A Notebook – Since 2007
the see-thru wire black cat
leans to the blue
porcelain pot
falls prey to squirrels
or a pair of bigger black
crows her back arched
tail curved ? happy
tells wants to interact
head turned to the front
porch for her portrait pose
to remember these
first days of summer
forgotten cold kittish days
of blows weathered thru
you as if you were made
of wire hollow and hungry
but today the leaves unfurl
the sun gentle rises
like a young man
getting dressed for work
Dolly Parton has written over 3,000 songs. We used to say we “made up” a song, since we didn’t write anything down, notes or lyrics. We made up our songs guitar in hand. It would take about 150 hours to play 3,000 songs, or you could play the same song on repeat for a week, which you might if you thought you had a hit. If you draw your song subjects from the lives of your intended audience, you’ll probably gather some listeners, if not reach the top 40. Dolly, born and raised in the Great Smoky Mountains, no doubt heard as a child ballads that originated in the British Isles. These ballads came from an oral tradition, told stories, the setting often changed to fit a new environment. The accompaniment might drone wearily to an exaggerated wintery fiddle pathos. On the other hand, songs of spring might jump, jig, and reel. Ballads are folk songs, and while anything can be a song subject, songs of love and hate, war and peace, life and death, faith and betrayal – those subjects are ever popular. Songs are made using all kinds of rhetorical devices. We might think of songs as meant primarily for entertainment, but songs can teach, preach, tickle, and scratch. A good musician can make a bad song sound good, and a bad musician can make a good song sound bad. The Psalms are songs. What’s good is what’s real, even if it’s bad.
I was perusing Greil Marcus’s updated “Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock ‘N’ Roll Music.” This sixth revised edition (2015) contains “Notes and Discographies” that run over 200 pages. But Dolly’s only mentioned twice, once in the original section, in the Elvis chapter: “Listen to Dolly Parton’s downtown hooker yearning for her Blue Ridge mountain boy; listen to the loss of an America you may never have known” (129), and again in the notes section under “Cameos: From Charlie Rich to ‘Louie Louie’” (360-363), where “A Real Live Dolly Parton” (1970) is said to include her song “‘Bloody Bones,’ a ditty about orphans who burn down their orphanage.” But while that Dolly album does contain a piece called “Bloody Bones,” it’s not a song but a story she tells, and it’s not about orphans but about her family growing up and how they all went to bed at the same time, and mostly in the same bed, there were 12 kids in a little country house, and they stayed in bed afraid of the boogie man and such tales their Mom shared. Well, Dolly’s not rock n roll, so maybe Marcus hurried through it. That’s likely going to be a problem for your discographers if you go around putting out 3,000 songs. The prolific Bob Dylan has only written about 600 songs. Anyway, Dolly did write a song about kids cooped up under some sort of evil matron, and they do burn the place down, sort of Matilda style. It’s titled “Evening Shade,” and it’s on the album “My Blue Ridge Mountain Boy” (1969).
So I’ll take this opportunity now to lighten the load for my future discographers and say I’ve written (made up) only around 6 songs, with lyrics, that I keep in my active repertoire, another 8 or so instrumentals.
With lyrics: “Bury My Heart in the Muddy Mississippi” (1978); “Pretty Vacant and We Don’t Care” (1985); “Goodbye, Joe” (1995); “Two Riders Were Approaching” (2021); “Down by the Bay” (2022); “I Talk to Myself” (2023). Dates I’m just guessing, plus revisions are always ongoing. There is no right or wrong but how you feel at the moment. When you get stuck, improvise your way out of it.
Instrumentals: no dates shown – been playing and improvising most of these for years, but I’ll list them in approximate order, beginning with the oldest, from around 1970, which contains a riff an Army sergeant showed me. I just title them to remind myself of the idea and where it came from: “Sergeant Oliphant’s Blues;” “Saddle Up and Go;” “Double D;” “Em Surf;” “Good to Go;” “Patio #1;” “Patio #2;” “Blues for Tommy.”
You can hear versions of my made up songs on my Live at 5 Instagram channel. Live at 5 was a Pandemic exercise that brought the extended family and friends together almost nightly for songs and comments and sharing while we were all hiding out from the virus.
War leaves everyone destitute, champs as well as losers. At least that seems the case in some quarters in England following its WWII victory. But out of the drained sensibilities comes Lucky Jim, whose primary motive is to avoid being chumped. His new arms are not mod Joyce’s “silence, exile and cunning,” but scoff, erosion, and contumely. He finds himself immersed in a milieu devoid of usefulness, stupefied:
It wasn’t the double-exposure effect of the last half-minute’s talk that had dumfounded him, for such incidents formed the staple material of Welch [Jim’s mentor] colloquies; it was the prospect of reciting the title of the article he’d written. It was the perfect title, in that it crystallized the article’s niggling mindlessness, its funereal parade of yawn-enforcing facts, the pseudo-light it threw upon non-problems. Dixon had read, or begun to read, dozens like it, but his own seemed worse than most in its air of being convinced of its own usefulness and significance. ‘In considering this strangely neglected topic,’ it began. This what neglected topic? This strangely what topic? This strangely neglected what? His thinking all this without having defiled and set fire to the typescript only made him appear to himself as more of a hypocrite and fool. ‘Let’s see,’ he echoed Welch in a pretended effort of memory: ‘oh yes; The Economic Influence of the Developments in Shipbuilding Techniques, 1450 to 1485. After all, that’s what it’s…’
Page 9 of “Lucky Jim,” by Kingsley Amis, first published in 1954; New York Review Books Classics 2012 with an Introduction by Keith Gessen.
Jim’s problem (to date still unresolved for so many in galleries of classrooms) is simply what to do, and while Beckett is now back in Paris resolving “Nothing to be done,” Jim Dixon is back in England, having made his way through a back door into contemporary academia, which doesn’t necessarily equate to a decent job:
‘Well, you know, Jim. You can see the Authorities’ point in a way. “We pay for John Smith to enter College here and now you tell us, after seven years, that he’ll never get a degree. You’re wasting our money.” If we institute an entrance exam to keep out the ones who can’t read or write, the entry goes down by half, and half of us lose our jobs. And then the other demand: “We want two hundred teachers this year and we mean to have them.” All right, we’ll lower the pass mark to twenty per cent and give you the quantity you want, but for God’s sake don’t start complaining in two years’ time that your schools are full of teachers who couldn’t pass the General Certificate themselves, let alone teach anyone else to pass it. It’s a wonderful position, isn’t it?’
177
Some guys will do anything to avoid working on commission:
Dixon agreed rather than disagreed with Beesley, but he didn’t feel interested enough to say so. It was one of those days when he felt quite convinced of his impending expulsion from academic life. What would he do afterwards? Teach in a school? Oh dear no. Go to London and get a job in an office. What job? Whose office? Shut up.
177-178
But why would office life, in sickness or in health, not be preferable to the games teachers play, particularly the major league players:
Amis and Larkin graduated into a literary world still dominated by the modernism of Eliot and Pound, and haunted by the shadow of William Butler Yeats. Though Larkin went through a long apprenticeship to Yeat’s poetry, both men eventually came to think that the modernists had made English-language poetry vague, pretentious, and verbose…Chelsea represented the artsy crowd, the modernist crowd, the posh crowd that had taken English literature too far into the realm of abstraction, had turned it into an elite pursuit. Not that the rest of contemporary literature was any better.
Page x-xi of Keith Gessen’s Introduction.
While much of today’s poetry remains “vague, pretentious, and verbose,” some reaches further into the pit of the common reader’s hand reaching out for not meaning but significance lately lost thanks largely to poetry being conquered in academia by the philistinism of the sociologists and psychologists, not to mention the political polemicists. Yet, as Keith Gessen points out in his “Lucky Jim” NYRB Introduction: “But of course then as now the world was filled with young college graduates convinced of the sheer absolute idiocy of everyone, living or dead” (xiii). But how accurate is that statement? Not to say that everything is not idiotic, but that everyone thinks that everything is idiotic. And anyway, anyone can feel that way. It doesn’t take a college degree. And it might be true for high-schoolers these days, or high school dropouts, or college graduates in search of a job in their area of obsolete, irrelevant, or antiquated study, or retirees from any number of careers or pseudo careers. If everything is idiocy, one can at least prefer one’s own.
The problem is not only what to do but how to do it and how to think about what to do and how to think about doing it and to feel about all of it and how to remain free in spite of all of it, if one can even keep track of what is meant by it. And all without undo influence from the idiots one once might have admired but have now come to scorn but not enough to ignore. Gessen puts hate as the great motivator for both Amis and his pal Larkin. But hate is far too strong a word to describe what they were all about, or what Jim is about. To be unable to achieve satisfaction is not to hate the losing streak, the white shirts, the wrong cigarettes, the useless information, the starved imagination. One might though hate that one still feels one wants to be a part of it, even if that part entails making fun of it. If you live a life of pure loathing, what’s left you in the end to loathe but yourself?
And “Lucky Jim” is a comic novel, not one of fear and loathing, and with literary precursors. If Jim (or Amis) makes fun of “The Canterbury Tales,” it’s in their being removed from life and buried in a classroom. Given his tastes and dislike of the phony and the mannered, it’s understood he values Chaucer’s use of flatulence to create lasting, well digested literature. He doesn’t hide the compost. He loves it. And he’s not angry about it. And if Jim “hates” Welch’s son, Bertrand, his evil nemesis, it’s for good reason. Bertrand makes an excellent foil character. One feels an author’s love for his Iago, Lady Macbeth, Polonius. In any case, Henry Miller had already written his Tropics, and they’re not about graduate school. Ginsberg is working on Howl, but neither are the Beats angry young men. They are bent on living. They will eschew an air-conditioned nightmare, thank you.
And an elderly Jim would no doubt prefer self-loathing to schadenfreude. Smug and complacent, he is not. And he’s not falsely self-deprecating. He doesn’t insult himself as bait for what he might fear an otherwise hostile audience. He’s not self-satisfied. He recognizes his faults but doesn’t take credit for them.
An interesting companion reading to “Lucky Jim” might be Barbara Pym’s “Excellent Women,” published two years earlier, or her “Jane and Prudence,” a year earlier, or “Less than Angels,” a year later. It hardly seems the same world, but it is. One might find Pym’s heroines rescued from the arms of a horned and horny but hardly hating Kingsley Amis.
The day after
the hottest day ever
snowfall covered
sunburned green fields.
Subterranean streams
flooded root cellars
and mothers combed
sediment from wet hair.
Ocean waves reached
the heartland
where the fathers
buried their weapons.
Honeysuckle blossomed
on trellises rising
out of snowdrifts
and by evening
of the second day
of the Age of Weather
digesting ducks turned
around and drove home.
and the balloon man
sd let there be light
but he forgot
to include the night
sun filled every
puddle with sand
that day the moon
failed to follow
the air smelled
of rum molasses
and beach tar stuck
to the swing seats
nowhere to hide not
an ice cream truck
in sight or sound
no marbles or skips
pirates stole
even the gloom
all the motel
rooms full
the only noise
the gasps
from the leaky
balloons
If a leaf trembles
birds like angels dart.
Sitting out with guitar
on couch in impromptu
outdoor green parlor
under the Japanese maple.
The air marine mid eve
drizzle drops like notes
in a slow waltz fall
through the leaves
into my dry curly hair
small droplets subtle
piecemeal for the birds
talking, "Wouldn't a Joe
pilus be nice for our nest."
Later a dark sleep rain
summer wide opened
window wet percussion on
the roof leaves and walk
a tale of early summer
warm wet mysterious night.
And in the morning door
opened with coffee
in hand awe greeted
by a sparrow building
nest in welcome wreath.
In the far backyard
a patch of wildflowers
spreads perennially –
Bellflowers, I think,
Peach-Leaved Fairy Bells
(I looked them up),
but they don’t come
when I call them in.
I suppose some scrub-jay
dropped them here
to bring me a bit of cheer
giving up beer beyond Lent.
The flowers don’t need me
to tend or water them,
in June, tall and prolific,
invulnerable. Late Fall,
they’ll droop adrunk,
in the pubside gutter.
Wilderness inspired,
I buy a big bag of seeds
at Bi-Mart in early Spring,
but of a google broadcast,
only a few sprouted,
and not as proudly
as the Petticoat Bellflowers.
Maybe the bluebirds
picked up those seeds,
and even now drop them,
one by one, somewhere
over a distant biege sea.
Summer creeps up
on us a dusty
horny toad
nowhere to go.
The squirrel
of spring pool
ball path
soon still.
The mellow hibiscus
the rose of Susan
afternoon cold tea
winter up in the air.
A California scrub
jay scolds a crow
as I put marigolds
out on the porch.
Kevin tinker off
and me hitchhiking
Vista del Mar home
from Junior Lifeguards.
At Refugio Beach
Bruce catching
lizards in the rocks
along the creek bed.
Seems odd to fall
asleep still light
out and wake up
still in light.
Soon too hot
to hold this
device for words
of summer morns.
Light illuminates nouns
brings persons places
and things into the field -
light is a verb that creates.
Too little light we see
ghosts waddling to and fro -
whole life on the sun
is a bath in orange juice.
Light her touch when she
lits down and makes light
work of your worries and woe -
light she comes light she goes.
Thomas Merton, in his preface to his collection of essays titled “Mystics and Zen Masters” (1961-1967, The Abbey of Gethsemani, 1967 FS&G), suggests a closeness in claims of those across cultures attempting contemplative lives:
The great contemplative traditions of East and West, while differing sometimes quite radically in their formulation of their aims and in their understanding of their methods, agree in thinking that by spiritual disciplines a man can radically change his life and attain a deeper meaning, a more perfect integration, a more complete fulfillment, a more total liberty of spirit than are possible in the routines of a purely active existence centered on money-making. There is more to human life than just ‘getting somewhere” in war, politics, business – or “The Church” (viii).
Entering the Church, apparently, does not guarantee a contemplative future. And when Merton asks, “What, exactly, is Zen?” (12), he already knows there can be no satisfactory answer. Writing in the 1960s, Merton was in tune with his Catholic audience under the influence of John XXIII’s Second Vatican Council, which called for an aggiornamento, a modernization, bringing the church up to date.
Merton even suggests Zen, having lost, like Christianity, its Medieval “living power” (254), is in need of an updating. Today, we might ask, What, exactly, is Christianity?
In Christianity the revelation of a salvific will and grace is simple and clear. The insight implicit in faith, while being deepened and expanded by the mysticism of the Fathers and of a St. John of the Cross, remains obscure and difficult of access. It is, in fact, ignored by most Christians (254).
The Coming of the Toads 