Clawing the Corridors

The herniated disc continues to offer hidden blessings: I spent a lot of time prepping for the MTEL exam again today. Not that the test seems particularly hard, but I still have a nerdy teenager's revulsion at getting a single answer wrong. So I'm doing exercises in my head: name as many conjunctions as you can; define abjure; list rules of capitalization relating to geography. Good, clean fun.

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Go through a murky, impressionistic part of The Hamlet and am back into what I like most: Balzacian realism, or so the critics call it. The murk made me want to give up, once again, on the old mudmaster, but I'm glad I decided to trudge on and find the jewels that lay beyond: Protestant love confusion, heat, and shady dealings in Frenchman's Bend.

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Now, I'm off to the store, gingerly. Yes, I know. I'm not supposed to be running around. But I'm under twin imperatives that go beyond hunger. I have to rest up, but I can't let the old carcass just rot either. And I quick trip to the produce section is about as mild an exercise as I might conceive. It's easier than taking a shower, surprisingly, physically, although more taxing in terms of feeling plain helpless. It's tough to go out into the world knowing I could be beaten up by your average eight year old. Damn back.

Couching It

Today, my back is worse, and it was a big struggle to get out of bed and get the Dufflebag to school. Lots of wallholding.

I stopped with the heating pad and opted for ice packs, which brought some relief: clear but temporary.

Since I've done nothing but lie around trying to heal up, I managed a trip to the store to buy a french press -- I've been using a decades old drip maker that seems to impart a certain unlikeable somethingness to the coffee that makes it hard to stomach. I bought a supercheap press earlier this year at a Chinese market, but the screen falls off the post with every use, making cleaning time last longer than drinking time.

So, I have a french press.

I took the first part of the MTEL practice exam today and am starting to focus on the licensing exam. If I could suffer this back problem at any time, now is it, since it makes it much easier for me to stem my curiosities and stick to the subjects at hand.

Spurs

It's been three weeks since I started training again. For one of those, I had to stop for a sinus infection. Now, I believe I herniated a disc and can do little more than lie down, shifting for more comfortable positions.

It bothers me, not being able to train, and not being able to go on a short hike yesterday. But even simple tasks like making coffee are difficult. A nuisance. I have considered relating the difficulties that come along with wiping my ass, but suffice to say it takes less time to simply take a shower.

It does give me time to study for the MTEL, which I'm taking in early May, and to read Faulkner's The Hamlet.

I remember struggling with Faulkner when I was younger, and telling Charlie that I just didn't get it. If I remember correctly, he suggested that was astute on my part, and suggested you needed to be from the South to truly "get" Faulkner.

As I read him now, I do get the sense that his writing is all the more vivid now that I spent a short period of time on a farm. The world he describes is still agricultural. Now that I know what "cutting to the quick" really means, a scene with a botched horse shoeing makes more sense. It also seems to accord well with the times: money, food, work. Confidence games. Aspiration. And all told in a prose that is dense and rich.

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I watched both Monte Hellman's Cockfighter and the bonus Warren Oates biopic this weekend. I'll probably go through the commentary track today.

It is an impressive film, and deserves to be seen by more than just the cinema insiders who are drawn to it. In fact, it worked well alongside Faulkner, in terms of setting and tone, even if I suspect the Charles Willeford novel it is based on is unfaulknerian.

For those of you haven't seen it yet, Warren Oates plays a cockfighter who takes a vow of silence after a drunken, foolish bet makes him lose his chance for the coveted Cockfighter of the Year award, given out by the state Senator despite cockfighting being, at the time, illegal.

It is a basic story: a man torn between love and vocation, but it is also entirely fucked up. His vocation, after all, is disreputable and his ability to maintain meaningful relationships is stunted.

Hellman, at his best, works with simple stories but focuses on the sort of casual but meaningful details that other directors ignore. Watch the movie carefully and you could probably put short spurs on a game cock yourself.

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.