True Stories...

I read this this morning. The post itself is about the subconscious racism shining through in how two women in similar situations are either humananized or dehumanized by the language used to describe them. They discuss it more effectively than I might, so I'll leave it to them.

This weekend I picked up True Stories, a book of poetry by Margaret Atwood. She has never been one to soft-step touchy subjects, but the poems contained in this book struck me as particularly... 'brutal' is not the word I am looking for and neither is 'gruesome'. Either of those words suggests some intent to harm or titilate, and I detect none of that here. Maybe 'direct' could be the word, but compared to how these poems communicate that word seems timid. They illuminate an unblinking awareness and put up a challenge to our tendency to beautify reality in an attempt to forget/ignore the harshness of the world. Yesterday i read the poem "Christmas Carols", which starts off, "Children do not always mean/ hope. To some they mean despair." Elaborating a few lines later, "This one had her pelvis/ broken by hammers so the child/ could be extracted. Then she was thrown away,/ useless, a ripped sack." Before and after this description were the descriptions of two other women who killed themselves because of pregnancies they were unwilling parties to, which were both gruesome descriptions, but somehow the image of a woman gutted so the child could be removed and then cast aside knocked the wind out of me. It seemed particularly barbaric, like it couldn't be believably imagined out of nowhere and could only be snatched from real life to be in this poem. The descriptions of a woman raped and killing herself or another dying while trying a home abortion rather than be forced to carry a child again seemed things that could be pulled out of the back of your mind, not because they are unbelievable, but rather because they are, however horrible, somewhat commonplace (or they are where access to abortion and birth control are blocked). The existance of either is not something any sentient adult could be shocked to know has happened. One might be shocked being presented with it (and you are when you read this poem), but the shock is at having it laid out in front of you, not in the possibility of such things happening.

But the child extracted from the mother like pea from a pod struck me as unreal. Not that I doubted that such things could happen, but I found myself wondering where this thing had happened. This was not a generalized possible horror, but felt like it must be a specific one, a terrible thing Ms. Atwood had read about somewhere and incorporated into this poem for its punch, some atrocity acted out in some war zone at the extreme edges of desperation. These thoughts were just sort of automatic in my mind. I didn't spend the last day meditating on this poem; one should never stare too long at something clear and searingly bright. Rather I read it through several times and each time kept sticking on this image of a woman as a wrapper, to be removed and thrown away like trash once the desired product was taken out.

Perhaps that is exactly the point I was trying to make: this struck me as something that had happened to a woman, one woman; not a thing that happens to women, a thing that could happen to any women.

Then, one day later, I stumble across an article on two of these crimes, one recent one a few years ago, both in this country. They weren't in war zones or on the fringes of humanity. It isn't a crime that happened to one woman; it is a crime which happens to women, though apparently the color of the victim affects how it is reported. Perhaps the authors of those articles could use Ms. Atwood's admonition from later in the poem: "Think twice then/ before you worship turned furrows, or pay/ lip service to some full belly/ or other, or single out one girl to play/ the magic mother, in blue/ & white, up on that pedestal,/ perfect & intact, distinct/ from those who aren't. Which means/ everyone else."

Synchronicity of the Lambs

Right as I was reading the comments for this post on Hunters and Gatherers, "Lotion" by the Greenskeepers started playing on my itunes...

My state always knows how to make me proud!

I've been spinning my wheels and starting to write and then not publishing anything, but this will shake me back into commentary. My state always makes me so damn proud.

And honestly, this sounds like such sweeeet just desserts that I wouldn't mind some fucking idiot asswipe like troy king getting served, but I bet you a dollar that this all just gets swallowed up and quietly washed away. There is something about Alabama that let's controversy stay gossip and never acknowledges it as news. When something distasteful appears, it is like being in the middle of a field during a flood. You can scream bloody murder, but the background din of social chatter about nothing just slowly rises until whatever taboo subject is drowned like unwanted puppies. People know it happened, but afterwards you are just left with a sore throat from hollering and as this emergency chatter drains away everything sort of settles back where it started.

In Alabama, all public memory is secret. Everyone may know and remember whatever troubling detail, but never underestimate the power of a polite southerner to be unable to recall an uncomfortable detail. If it doesn't get you killed, the community will just hush damn near anything over. Blame someone, remove them, edit them from stories or vaguely recall their existence.

There is no Post or Daily News. There are a thousand reasons to hate either of those publications, but they also keep shit like this from dying unceremoniously. Like I predict this fellow will. It is either true and it will be whispered near and wide, but never officially published (please let me be wrong about this) and if he has reciprocal dirt he will quietly shift into some other lucrative position out of the search lights, or it isn't true and is some kind of political hit piece (remember that Alabama is where karl rove honed his skills), maybe retribution for not pulling off the Siegleman frame-up smoothly, and the rumors will do their damage and he will quietly be scooted into oblivion. Granted, it might be true and still be getting spread as some kind of retribution from his repub overlords, or just plain old pissed off enemies, but either way I'll be amazed and proud if even ONE newspaper in Alabama has the balls to run with this story openly. Maybe they already have, I've only just heard about this story and so haven't really started digging yet. Oh, but I will...

on Gay Pride...

This last weekend I went to the Gay Pride Parade here in New York. I've got tons of thoughts about it which I'll sort out in the coming days, but I'll save the long analysis for another day. The short of it is I still think the day and the parade are significant. Call it a parade or a march or whatever, it matters to me that it can and does happen. This is partially in response to comments friends have made over the years, invariably other urban homos for whom being gay can easily be a casual part of their life, just one more thing about them and nothing that threatens their safety or livelihood.

A number of years back, a friend wrote a "gay shame" email complaining about 'what gay pride has become' and I began a response which got lost in my email drafts. I'm all about digging up old things and subjecting them to scrutiny, so here from the vaults is my response to these curmudgeons who blush at the commercialism and flamboyance of our numbers let loose in the streets each year (there are a few comments in here which I know might ruffle a feather or two and strike me now as mildly offensive but I leave in for historical accuracy; please hold full judgement for my forthcoming modern update, reflecting on my most recent Pride experience):

At this point in my life and with all the bizzare that I have seen around me, I have come to love the things that just make life surreal. We all know that there is nothing more surreal than Pride events. I like that they exist, I like that people go crazy, I like that there are middle aged men who have reduced all their goals in life to basically just trying to look the most like an exaggerated charicature of a musclebound adolescent Ken doll.

I like all of this of course in theory. Not unlike communism, it just isn't funny when you apply it to real people. But I guess I can still enjoy the spectacle and the hoopla, and anything that really gets under the skin of the religious right is ok by me. Just look at it like you would a freak show or a scary movie or a highschool valedictorian delivering an impassioned speech: take it very serious while you watch it so you can enjoy the full effect but only remember the really comical bits and repeat them to your friends.

People know that the section at pride isn't the only section of the gay world. We do look rather funny when mixed all together like that, but it is fun. Sure the drag queens and dykes on bikes get all the air time, but everyone gets to throw their own party. And I will tell you, Pride isn't important to the people who attend who live in those cities where they have them; they are important to the terrified closeted fags who are living on the front lines out in bumfuck (what a fitting name) nowhere who just need there to be some gay presence that makes itself felt and lets them know that something else exists.

So you say it doesn't set a good example for them, showing them a big event that is just a bunch of half naked muscle clones and men in tiaras? Well, it isn't any worse than any homecoming parade anywhere in the country. At least at the Pride parades we have grown men and women dressing any damn way they choose instead of the town's pretty adolescents dressed up in team hoochie gear to shake it for their parents and neighbors. Every week in the fall the girls get thrown into the air to better spread their legs and show their crotches to the crowd while the boy don stretch pants,codpieces, and shoulder pads and slam into each other for the thrill of the community. The difference between a highschool football game and a gay pride parade is the lack of violence and pedophilia in the latter.

farmers market, etc.

I went to the farmers market and came home with two books(The Strand is dangerously close to Union Square); an ukulele, tuner, and how-to-play guide(so is The Guitar Center); tomatoes, carrots, romaine lettuce, lady apples, strawberries, blue berries, a sweet basil plant, Empress of India nasturtiums, a pink ivy geranium, and a pint of hazelnut crunch icecream. I did not buy the Psycopsis papilio orchid that I wanted to buy; this was not restraint, but rather a matter of the physical limitations of my arms.

instead...

I've been up and out of bed since early this morning, and scanning through blogs and news sites I decided I would use some of these beautiful morning hours to write a bit and get back into the political commentary game. I that james dobson was commenting on Barack Obama and spouting his typically narrow-minded Us vs. Them bullshit, and I was going to take the bait (and perhaps later I still will), but it can wait.

The sun is shining so I'm off to find fresh flowers and veggies and perhaps even a ukelele.

The Red Queen

I almost put it down, but I'm glad I didn't. I grabbed The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature on a whim. I'm a bio nerd, and at the same time I had grabbed a couple of other books in a similar vein at the same time so why not? I've been consuming books like a mad man on this trip, but this one was hard to get into at first. Red flags went up when I was inspecting it before committing as I noticed that the blurbs about the book weren't from biologists, but rather from various newspapers. I don't care what the Boston Globe thinks about any science book unless a scientist wrote the damn review. And their review was crap anyway. This book was not "literary and witty."

Which is partly why I almost put it down. Until he finds his stride and gets out of laying groundwork and into the subject at hand, Matt Ridley's writing is more irritating than anything. He isn't a bad writer (obviously) but there are little things about the way he writes that kept irritating the fuck out of me for the first few chapters. Partly this is the irritable know-it-all in me that is sifting through the necessary groundwork of a science book written for a popular audience and bristling at feeling condescended to having all these basic concepts rehashed, but I go through that every time I read science from any author and I know that my memory is a big fat jumble and I like rehashing these ground rules before setting out on this journey with whatever teacher. Most bio writers don't get my back up like this when I read them, but this guy really did. Partly it was how he presented conflicting ideas as a sort of Highlander death match: "There can be only one." Biology isn't a clean pretty sort of clockwork science, particularly when we start talking about how this or that might have evolved or what selective pressures might have led to whatever. There might be various pressures playing out or different ones at work in different cases, but the tone at the beginning of the book was the opposite. There are answers and this or that is the correct conclusion blah blah blah. He was more nuanced the further into the subject we went, but his discussion of why sex exists was, though extremely informative and wide ranging, barely tolerable. That sounds harsh and it kind of is, particularly since I now think fondly of the book having finished it. I feel like I really took something away from reading it and plan on recommending it to friends, but I really almost just put it back on the shelf.

So if you pick it up, expect to do some trudging before it catches its stride; or if you have started it and put it down, consider picking it up again. It is well worth the effort.

Where are you?

I've been thinking about my dreams lately. My dreams have always been vivid and bizarre, but right now they are really striking me. This may be simple because I'm currently well rested and am sleeping as much as I can stand (though not always straight in a row).

Last night I dreamed that I been just woken after some sort of ten-year hibernation, which for some reason meant that I had to hang out with some lesbians talking about the photo book their talented friend had made of photos of them after they had all been in Usher's wedding, which was held during a timeout in a baseball game, out on the diamond with the players still on the field ("I'm not a player, I just crush alot..."). The book was ridiculously thick and had been simply titled "L", which one of them told me the producers of The L Word didn't like, but you can't copyright a whole letter, right? I just wanted to know where exactly I was and when i got to go somewhere else. I found my computer and was able to check my messages, and my inbox was full of messages from all kinds of people I wanted to hear from, but one stood out. My Liz had sent me a picture. No message, just a picture of her smiling and laying on a couch in a loose yellow dress. She used to avoid wearing yellow because her skin was so fair she said it didn't look good on her, but it did in this picture. I was preparing to send her a picture in return and more came from her. Her sitting, her again on the couch with a couple of friends, always smiling.

The pictures had that sort of over saturated color that pics from the 70's sometimes have. Before I could respond with my picture, stumbling trying to decide what kind of picture to send- old or shoot a new one, silly or just smiling, flattering or plain?-, she showed up at the door. What had sort of been a room in a mall like supercomplex was now a converted version of my grandparents old living room, and I invited her in and we hugged and began talking immediately. We stumbled over each other trying to explain the last few years that we have been apart (that whole ten year hibernation thing sort of evaporated like things do in dreams). Nothing really that we talked about was all that important, but I remember feeling so relieved to have found my friend again.

When I said "My Liz" earlier, I mean the Liz who I was friends with in highschool and became better friends with in college. I called her my Liz to distinguish between the other Liz's in my life, who became known as Mason's Liz, Lisa's Liz, and Sculpture Liz, each according to how I came to know them. Once Sculpture Liz took offense and told me she was going to make t-shirts which said, "I'm my own Liz" for all of them. I never meant to offend and don't mean to now. If I have ever met anyone who was their own person it would be her.

The dream was remarkable in how comfortable it was just sitting and talking and realizing how much I've missed her. I hope I can find her again.

fruit danishes, eating disorders, and Tom Cruise

I'm sitting in the galley at the square plywood table with astro-turf on its surface (this isn't as strange as it sounds; on these boats there is almost always some non-slip something on all the horizontal surfaces, especially in the kitchen) eating a strangely delicious pineapple danish. It is one of those not quite industrial but still too manufactured to call baked fresh. They aren't individually packed and sealed to last for months on shelfs, but rather the kind baked in mass at some big bakery then crammed together in an open-topped cardboard box and wrapped in cellophane and sent off to grocery stores. These then found there way into the ice-hold on a fishing boat and have only just come out to the inside refrigerator. Sitting eating this pastry and thinking about how intensely delicious it is and how delicious the apple one I ate yesterday was, I suddenly want to eat the whole box. Not just an expression, I literally want to eat the whole box and find myself thinking about eating disorders.

This isn't because I associate consuming whole boxes of pastries with eating disorders, rather eating has taken on a rather capriciously religious aura when I am on the boats: sometimes enthralling me, sometimes horrifying me. I've become much more intimate with food as a necessity and limits of it and what is and isn't luxury in consumption. And the strange appeals both of gorging and withholding. These are faint siren calls to me that don't have me particularly worried, but they make me think about eating disorders from time to time which otherwise I wouldn't be inclined to think about abstractly.

And then I found myself thinking about Tom Cruise. These two things are not related; he appeared from the ether as I sat eating and pondering because I found myself looking at the dvd case on the table. Almost every boat with anything of a dvd collection has Mission Impossible: III. Why that movie? I have no idea, though action movies are always popular. But this one has been on most of the boats I've been on and one day I'll watch the whole thing. I've seen the beginning and the end, seeing the end earlier today which surely prepped me to think of Mr. Cruise when I saw the dvd case sitting there. There is slightly more synergy to it, though.

There is always a weird unintentional synchronicity out here that I find myself noticing. Like the same actors showing up in every movie and I don't mean someone being a fan of one actor, like the Stephen Segal marathons I'm subjected to, but completely unrelated movie choices piling up, like me watching Alien by myself in my bunk, then someone putting in Holes (also starring Ms. Weaver) then Steel Magnolias (Tom Skerritt) and back to Segourny with Ghost Busters. Today's tangle was less spectactular: Mission Impossible: III on the main TV while I eat lunch and a passing Tom Cruise joke by Dan Savage on a This American Life podcast.

I've discovered podcasts and am in love. They are perfect for this time away from civilization and I didn't download near enough when I was on land this last time, but I did get one episode of This American Life. I've always liked that program on NPR, so I was psyched to have it to listen to here in my bubble life. In this episode, one of the commentaries was Dan Savage talking about portrayals of straight people on television, arguing that they are just as ridiculously stereotyped as portrayals of gay people. To make his point he was listing various straight characters from tv-land , reminding us that real straight people don't act like that. He naughtily adds in, "Tom Cruise on Oprah's coach: real straight people don't act like that." This got hearty laughs. I laughed too; it is funny.

But hours later, scarfing down a danish and thinking about eating disorders, I see the cd folder and suddenly wonder what Tom Cruise thinks when he hears these jokes. Sincerely, like actually wondering what he really thinks, not some kicked in auto-guilt response programmed in to be casually pondered to try to balance out my evil sense of humor. I suddenly really started wondering about it.

I mean, on the one hand, suppose he is gay. What the hell goes through his mind feeling attracted to men and feeling compelled to publicly disavow it but having everyone assume that he is gay anyway despite him taking on all the trappings of a straight identity? Ok, writing out that sentence reminds me why every gay man finds the possibility uber-tragicomic: most of us have been there. Repressive omnipresent evangelical religion into which your identity has been publicly and intimately intertwined? Check. Serious intimate heterosexual partnerships? Check. Feelings of being surrounded by others whose lives would be negatively affected by you going public with your 'secret'? Check. We could go on, but point being been there done that, so if I for a moment treat Mr. Cruise as a real person rather than simply a public figure then I've got to empathize for a moment with how this stuff hits against you when you feel trapped in the best-little-boy-in-the-world loop.

And what if he is actually really and truly straight, totally not into guys? Would it then all be funny to him? Annoying? Actually, if he is really straight, then who cares? I've always gone with the "if it ain't true, who cares?" approach to gossip and such, so if he is really fully total hetero then this gets boring.

He has a look in his eyes that says he is hiding something. His eyes scream it. This is part of why he is interesting as an actor despite over-saturation. There is something there; it might not be that he is gay and for that matter if he was and came out I don't think he'd look any less guarded and walled up behind those eyes. But something is back there and every one of these jokes pokes at it even if we've got our conclusion wrong, so maybe it could still be interesting even if he is straight. Anyway about he is a person and I wonder how he takes it all in. Does he just shrug it off and laugh? I imagine that's what he does in person if cornered and he can't just pretend like he doesn't hear or understand.

Is this whole mental game empathy or just a more vulgar and violating kind of voyeurism? I think I can honestly say that it originated in a sympathetic place, suddenly struck thinking of the actual person behind the facade of celebrity, thoughts of him and his feelings bubbling up from my subconscious. And I pursued the thoughts here in text from a similarly sincerely thoughtful place, just following the original quandry a little further, but at some point, perhaps the moment that this becomes a public musing and no longer a personal sympathetic pang, I can't help but feel that it tipped over into the same celebrity voyeurism that something in me had been reacting against.

Since writing this I've returned to land. In San Francisco I followed a random urge for a french cruller to a donut shop that I've stumbled into in the middle of the night after drinking at Aunt Charlie's, where I found in addition to the desired french cruller an apple danish which cried out for me to consume it. It was delicious and smiled eating it as I walked down the street and remembered how powerful the flavor was in my deprived weeks at sea, but I only wallowed in memory of the flavor and didn't think at all about eating disorders or Tom Cruise.

fucking idiot

You can suggest that much stupider things have been accomplished by someone attempting to come up with the singularly most idiotic action possible by a human, but at this very moment I personally doubt even the possibility. I have a bag filled with cords and cables: power cords for my computer, cell-phone, old cell-phone, external hard drive, USB cable to connect my phone to my computer and another to connect my camera to it as well. I have anywhere from three to five sets of headphones and two different battery chargers for my camera. But somehow, I managed to take the only cord which isn't a uniform black and forget to return it to my bag.

So I'm now out at sea, where the single most difficult part of my job is staying awake during long hauls and have the single most useful tool for keeping me awake, the i-pod, but not the cable to synch it with my computer and which is also used for charging it. On white little bundle of wires carelessly forgotten on my bedroom floor even as I obsessively downloaded songs and podcasts and audiobooks. So now I've got a half charged i-pod to dole out preciously over three weeks of 10-14 hr. shifts.

Harumphh.

dreams

I should probably pay more attention to my dreams. It isn't like they are subtle. I've always been one of those people who dreams intensely. I know that supposedly we only dream for a few hours each night, but I have a hard time believing it. I've always felt like dreaming from eyes shut to wide awake was the way my body functioned. This may of course simply be perception, but there are times that I wonder.

I usually dream vividly, though I can't always recall the dreams themselves. I can usually recall the associated emotions, be it joy or terror or frustration or whatever. It can be disorienting to wake with an underlying intense emotion that is completely disconnected from your surroundings. Even more disorienting though is when the emotion isn't entirely inappropriate to the situation, but was somehow connected to it in the dream, like when I dreamed I've had a discussion the night before with the first person I see the next morning, which had in the dream been heated and I find myself sitting across from my roommate trying to reconcile my feelings that one of us should apologize to the other with their apparent complete obliviousness to what takes me a few groggy minutes to realize was all in my head.

Sometimes I can remember bits of my dreams and understand that they are telling me something. I knew needed to get out of my desk job when I would wake to realize that I had spent the entire night frustratedly databasing. I didn't like doing it in the day time; I really hated doing it throughout the night. Right now my dreams aren't screaming for me to find a new job, but they are stretching out and feeling around at different jobs. From last night's dream I can take away that I need to get back to diving and perhaps make moves which allow me to maybe move towards more adventurous employment. When I write "more adventurous" from my bunk on a boat in the middle of the ocean, I think I also mean more entertaining. There is a certain adventurousness to working on a boat in the middle of the ocean, but on the other hand it can also be amazingly boring. I'm required by my job to NOT take risks. Maybe trying more aggressively to get on board for collecting trips and maybe see if I can get my foot in the door with adventure film-making or something like that. Oddly enough, the other extreme that I see as a possibility is making this damn written word pastime into employment somehow. How, i have no idea, since writing is one of those things that I fiercely guard from outside encroachment. The opposite of guarding something is selling it.

"crooked-letter state"

I just read Kevin Sessum's memoir, Mississippi Sissy, and I'm for the moment speechless. Wow, just wow.

I have a bad habit of starting out to write about a song/book/movie that I've just heard/read/seen and barely mentioning that work of art before I basically just start rambling about myself. It seems a bit narcissistic, which I suppose it is (which I also suppose is exactly the adjective you should expect when you start blogging), but I also like to think there is something complementary in finding a stepping stone to self-reflection in someone else's artwork and only lazy people with book reports to write want to read someone else's synopsis.

So I'll skip over all the critical commentary that I'm sure someone else has already done better anyway; suffice to say the book was well-written and an engaging read. I had seen it when it came out in hardback and was immediately drawn to it. It was obviously written for me to read, but I refrained and patiently waited for it to come out in paperback, not -for once- so much out of cheapness as books and music for my trips at sea are currently considered life-saving expenses rather than luxuries, but because the hardback book was large and heavy and wouldn't travel well. When you typically bring an extra bag just for books in addition to those you cram in your duffle bag and other pack, such considerations matter. But after this long wait, let's say that the book was better than I ever could have expected.

I don't know what I did expect. I was drawn to it because I'm also something of a Mississippi sissy. I grew up straddling the state line between Mississippi and Alabama, born in the former and growing up mostly in the latter, but within a few miles of the border the whole time. So I suppose I was looking for someone else's story about growing up gay down there. And I found that, in spades. I ended up taken in more by the landscape than the coming out bit, though.

This is a different way of rendering the same landscape that I keep talking about whenever I go on about Faulkner or O'connor or most recently McCullers. This wasn't a fictionalized snapshot from some omniscient point above or looking in from outside through the eyes of a created character. The fictional accounts are only believable if the landscape feels familiar, feels realistic, but the difference between feeling realistic and being real can be jarring. I've said many times how much trouble I have reading Faulkner, because to me it is too realistic and too traumatizing most of the time so I've only made it a very short way through his catalog of fiction despite being a fan, but at the end of the day it is fiction and I can back away from the characters and argue with myself that he cast the landscape in harsher light to make these masterworks of tragedy.

Memoirs are different.

Assuming the writer is being honest, you can only explain away so much as dramatic lighting and theatrical staging. They tell their story, choosing their scenes, shaping the trajectory of the plotline, framing everything just so, but unless it is a fanciful retelling the backdrop is already there in each scene. This emotional/political/literal landscape is where the story already has happened, not a believable facsimile rendered to plant a story in, but a place to harvest what crop it has already brought forth. If the writer has any talent as a storyteller, which Mr. Sessums certainly does, the seams don't show and the background is just that: background. If I read this as more of an outsider I don't know that it would have struck me as anything other than an element in the story, but being from this same landscape it loomed large in my reading. Not distractingly so, but as I read about his experiences I couldn't help thinking how familiar or foreign everything seemed.

I'm from a younger generation. I caught the tail end of the Seventies and grew up a child of the Eighties. Integration had already happened and it was a very different South in many ways. But in many others not so much, and I recognized the people and pictures he painted in his retelling. The foreground was different for me when I was growing up there, but oh how I recognized all that swirled in the background. Sometimes though, recognition isn't enough. Once you've got something in your sights, its remains a thing apart until you've completed Adam's task and named it. This first and most slippery charge of humankind is where a writer's magic lies. The ability to present and describe is his power over our surroundings and minds. I've thought quite a bit lately about the power of names and language and how we describe things. Names can maim or contain or cut free depending on how they are wielded.

I could get off track and begin speaking abstractly about names and words and such (especially since I've just finished reading two books on the English language and am gurgling with thoughts about word usage in the current election), but I mention all this simply because Mr. Sessums finally game me the name for that landscape when the black lady who had helped raise him at his grandparents house remarks, "Love? Hmmph. It ain't never 'nough in a crooked-letter state like this."

"Crooked-letter state". Maybe when I read I leave myself wide open to being struck, but that phrase caught me square between the eyes. I had to put the book down for a moment and just breathe. If you aren't from Mississippi, you might not have been taught how to spell the state with the sing-song description: "M, I , crooked-letter, crooked-letter, I, crooked-letter, crooked-letter, I, humpback, humpback, I" but this is how we were taught and it still goes through my head each time I have to spell it. The childhood phrase turned into a scornful descriptor made it, for me at least, terrifyingly potent. It hits enough of a subconscious place that I wonder if it clangs in the mind of anyone else who reads it. The whole sentence is harsh enough, but the overt anger and frustration paled compared to what was said by her name for our landscape.

Kevin Sessums and I grew up differently and similarly but both of us grew up in a "crooked-letter state". Having found it so aptly named only made his rendering (and my remembering) of our common landscape so much more beautifully potent.

"Go Don King! Go Don King! Go Don King!"

So I didn't watch john mccain's "speech" the other night. Dude is just a crazy old kook at this point...and actually, sadly, that description makes him sound like a more likable candidate than he actually is at this point.

Still, I kind of didn't want to believe that the speech was as horrible as everyone said. The guy used to be at least reasonably capable of speaking publically but apparently 8 years of bending over and grabbing his ankles while bush/cheney sodomized his credibility has damaged more than just his reputation (sadly the most likely comment that I am going to get on any post is someone berating me for perpetuating the attachment of negative connotations to homosexual acts -not that sodomy can't be a heterosexual act- or connoting sex and violence; and they will be right, but can you come up with a better description of his last 8 years in office?) and upon watching it tonight I realize that no one was exaggerating about how bad the speech was.

Other people have already made enough funny comments about that lame ass speech, so I'll refrain, but listening to the horribly staged crowd interaction -mccain's pregnant pause and giggling at his jokes waiting for the crowd to start clapping and their unified idiotic chanting and stilted applause- there was this awesome moment where the crowd starts chanting what one has to assume was meant to be "Go john mccain! Go john mccain! Go john mccain!" but they were a little off on their pronunciation so I had to sit for a second trying to figure out what the fuck they were saying and the only likable moment in this miserable lowpoint in the history of public speaking was the moment of pleasant absurdity when my occasionally non-sensical brain interpretted their cries as "Go Don King! Go Don King! Go Don King!". It honestly sounded more like that than the mccain's name and that moment of confusion was the only pleasant moment of the clip. (at 16:28 in the clip found here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A7RuX4pQPLY&eurl=http://www.groupnewsblog.net/ )

I paused for a second and reflected on how much better Don King would be as republican candidate for the presidency. At least he knows how to speak in public and probably even knows how to pronounce "New Orleans".

Oh, and for half a second can we collectively roll our eyes at how many times he said "change". The democratic candidates hammered that word into the fucking ground and I didn't think it was possible for anyone to make it a more annoying soundbite. I stand corrected.

Breathe in, breathe out...

At the very top of the list of things that I never want to experience again is listening helplessly to violence involving a loved one from the other end of a cell phone call. Friends out on a boisterous night on the town, yelling at a passing car that almost runs them down, car stops, words exchanged, the sound of blows to the head, a quick good bye and brief assurances that all was well. And it all will be fine and they are probably laughing about the altercation right now, amped up on booze and adrenaline; I'm sure I would be.

But I'm helpless on the otherside of the world, too far from the situation to be able to laugh at it, with far too vivid an imagination, particularly for doomsday scenarios and snowballing calamities, to just let it be something that has concluded and relax about it. Listening to violence in realtime... I've got mother hen and big brother instincts from hell. I don't particularly worry about threats to my person; every concern I've ever had about personal physical violation is fossilized in the protection of a bowl, a cup, and a cactus (yes, crazy, but it works for me), but when it comes to others it is a whole different ball game.

I'd repeat my New Orleans hostage situation again without hesitation if I had to choose between that and this again.

This certainly isn't the most riveting subject matter for a blog, but at the moment this is the extent of what I can do, which may work only to amplify my feelings of helplessness but I've got to do something to try to talk this oncoming panic attack out of existence.

breathe...

breathe...

breathe...

today is special...

I've probably gotten the date wrong, but this is the date my brain settles on when I try to remember when the world got brighter and I learned to smile again. The world is so amazing and brilliant, with all the ripples and convolutions and absurdity. I forgot that for a while; I'll never forget it again. Everything hasn't been perfect for me since then and I didn't suddenly start believing that the world was perfect or ever would be, but suddenly that was ok. I didn't need everything in its place, I just needed to know that someone out there could look at me like that, that I could feel so...much. Good/bad, all of it sparkling and glowing but rotten and smudged too. The world chose me and someone reminded me how to be fully involved in it again, for better or worse and full-steam ahead. Today I am somewhere in the middle of the ocean, probably a little seasick and miserable (this was written before my departure), but looking at all that I can and can't understand and loving it all. Cheesy and silly, yup, but sometimes I am.

I saw a smile today some blurred number of years ago and I smiled back. I've been smiling ever since.

Celebrate something today, anything and everything. Today is special.

It's the little things...

I'm always blabbing about how the movie selection at sea is completely nonsensical. Which, of course, is not a complaint. Today one of the crew was letting me look through a collection of dvd's that he had with him and he explained that he had watched most of his dvd's a thousand times so he had borrowed his kids' collection. I thought this was great, since I'm a total sucker for kid's movies and can't wait to watch Chicken Little and Open Season sometime, but today I settled on Zoom: Academy for Superheroes.

Why not? I really didn't know anything about it except that it was big budget, so it should have good special effects and it has Tim Allen in it, so it shouldn't take itself too seriously. And I like super hero flicks and kids-kicking-ass movies are always the best. If you don't expect too much and just want to be entertained, this kind of thing can be perfect.

And really, based on the criteria that I just laid out, it was perfect. Special effects were spot on, the visual presentation was great, the story silly but you could roll with it, the movie made fun of itself and was slap-stick goofy. I really wanted to just like it, just enjoy the schlocky comic-ness of it, but a couple of things stuck in my craw and just ruined the whole damn thing (ok, didn't ruin it all, I still enjoyed it, but pissed me off enough that I'm sitting here tapping away about it).

It is always the little details that fuck things up. Just a couple of slightly different changes and it wouldn't have left any bad taste in my mouth. The one that was the tipping point is a stupid one; I'll concede that right here at the beginning. The whole schtick of the movie is there are these sort of weirdo outcast kids who have special powers who are brought together by the military to turn into this super team. One of the team members is the requisite hot redhead with psychic powers. You'd think I'm getting in a huff because this is such a blatant Jean Grey rip-off, but no, I just let that go. Cheesy "let's throw together a super team" movies are always ripping off classic comic heroes. It happens. But to introduce her to us, they show a scene in high school where the cheerleaders are treating her like shit and she makes the cafeteria food attack them, so all in all a completely satisfying scene. For the record, I don't hate cheerleaders, kind of actually love that they exist and plan on watching the Bring It On sequel that is in this same movie collection, but we all knew some cheerleaders who were straight-up bitches and who deserved more than anything to have cafeteria food explode all over them. So anyway, I like this girl from the start. The actress playing her is so unbelievably beautiful, but in a quiet kind of way and she plays the character well.

So everything goes great and they win (suprise!) and they have a stupid back to their daily life sequence. This was painful and idiotic enough as these things inherently are, but, aside from the little princess girl's bit which was kind of cute and didn't make you hate the director, the rest of them were nothing except cringe-inducing. Part of what made them so obnoxious is how they were obviously supposed to show how these outcast kids were now socialized and included and celebrated by their families and peers. Don't they get that we liked the kids because they were outcasts and weirdos? Show that they've learned to deal with their differences, but don't put the fat kid on a soccer team and DON'T DON'T DON'T turn the hot redheaded outcast into a fucking cheerleader!!!! Again, I have nothing against cheerleaders as a whole though I will concede that as a rule teenage girls who become cheerleaders tend towards the dark side. But high school is a dark time, we all tended towards the dark side in our own little ways back then. I just don't want my cheesy fun movies to feed up evil cheerleader nightmare bitches as the foil to the cool outcast that they treat like dirt and then after showing me how likable and fun she is and giving her super powers to show me an after-the-adventure sequence about how she is now using her superpowers as a cheerleader!!!! Let her and her hot super boyfriend be all cute and obnoxious teen-lovebirdy but don't turn her into the evil thing you started out pitting her as different from. Look, she'll show those bitches; oh look, now she is one. Good job, geniuses.

So I warned you that this was something stupid to get pissed off about, but I'm blogging about it. Blogging is all about petty rages over things that are too stupid to actually discuss in real life (though had I watched this movie with my friends instead of here in solitary confinement, I'd be having this conversation in realtime, but we can pretend like I am socially savvy enough to not waste actual quality time on such petty complaints). The second major complaint is perhaps a little more cogent.

So they assembled this super team and they bring them in and decide to have this stupid try-out bit. The whole try-out thing was dumb to start with since they had already shown us little a-day-in-the-life sequences for each of the ones who would be picked so it wasn't like we didn't already know who the super heroes were going to be. Still, it was kind of funny so I can't really hate on it being in the movie. I can hate on their casting for it. I'm not Mr. Super-PC. I get exhausted by political correctness as much as the next guy, but you can pull your head out of your ass and show a little bit of sense when you cast for shit like this. I don't care that the whole team was white kids. Big fucking deal, not the only superhero movie and every silly film doesn't have to be an equal opportunity event, but if you are going to have a team of lily white kids, do you have to have the casting sequence where every person not picked for the team isn't white and has lame-ass super powers? I mean, come on. So you want to have a little American Idol moment so Tim Allen can play Simon to Courtney Cox's Paula (and Chevy Chase's Randy Jackson), fine. Ha ha, get some laughs with it. And you want to have a team that is all white kids, again, I don't care. Fine, do it, I liked the kids they cast for the parts. Just make all the lame kids white too. Or most of the lame kids white... or even one of them! Because when you make all the lame kids black/hispanic/asian/mixed and all the super kids white, I can't just enjoy my cheesy damn movie and instead have to think about racial politics and if that is really what I wanted to be doing I'd have been watching The Color Purple (ok, so if they had The Color Purple on this boat, I would so be watching it instead but you know what I mean). This isn't a real super hero movie, leave the racial metaphors for the X-Men, just make your Tim Allen feel-good family fun flick. Having lot's of people of color for extras doesn't make the movie racially sensitive, it makes it racially distracting. It doesn't make me furious or troubled, it just makes me think whoever did the casting for the extras is an idiot.

So anyway, should you watch the movie? If you are stuck on a boat in the middle of the pacific ocean, completely cut off from society and facing a limited number of movie options like moi, then I heartily recommend it. You'll love it and it will be a nice break from Steven Segal flicks. If you are in a movie store and could pick anything you want? You could do worse and if you have the stomach for kid action movies, you'll probably enjoy it. It is worth watching just for the little blonde girl with super strength's outfits and temper tantrums.

blue magic

I've seen blue
eyes like that
before

they were also
yours: you looked
back

before turning to
walk away from
me

in the morning
sun they cast
spells

that i now
find I'm still
under

A hunting we will go...

"But I feel like I shouldn't be reading this book. Well, not like I shouldn't be reading it, but like you should be reading it." Ben says this to me a couple of days before I head out to sea for this most recent trip while telling me about how beautiful The Heart is a Lonely Hunter is, which he was then reading. I've bought the book several times when I've come across it at used book stores, always intending to read it but never getting around to it. Of course these various copies are scattered across states and various places, so when my friend Ian who had been sick wanted to go to Barnes & Noble to escape his apartment, I jumped and was determined to find a copy for this trip. In bookstores I turn into a weird beast who easily loses all sense and is tugged from one book to another and lost in a trance, so when I staggered to the counter laden with books, Carson McCullers wasn't with me.

And she wouldn't have been with me on this trip, but sometimes a thing's time has come and even my absent-minded stumbling and procrastination can't keep it from happening. On a whim I stopped in this bizarre Japanese import store they have in the mall, which I've only ever gone in before for the inexpensive electronics but as I was leaving I noticed they have a book section. Mostly Japanese titles but there was also a substantial section of books in English, most of which were only a dollar! I started casually perusing and noticed that there were some good books and suddenly remembered The Heart is a Lonely Hunter and bam! Only one copy, but they had it for a buck. Having a funny feeling while looking through the cd section next to the books, I picked up a Reba cd which naturally was the one containing the song of the same title. Personalized recommendation, song, and hard copy in hand there was no way around this book except right through the middle.

I'd bought so many copies of it because I liked the title. This is largely also why I kept not reading it: fear that the book would kill the title. Maybe that sounds silly or just ridiculous, but some titles hit me and make some vague impression about what the book the describe should be like. Not a clear feeling or some ghost outline of story, but just leave an impression and something in me worries that if the book's impression and the title's impression don't feel the same that it would be somehow disconcerting. I know this is crazy and it is mostly subconscious but certain books I feel like I have to have a reason to pick them up to get over this hump and this was certainly one of them. If someone telling you as they read a book that they feel vaguely like they are cheating because you are the person who should be reading it can't get you to pick up a book nothing will. So I did.

And I have no idea what to say. Wow. There is so much that could be written about this book. The cross section of the characters. The running theme of messianic projection or of the blurring of gender and racial distinctions contrasted against the community/individual enforcement of black and white interpretations of each. I hope to dig deeper into the different subtleties when I've got more time and be objective and not personalize the story or its impact so much, but I'll need a little time. Partially because there is the sorting out of what was meant when I was told that I should be reading this book. In a way that totally makes sense and I immediately understood and further understand having read the book, but like the impressions certain titles make on me, the understanding is subconscious and it would make less and less sense to me if I tried to articulate it right now.

But largely I've just got to deal with this book the way I have to deal with any decent Southern writer. Every time I read Faulkner I'm blown away by his writing and feel like my head has been both beaten up and revived. Emotions flood back and I'm populated by feelings that come at me like they are out of a different lifetime and from a different person, and in a way are. This is not to compare McCullers to Faulkner. They are very different writers, but they write in the same emotional landscape and it is the same landscape that I grew up in. So in a way I can't read these stories without asking which character I could have ended up like if I hadn't escaped (that is the right word and not meant in a strictly geographic sense). Few of these characters ever escape.

Congratulations, you may already be a winner...

Years ago, I visited my brother in Santa Fe, New Mexico where he was attending St. John's College. I learned a few things on that trip, perhaps most notably that cutting a hole in the bottom of a jack-o-lantern carved from a giant pumpkin and wearing it on your head is one of the most miserable costumes you can imagine. It seemed such a simple idea that I wondered why more people didn't do it. In case you ever wonder the same thing for yourself, more people don't do it because 1) it is almost impossible to see out through a jack-o-lantern, no matter how big you make the holes, 2) a pumpkin large enough for your head to fit inside weighs about eight thousand pounds, 3) it is even more difficult to drink though than it is to see through, 4) your head is surrounded by a pumpkin, which are almost too hideously slimy to stick your hands inside while cleaning out; imagine wrapping that around your head, and 4) if you succeed in ignoring all these things and wear it around the party as if it were the easiest thing in the world (which you will do after spending 25 bucks on a vegetable and half a day trying to make it work), then drunk idiots will come up and ask if they can try it on, then realizing how horrible it is, they will point out all the aforementioned reasons it is a bad idea and give it back.

I didn't spend the entire trip with my head up the ass of a gourd, and one afternoon wandered into a delightful little book store. I love book stores, and recently had been delving into reading Latin American authors and here I found myself in this little out of the way shop specializing in Latino writers. I scooped up some Gabriel Garcia Marquez and a collection of essays by Mario Vargas Llosa and I also think this is where I bought my copy of nonfiction works by Jorge Luis Borges. I grabbed a couple of anthologies, some essays by Ocavio Paz, and God only knows what else. Seeing that I take more than a passing interest in the written word, the gentleman behind the counter struck up a conversation with me. He described all manner of intricacies of Santa Fe and the culture of the Southwest in general, and we started discussing Latin American literature. I told him I'd only just started delving in South American literature and asked him who he recommended. Hearing that I liked Borges (I just remembered, that is not where I bought his nonfiction works -they came to me via the used bookstore in Pensacola- I picked up his Labyrinths there), he recommended Julio Cortazar (which he pronounced "CorTAza", thankfully I had him write it down).

He was out of Cortazar at the moment, but he wrote the name for me on one of his cards which I buried in one of the books and found later. Searching used bookstores for his work, for a very long time I succeeded in only finding a very small collection of his short stories. The stories were vividly written, but also very dark. There was an ominousness that was hard to imagine and hard now to relay. These few short stories seared into my head the images from them, almost in a way that made me afraid to pick up another of his books. It wasn't that they were gory or really all that horrific, but the crispness with which the visuals were rendered contrasted so succinctly with the opacity of the greater story. They were more unsettling that horrific, but enough so that while I kept an eye out for more of his work I never entered into a determined search.

I eventually stumbled upon a copy of his novel The Winners. This ended up in a pile of books unread until this last Christmas I found that my sister's fiance had pulled it out of my collection. He didn't seem to be reading it; it was just waiting there glaring at me over the holidays until finally I packed it in my bags to help me get through the long days at sea.

Obviously I wouldn't be writing about it if I hadn't made good on my promise of action and finally read the book. This introductory commentary has gone on too long to be part of a rigorous analysis, but let me say that I need to go back to Santa Fe and thank that bookstore owner. I realize that I tend to either gush or spit venom when I write, and so I've been trying to temper both inclinations (are they different inclinations or simply the same one in different directions?) but not gushing about this book is difficult. The story, the characters, the way he writes, the language...

Enough of all that. This book forced me to revive my old habit of reading with a pencil, too many perfect phrases and challenging thoughts taunting me, daring me to lose them in the mass of text. I went crazy before this trip with buying books so I am laden with a retarded amount of bound paper to thumb through, but they've been given a difficult act to follow.

leaving port...

this is what Mason has been doing instead of writing...

behold the cuteness: http://www.nypost.com/seven/03242008/news/regionalnews/easter_fest_a_real_hat_parade_103251.htm

sunset...

View from crater rim

Hiking above Palolo Valley just out of Honolulu

An update and a few thoughts....

I'm living at sea most of the time these days and then travelling the rest of the time, so my life is a big fucking jumble. Love it and hate it, that's what it is and with that, so is this blog. I've never exactly used this (or meant to use this) as an actual diary kind of record and don't now, so it has always been sort of scattered. I gripe less about politics here than I used to and talk more about personal bits and pieces. For better or worse.

And these days, I'm even fiddling a little bit with format, trying to include more pictures and occasionally (very rarely and possibly never again) even including my meager attempts at poetry like in the last post. I have no knack for poetry but sometime prose doesn't cut it and really, if you have a blog, there isn't further down the pole to slide in terms of written word. Not hating on blogs, just recognising that serial self-publishing freakazoids like myself gotta be forgiving to the various forms folks use to thrust their self-expression upon others. Of course this commentary doesn't for a second suggest that I'm softening on my opinion that anything thrown out there is knowingly being thrown to the wolves and in all fairness subject to whatever informed (or not) critique they can throw at you.

Anyway, I'm still trying to sort out how to try to make this less sporadic. I'm at sea, where I do most of my writing, then on land for a few days to spit it all out and then gone again.

So thank you to those who deign to read occasionally. I started this telling myself it was only as an archive but I should admit that the exhibitionist in me likes the public nature of it and the egalitarian in me likes the openess and invites participation. There aren't enough comments to yet consider this anything approaching a conversation but comments are always welcome (harsh being just as welcome as the kindly, though if you are a fucking idiotic gay republican I'll probably comment back and call you a fucking idiot).

As long as I'm rubbing one out about all about the blog itself and my thoughts on it, I should discuss thoughts about the name of the whole shebang. When it started, it was largely started as a reaction to needing an outlet to express politcal outrage. The whole "Awareness is painful, but ignorance is deadly" crap came out of a feeling that our politics so easily get fucked so hard because so many people just tune out anything that makes them uncomfortable and welcome anyone who promises to ease their discomfort. I still think that and use this as a place to react against it, but on the other hand, the title is pretentious and obnoxious. And not really indicative of what I'm doing here. I'm not one for changing horses midstream, but neither am I one to stick with something just for the sake of sticking with it. I'm in it because I want to be, but I'll tweak it where it needs it to keep it functional. So don't be suprised if the title changes in the near future (though you can be almost completely certain that I'm not going to go to the trouble to change the URL).

adrift...

what if i did live
like i insist i can?
cut ties that bind.
would i be fine,
drifting free and easy
like i might,
tumbling all around?

no chains
no tethers
no gravity to hold me down.
would i still know
at such great heights
tossed about like a kite,
would I still know
which way is the ground?

angels soar:
they were born to.
but what would a devil do
sent floating over town?

you'd look up
i'd look down
shouldn't it be the other way around?

"...that mythopoeic faculty which is so essential for the imagination."

Since being first introduced to Mary Renault with The Persian Boy years ago (oddly enough by my then girlfriend), I've been a fan. I hadn't read any of her books in years when I stumbled upon The King Must Die in a used book store, so I decided to dive back in. If you don't know her, Ms. Renault's specialty is rendering classic historic tales into lively stories often ripe with rich homoerotic content. The King Must Die is sort of retelling of the legend of Theseus and didn't have any of the homo stuff of the Alexander novels, but was a fun read none the less.

Part of her charm and talent is in taking legendary tales and re-imagining them as more or less plausible historical events. There is of course going to be a certain level of artistic freedom required in any such undertaking, but her final products are usually fairly compelling. I'm of course not a classics scholar, but as you move through these stories you get a sense that she has worked hard to populate her landscape with plausible inhabitants not just transplanted contemporaries. This novel had all of that on display, but it was her treatment of the supernatural that struck me.

Greece mythology is filled with supernatural creatures and super-human acts and part of retelling these tales in a believable historical context is figuring out how to render these supernatural elements as believable without losing the magic of the tale. She takes the more unlikely creatures, like the Minotaur in this story, and works with them, turning them into fully human elements or showing them in the context of natural phenomena. But what she notably does leave intact are the religious supernatural bits. I haven't really decided how I feel about this.

On the one hand, I like that she strays from the obvious fantastical elements of the traditional legends. In a way she gives them new life and makes the characters more three dimensional and relatable. And I like that her attempts at realism didn't drive her scrub the religious elements from it. There is still this muted religious dialogue going on, and by dialogue, I mean a dialogue between the protagonist Theseus and the gods. She doesn't have them appear directly before him performing miracles and the story could possibly function with the gods existing in it only as figments of the characters' imagination, but they function as silent partners enough to argue that she intentionally left them in. At some point in reading the novel, a question formed in my head, "Why include some supernatural elements and exclude others?"

The simplest argument would of course be that it is a matter of style. This is her style of rendering historical fiction and apparently an effective one. Perhaps she eliminates the greater external supernatural bits which would intuitively set off bells in the readers head that this is a fictional rendering. It is, of course, a fictional rendering, but a successful one precisely because an argument could be made that it could have happened that way. If he had faced a truly half-bull/half-man monster, you wouldn't really get to make that argument. By leaving all the potentially supernatural elements as the works of unsee players who just happen to sound like and have effects like natural occurrences, you can still argue for its plausibility. The characters can believe the gods caused an earthquake and you can read it as something that could resemble a historical event. The story is narrated by one of those characters so he is naturally seeing the hand of the gods in events around him.

But its inclusion doesn't seem as incidental as all that. I came away with the feeling that she left these gods working in the background as purposely included players in the story. She leaves room for the modern cynic to explain them away, but she breaths into them a certain life of their own.

I know I'm swimming in circles here, but I'm trying to get at something. I'd argue that her stories are richer for the inclusion of this religious element as not just background but as an actual mover in the plot, so I have no complaint with that.

It is interesting to me that in a way, inclusion of a supernatural element renders landscapes more believable. Of course it must be well done; nothing is believable without style. Marquez or Kundera are so believable partly because elements of their stories are so fantastic and impossible. In a way it makes the realism of the story stand out in stark contrast, but they are extreme examples. I'm partly just getting at the importance of exercising the capacity for belief in the unbelievable.

I made a comment over the holidays about "Christians" in third person which shocked someone who I wouldn't think I could shock with any statements about myself considering how intimately he knows me. He asked me if I no longer considered myself a Christian, which seemed an inscrutable question. "Huh?" was kind of all I could think to say. On the one hand, considering the state of modern Christianity, do I consider myself one of 'them'? Hell no. I've said before that most people who call themselves Christian these days are idiots and assholes and aspire to be more of both far more than they make any aspiration to follow the teachings of Jesus. And then there are those who are more truly Christian in the sense of having some code which they follow based primarily on New Testament teachings. Those folks I can relate to. And in plenty of ways I'm still one of them. It was how I was raised, and when push comes to shove with the world, there is a mentality modeled on Christian teachings which is what I resort to.

On the other hand, I think there is something to say simply for the capacity for faith and belief in the supernatural. I read plenty of writers, particularly fellow bloggers, where I perceive an almost total rejection of anything not firmly rooted in the cause and effect world. And I don't mind someone else approaching the world that way, but I like my fantastical bits. I don't try to put them at odds with concrete reality, but neither do I care to try to 'prove' that they are based in concrete reality. They are the magical bits, I don't want them explained to death. The creationists are a bunch of fucking idiots who are just torturing both worlds by trying to have this cake and shit on it too. You want to believe that the earth is young and people lived with dinosaurs? Fine, I don't care if you do believe that, but keep it the hell out of science. They don't fit together and won't.

But when my friend asked me if I was no longer a Christian, I think his question was about faith more than identity politics. In effect his implied question was, "You've lost your faith?" The answer to that would be no. My crisis of faith came years ago and nearly splintered my head (you think I exaggerate, but in this instance, not in the least), but I walked away from it with my faith and mind intact, if perhaps a little less dogmatic. I felt like I stepped up to a precipice and looked over into the shrieking vastness, all existential turmoil and angst hurling me over the edge... and then I quit trying to make it all fit. The expanses quit howling and I could again smile at the music of the spheres and get out of some of my self-righteous importance and desire to have all the answers and be RIGHT, and so learned to just relax. It is an amazing world we live in, a spectacular universe we inhabit. I felt somehow put in my place, which was both the center of it all, most important of all things ever and at the same time the least important, most insignificant speck. I backed off the demands and more properly positioned myself and decided that the only prayers that I'm really qualified to make amount to "Wow," and "Thank you," (though to tell you the truth in my more centered moments, even the simple "Thank you," feels a little indulgent and self important).

This isn't to say that I don't still argue with the cosmos and beg and plea with God. I do. I'm writing this in the middle of the ocean. If nothing else will at the same time bolster and shatter your faith, the ocean will. But the point of all this, the faith that came out on the other side has its deepest roots in Christianity and that remains central to the way I approach the supernatural, but on the other hand, after feeling like my spiritual ego was so broken and freed by all that, referring to myself as Christian feels a little constricting. The identity of someone as 'Christian' has more to do with how they align themselves historically than anything to do with faith. My older sister made this very clear to me when she told me before the last election that she was voting for bush because he was the 'christian' candidate. Kerry was a Christian candidate too just like every other damn candidate we've ever had, but bush's invocation of belonging to the same social demographic as my sister was more important as an indication of faith that his actions.

Perhaps that frustration has made me particularly reluctant to refer to myself as a Christian these days. There has been a loud claim staked on the American Christian identity, and to put it plainly, I don't want to be counted in that number. The jackasses and idiots have claimed that title for their cultural touchstone. But as far as my faith, it remains. I'm still uncertain about plenty, but also in the context of having to deal with all these fucking pharisaical idiots parading their cultural identity around as faith, I've perhaps become a little bit more grumpy and easy to rouse. It gets confusing with people like my sister, who in terms of actual faith and having this core set of beliefs which governs how I interact with other people, we aren't very different. We are amazingly similar. Though it pisses me off when she identifies her faith with warmongers like the president, I know that the creed she follows personally leads her to first treat others with respect and kindness.

I've gotten off track. Simply trying to write down my original question born of reading The King Must Die, "Why include some supernatural elements and not others?" brought out the explanation without even trying and let the nagging questions presented to me earlier about my beliefs come bubbling up. We live in an absurd world. This isn't a complaint. I guess in the end for me the inclusion of the supernatural in a view of the world, be it a novel or personal faith, ends up being a choice of style. Do the supernatural elements render the whole more spectacular or do they detract?

Mary Renault uses the invisible supernatural elements in her stories to connect the characters to the events of the natural world around them and the emergent properties of the civilization they live in, or perhaps more accurately she uses these elements to show how her characters make these connections. In the end this is what all supernatural elements are, a way of connecting things which may not otherwise be connected or for understanding connections which aren't otherwise clear.

While home over the holidays, I dug through damn near everything I've ever owned (you could call me something of a pack rat; I like to think of myself as an archivist) in a vain attempt to find my dive card, but I did manage to find some books I'd been looking for. Among those, perhaps the smallest and easiest to lose is The Decay of Lying by Oscar Wilde. It is ostensibly a play, though I can't imagine it ever put to stage, but is more or less a soliloquy split into a dialogue about art and life and the cult of Truth. It deserves its own consideration and will perhaps get it in a future essay, but there is a line which I quite liked about religion: "As for the Church, I cannot conceive anything better for the culture of a country than the presence in it of a body of men whose duty it is to believe in the supernatural, to perform daily miracles, and to keep alive that mythopoeic faculty which is so essential for the imagination." What a wonderful description! If only that were what the church concerned itself with these days...

Who needs sad songs when you have sad movies?

Today is the third day in a row we've had nothing to do because we are waiting for the moon to come back before fishing again (you don't catch many swordfish during a new moon), and my roommate has been tearing through his formidable movie collection. He is watching a movie when I get up in the morning, and pretty much watches one after another til on into the night. Some days I like his selection and watch along, other days... not so much. This afternoon, he put in Saw II. I hate hack 'em up flicks. I can do scary and don't mind some gore if the story comes first and the gore is secondary, but... whatev'. Saw II was about as far from anything I would chose to watch as you can possibly get.

I've said before that the movie libraries on these boats are completely without rhyme or reason, but perhaps nothing better illustrates this than his choice of movie to follow-up Saw II, which would be Steel Magnolias.

At then end when all the sad shit is happening, I'm up in my bunk trying to not sniffle loudly enough for my roommate to hear me. This is a fishing boat. You can't be all weepy in an ultra-macho male work environment, right? Well, actually I suppose you can if you are watching Steel Magnolias because after he turned off the movie and there was no longer the noise from the movie to hide it, I could hear him sniffling in his bunk.

This is one of those great movies for playing if-we-were-who-would-we-be? I've always supposed that if we were characters from Steel Magnolias that I would want to be Truvy, mostly just because I like Dolly Parton, but I've always been sure that I would instead be Clairee. One, she is a likeable character, but more than that, amongst my friends from college who I usually play this with, there was always a dichotomy between my friend John and I, so that whenever there was a diametrically opposed pair of friends amongst the characters we each had to be one of them. And in this cast, John would be Ouiser so I would be Clairee. This was mostly fun to say because John would then huff and argue and make everyone agree that he was in fact Ouiser.

Watching it this time, I've changed my mind. I want to be Ouiser. She is the best ever. I can't wait to be cranky and old and grumpy like that. Actually, I guess I already am. I was realizing while I was home at Christmas, I'm already the grumpy guy in the family. Amongst my friends, I might be Claire, but at home I am totally and completely Ouiser. I'm the one that storms in and bluntly asks questions that no one else does and the one who voices complaints that no one else will say and the one who gripes about being dragged along to things that everyone else is being cheerful about. And I like it that way. Someone has to be grumpy and why not me?

Maybe I should start wearing funny hats, too.

Sad Song Mix continued: the final cut

I could probably spend the entire damn trip writing about the songs that should be included and why I won't include them, so I'll just cut to the chase (this of course is no guarantee that I won't change my mind several times before hitting land again and give you more boring play by play the whole time) and share the final line up with a few comments on the selections:

1) the longest drive - the Capricorns (for the duration of this commentary, I'm not capitalizing most titles of songs and mean nothing by it other than I'm feeling lazy. )
So maybe in the greater universe this isn't one of the saddest songs of all time, but I've been Capricorning myself to death and obsessed with them since the last trip. In listening to them over and over and over and over again on that trip, it struck me how truly sad this song is, which you would never notice if you just went by the frantic electro beat, but when you give it a good listen that frantic pace only seems to reinforce the desperation and loss this song is a record of.

2) the grand tour - George Jones.
As I said before, the man has a voice made for breaking your heart. This isn't his most desperate song but it packs a wallop. "A Good Year for the Rose" might have edged this one out if I had it in my library.

3) golden ring - Tammy Wynette and George Jones.
Again, I've already discussed why this song is so pointed. You are probably thinking to yourself that I'm not really going to break anyone's heart with my song selection so far, and that might be true, particularly since I imagine my main audience to be comprised of cold hearted bastards (which you must all be since no one ever leaves comments. Of course this assumes an audience...).

4) miss being mrs. - Loretta Lynn.
Too damn beautiful for words. So simple and to the point, just laying out flat how she is missing her husband. No embellishment, just direct and lovely phrasing.

5) letter to mom - Iris Dement.
Enough of just sad, let the soul crushing begin. If she wanted to sing it sad, Iris Dement could make you cry with "Jingle Bells"; there is just something in that voice. If she, Nanci Griffith, Emmylou Harris, and Gillian Welch brought their voices together, what hell they could cause. Throw in Lucinda Williams and the vocal combination could destroy us all if they decided it was time for us to cry. They each have a different kind of gorgeous warble that can either make you think of angels or just rip your fucking heart out. Iris is kind of the most punk of them all, with the most unruly voice which can sound so childishly innocent but always barely holding back this ethereal growl. She (particularly with any combination of the above women) could make the most amazing Southern gothic rock opera album. Let's imagine it with all of them...

I'm getting off track. I'll plan out my fictional world where I decide who sings what songs later. Back to sad songs and Iris crushing our souls. "Our Town" might be sadder in a way; it is certainly more defeated, but this song is so wrenching it is hard to believe it was even written much less sung and, having been sung, that it was sung by this voice. It starts so friendly but the subject matter... holy shit. (note: in the liner notes from this album, Ms. Dement points out that this is not autobiographical, but she did write it to help her process a story told her by a friend.)

You could argue that this song is too upbeat sounding or too defiant or...no, listen to it again and cry some tears.

6) six o'clock in the morning - ?
I don't know who the artist is. I can't remember for the life of me and have lost all the other songs I had by him, but I remember all the ones that I had were somehow in this same vein of wow-life-is-miserable-but-you-have-to-trudge-on. It is just sort of plodding misery and the weight of life's futility piling on instead of any one tragedy. Instead it focuses on that horrible moment of any routine day -getting out of bed- and treats it as the Sisiphean task that it is.

7) one more dollar - Gillian Welch.
One more soul-crushed-by-daily-life, there-but-for-the-grace-of song. Something in this song is so sad to me. I listen to it and cringe (and then listen to it again).

8) cold missouri waters - Richard Shindell with Dar Williams and Lucy Kaplanski.
This is cheating. This is from the album Cry Cry Cry which was made by these three sadists for the express purpose of collecting tear jerking tunes. But I don't care. The atmosphere in the song, the way the story is shared, the death bed confessional of it all. So damn amazing. Just a good plain sad song.

9) lonlier than this - Steve Earle.
Steve Earle can write a fucking song. And though he does great rebel songs and love songs, his sad songs are pretty hard to beat. I love this song. From the first time I heard it, I was mesmerized by the direct wallowing of it all. "It doesn't get any lonlier than this," is a pretty bold statement but he catches that emotion that makes that statement seem truly pained and sincere rather than hokey. I love singing this song, but Mason blatantly refuses to play it ever on account of it being too sad (this is from someone whose favorite song to sing in "Long Black Veil").

10) travelling soldier - Dixie Chicks.
I wanted to include "Am I the Only One", which is one of my all-time faves, but somehow in all these other songs its existential howl seemed too far away. "When You Were Mine" was a close second, but for just sheer complete and utter sad-songness this one can't really be beat. Natalie Maines has the voice to deliver it, and the story is so sweet then so lonely and hurt. It starts so pretty and you kind of have a moment when you know it is going to turn bad, but really, the image of the lonely girl in her band uniform crying under the bleachers while no one else cares is so insanely heart breaking.

11) ruby, don't take your love to town - Kenny Rogers and The First Edition.
The groovy back beat and finger picking makes the song sound amazing in a way that it is easy to forget some old country songs used to sound. But Kenny's quiet pleading in the song contrasts that so perfectly. It can't be just a man wishing his woman would do right by him; it has to be a song about a crippled vet watching his woman slip away from him because of his war injury as he lies there slowly dying. Don't hold back now. Of course, the song most likely to make anyone anywhere cry is Rogers' "The Coward of the County" and I haven't forgotten this, but I figured one rape song is enough for any list and anyway in the end of that song, you get revenge and get to feel an explosive surge of everything-is-right-in-the-world that kind of nullifies the pure sad-songness of it all. (Note to Kenny on the off chance that he ever reads this: drop the 'touching' mellow adult contemporary stuff for a while and make a kick-ass rough-around-the-edges album. And do a duet with Dolly on it. In a perfect world, the duet would be a cover of the Mountain Goats' "No Children" a la Kiki and Herb).

12) if we make it through december - Merle Haggard.
Just one of the most heart breaking songs ever. Not woe-is-me-my-baby-left-me or any crap like that, but a poor man being crushed by not being able to provide for his family at Christmas time.

13) martha - Tom Waits.
I've already written extensively about this song, so I won't beat a dead horse. Just so beautiful and sweetly sad. Tear-jerkers don't have to all be soul crushing.

14) getting over you - Janice Ian.
The way this woman writes and the way she sings... damn! "At Seventeen" could have been here, but teenage misery only deserves so much sympathy, even when it is captured so perfectly. And this is just so sad. From the first moment you hear the voice in the song, there is this tension of "I'm fine, no problem" and just-about-to-lose-it. There is that moment when she sings "You want answers that I can't give; you want words I don't know!" where her voice explodes at "know" and does something that gives me chills. The phrase is powerful enough and then she has to do that thing with her voice and it blows my mind every time.

15) red dirt girl - Emmylou Harris.
Again, one of these warbly angel voices that can kill. Of all my beautiful tremulous ladies, Ms. Harris's voice is completely other-worldly. Almost too hypnotic to break your heart at times, because you can get so lost in it, but this song kills me. Maybe it hits me all the harder since it is set in my landscape. Red-clay Alabama is my homeland, and there is something about that dirt that gets to you. That may seem like a dumb thing to say, but... I don't feel like discussing the affect of the soil on the mood of the landscape from my childhood. Let's just say when she sings about a red-dirt girl, it has immediate impact for me and there is built in tragedy in that landscape and the story in the songs fits perfectly. I wonder if I'd feel the same about the song if I were from somewhere else.

16) billy grey - Robert Earl Keen, Jr.
Just a plain beautiful tragic love song. This man doesn't get near enough credit as either a song writer or singer. Something in this song always gets me.

17) ruby's arms - Nanci Griffiths.
So Iris can growl and Emmylou can make you feel like you are in a legend, but for just breaking your heart straight out, nobody's got nothing on Nanci. Something in her voice cuts like a knife. This song is kind of pleasant and billowy, but the sadness is so overwhelming. It is one of those songs where I start wanting to pick it apart as I listen and scream at the protagonist not to leave, to question motives and all that crap, but her voice pushes that away and I'm just left with no doubt that he has to leave, that he truly loves her, that he can never turn back and I accept it all kind of soothingly, but then Nanci sings "Jesus Christ, this cold hard rain; won't someone put him on his train?" And my heart breaks right down the middle.

18) sweet loraine - Patty Griffin.
This is the first song by Patty Griffin that caught my attention. When I was in college in Charleston, the local music store had listening stations and I used to go between classes sometimes and just bury myself in songs. This album was up for a while and I listened to this song over and over and over again. It blew my mind everytime. It still does. The little phrases in the song are the ones that kill you. "Her mother threw stones at her on the day she moved. Now isn't that a funny thing to do, from someone who never really wanted you?" and "Her daddy calls her a slut and a whore on night before her wedding day; the very next morning, at the church, her daddy gave Lorraine away." would be gut wrenching by themselves, but again we've got a singer here who makes you feel it.

19) anymore - Travis Tritt.
This almost feels cheesy next to "Sweet Lorraine" but Mr. Tritt can deliver sad and be believable in a way that too many of "Today's Hottest Country" artists can't. I would just consider this a nice sad song, but I've got the indelible memory of the video attached to it. He had this series of relentlessly heartbreaking videos to go along with his songs and this was the clincher (if I'm remembering correctly). In this one, he is a wheel-chair bound vet whose best friend is an old black man who walks with a cane, who is working on his boat when his very pregnant wife brings him a snack, slips on the boat, hitting her head as she falls into the water. He crawls out of his wheelchair and sprawls helplessly on the dock reaching for her in the water as his old friend wades into the water to pull her to safety. She dies, but the baby lives for him to raise alone. The song is being sung as he his preparing to explain to his now adolescent daughter how her mother died. The video ends with them pulling up in their boat to the place where the mother is buried and his daughter turning to him and saying "Why do we always come here on my birthday, Daddy?" It sounds too schlocky to stand, but somehow they pulled it off without making seem like a farce and basically just pile as much tear-jerk as can fit in one video. The song by itself is sad and beautiful, but the memory of that video won its place in my mix.

(update: note that in the comments, some kind person corrects my memory, pointing out that the video I described remembering above was "Tell Me I Was Dreaming". This was actually a video trilogy, with "Anymore" showing him in the VA hospital, becoming friends with the black guy, trying to push his wife away and finally breaking down and returning her call and finding her still in love with him. She takes him home and every -including you- cries and smiles. The end of the trilogy with him taking the little girl to her mother's grave is chronicled in "If I Lost You". To make sure I got it straight this time, I just re-watched all three videos and had my heart smashed to bits again. Do not watch these unless you really want to cry.)

20) sometimes i still feel the bruise - The Mountain Goats.
Again, I've already covered this song ad nauseum so I won't recap here. Go read the other post.

21) You'll Never Leave Harlan Alive - Patty Loveless.
It isn't a warble that makes Patty Loveless's voice so deadly, but there is such unbelievable power in her voice. And few people can sing sad like she can. There are a couple of other songs from the same album which are heart breakers, but this song still stands out. The story is beautiful and tragic, but the whole sound of it kills you. If it didn't have words and she were just singing the sounds you would still get your heart destroyed by this song. You don't need the words. More than any other song on this list, it just sounds tragic. Brad Paisly also recorded this song, and I can't imagine what he was thinking. Actually, I can. It is a beautiful song and who wouldn't want to sing it? But damn, the list of people who could do it justice after this version is a very, very short list and Paisly is a great entertainer but only a good singer. Raul Malo or Toby Keith or Dwight Yoakam might be able to make a passable swipe at it, but still...

22) he was a friend of mine - Willie Nelson.
It is no secret that I love Willie Nelson. Obsessively. But all that aside, this song is a killer. So quietly sad. And this isn't a song that is easy to sing (try sing along for a minute. I'll wait), but Willie's voice captures something so perfectly here. The song has this tremendous potential, but without the right voice it would be nothing special. The lyrics are kind of repetitious and bland, which are strengths the way it is sung here, but in different hands you would just have a plodding, pleading yelp. Oddly enough, I have three versions of the song on my computer. Cat Power does ok with it. Nothing special. And I've got Mercury Rev doing it. They do a suprisingly good job with it, but the song just doesn't break your heart without Willie wielding it.

Anyway, that's gone on long enough. If anyone has good sad song suggestions, I'm always looking for some tear-inducing heartbreakers.

Sad Song Mix is totally back on!

So I still don't have "There Were Roses" (hint hint Mason, email it to me), but I found that I do have "Billy Grey" and "You'll Never Leave Harlan Alive". Besides, "There Were Roses" skates the fine line into activism songs. Don't worry, I'd still include it happily (or sadly, I guess), but I'm trying to talk myself out of including "Black Boys on Mopeds" which is totally an angry at the world issue song, but so damn spot on in sad-songness with the emotion in O'Connor's voice; and also Johnny Cash's "Ballad of Ira Hayes" which is also super issue-y and sung with more growling defiance than sadness and is sing-songy, but it is so damn sad and wretched that you can't really help having your heart broken. But if I include it, I feel like it is a small step to suddenly including "Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee" which is totally moving but all issue and completely not what I am going for with this time-wasting exercise.

I know that having mentioned Sinead O'connor that the obvious song for a sad mix is "Nothing Compares 2 U", but it was so popular and is so connected in my memory with images of the video that it takes a moment of active dissociation before I can just lose myself in the song, so it is out.

As long as we are talking issue-y but moving sad songs, "Tomorrow, Wendy" was a contender but is also out. The sound of the song is too pleasant and the voice too defiant. Of course this combination juxtaposed with the subject matter and lyrics is what makes it such a moving song, but still, out. I am tempted to let "Joey" in, though. Its melody might be a little too upbeat too, but damn that voice. Knife straight in the heart. If they hadn't backed her with pleasant upbeat tempos we'd have all killed ourselves or been scarred for life listening to Concrete Blonde. But the song is kind of a make up song, not the completely heart stomped tragedy we are going for here. If we were going to let "Joey" on board, then I feel like I'd have to also include "Jesse". "Jesse come home, there's a hole in the bed where we slept now it's growing cold," is about as pleading a line as you could ask for, but still it is a reconciliation song that only might be hopeless and besides, if I wanted my heart ripped out and stomped on by Joan Baez (which is exactly the kind of thing I am sucker for), I would include "Prison Trilogy", which I don't have and which brings us back full circle to issue songs.

Sad Song Mix: ain't gonna happen

Like I've said before, I love sad songs. Really, really, really love sad songs. And a favorite time waster on the the boat is compiling playlists. Some of these actually materialize as mix cd's for friends, but sometimes I just pick a loose theme and run with it. Tonight I decided to, you guessed it, make a sad song mix. I've told myself that I am going to make the ultimate cry your eyes out mix cd, but this aim is going miserably. First there is the issue with suddenly remembering songs which have to be on it that I know I don't have. You can't make the saddest cd ever without Kathy Matthea singing "There Were Roses" or Patty Loveless's "You'll Never Leave Harlan Alive", both of which I should have, but don't have with me.

And then there is the issue of whether or not picking songs that make you cry because they are so touching is allowed. I don't mean horrid shit like "Butterfly Kisses" or "Holes in the Floor of Heaven" (which, being honest here, both of which I found touching-ish when I first heard them -I totally have a soft spot for cheesy sappy stuff like that- but they were beat to fucking hell on the radio and only sort of tolerable from the start), but stuff like Red Sovine's spoken word tear-jerk trucking tales like "Giddyup Go". Yes, just as patently cheesy and intentionally schlocky but the sincerity is sweetly subtle and doesn't feel quite so fakey-fake to me (maybe just because I grew up listening to it) and really, if you can listen to "Giddyup Go" or "Teddybear's Last Ride" without tearing up, you should be institutionalized. Same goes for "Christmas Carol", which oddly enough I would totally include on this mix if I had it, even though I wouldn't allow the other aforementioned touching tear-jerkers. It is kind of in its own league of make you cry retardedly songs, and strangely the first Christmas song I heard on the radio this year, after several years of not hearing it (and it is one of those songs that is only effective if you hear it randomly on the radio).

Anyway, I kind of decided that I was trying to find actual sad songs, not just weepy things (though again, "Christmas Carol" still counts. If you know what song I'm talking about, you know why). Things were going ok until I decided that I would peruse some George and Tammy. Now, when you want to break a heart with voices, those two have criminal talent. This only makes it more difficult. Sometimes they both get a little too goofy with their phrasing. Now George Jones totally clowns intentionally, and you can tell he knows he being cute with his words even when he's singing tragedy, but Tammy Wynette does not. She may know it is a gimmick, but damn if she doesn't sing those songs even more sincerely and deadpan, and faced with this delivery and these horrific messages in cute packages I can't decide whether to bawl or crack up.

I told myself that "He Stopped Loving Her Today" may in fact be one of the truly saddest songs ever written, but it is so omnipresent that it feels like cheating and doesn't have some of the oomph for me that other songs might, so I settled on "The Grand Tour" for Mr. Jones. Mrs. Wynette on the other hand, she is killing me. Seriously.

It is her cheeseball songs which kill you. "D-I-V-O-R-C-E" might be the most ridiculed song on earth because of how silly the concept of the song is, but on the other hand, it kind of rips your damn heart out exactly because of this goofiness letting the heartbreak story sneak up on you.
But you can only hear so many of these songs before you kind of just have to bust out laughing. "Kids Say the Darndest Things" and "She Didn't Color Daddy" and "I Don't Want to Play House" are each heartrending in their own right, but with her whole resume of songs in this vein, at a certain point you lose it.

But being country's power couple of heartbreak, their best stuff is together. "Two Story House" and "Golden Ring" both made the cut. Maybe they aren't exactly what I had in mind when I first started this mix, because either of them if you listen in passing sound cheerful. I remember having listened to them for years and then one day had them both on an album and really listened to them for the first time. I had to listen to them on repeat to just wallow in the horror of this quiet tragedy that slips up on you. "Golden Ring" might really be the true winner, though both are so wretched and effective because they are being sung by both sides at the same time, with no one party singled out as the offending party, instead the breakdown is presented as almost inevitable and unnecessary at the same time. Maybe this is what makes these songs so effective: we know the narrators have personal knowledge of this kind of tragedy, but they sing it from a neutral if sympathetic distance which make the wrong turns and misunderstanding seem so misguided and avoidable.

The whole project is unworkable though. I just remembered that I don't have Robert Earl Keen, Jr.'s "Billy Grey" which is pretty much unmatched as outlaw tragedy love song. Ok, that isn't true, Richard Thompson's "1952 Vincent Black Lightning" is right there neck and neck, though for some reason though I find it harder to imagine it inspiring tears.