Loose Knots

Apologies to regular readers. I haven't been on here much.

I started training bjj again regularly, but was sidelined last week with a persistent sinus infection. It has finally loosened its grasp on me, and I took a brief hike this morning in the local state park. It was an easy trail, but one of the most beautiful nature trails I've seen. It runs smack against various streams. There are plenty of bridges and beaver dams and sudden, unexpected, open fields. I wore my knee brace and brought walking poles with me, and my knee hardly seems to have been affected.

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I finished Charles Portis's True Grit. An old Boston Globe review called it a perfect novel, and I agree. It is precise, warm, witty, and violent. There are enough slight digressions to make it feel human, while the pacing is brisk. Portis really knows how to work the language, how to make the words themselves a source of pleasure. He knows equally well how to give characters nuance and color.

Here's the breathless first paragraph:

"People do not give it credence that a fourteen-year-old girl could leave home and go off in the wintertime to avente her father's blood but it did not seem so strange then, although I will say it did not happen every day. I was just fourteen years of age when a coward going by the name of Tom Chaney shot my father down in Forth Smith, Arkansas, and robbed him of his life and his horse and $150 in cash money plus two California gold pieces that he carred in his trouser band."

This isn't music, so much. But the tension between the sounds of the words is masterful. A reading out loud will help reveal how dense the language is, given its simplicity.

I found myself laughing a lot while reading it. I tried to find some passages to read out loud to Jess so that she might understand, but all that I could find, when read out loud, sounded gruesome.

As Portis might put it, it is that kind of book.

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My main goals now are to get back in shape and to get my teaching license so that I can start teaching high school English this fall. I am embracing the focus.

Additionally, homelife has been particularly good to me these past few weeks. I am a lucky man.

A walk around the house today reminded me of why we were drawn here. With a little heat and sunlight, the surrounding woods seem to hum. Already, this seems less the drab and dying place of an overlong winter, but a place of color and energy.

At the local state park, I stood alone in a vast field, with a bridge crossed stream on my right side on the mountains on my left. I lay down in the grass and let my sunstarved skin rest in the heat for a few minutes. I didn't feel, as I have recently, like a knot of sore joints. I felt ambitious, and eager to get back to the work of reading and writing.

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For lunch, I made another various on Mark Bittman's anti-ramen soup, this time adding seaweed. Yesterday, I made it with carrots, celery, galanga paste, lemongrass, and fish sauce, along with the ingredients given in the recipe. It is a quick, easy, tasty lunch, and lends itself to leftovers or, in my case, veggies gone nearly bad.

From Greensides into Darker: A Review of Bonnie "Prince" Billy's Beware

1. Bonnie “Prince” Billy’s new cd, Beware, was released on Tuesday and is perhaps the most anticipated recording of Will Oldham’s career. For those of you new to his music, I’ll give you the history in short. Oldham was a child actor and continues to occasionally appear in films. He took the photograph for the cover of Slint’s Spiderland album. He started recording under various Palace monikers – Palace Brothers, Palace Music, Palace Songs and, simply, Palace. He records under his own name, as well as under the name Bonnie “Prince” Billy. Famously reluctant to give interviews, Oldham was unexpectedly candid in a recent New Yorker profile. Oldham loves to visit hot springs and reportedly organizes his tours around them. This seems incidental, but if you were to attempt to explain his music to someone who hasn’t heard it before, the feeling of lying in a hot spring might be a good place to start. The music is circular and often spare. His voice is warbly and high, although when you hear him sing with other musicians, its clarity and resonance become apparent. Oldham is known for making his recordings with some of the band members unrehearsed. Sometimes, the musicians don’t hear the songs for the first time until they are actually being recorded.

2. I read something recently that suggested BPB isn’t driving music. When I used to drive a truck for a living, I often found myself hitting fast forward during his songs, even though I very much like them. There have a languid quality that makes the ride feel long and even claustrophobic. This is my first major point about Beware. You can drive to it. There is a steady, churning, insistent quality to the rhythms. BPB often counterpoises anachronism with the utterly contemporary. An example from the back catalogue: a loose, haunting piano waltz played against a drum machine is called, “You Have Cum in Your Hair and Your Dick is Hanging Out.” These counterbalancing tensions are found in other ways, and Beware is full of them: some of the musicians, particularly the backup singers, sound rehearsed and offer perfect, rich harmonies, while others play as though they are improvising. The lyrics are bald and almost uncomfortably honest, but, as with Oldham’s hero Merle Haggard, the precisely autobiographical blends into intimations of the Everyman and the Everyromance. The traveling rhythm I note above at times evokes trains or even wagons, but, on the songs where Oldham seems most inspired by Gram Parsons and Gordon Lightfoot, we are in the world of cars and open highways.

3. In fact, for his apparent archness, lyrically, Oldham seldom strays from basic themes of popular music: mostly sex, but God as well.

4. Few lyricists can be so blunt, and appear so cryptic. Much of this comes from the listener’s inability to determine what is lyrical (in the older sense, with an assumption of insight and autobiography), what is ironic, and what is ballad (again, in the older sense, involving a story). And, outside of the films of Eric Rohmer or the writings of Proust, you won’t likely find depictions of love so decentering. A rowdy song starts off promising for our young lover: “sometimes you like the smell of me or how my stomach jiggles/even if that smell is liquor . . . but you don’t love me.” Our anticipations are thwarted and we are disappointed as well. This man sounded so optimistic! But again, the unexpected: “that’s all right/because you cling to me/all through the night.”

5. Here is Oldham at his most Haggardesque: “I don’t belong to anyone/There’s no one who’ll take care of me/It’s kind of easy to have some fun/When you don’t belong to anyone.”

6. If this is the voice of Oldham or of his inventions, we’re not sure, but through the conflicted love, the lyrics convey a search for purpose: “if I follow the song I hear/will another come near,” “I’ll likely never know/The answer why/You are hello/I am goodbye.” The ambiguities between a personal search for the good life, the search for romance, and the search for transcendent meaning are often answered with a shrug and a turn to work itself, be it creative or otherwise. “Yeah work baby and all good things will gather/love to your buckets, to honor your father/and arms will hold you!”

7. I don’t want to waste time speculating on the title, but I will say this. A close listen to the music and a reading of the lyrics suggest what we might beware of: loneliness, pointlessness, and darkness of various sorts. I would have to imagine that the title adds tension to two words that recur throughout the songs: work and light. Given how prolific Oldham is, it isn't surpising to see work invoked as a stay against confusion. Yet it is clear that this work serves a higher purpose.

8. I also don’t want to waste time speculating on whether or not this will be the recording that pushes Oldham out of the constraints of a cult following into the mainstream. Listeners have known long enough that he belongs among the serious and challenging great American songwriters: Foster, Dylan, Haggard, and Hank Williams. I will say it’s a beautiful album that reveals more with each listen. I suspect it will seem a high watermark in the BPB canon.

Backburners on Fire!!!

When I left off working on the novel, the inevitable shake-up occured and I've been writing less in all arenas, including this blog. Now, after spending the morning working on applications for teaching jobs, I can at least offer hints of an update.

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I spent Saturday at a judo seminar at Boston BJJ, and returned home to take Jess and the Dufflebag out for pho. The Dufflebag had never had Vietnamese food before, enjoyed it past measure. Nice to see how he's transformed from having a pickiness so profound that I heard about it before I met him to the current situation, where he's wondering why I'm holding off on frying up the eel housed in our freezer.

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The new Will Oldham (Bonnie Prince Billy) cd, Beware, comes out tomorrow, and it will one of the few discs in the last five years or so that I'm so excited about that I'll pick up on the release date.

Check back for a review.

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So, if I haven't been writing, what have I been doing?

Well, the applications are taking up some time. I put in three days of training last week -- about as much as I'd trained in the past three months. The knee feels sore when done, but healed the next day, and that's fine for now. I'm also enjoying bjj again, but I suppose that comes from not having the urgency of the novel pressing on me. It is a happier life without writing, I'll admit, although it feels somehow emptier.

I've continued to listen to music closely and with enjoyment in ways I haven't in years. For the past few days, I've set my ipod to play all my songs by The Fall and my interest is sustained.

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You might note that there's not a lot of cooking going on. I'm still making dinner most of the time, but exercise, the job search, and a few photo jobs have pushed all that to my crooked little backburners.

The Common Whore of Mankind

Is Karl Marx the first great intellectual of the twenty-first century?

Christopher Hitchens explains why this may be the case here.

HVAC in the News

It isn't every day when you read about HVAC workers, particularly people who work on the supply end, so it's interesting to note that Michael McLendon, the Alabama man who murdered twelve people yesterday, not only was a former HVACer but went to two different supply houses while on his spree.

Since a small but significant percentage of the guys I knew in that field seemed capable of such an act, it comes as no surprise to me. This isn't to make light of a horrible situation, but a statement of fact.

Gator, Tater, Sprout Conclusion

I was more than pleasantly surprised by the fried gator. The best parts were the longer, thinner ones, which tasted very much like fried clams. The thicker ones tasted somewhere between chicken, pork, and tuna. I cooked them in the Fry Daddy after dipping the pieces in eggs and then dredging them in flour with fresh black pepper, salt, a cajun spice mix, and galanga powder.

The Dufflebag went for seconds.

I served it with with roasted potatoes and brussel sprouts, which I cooked with rosemary, paprika, garlic, salt and pepper and dressed in a mustard sauce. A simple dish that I've made before, but it always seems to work well and somehow manages to seem both healthy and hearty. Since I don't watch much tv other than cooking shows, it's nice to be reminded that simplicity is sometimes best. Of course, everyone knows this, but everyone also forgets.

Back to working on applications!

Gators, taters, and sprouts

I've decided to stop working on the novel this Sunday.

It is driving me nuts, the combination of putting my life on hold while, at the same time, only making the slightest progress with lots of effort. It doesn't mean I'm giving up on the novel, only that I'm putting it on the shelf while I start the job search in earnest. I also need to start exercising again. Imagine a strange, immobile sea creature that rests on the ocean floor, eating bits of stray fishbones and the occasional starfish. That creature? That's me right now.

This doesn't mean I'm done with the novel, only that I'm letting it ferment for a time while I take care of other matters of increasingly vital concern. It also means that I can start acting like a human being again, I hope.

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I'm going to fry up the alligator I bought, frozen, weeks at SS Lobster and serve it with roasted potatoes and bean sprouts. I'll let you know how it goes.