if so, fetched its asking price of fifty million pounds—some have doubted Hirst’s work on it—is an interesting but tangential questions.) In the course of one fair and square taunt after another, Hirst surely marvels at what he is abetted in getting away with. “The Complete Spot Paintings,” to his credit, makes no bones about what a certain precinct of the world has come to. What it come to next is somebody else’s move.

    *I spelled this right the first time without having to check, which makes me not so much a good speller (or Germanic name-knower) but rather a total dumbass NYer fanboy.

    Against Biography: An Initial Position

    I.
    My taxidermy book uses its central historical figure the way most people are used: for someone else’s personal gain. In this case, my own. What the life of Carl Akeley, the oft-called Father of Modern Taxidermy, got me was both an ongoing narrative and also a kind of structural cubby closet in which I could stow all the present-day taxidermy stuff I was way more interested in thinking about.

    Despite my using Akeley (or more precisely, as a kind of toll or penance for using him), I had the responsibility to turn the events of his life into a story readers could be engaged in. It was work I sometimes came to hate. The problem, it seemed to me, was that I had no primary source. Akeley had been dead for almost eighty years when I started writing about him, and even his own (ghostwritten) memoirs weren’t going to give me the intimate details I wanted to turn an actual person who lived into an interesting nonfictional character.

    In other words, the form of nonfiction I chose dictated that I recreate a life on the page as fully as that life was inside a body. That this problem provided a nice echo of the one every taxidermist has whenever he tries to mount a lifelike animal skin didn’t much assuage the unease I felt while doing it.
    Continue reading Against Biography: An Initial Position

    Big Dull Consumables Roundup

    I. Books
    Slow, here. I finished Didion’s Blue Nights this morning, which was a breeze to read through. It’s too soon for me to articulate how or why, but it seemed in this book that her mantric style and the brevity of the chapters did something to the grief running throughout that’s different from what happened with grief in Year of Magical Thinking. Also: way more designer dresses and name-dropped Hollywood types. Didion articulates her resistance to the claim that her daughter Quintana lived a life of privilege:

    “Ordinary” childhood in Los Angeles very often involve someone speaking Spanish, but I will not make that argument.

    Nor will I even argue that she had an “ordinary” childhood, although I remain unsure about exactly who does.

    “Privilege” is something else.

    “Privilege” is a judgment.

    “Privilege” is an opinion.

    “Privilege” is an accusation.

    “Privilege” remains an area to which —when I think of what she endured, when I consider what came later—I will not easily cop.

    It’s a smart passage, falling right in the middle of the book, and maybe it says something about me and not the book itself, but I couldn’t get past the flights to Europe, or the self-identification with Sofia Loren, or the Manhattan apartment with 13 telephones, to get to the pain of losing a child.

    Also, Hollinghurst’s The Stranger’s Child was a masterpiece of realism, in terms of the way he renders his scenes (see here), but in its skipping through decades each chapter (the book spans just about 100 years), my engagement to the narrative ran counter to what such engaging passages seemed to want from me. It’s a novel with an absent central figure—a ghost, really. I will say that by the penultimate chapter it’s rather stunning how much characters from the initial chapter have grown and changed. It’s like having lived a lifetime with them.
    Continue reading Big Dull Consumables Roundup

    Final Angry Thoughts on D’Agatagate 2012, Part Two

    (Continued from yesterday.)

    II.
    They will not help you in the work you have to do regardless of how you understand that work.

    If you have decided for your work that a faithful adherence to the factual record is your best strategy, conservative arguments will not tell you how to adhere to that record. Nor will they tell you how to take the mess of the factual record and turn it into the elegance of art. They will not tell you how facts might be sequenced such that heretofore unseen truths might finally see the light of day. They will not tell you how to enact what D’Agata himself calls the “silent indictment”—where a writer of nonfiction slips into an exclusively expositorial mode to influence her readers’ opinions on a person or place, without ever using her own rhetoric. Didion is the master at this. These arguments will not tell you how to learn from her example.

    They will only tell you what not to do.
    Continue reading Final Angry Thoughts on D’Agatagate 2012, Part Two

    Final Angry Thoughts on D'Agatagate 2012, Part One

    This is an insider post. For the majority of you unencumbered by this debate that’s been going on, I’ll point you . Everyone else keep reading. N.B.: I’ve been pretty sick this week, and in the midst of being sick I’ve been in the midst of a large annual conference of writers.

    I.
    The glaring, undiscussed fact about D’Agata’s book (though Dinty W. Moore does touch on it ) is that it was both published and acclaimed, which is more than can be said about the books of most of his detractors.

    What I mean by this is that people who are not writers have deemed it literature, which is to say art, which is to say we artists who make literature now have a responsibility to respond to it.
    Continue reading Final Angry Thoughts on D'Agatagate 2012, Part One

    The Greatest Guitarists of All Time

    I care more about the ambitious Sigma Chi boy down the road’s plans for next year in his bid for house pledgemaster than I do about whom the editors of Rolling Stone think, this year, are, in order, the top 100 guitarists of all time. It is the exact sort of non-journalistic ad-seller that makes me pine for the demise of magazines that’s not coming as quickly as those prognosticating the end of newspapers seem to claim. There’s nothing to be said about RS‘s actual list, except guess where they ranked Jimi fucking Hendrix.

    Here, though, are the letters RS claims in its 19 Jan 2012 issue to have received, which are, alone, a source of robust comedy:

    THANK YOU FOR THE 100 Greatest Guitarists issue [RS 1145]! In a time when we find ourselves so preoccupied with political, economic and climate-change woes, it was so cool just to kick it all aside and read up on and debate some real heroes [sic]. I may not agree with some of the rankings or omissions, but I felt your four choices for the covers said the most. Those guys rocked the world like no one else. —Jeffrey Gennett, via the Internet

    I WAS IMPRESSED WITH THE group of judges you assembled. The results were dynamic [sic]; it was great to see musicians reflecting on fellow guitarists who influenced them. —Andy Olavarria, McCall, ID

    I SPENT AN AFTERNOON completely obsessed with the “100 Greatest Guitarists” list. Absolutely nourishing stuff! It was brilliant [sic] to put together a diverse panel of players, have them vote and gather the stories about why their world was moved by another musician. —Kevin Bedard, Pine, CO

    I’VE READ YOU SINCE I WAS a young twerp with braces. Now I’m an older twerp who plays drums in a band. I was very disappointed to see that your list reeked of sausage. Where was Maybelle Carter and Carrie Brownstein? Where the ladies at? —Rebecca DeRosa, Brooklyn

    I AM FLATTERED AND A LIT-tle astonished to be included in your “100 Greatest Guitarists” list. I wanted to point our, however, that Wilco’s song “Spiders (Kidsmoke),” singled out as one of the examples of my work, actually features extended guitar forays by our leader, Jeff Tweedy, not me! I wasn’t even in the band when that song was recorded. Got to give credit where credit is due. But thanks, everyone. —Nels Cline, Number 82, Wilco lead guitarist [emphasis added]

    Two lessons, here. One, never listen to what a male Rolling Stone reader has to say. Two, don’t subscribe to three years of RS on supercheap Web discount because you think it’ll help you stay connected to what’s going on in music these days.

    Very Good Paragraphs

    From Alan Hollinghurst’s new one, The Stranger’s Child:

    She could really play, couldn’t she?—that was Paul [Bryant (!!!)]’s first feeling. He looked around hastily at the others, with a bashful grin on his face. Was it Chopin? He saw them all deciding, staring at each other, frowning or nodding, some leaning to whisper. There was a noiseless sigh, a wave of collective recognition and relief that almost made the music itself unimportant: they’d got it. He didn’t want to show that he hadn’t. He had never seen anyone play the piano seriously and at close range, and it locked him into a state of mesmerized embarrassment, made worse by the desire to conceal it. There was the noise itself, which he thought of vaguely as the noise of classical music, sameish and rhetorical, full of feelings people surely never had, and there was the sight of Mrs. Keeping in action, the plunges and stabs of her bare arms up and down the keyboard. She wasn’t a large woman—it was only her presence that was crushing. Her little hands looked grave and comical as they stretched and rumbled and tinkled. She rocked and jumped from one buttock to the other, in her stiff red dress, her black wrap slipping—it twitched and drooped behind her as she moved, with a worrying life of its own. The riveting, but almost unwatchable, thing was her profile, powdered and severe, shaken by twitches and nods, like tics only just kept under control. He stared, smiling tightly, and covering his mouth and chin intensively with his hand.

    “Brothers” ? Emmet Otter’s Jugband

    The song that everyone’s been waiting for, just in time for the end of January when the Xmas season is so far away not a soul wants to think of it. “Brothers” isn’t in any way a holiday song, but those unfamiliar with the movie you’ll find it in should head over here and start reading. I’ll take anyone in a battle royale to the cold, grueling death over whether there’s a better Emmet Otter song. (“Riverbottom Nightmare Band” fans I’m looking in your directions.)

    I’m not the sort of guitar player who does well with riffs and ditties, particularly in folksy/bluegrass/jugband genres. But lemme try to get the opener down to give you an idea:

    e-----------5-3-|------------|
B-------5-------|-3-3-3-5---:|
G-5-7-5---5-----|---------5--|

F
How much alike we are! Perhaps we're long-lost brothers?
                        G7
We even think the same! You know, there may be others.
Am                                   C/G  C/A  C/Bb   C/B
                 We can always use a friend.
Am                                                         G  G7  Gadd6  Gadd5
This family just keep growing! This family doesn't have to end!
C
Brothers!
C
Brothers!


Verse 2:
So many things to learn! But we'll enjoy each lesson.
Problems don't worry us when half the fun is guessin'.
                 Live a lifetime of surprise.
We'll all become musicians, and leave the wonder in their eyes.
Brothers!
Brothers!

    Then there’s a fancier ditty than the one that opens the song and a kind of G7-C ending. Note the ways the notes walk up and then down in the chorus.

    BlogWeek, Final Day: Lorraine Nelson: A Biography in Post-it® Notes

    To end the chiefly spiteful/sickly BlogWeek on a positive note, The Cupboard has just release its latest volume: Lorraine Nelson: A Biography in Post-it Notes. This was the winner of our first-ever contest, and it’s also (essentially) our first-ever work of nonfiction. A happy union.

    It’s about a person who may be real and a job that feels all too real. Michael Martone (whose new book, Four for a Quarter is the exact sort of thing we would have loved to publish, if [when?] The Cupboard ever prints full-length books) selected the book among the finalists. Here’s what he had to say on it:

    It’s made up of surprising but complex asides, elaborated and compacted articulations that scale beautifully into a durable and brilliant skin, a chain mail of associative links and leaps. The language is massive and minute, mute and malleable. The whole piece performs the paradox, recombining the airy ephemeral with an adhesive that does, in fact, stick.

    Lorraine Nelson‘s one of our best volumes ever, and only $5. You can order a copy here.

    BlogWeek, Day Four: The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword

    The problem with The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword is the problem with all the past alternate Zeldas: redundant parts that get tedious and turn play into chores. Start with Ocarina of Time which is flawless. God, remember Ocarina of Time? Yes, there was that wacky goosechase/errand boy mini-quest where you had to pass successive objects from one lazy Hyrulian’s hand to another, but something about this felt to me heroic—or at least a form of good citizenship.

    Then we got Majora’s Mask, the central conceit of which was (if memory serves) that you had to keep living the same three days over and over again, doing things differently each time to make your way toward Zelda. (Maybe? I never got to the end.) Redundancy and repetition. I never felt comfortable in that weird world, nor did I feel gallant and ambitious in my discomfort.

    Next is—wait, I’ve got it wrong. They don’t exactly alternate between good and bad, because next was Wind Waker, which started out nice and graphically cool, but then (again if memory serves) you’re tasked with going on your little raft back to all these tiny islands you hit up earlier in the game, in, I think, a certain sequence. Just to get an item you need to continue in your quest.

    This is the point I’m trying to make: it seems that alternate Zeldas take these kind of narratively lazy shortcuts as a means of prolonging game play, where rather than move little Link forward and onward, they stick him in a kind of recursive loop for a few cycles. The effect is either like being a hockey player in a penalty box, or falling down a chute when you want to climb a ladder.
    Continue reading BlogWeek, Day Four: The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword