Dr. Metablog

Starlight, Dewdrops, etc.

The Stephen Foster songbook was a staple of my childhood. My mother sitting at the old Hardman baby grand, sang "Camptown Ladies" and "O Susanna" and "Old Black Joe." But times change and Foster was pushed to the sidelines years ago. Too racist, too sentimental, too 'soft'. It's undeniable that the lyrics of many of his songs are reprehensible.

Now we're enjoying a Stephen Collins Foster Revival and Festival in our very own home. It began with the discovery of the "American Dreamer" cd that Thomas Hampson recorded in 1992.  Hampson, opera lovers will know, is the world champion of living baritones, and in this cd, he does Foster proud -- to the inventive accompaniments of Jay Ungar and Molly Mason. No question but that Foster was a truly superb melodist -- with a long string of songs that would have gone double-platinum, if there had been such a thing, in pre-Civil War America.  

Hampson sings the Foster songs as if they're Schubert lieder, but there's another recent cd, "Beautiful Dreamer" -- a "tribute album" in which Suzy Bogguss, John Prine, Allison Krauss, Mavis Staples and a bunch of excellent lesser-known (to me) but wonderful musicians lay into these tunes with enthusiasm and verve. Who would have guessed the "Beautiful Dreamer" was country before country was cool? Pure country.

Foster was a better melodist than poet. Often his lines are awkward and time-bound and mawkish, but occasionally he hits the nail on the head. I like "beautiful dreamer, queen of my song"; I think that "slumber my darling the birds are at rest" is fine, but a succeeding line in the same song -- "thy pillow shall sacred be" -- is bad beyond ordinary bad; "weep no more, my lady" is positively Shakespearean and "all the world is sad and dreary/ every where I roam" is well-rooted in the medieval contemptus mundi  tradition; "long may the daisies dance the field, frolicking far and near" is far too pseudo-Wordsworthian for my palate. Foster's best lyric, in my view, is "Hard Times Come Again No More" --  "'Tis the song, the sigh of the weary/ Hard times, hard times, come again no more/ Many days you have lingered, around my cabin door/ Oh! hard times, come again no more."  It's inspired, heartfelt, and eternally pertinent -- and also, wedded to an excellent melody. "Hard Times" was not known to me in the days of my youth -- more's the pity.  

Old guy, maybe a bluesman, bottle of hooch in a brown paper bag, sits on a bench in the middle of the night, downtown, playing air-sax, nodding. Young fellow comes by, cheerful, asks him, "Crosstown buses run this way?" Blues guy looks up, pauses for a second, and then drawls, "Doo--dah, doo-dah."     

Pastorale

Sharon was here yesterday.  She has a new method to keep the raccoons and the rats out of the food bins.  "The rats gnaw through the plastic garbage cans, the raccons open them unless I bungee them real tight. Galvinized works, but what we do now is buy junk refrigerators or freezers.  The rats can't get into them.  Of course, what you spill is feast for the mice."  Sharon's husband is a vet, but at lambing time last winter he was still recuperating from a hip replacement.  "One of the ewes," Sharon says, "was having a hard time delivering her lamb.  I went out to help pull.  I pulled out a head and a leg.  The lamb must have been dead for a long time.  I whipped out the cell phone.  I said to David, 'I don't care how long it takes to limp down here, you're in charge.'  He took one look, got the rifle, and shot the ewe." 

Updike- II

In Terrorist, Updike takes us inside the head of a young,malleable, soft-spoken Islamist fanatic.  The protrayal is persuasive, in part because the horror bigotry is understated and casual.  It's quite a feat of imagination on the author's part.  It's a good novel -- a page-turner, as they say.  It's most remarkable feature is that the hero of the novel is a tired and bedraggled high school guidance counsellor;  What a breakthrough -- the guidance counsellor, figure of o-so-much contempt and satire, as savio!.  Of course, the contrived/dramatic ending in which the terrorist and the counsellor square off is totally unbelievable, but at least it doesn't involve fistfights or animatrons.  On the whole, Terrorist is a very readable, imaginative and largely satisfying novel.  It's a bit spare, laconic  -- but perhaps it only seems so because I'm also reading Doestoevsky.  It's not a novel for the ages -- it's too obviously occasional.  And I must say, I'm suspicious of a piece of fiction about the interaction of various ethnicities in which the only two Afro-Americans are a whore and a pimp named Tylenol.  

Off to the Bradford Public to see what else is in their Updike holdings.

Our Lady of Internal Combustion

I stopped at one of those highway gas-station convenience stores a few weeks ago, searching for some invigorating M&Ms. I couldn't find them, but I said to myself, this is America and I'm an American, and if there's one thing I know it's that there are going to be M&Ms somewhere in this quickstop. I poked around a little more and sure enough, just a little out of the way, there they were -- five different kinds of M&Ms. I went for the classic multi-colored ones. Am I the kind of person who's going to experiment with peanut butter M&Ms?  It wouldn't be me. 

But I'm off the point, which is, that when you're a native of the place, you know more or less what to expect. You're not likely to be taken by surprise very often. But every once in a while, something hits you right between the eyes, and you say, where the heck am I? I had such an experience today when I read a flyer from the West Fairlee Center Church, which is right over there on Middlebrook Road, not more than three or four miles from where we live.

I have no quarrel with the "Old Fashioned Community Hymn Sing" on July 12 or the "Shape Note Singing" on August 2 -- that's exactly what I would expect from a church in West Fairlee Center. I'm a little puzzled by the "Blessing of the Animals" on July 19, but then I remembered St. Francis, in some ways my favorite saint, and I remembered that he preached to the birds and that when he was dying, he thanked his donkey and (this is a bit hard to believe but what the heck) his donkey wept. So I'm OK with blessing the animals, although I myself would feel hypocritical blessing the particular animals that I was preparing to transubstantiate into lambchops or hamburger.

But what makes me feel like a stranger in a strange land is the event that is scheduled for August 9 -- the "Blessing of the ATV's" (sic). ATVs, for those of you who don't know, are "all-terrain vehicles," and are very useful if you're out on the range in the vast West patrolling miles and miles of barbed-wire fence, but which in the crowded East are used mostly for "recreation," which seems to involve tearing up private land (someone else's private land, that is) or government land, making a whole lot of noise, and sometimes driving underage and illegally, and much too fast, on our usually peaceful "unimproved" dirt roads. No mufflers, no insurance, no license.

So what's with "the blessing of the ATVs?"

St. Francis has become the patron saint of environmentalists. Is "the blessing of the ATVs" supposed to be a rejoinder to St. F and to ecological thinking? Are we experiencing a Christian sanction of anti-environmentalism?  Or have these back-country bible churches long been blessing tractors and balers and pickups and backhoes, and I've just not noticed?

WTF is going on? Am I in the America I know and understand?  Why am I feeling vertiginous? 

Would St. Francis have thanked his ATV?  And if he did, would his ATV have wept?  

Updike

I've shamefully neglected the writings of John Updike.  I read the first Rabbit novel when it appeared in 1960 and was struck by its vigor and authenticity.  A talent to watch, I said to myself -- but then I lost track.  I loved one of the Bech books, devoured on an airline ride from somewhere to somewhere else twenty years ago.  I've been dazzled by short stories in various anthologies and by art criticism in the NYRB.   But for a writer considered an American master, nominated for a Nobel  -- well, I've been inattentive.  And now Updike is gone.  I'm late (as usual).  To remedy the personal deficiency, I hastened to the Bradford Public Library, where, sad to say, the only Updike on the shelf was one I'd never heard of,Villages, published in 2004. 

Villages is billed as an autobiographical novel and appears to be so.  It's eminently readable, slickly written (sometimes so facilely that it crosses into self-parody).  But, my-oh-my, what an embarrassingly bad performance.  It's no more than a sexual history of "Owen Mackenzie" in which the succession of women Owen encounters are diffentiated only by the size and shapes and degrees of mucosity and erectility of their reproductive organs.  It's an adolescent novel written by a seventy-year-old eminence.  What the heck was Updike thinking?. Why would he waste precious time on such unambitious, indulgent stuff -- unless he took a long-ago manuscript out of a drawer and fooled around with it a bit?

Disappointing indeed. A few years ago, I read through the novels of Philip Roth, who is an exact contemporary of Updike.  My conclusion:  that Roth (see Books over there on the side of the page) was a writer of arrested development.  Oh no, not again!

Let's see if the BPL has anything else by Updike today.  Let's hope for the best.  Villages has got to be an aberration.