It seems like in my journaling or blogging or whatever, I’ve been thinking and writing a lot about the nature of memory — the ways that it helps us, the ways that it holds us back, and the ways that it sometimes tricks us. We think we’ve had an original thought, told a clever joke, written a unique melody, but then we find out that we’ve actually just recycled something that we’ve heard or read before. Or we have the opposite experience — someone whom we’ve known for a long time recounts some story in which we’ve said or done some momentous thing, but we have no recollection of the event. Did it happen? Are they mixing their stories up, or are we? We remember the exact circumstances of the first time we met our lover, but they remember only our retelling of the moment. The fact is we can’t retain everything, so our brain is forced to pick and choose. Those of us who lament that we are “bad with names” in fact just don’t pay enough attention when people introduce themselves. I can meet someone and then minutes later not have the faintest idea what to call them, not because something in my brain fundamentally can’t retain the information, but only because I wasn’t really present when they first shook my hand.
Every once in a great while, I start reading something, only to realize after some number of pages that I’ve read the thing before, some years prior. Usually it happens with fiction that left me so unaffected as to fall right out of my head the moment I turned the last page. My mother used to be an enourmous consumer of romance novels. Of course, they were all exactly the same, and it was impossible for her to know which ones she had already read. Nonetheless, it mattered to her for some reason not to read the same one twice. (I still don’t understand why.) So she developed a system: she would go to the local library’s used book sale, buy a stack of 20 or so romance novels for 25 cents each, and as she read each one, she would leave a mark on the inside back cover to signal its completion. Whe she had read the whole stack, she would donate them all back to the library. Then, at the next book sale, she would root through the piles and pick up only those romance novels that didn’t already have the mark in them. Of course, it didn’t guarantee that she wouldn’t end up with a different copy of the same book, but it probably didn’t really matter if she did, as long as she didn’t realize it, because they were really all the same book, anyway. But the mark system satisfied her, and there were always a couple of brown grocery bags full of books lying around the house, one incoming and one outgoing. The system may persist to this day; I’m happy not to know.
In any case, I experienced one of those tricks of memory when I read the The Best of Roald Dahl. I thought it was my first time with the book in my hands. A couple of the stories sounded familiar, but then a lot of the stories are a lot alike: a seemingly meek and mild-mannered person has some grief with a less-than-meek antagonist, and in the surprise plot twist, we find out the the meek protagonist in fact has a murderous streak and someone gets killed in an unusual and grisly way. And then I came upon the story “Royal Jelly”.
The legend of the Beeboy is not well-known, and I don’t care to retell it here. Those who know it, know it, and those who don’t, don’t. Suffice to say that it’s a tag that I’ve carried with me since I was seventeen years old, an alter ego that has taken on different meanings over the years. What I didn’t know was that the origin myth was lost even to me. I remember when I started being called “Beeboy”; I remember the first drawing of the Beeboy, the sculpture of the Beeboy, the first ‘zine and the first album to be put out under the Beeboy(!) Productions label. I had honestly thought that the whole persona had been the invention of myself and a couple of friends, seventeen years ago.
And then I read “Royal Jelly”, the story of a man who feeds his malnourished child on queen bee nectar and ends up converting the infant into a fat human-insect hybrid. I gasped at the realization — I hadn’t invented the persona at all. At least, not out of my own fancy. I had absolutely read the story before, in that year when I was seventeen. I had surely borrowed the book from Bughead, who was a huge Roald Dahl fan, and who had been there for the birth of my own Beeboy myth. It was a crazy moment — this totally integral creative identity that I had been employing for nearly two decades had its birth in something that I had utterly forgotten. It was like forgetting the birth of your own child, and then coming across a photo of the event years later.
Thing is, I’m forgetting so many moments all the time. There’s just no way to know what’s important while it’s happening, which events will be life-changing and need to be filed, and which ones will end up as useless mental trivia that stick with us for no good reason. I don’t remember quite where I was sitting when I started writing this entry. Maybe someone spoke to me. Maybe I’ll meet that person again, have to be reminded of their name, try harder to tuck it away this time. Maybe that person will go on to change my life, totally alter the arc of my existence. I’ll reach back for the beginning, try to find that first moment when I met them, and it won’t be there any more. Maybe they’ll have a story about it, or maybe it will simply be lost, a story to be invented rather than recounted.
Then again, recent research suggests that the act of retrieving memories alters them during the retrieval, because they get re-associated with the context in which we recall them. Think back to where you were on September 11, 2001. If you were like most Americans, you were glued to the television. Do you remember watching footage of the first plane hitting the north tower of the World Trade Center? Seventy-three percent of the subjects in one study do. Thing is, that footage wasn’t actually aired until September 12. Which means that seventy-three percent of the subjects in the study report recalling something that didn’t actually happen. It’s just the constant review of the footage that happened in the days that followed that caused them to re-associate the memory with what they saw the day of the traumatic event. Memories, in a sense, wear out. We change them a little every time we “use” them, in a kind of mental Schrödinger’s cat scenario. Conviction is no indicator of accuracy. It’s quite possible to be entirely convicted of a version of events that rather completely clashes with reality.
So, we can try to journal and photograph everything and live with the information-retention fetish that is the modern world, data-mine our memories to create some Matrix of Truth. Or we can accept the fluidity of it all, and just try to tell good stories. I certainly do plenty of both. Given the choice, I suppose I would probably choose good stories over maximum data retention. In the world of Google, Facebook, Flickr, etc., I think the latter is probably the easier one to achieve. I can only hope that we don’t lose our collective handle on storytelling, crushed under the burden of so much recorded Truth.
It goes without saying that tastes change over time, both for individuals and for cultures. It’s hard to get high school kids into Nathaniel Hawthorne and Jane Austen, and it’s not just because high school kids lack sophistication. The language doesn’t resonate with them; the themes don’t resonate with them. And that’s OK with me. I’m no Platonist, and I don’t think that Quality is some inherent, well, quality of works of art. Art speaks to the context in which it was made, and some works have themes broad enough to span multiple contexts and so have staying power, but it’s simply a truism that Henry VIII doesn’t play the same on Broadway as it did in The Globe. That’s not Shakespeare’s fault; times change, and people have different needs. Part of Shakespeare’s greatness, no doubt, is that it still plays pretty well on Broadway because he was able to see past the troubles of his times, but I still don’t think we can utterly blame The Unwashed Masses for finding it boring.
The same is true for our personal tastes. When you’re fifteen, Catcher In The Rye rings awfully true. When you’re fifty, it’s still a good read, but it’s (hopefully) not still speaking to your current station in life. If it is, then you probably haven’t grown much. Again, the best books manage to span multiple contexts and multiple lives, but they can’t speak to everyone at all times, and it’s unreasonable to expect that they should.
When I was in my late teens and early twenties, Charles Bukowski spoke to me. I read lots — most — of his work, and I felt that it was something real. Like Holden Caulfield and Bukowski himself, I felt that so many of the literary greats were phonies, that what they created was artificial, that it had nothing to offer to me. I felt that academic literature was so much verbal masturbation, that writers like Bukowski wrote from where it was really at. To some extent, I still feel that way. Jane Austen still doesn’t speak to me. I don’t find the misery of Raymond Carver characters to be picturesque or interesting. Even The Bard himself is still hit-or-miss for me.
So when I read through Run With The Hunted, I was a little surprised to find that it was hit-or-miss for me, too. When I was younger and more angry, stories about desperate drunks seemed pretty interesting. Even if I felt like trash, there were any number of people out there way worse off than myself who were finding slices of beauty in whatever ditch they awoke. But reading that stuff now, it just seemed like repetition. Bukowski drunk, Bukowski with bad women, Bukowski feeling superior to other writers, Bukowski at the racetrack. There are still glimmers of beauty in all of it for me, but it no longer speaks to where I am. I’m not that angry, I don’t have the need to feel superior to anyone, and there isn’t much left for me to get out of Bukowski’s writing. At this point, reading his stuff is just revisiting a chapter of my life that I’m glad to be over. There isn’t anything much more for me to learn from it.
By the time I’m ninety, I’ll probably be one of those guys who just scowls at the New York Times every morning. Of course, so was Bukowski, so maybe that fits.
Another lap around the celestial skating rink has come and gone, as have the corresponding festivities. This year’s party was a bit scaled back from last year’s owing mainly to the fact that I’ve moved to another town and need some time to rebuild my forces. Of course, by “scaled back”, I mostly mean that the party went on for something less than 24 hours this year. I doubt that anyone could say that I was truly slack.
The day started with late breakfast in preparation for the Hey! Cow! tournament and wine tasting around the county. For those not familiar, Hey! Cow! works as follows: each vehicle has a driver’s side team and a passenger side team. The object of the game is to attract the attention of cattle. Each team member is permitted one Shout per pasture. The Shout consists of two words, the first being “Hey!” and the second being “Cow!”. One point is scored for each cow that turns its head to look at the shouter. At the end of the day, the scores are tallied and the winning team receives some concession from the losing team. An excellent example of The Shout is as follows:
Experience suggests that the quality of The Shout is directly proportional to the number of vineyards visited.
Post-Hey!-Cow!, we returned to the Log House, where a crack team of specialists (which is to say, three of us with beers and hand drills) had assembled a dance floor the night before. There was a potluck, there was music, there was square dancing and hula hooping, and there was an unusually high concentration of Italians. It seems you just can’t keep Italians away from square dances.
So thanks to everyone who attended and contributed their energy and talents to a memorable evening. The square dance floor will be making an encore appearance at Musicalia next weekend, and probably at other festivals throughout the summer. Look for it!
I had never suspected that one could judge the character of a town by the difficulty one has in obtaining a pair of underwear. It seemed like a simple enough task. In my haste to pack for a long weekend in Asheville, NC, I apparently forgot to put any underwear in my bag. I didn’t figure it out until I got up to dress in the morning, and rooted around in the backpack. What the hell? Of all the weird things I could possibly forget, why underwear? Going commando for a few days seemed plausible enough in the spring weather, except for contra dancing, when I would surely want something to keep my, er, “goods” from being battered to death on my thighs. So, no problem. Asheville is a big town, and I’ve got nothing but time. I’ll just walk downtown and buy something simple.
Two hours later, I had come up dry and confused. There were at least five stores where I could buy a hand-woven Nepalese shirt. Probably six specialty shoe stores, including a place that will measure your feet and custom-build a pair of sandals to fit them. There were four or five bookstores, three specialty chocolate shops, places to buy beads, places to buy incense, places to buy Tibetan singing bowls and organic dog biscuits. Three tea houses, four coffee roasters, a couple of skateboard shops, a hand-made drum shop, more vegetarian restaurants than there are vegetarians in the rest of North Carolina. But nowhere, nowhere to buy a pair of underwear (excepting the high-end lingerie shop, which deals in anatomies significantly different from my own). Finally, desperate, I went into Urban Outfitters. Me, in Urban Outfitters! At least they surely would carry underwear. The clerk shook her head sadly. “I’ve been in town for four days now, and I haven’t found anywhere that sells it,” she said. “But if you find any, let me know.” One of the other clerks directed me to the “General Store” as my only likely hope. It seemed like a chance. What could be more General than underwear?
I walked in, wandered around racks of fishing shirts and waterproof hats. Finally, I asked at the counter. Where could I find the underwear? Hesitatingly, the woman told me, “Well, what we have would be downstairs…” So I headed down, where there were tents, sleeping bags, kayaking supplies. It wasn’t obvious to me that there was any underwear to be had, so I asked again downstairs, thinking to myself that this was surely the most that I had spoken the word “underwear” to perfect strangers ever in my life. The downstairs clerk directed me to a clothing rack near the camping supplies. There, on a hook, were the only men’s underwear that can be purchased in Asheville, North Carolina. A single pair of quick-dry, capilene, moisture-wicking briefs with built-in fungicide and three-year warranty. Sale price: $17.99.
I decided that I could turn my existing pair inside out on alternating days. I also decided that there must be an awful lot of free-range testicles in Asheville, NC.
Which brings me, of course, to the subject of poetry. Many years ago, I thought that I knew something about poetry. I read it, wrote it, I probably even called myself a poet once or twice. Like so many things in my life back then, it was largely a vehicle for expressing discontent. I also wrote love poems and some humorous poems, but poetry was so associated with discontent for me that I put it away when I put away the discontent. I hardly acknowledged the poem for years. Not the fault of the poem, of course. I just needed time to de-couple it from teenaged angst.
So I pulled my copy of Stranger Music from my shelf as the first book of poetry that I had read in maybe a decade. I had recently rediscovered the music of Leonard Cohen, had enjoyed re-learning to play those songs, and had enjoyed the lyricism of them. There are some beautiful and lyrical moments in the poetry. But nearly always of the same type. It’s all love and loss, war and Judaism, being conquered by bad women or no women at all, and some of it is poignant. But almost none of it is just good fun. It’s all seriousness, all gravity. I wonder if Leonard Cohen could write a poem about the difficulty of obtaining a pair of underwear in Asheville, North Carolina. I wonder if I could. I can’t remember the last poem I’ve written. Plenty of songs, sure, but no poems. So I think I should try. I don’t know if the undercarriage of Asheville is the right starting point — almost certainly not — but it would be a tough thing to take too seriously, and that’s a good thing. I like love and loss and being conquered by bad women and no women at all, but it’s all been written. The freewheeling genitalia of the Western Carolina mountains have not, to my knowledge, been lauded in verse. There may be an opening for me.
I’m not a flag-waver and never have been, but I don’t mind saying this: The United States are home to some of the greatest music traditions in the world. I came to particularly appreciate this while traveling in France. They’ve got trad music in Brittany, a bit of Basque music down in the Basque country, and some authentically Parisian styles, but most of the rest is just ‘European’ — a couple thousand years of influence blended together into no particular regional style. Here in the States, we have two great things going for folk music: immigrant populations from around the world, and a huge country with a high degree of geographic isolation. It’s a perfect recipe for diverse and distinct musical styles to emerge. So we get Cape Breton stuff in New England, Scots-Irish influenced old-time in Appalachia, African spirituals in the Southeast, Cajun music in Louisiana, Native American styles throughout the plains, Tex-Mex conjunto in the Southwest, Hawaiian guitar on the islands, to say nothing of jazz, the blues, rock and roll, swing, and on and on. If you can’t find traditional American-born music that you like, then you truly haven’t tried very hard.
Which means that exploring American folk music can easily be a lifetime pursuit, and is for a lot of people. It’s as deep a rabbit hole as you care to make it. You can casually pick up a Smithsonian Folkways compilation and skim the surface of a lot of things, or you can spend the rest of your life in East Kentucky learning everything there is to know about a handful of particular musicians.
As for Cajun music, I’ve only barely started dipping into it. I’ve long been aware of it, always liked the bits of which I was aware, but never really put my toes very far into the water. That started to change for me in France, of all places. On a night out in Paris, I ended up at a punk club dancing to the sounds of Sarah Savoy and the New Francadians. They do their share of traditional Cajun, but also cross into the classic country music that I’ve been performing the last few years. But instead of Hank Williams, it was Hank Williams translated into Cajun French. The Parisian punks loved it, and I did, too.
So I did some homework. I already had some of the real 1920s and 1930s vintage Cajun from the early days of recording: bands like the Hackberry Ramblers, scratchy old recordings with no bass tones and indistinct vocals. So I decided to fast-forward to the folk revival, and picked up The Balfa Brothers Play Traditional Cajun Music. While the title may lack creativity, the music more than makes up for it. It is, without question, dance music. The rhythms are smooth and slippery, the vocals pained and unrestrained, the accordion rich and booming. It has quickly become one of my favorite albums, both to listen and dance to.
I don’t know how far down the Cajun rabbit hole I’ll venture. As with old-time music, it’s bottomless. But if you’re looking to dip in, this album is about the best place to start that I can imagine.
The Best of Roald Dahl
