Trail of Crumbs

Kim Sunee's memoir, Trail of Crumbs: Hunger, Love, and the Search for Home, appeared by chance on my lap.  Kate found it at the Mars Hill Library and passed it on to me.  It's the true story of a young (30-something) woman, born in Korea and abandoned at age three in a market, who is eventually adopted by a New Orleans couple and who, at the time of writing, has ended a domestic relationship with a wealthy Frenchman and is still searching for her true identity and her home.  The book is as captivating as a novel because the author writes so well and has a tale to tell.  Because Kim  or "Keem" --(I call her that because she is so referred to by the people in her life  AND because I can't manage the diacritical marks for her family name) loves to cook, the memoir is also suffused with recipes French, Asian, and New Orleanian.  

    Because there are people in my family who were adopted from other countries at an early age, Kim's story has extra meaning.  We all seek our identity, our place in the world, and for the adopted person there is the extra question of who and why.

  Kim Sunee writes beautifully, for the most part: I could have skipped a few of the more intimate amorous scenes.  But her story is important and engaging, and I recommend this book to everyone.

"Dead rock stars are singin' for me and the boys on the Rivet Line tonight. Hendrix. Morrison. Zeppelin. The Dead Rock Star catalogue churnin' outa Hogjaw's homemade boom box. There's Joplin and Brian Jones and plenty of Lynyrd Skynyrd Dead Rock Stars full of malice and sweet confusion. Tonight and every night they bawl. The Dead Rock Stars yowling at us as we kick out the quota."

This is how Ben Hamper's Rivethead. opens. This is as fine a piece of writing as you'll find anywhere.

Here's another opening (with slight apologies to the writer for not asking) that grabs your ear and imagination right away:

"Like spirits they came, over the hills. They came in pairs, always in pairs.... They still come now, somewhere in the part [of] my mind that takes reality and stores it and replays it. They were light and diaphanous. Each a star, a pair of stars, holding hands."

Good writing's good writing, whether it's Alana Nash's wonderful reviews in Stereo Review during the 70s or Thoreau or LeGuin or wherever.

The title of the story quoted above is "March of the Dead." Check it out. Or ask.

Leather

This sign was an important part of my childhood and signified a milestone you passed at about age eight, though in that in between stage it helped you grab the rings.

"Headin' down south, to the land of the pine..."

What makes a great song, or even a really good one? I'm talking about popular music here, not art songs. Folk, rock and roll, whatever. This summer I fell in love with a song, as happens every now and then. I mean to the point where I listened to the song over and over for several weeks. Since the band members are all young, the age of my children, I wondered if I was just wishing I were young again, with that feeling of freedom and optimism that seems to fade away. But now I really thing that some songs are just "classics" and bound to last. (The song is "Wagon Wheel [Rock Me, Mama] by the Old Crow Medicine Show.)

Here are a few things that I think make a great song, whether it's Woody Guthrie's "Let's Go Riding in the Car, Car." Libba Cotten singing "Freight Train," or Otis Redding's "Sitting on the Dock of the Bay," or any other classic. Melody, of course -- it's hard to define what makes a melody fine, but the really good ones are engaging and more inevitable than they are original -- by which I mean that the progression of the melody just flows naturally, like a stream, but not in a predictable or hackneyed way. You want to sing or hum along with it. The "sound devices" of poetry play in, too, things like assonance and alliteration, good (again neither predictable nor too oddly original, but inevitably right) rhyme and such.

And then the words. Listening for the umpteenth time to "Wagon Wheel" and then visiting the band's fansite and reading several comments by people who said things like "I can really relate to what they're saying about freedom, I feel that way too" and thinking about these comments, I realized that the best songs are just particular enough and just general enough that they touch almost everyone in a powerful way. A lot of singers write songs that are so full of particulars that the universal is lost and the song becomes boring, irrelevant or outdated after a few listenings. Too general, and it's like a typical teenage love poem, full of angst but no images. The best songs create just a few images (see the header for this post), enough to make the scene real, and touch universal themes -- of yearning, sorrow, desire, joy, or whatever, and they do it artfully. Maybe that's what it all comes down to, giving life to a universal theme through art.

Note: I think I'm talking about "lyric" songs here, as in lyric poetry -- not odes or memoriams, or ballads, or protest songs, though they all are created with artfulness or not. (And, of course, we DON'T all necessarily like the same songs. Some of us like Plovakian music, some prefer punk, some [shudder] barbershop singing....

Spooky Picture

I can't say what this is. I won't say. But I have to post it, at last, somewhere. I may put a slightly differently- detailed picture elsewhere. Stay tuned. (It's not a happy story.)