Day 29: Owen Dodson, Julio Corteza, Emil Cioran
The poem below is not online so I have included it here in full. I found it in The Picador Book of Blues and Jazz.
Owen Dodson - Guitar
Ma six string guitar with the lonesome sound
Can’t hold its own against a Georgia hound.
O mamma when the sun goes the downstairs way
And the night spreads out an the moon make day,
I sits with ma feet raised to the rail
And sings the song bout ma buddy in jail:
In the red-dirt land,
And the pine tree high,
Gonna find me peace
By-an-by.
Gonna find me a baby
Some pretty-eye gal
To be ma mother
Ma wife an pal.
Ain’t bad nobody
To call me home
From the electric cities
Where I roam.
Yes, I been travelin
Over all
To find a place
What I could call
Home, baby,
Sweet cotton-field home. . . .
When I gets to the place where a cracker got mad,
Struck ma fine buddy, struck all I had,
The hound start howlin till the stars break down
An make ma song like a boat what’s drown.
Ma six string guitar with the lonesome sound
Can’t hold its own against that Georgia hound.
On my first reading I loved this poem for the funny rhymes and language you hear in really old recordings of blues and folk music.
On second reading I realised it tells a story within a story; that the singer's song, which mostly sounds quite generalised, is a way for the singer to process grief, his friend possibly being murdered by a white man in jail, or sent there for acting in self defense (?). Like most folk and blues songs, we don't get the full details, but the lyrics and the way they are sung are enough to paint an intriguing picture.
I like that this poem is written like a blues song, but also celebrates the cultural function of the genre and form. I gotta read more of this book.
Stories: Julio Cortezar - A House Taken Over
A classic gothic ghost story in which the boring domestic life of two middle-aged siblings is disrupted by ghosts which we never see.
I like the claustrophobic descriptions of their life together. She is always knitting and he is always watching her knit do so. Descriptions of knitting take up a good portion of the narration.
There is also an unstated but very present sexual tension in the story, as if the narrator is repressing his desires toward his sister. They behave as an old married couple, and there are many sentences that lead you to believe that this may be a taboo story, but then the next sentence disproves it.
"Whenever Irene talked in her sleep, I woke up immediately and stayed awake. I never could get used to this voice from a statue or a parrot, a voice that came out of the dreams, not from a throat. Irene said that in my sleep I flailed about erroneously and shook the blankets off. We had the living room between us, but at night you could hear everything in the house. We heard each other breathing, coughing, could even feel each other reaching for the light switch when, as happened frequently, neither of us could fall asleep.
Aside from our nocturnal rumblings, everything was quiet in the house."
Gothic stories, as opposed to general horror, are all about the ways in which repressed secrets, desires and histories always come back to get us. Why the house is haunted, the narrator does not say but we are given enough clues to make it interesting.
Overall I liked the atmosphere and description in this one, even if it is a fairly standard gothic ghost story. Cortezar is one of the most well-regarded South American story writers, so I feel the need to read more of him.
Essay: E. M. Cioran - The Trouble with Being Born (Part 5)
This time of year is hard for me, so reading someone so joyously, comically miserable is a good balm for my ailments..
I long to be free - desperately free. Free as the stillborn are free.
Cioran's misanthropic barbs and quips could be seen as annoying by some, particuarly in the first chapter where he focuses exclusively on the one natalist topic, but later it gets great. His aphorisms are all quite varied, sometimes wise, but always funny. His words offer catharsis for times when I also long to be free. From this chapter, which is where I am up to, here are my favourite quotes;
For a writer, progress toward detachment and deliverance is an unprecedented disaster. He, more than anyone else, needs his defects: if he triumphs over them, he is lost. He must be careful, then, not to improve, for if he succeeds, he will regret it bitterly.
Since we remember clearly only our ordeals, it is ultimately the sick, the persecuted, the victims in every realm who will have lived to the best advantage. The others - the lucky ones - have a life, of course, but not the memory of life.
I'd like to pray with dagger-words. Unfortunately, if you pray at all, you have to pray like everyone else. Wherein abides one of the greatest difficulties of faith.
Seen from the outside, harmony reigns in every sect, clan, and party; seen from the inside, discord. Conflicts in a monastery are as frequent and as envenomed as in any society. Even when they desert hell, men do so only to reconstruct it elsewhere.
An orangutang in the strict sense of the word, man is old; as historical orangutang, he is comparatively recent: a parvenu who has not had time to learn how to behave in life.