Sing! Sing a Song. . .

If you’re anything like me, there are songs that you love because of their lyrics; writers you admire because their songs have depth, meaning, or just a sheer playfulness that has nothing to do with the tunes.

So, today’s question?

What songs … either specific songs, or songs in general by a specific group or writer … have words that you love?
Why?
And … do the tunes that go with the fantastic lyrics live up to them?

Iris DeMent wrote my theme song:

The Way I Should

A cold wind against my shoulder woke me up in the middle of the night
An autumn leaf was scraping against my window
like it was trying hard to get inside
and then a ghost that I had met before kept me up 'til dawn
and everything I thought was right was suddenly all wrong
He said, "Your score is looking pretty bad"
and then he asked me what it was that I had to show

So I went running down a list of things
some were real, but on some of them I lied
'cause I felt I had to justify each breath that I'd been breathing in this life
Then I realized I was playing into someone else's rules,
trying to keep my score up in a game I did not choose
Then I looked that ghost straight in the eye
and said "You'd better not be coming back by again"

And it's true that I don't work near as hard
as you tell me that I'm supposed to
I don't run as fast as I could
but I live just the way I want to
and that's the way I should

October's leaves were dancing 'round
like angels dressed in robes of red and gold
but November's come and gone now
and they're lying in the gutter out along the road
They're gonna make their way out to the ditch or someday to the sea,
they'll get to where they're going without the help of you or me
and if each life is just a grain of sand
I'm telling you man, this grain of sand is mine

And it's true that I don't work near as hard
as you tell me that I'm supposed to
I don't run as fast as I could
but I live just the way I want to
and that's the way I should
but I live just the way I want to
and that's the way I should

I couldn't find "The Way I Should" at YouTube, so here's another classic Iris Dement, "Let the Mystery Be":




My favorite music of all time comes from Dwight Yoakam, Emmylou Harris and Johnny Cash. I love the combination of voice, the sensibility of the lyric, and--because I'll always be a hillbilly at heart--a bit of banjo if at all possible.


Emmylou singing One of These Days:



Johnny singing Folsom Prison, my daughter's favorite roadtrip song:



and

Dwight, back at YouTube, singing Sunnyside of the Mountain and his own Miner's Prayer

Twang you for listening.

Booking Through Thursday

I don’t want to snorkel or learn to sky dive
Just leave me alone until Chapter Five.

--Jessica, at Both Eyes Book Blog

Here's good news:

After years of bemoaning the decline of a literary culture in the United States, the National Endowment for the Arts says in a report that it now believes a quarter-century of precipitous decline in fiction reading has reversed.

Dry Storeroom No. 1

On one of my forays through the basement I came across a door that I had not noticed before. This was on a corridor with an air of being seldom visited on one side of which were tucked away the osteology collections--bones, dry bones, where oxen strode naked of their skin and muscles, and great bony cradles hung from the ceiling, the jawbones of whales. Here, ape and kangaroo met on equal terms in the demotic of their skeletons, with no place for the airs and graces of the flesh. Strange though these collections might seem, they were as nothing compared with what lay behind the mysterious door opposite. For this was Dry Storeroom No. 1. Neglected and apparently forgotten, this huge square room entombed the most motley collection of desiccated specimens. Fishes in cases were lined up species by species in their stuffed skins; they were presented in faded ranks like a parade that had forgotten the bunting. At one end there was a giant fish that seemed to have bee cut off mid-length, such that the posterior part of its body was apparently missing, and it had a silly little mouth out of proportion to its fat body. It was a sunfish, and its cut-off appearance was entirely natural--a faded notice attached to it proclaimed it was the "type." Elsewhere there were odd boxes, on of which contained human remains, laid out in a kind of slatted coffin. The shells of a few giant tortoises hunkered down like geological features on the floor. There were sea urchin shells, and some skins or pelts of things I couldn't identify. Most peculiar of all, on top of a glass-fronted cupboard there was a series of models of human heads. They were arranged left to right, portraying a graded array of racial stereotypes. One did not have to look at them for very long to realize that there was a kind of chain running from a Negroid caricature on one side to a rather idealized Aryan type on the other. This was a remnant of an old exhibit, heaven knows from what era, with more than a sniff of racism about it. Dry Storeroom No. 1 was a kind of miscellaneous repository, a place of institutional amnesia. It was rumoured that it was also the site of trysts, although love in the shadow of the sunfish must have been needy rather than romantic. Certainly, it was a place unlikely to be disturbed until it was dismantled. I could not suppress the thought that the storeroom was like the inside of my head, presenting a physical analogy for the jumbled lumber-room of memory. Not everything there was entirely respectable; but, even if tucked out of sight like suppressed memories, these collections could never be thrown away. This book opens a few cupboards, sifts through a few drawers. A life accumulates a collection: of people, work and preplexities. We are all our own curators.

--Richard Fortey, Dry Storeroom No. 1: The Secret Life of the Natural History Museum

The hard, clean questions

I believe that there is one story in the world, and only one, that has frightened and inspired us, so that we live in a Pearl White serial of continuing thought and wonder. Humans are caught--in their lives, in their thoughts, in their hungers and ambitions, in their avarice and cruelty, and in their kindness and generosity too--in a net of good and evil. I think this is the only story we have and that it occurs on all levels of feeling and intelligence. Virtue and vice were warp and woof of our first consciousness, and they will be the fabric of our last, and this despite any changes we may impose on field and river and mountain, on economy and manners. There is no other story. A man, after he has brushed off the dust and chips of his life, will have left only the hard, clean questions: Was it good or was it evil? Have I done well--or ill?

--John Steinbeck, East of Eden

A nice sort of a word

It is funny, but it strikes me that a person without anecdotes that they nurse while they live, and that survive them, are more likely to be utterly lost not only to history but the family following them. Of course this is the fate of most souls, reducing entire lives, no matter how vivid and wonderful, to those sad black names on withering family trees, with half a date dangling after and a question mark.

~~~

'Pythagoras,' he said, 'believed in the transmigration of the soul, and cautioned us to be careful when we ate beans, in case we were eating the soul of our grandmother.'

~~~

For history as far as I can see is not the arrangement of what happens, in sequence and in truth, but a fabulous arrangement of surmises and guesses held up as a banner against the assault of withering truth.

~~~

A child is never the author of his own history. I suppose this is well known.

~~~

Unfathomable. Fathoms. I wonder is that the difficulty, that my memories and my imaginings are lying deeply in the same place? Or one on top of the other like layers of shells and sand in a piece of limestone, so that they have both become the same element, and I cannot distinguish one from the other with any ease, unless it is from close, close looking?

~~~

Imaginings. A nice sort of a word for catastrophe and delusion.

~~~

But I am beginning to wonder strongly what is the nature of history. Is it only memory in decent sentences, and if so, how reliable is it? I would suggest, not very. And that therefore most truth and fact offered by these syntactical means is treacherous and unreliable. And yet I recognise that we live our lives, and even keep our sanity, by the lights of this treachery and this unreliability, just as we build our love of country on these paper worlds of misapprehension and untruth. Perhaps this is our nature, and perhaps unaccountably is it part of our glory as a creature, that we can build our best and most permanent buildings on foundations of utter dust.

--Sebastian Barry, The Secret Scripture

Memo to self: use time wisely

It seems ridiculous to make reading resolutions this year beyond what I've already said--to drastically curtail book purchases, to spend more time with books than computer screens. My sister went in the hospital last week; when she comes out in a few days, she's said, she doesn't particularly want to continue living in our parents' old home, which she and I own together. My husband and I will have to spend a great deal of time emptying the house and making necessary repairs before it can be sold (in this market? fat chance) or rented. I don't think I'll find many free weekends for, as L. likes to call what I like to do, excessive reading.

But my future self will be disappointed to look back and see that I gave myself no guidance, no aspirations for the months ahead, and blame my failure to use time wisely on this very lack. Read at whim, yes, but also try to:

• read more mythology. I read Book III of The Metamorphoses of Ovid while in the ER with my sister last Monday. If I read one book a month, I could have it completed by the end of the year.
• read more nonfiction, including presidential biographies. Once I finish The Three Roosevelts, I'd like to read American Sphinx and American Lion.
• read more classics. At the top of my list: Thomas Mann's Buddenbrooks and Stendhal's The Charterhouse of Parma. I'd also love to read Herodotus' The Histories and (I say this every year) Joyce's Ulysses.

That's it. Let's see how well I can do.