I am a lost and flaky thing

[ritaxis]

However, I did finally get those five stories mailed today. And I used the treadmill at Gloria's house though it was terribly boring because I couldn't get my book to stay in a readable position. The book is Kim which I read four times forty years ago. I wanted to read Zola, but I keep having this problem -- I hate the books. Is it the translation? Or is Zola really hateful?

We saw "Akeelah and the Bee" today and it is very heartwarming and sentimental, but it is also interesting and cool. There's some stuff about redemption through what? the dictionary? competition? helping? reconciliation? jumping rope? I'm not sure. Maybe all of these things.

Gloria's on a new medicine for the dementia, its stats look good. In general, her cognitive deterioriation has been accelerating, and physically she's been getting frailer. But this last two days, while she's been really very befuddled, she's been engaged, and her eyes have the light of human intelligence in them. No thanks to her regular doctor, who did not prescribe the medicine, and who, when I took her in last week for pelvic pain (and a history of bladder infections and intestinal difficulties) prescribed 800 mg of ibuprofen twice a day. No, we didn't do it. The other doctor gave her the dementia medicine and treated her bladder infection.

Tedious bad radio luck and annoying music most of the last two days no matter what station I turn to but I hit "The Elvis Blues" on the way home.I started free-associating about songs in general.

I was thinking about the songs that creeped me out when I was a kid:
"Mary of the Wild Moor" sung by the Louvin Brothers, I think, unless it was the Blue Sky Boys. Girl returns to her father's house with a baby, penitent, father doesn't hear her crying outside the door because of the noise of the wind, girl and baby freeze to death overnight. Really haunting tune.
"The Unquiet Grave" sung by A. L. Lloyd. It's a Child ballad and I'm too lazy to look up the number. Lover spends a year weeping on the grave, ghost declares that if they kissed, the lover will die (for some reason the children telling their mother that she makes them all soggy when she cries for them in "Lady Gay" did not creep me out, it was just compelling and fascinating and the version I had didn't even have all that business with the birch bark hats)
And the creepiest song of all, which I finally had to learn and sing but all I remember now is the first verse and the chorus: "Pictures from Life's Other Side," also sung by the Blue Sky Boys or maybe the Louvin Brothers. 

The world has a gallery of pictures of scenes that were taken from life
Pictures of joy and of sorrow, pictures of peace and of strife
Pictures of youth and of beauty, old age and the blushing young bride
They all hang on the wall but the saddest of all are the pictures from life's other side.

It's a picture from life's other side, other side
Somebody just fell by the way
Their life has gone out with the tide, the tide
They might have been happy one day
The poor old mother at home, at home
Watching and waiting alone
Waiting to hear from the loved one so dear
It's a picture from life's other side.

Now just imagine the tune, one of those ones that sounds really haunting played on the musical saw, okay?  And two-part pre-bluegrass old-timey mountain brother high-lonesome harmony with voices that were made for despair.

And tell me if you don't want to first barf and then go hide under the blankets until morning.

So naturally I was thinking about other old-timey songs too.  I was thinking about "Weaver's Life is Like An Engine"  ("very often flag your fixer when his head is hanging low/you may think that he is loafing but he's doing all he knows") and the one --

What did the bad boy say to his mother as he swung on the side of the train?
Someday or other I'll return, mother, and I'll be conductor of the fast mail train.
Did he ever return, no he never returned, and his fate was still unknown
They found him lying by the cold iron railway and his head was covered in the snow.

Yeah, that's the tune of the song that the Charlie on the Subway song comes from -- "The Ship that Never Returned."  The "Weaver's Life is Like An Engine" comes from a gospel song, which was also used for a lot of other  blank-blank is like an engine songs.  Currently the tune for that is mixed up in my head with the tune I know for "I Was Born In East Virginia."

So I don't know.  There's something going on with these songs, some creepy, some not so creepy, but they have this kind of high lonesome tune, sort of almost whiny, and it just makes me want -- I don't know -- I think remembering these tunes makes me want my daddy and my mommy, and the living room back in El Sobrante and the shelf of old records and the single handmade speaker as big as a television, and I want to curl up in front of the speaker with my paper and my crayons or maybe crawl up on the sofa and hide behind my mother's legs and cry.

On another front -- I finally know how Winston got his own apartment.  And it sucks that there's only one person in the whole wide world who's actually read The Conduit besides me and who therefore has a chance in hell of knowing or caring anything about it.  Since Forager Girl is the protagonist of the next thing I'm writing when I finish Afterwar  (real soon now, I've got five or no more than ten pages to go, and I'm able to do this again), I understand that Winston is a major supporting character.  And he also gets a true lover in this book, in the process of F.G. getting hers.  I'm pretty happy with the way it's shaping up and it just might be one of those fast ones like The Conduit.  

I'm about to get maudlin about writing all these terrific things and not getting them read, so I'm off to bed.

Comments

[kip-w.livejournal.com]

Songs get under my skin too. Sad folk songs, in particular, are not only creepy-sad, but enigmatic, leaving a lot of unanswered questions. Oddly enough, the theme from the movie Hush, Hush, Sweet Charlotte has these qualities, and is a fairly successful exercise in counterfeiting the sad-but-not-sure-why quality many of them have. (And with many others, you're damn sure why they make you sad, of course.)

[ritaxis.livejournal.com]

That barebones storytelling can be really compelling. The last couple-few years I've been thinking about it and trying to learn from it and I think it's helped my writing a lot, though I still don't do it myself.

[davidgoldfarb.livejournal.com]

I blush to admit it, but I had forgotten who Forager Girl and Winston were. (I just went and re-read those chapters.)

[ritaxis.livejournal.com]

They were minor characters and I never imagined they were going to get their own book. So it's no surprise you didn't remember them -- there were what, forty named characters in that book? Pretty funny since the first person narrator doesn't get a name of his own till halfway through.