Songs and Stories—Peter Vilbig

There’s a twist at the end of Jason Isbell’s song “Live Oak” that the Internet, or a corner of it anyway, debates. 

The song involves a man who’s drifted into a farming community and entered into a relationship with a woman. The setting would appear to be the North Central Plains before World War II. 

In his past, the narrator was part of a gang that robbed a Great Lakes freighter and killed two men. When rumors of that crime comes to his new farming community, he expects the woman he’s in a relationship with to be repulsed. Instead he discovers she might have seen this potential violence in him all along, and it drew her to him in the first place. The narrative unfolds with the economy of a Sherwood Anderson short story in a little over three minutes.

The online debate involves the last verse in which the woman dies, the man buries her and heads on further south. At least some listeners believe he kills his lover at the end. In their view the song is a murder story and a Gothic one at that. 

I’m going to say this is flatly wrong, but I want to make a further point: the “reading” of the song that turns it into a murder story involves a mistaken approach to reading (or listening), one that is at least a first cousin of the more troubling tendency toward conspiracy theories that are now being inflamed regularly on the Internet near you.

So what’s wrong with the murder theory of the song? After all, lines early in the song tell us: “I never held a lover in my arms or in my gaze/ So I found another victim every couple days.”

And there’s the possibility that the narrator’s an unreliable one: when he thinks his lover is intrigued or excited by his murderous past, she may actually be fearful. He thinks she’ll expose him, so he kills her.

But I imagine you see the problem with this line of reasoning instantly. You have to create new narrative elements—his discovering her fear, his deciding only murder will get him out of the problem, and you have to ignore (and what you have to ignore is just as big as what you have to add) that there’s no hint that the narrator’s remorse is not real and deeply felt, or that his love for the woman is insincere. Nor are there internal hints that his assessment of her reactions is off base. (And you also have to ignore the metaphorical reading of those lines about “another victim every couple days.”)

The murder theory involves faulty inferential thinking. The reading goes beyond what’s implied. But it’s worse than that: it also makes its untoward leaps based on a biased preference, the preference for the sensational murder story over other alternatives. 

This preference is rooted in psychology: by going beyond what is inferred, the reader/listener seizes power, erasing the narration’s force (and for that matter the author’s command—though as you’ll see in a second I’ll call that command into question). The reader/listener collapses the story’s mystery, the nuance that creates its real power and substitutes their own sensational fantasies.

This is where the overlap with conspiracy theorizing comes in. Conspiracy theories offer a way to erase the world and substitute our preferences. Erasing the story (about the actual world or a close approach to it) is satisfying because it puts to rest the unsettling vibration of uncertainty that the song, the story, the world sets up in us. By adding the bonus of allowing us to fill the now voided space (of story/song/world) with our own take, we gain the myriad satisfactions that come with confirming our preconceived views. All is right with the world. Indeed we’re in control of it.

As far as I know, Isbell has refused to say what happens in the song, and has even joked about it. I’m going to suggest that what he thinks happens, if he even has an opinion, would be interesting to know but would not sweep aside other interpretations. 

The idea that the author’s opinion about their work is not definitive turns out to be a controversial one—as I’ve come to understand as a teacher of writing. My students greet me with astonished disbelief when I suggest that the author might not know any more about a story than the reader. Yet I believe this is true. Words escape our intentions—anyone who thinks carefully about language, will I believe come to this conclusion.

Perhaps you’re telling yourself right now that while arguing for open-endedness, uncertainty, and the irreducibility of stories, I’ve reduced the song to my favored interpretation. 

So first of all, I’m not making a case for limitless, roll-your-own open-endedness. Stories have real gravitational fields that pull in settling directions. 

But I’ll willingly muddy the waters. I’m against the murder theory, but I don’t think it’s wholly absent from the song. That earlier line about victims and the last verse describing her burial must raise in the listener the question of whether the narrator in fact killed her (though the care he takes in that burial and the evident time it would take argues against the murder thesis). 

Rather I’ll say the hints of violence in the song are the way the narrator’s violent past and potentially violent present vibrate or radiate in the story. The murder possibility helps create the song’s emotional complexity, it just doesn’t determine its plot.

Here’s the lyrics. The song opens with the chorus:

There’s a man who walks beside me

he is who I used to be

And I wonder if she sees him 

and confuses him with me

And I wonder who she’s pining for 

on nights I’m not around

Could it be the man who did the things I’m living down

I was rougher than the timber shipping out of Fond du Lac

When I headed south at seventeen, the sheriff on my back

I’d never held a lover in my arms or in my gaze

So I found another victim every couple days

But the night I fell in love with her, I made my weakness known

To the fighters and the farmers digging dusty fields alone

The jealous innuendos of the lonely-hearted men

Let me know what kind of country I was sleeping in

Well you couldn’t stay a loner on the plains before the war

When my neighbors took to slightin’ me, I had to ask what for

Rumors of my wickedness had reached our little town

Soon she’d heard about the boys I used to hang around

We’d robbed a great-lakes freighter, killed a couple men aboard

When I told her, her eyes flickered like the sharp steel of a sword

All the things that she’d suspected, I’d expected her to fear

Was the truth that drew her to me when I landed here

There’s a man who walks beside me he is who I used to be

And I wonder if she sees him and confuses him with me

And I wonder who she’s pining for on nights I’m not around

Could it be the man who did the things I’m living down

Well I carved her cross from live oak and her box from short-leaf pine

And buried her so deep, she’d touch the water table line

And picked up what I needed and I headed south again

To myself, I wondered, “Would I ever find another friend”

There’s a man who walks beside her, he is who I used to be

And I wonder if she sees him and confuses him with me

The Twitter person @Arturo_Ulises (interesting name) who splits his time between between Tlön, Uqbar, and Brooklyn (interesting choice of domiciles) twitterated a link to a Radio Ambulante story about a run-in between the infamous Columbian drug kingpin Pablo Escobar and a well-known salsa musician. It’s a wonderful story, and so I’ve done a quick and very loose translation. Here it is:

Musicians always have peculiar stories. For example it is said that the Puerto Rican salsa musician Héctor Lavoe had an altercation with the Colombian narcotraficante Pablo Escobar during a musical performance at a party organized by Escobar.

According to the story, Escobar wanted the musicians to keep playing the same song, the hit, El cantate, again and again. The musicians refused, were locked in a room, and only managed to escape barefooted and without their instruments through the Colombian jungle. Finally arriving at a highway, they were able to hail a taxi for their hotel. But based on how the musicians looked, the taxi driver worried they wouldn’t be able to pay him. Lavoe assured him that he was indeed the famous Héctor Lavoe. The taxi driver asked suspiciously: “To confirm that you are who you say you are, you’re going to have to sing El cantate for me if you want me to take you to your hotel.”

“Listen dude,” Lavoe responded, “it’s because of crap like this that we have this problem. Somebody wanted me to repeat this song ten times, threatening me with a pistol. I was a little drunk and said to the orchestra no more songs. Pack up your instruments.”

***

It doesn’t need to swallow viagra sildenafil canada just alike the tablet. In fact the results begin to visualize within the first week of online cialis pills intake only. It generic tadalafil no prescription is entirely free from any type of pains and troubles of life. It overnight cheap viagra can also be cured. What I really like about this story is the formal repetition of the demand to sing the song, as though the musician (representing all artists one might suggest) is hounded by a fate that specifically arises out of his artistry.

But also the story says a great deal about power, and especially about the peculiar power music exercises over us. It’s like one of those tales from antiquity about a despot (Dionysius of Syracuse, anyone?) that teaches the futility of the dictator’s way of life. Here is Pablo Escobar, who at the time was one of the most powerful, wealthy, and feared criminals in the world, powerless before art. Just like all of us, who when we like a certain song, a certain melody (or Vinteuil’s Sonata, for that matter) want to hear it again and again, so too the great Pablo Escobar. Most of us however do not pull out pistols to hear the song repeated, no matter how much we might want to. But perhaps that is just our timidity.

***

Original text from Radio Ambulante is found here.

This story apparently was first told by the journalist and writer Juan José Hoyos in the pages of the newspaper El Colombiano de Medellín.

Nothing could be more natural in the face of the unassimilable loss that is Aurora than the call for us to come together or the exhortations from our leaders that we are so much stronger than the violence wrought against us. Psychologically, these moments of communal affirmation may well be essential. They reduce suffering and trauma. They are welcome.

So what I’m emphatically not saying is that such appeals to our sense of community and our common bonds should be diminished or silenced. Yet a thought experiment might be worth trying. What would happen if in the wake of the next horrific shooting (it’s coming, by the way: these are now part of the structure of American life) the calls for community, for coming together, were left aside? What would happen if we were to experience the next brutality separately and alone? No appeals for communal outpouring of aid. No praise for our resilience. No calming words about how much stronger we are than the they of evil.

I’m not here to suggest what would happen—because in fact no one knows. That’s why it’s a thought experiment. Offered here is a purely speculative effort at imagining what might happen—no more than that.

Imagine then our thought experiment in action: a terrible shudder of violence has just unfolded, but in this case not followed by the usual declarations about our communal strength. Given no consolation, left to fall downward on and on in our separateness, alone with the jagged mechanism of our isolate thought, down into the dark cloud field that such violence actually opens in us, we might finally sink into a hostile landscape of pure individuality, recourseless, fearful, enraged, destructive—detached and bereft.

This possibility is what makes responsible leaders rush to speak up for community in the face of such tragedies. And it’s no joke. Alone we would be turned over to the demons. But here’s where the thought experiment comes in. What if, in this fading away of the communal, an illusory and even mythic sensation of our togetherness were torn away too? What if in this painful moment of truth we were actually able to see ourselves as we really are? In other words, what if we were to have a genuine experience of our every-man-for-himself society? Who knows where such a revelation would lead. The thought experiment doesn’t require that closure. But it does seem to open up the possibility of a terrifying experience of our reality.

Or another outcome, less apocalyptic this one, more optimistic: what if an experience of our isolation and pure individuation actually led to a deeper and more authentic hunger for genuine community—perhaps even (and here the optimism flies over the moon) to some recognition that community is more than a feeling. It requires structures. It must arise out of our way of life, instead of being a coping mechanism only pressed into service when someone has once again enacted the mass murder script on the American stage.
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Some would perhaps follow this line of reasoning through another question: how is it that we live in a society in which isolated young men can purchase an arsenal of weaponry, ammunition, and perhaps explosives, with impunity, with no oversight? And the thought occurs: perhaps if we did not rush so quickly headlong into consolation, this question might be cleared of its categorical political baggage. Even some of those who rushed out to buy guns after the election of the nation’s first black president might just suffer a moment’s reconsideration, once the consolations and intensities of groupthink were denied them.

Or instead—left to brood alone about the meaning of such an attack—maybe we’d follow our thinking in erratic directions, into taboo territories. Consider for example the clear prohibition against asking what Christopher Nolan’s Batman movies had to do with the killings. With no one to shout us down (and maybe this is isolation’s unique value) we might, some of us at least, entertain thoughts about why it was the Batman saga that the killer chose as the setting of his mayhem.

This is not to advocate for the idea that the film goaded the killer into action. It’s to suggest that thinking about violence in our society and in the products that entertain us might be fruitful. Nolan himself issued a statement following the shootings. “The movie theater is my home and the idea that someone would violate that innocent and hopeful place in such an unbearably savage way is devastating to me.” But what if Nolan’s film itself violates that ‘hopeful and innocent place’? Having not seen the new film, I obviously can’t comment on it—but I did see the 2008 movie that preceded it. One man’s reaction: I found it to be an appalling jumble of contradictions that finally cohered into an ugly justification—after buildings fell in clear reference to the 9/11 attacks—for vigilante violence and torture.

I realize many will disagree. They will cite (and praise) the film’s ambiguity, since after all, isn’t art supposed to enlarge our sense of the space of uncertainty and ambiguity in our lives—forgetting entirely that the work in question is a cartoon and is seen by many (most?) of its audience as such. Artists have always wanted to have it both ways: to titillate, console, and aggrandize the consumers of their work, while delivering suitably ‘progressive’ messages or critiques of social conditions. But Hollywood is more shameless in this than the other arts, and Nolan is doing nothing if not following a time-honored tradition. His Batman saga fits what must have been the film industry’s motto all along: Hollywood—we make vengeance palatable for America.

Entertaining such thoughts has value, not as a way to deliver a brief against Nolan and his movie but because it might lead us in the direction of actually undertaking to untangle the meaning of the violence that haunts our actual national life—from predator drones to prison rapes to the endless toll of mundane and undramatic murders that unfold daily, which action movies do not reflect so much as provide a comforting screen for (pun intended).

But please, don’t get all bent out of shape. I’m only suggesting a thought experiment. A what-could-happen-if scenario. I proposed a couple of outcomes—and perhaps not the most important ones. Remembering this: what matters in my view is the possibility of thinking about what’s happened in more idiosyncratic ways, without consolation, in isolation, adrift in arenas that would be taboo in groups. Who knows what such thinking might reveal about who we are and what we are becoming, if such unexpected lines of thought were pursued in the privacy of an un-ameliorated grief and fear, before we rushed to come together as a community and ‘move on’?

Romney’s bullying.

Given that this blog has assiduously avoided anything topical with the secret goal (more or less realized) of making itself invisible to search engines, what on earth might now possess me to add my words to the torrent on Romney’s great haircutting debacle? Only perhaps that I was shocked. As a headline scanner, I had first thought: well, so Romney teased a boy who was gay about his hair. What a jerk. Then I read the story. I suppose there are those who think attacking someone—leading the group in the attack—and cutting his hair is no more than a mild prank. But really holding someone down and taking scissors to him? “Like a pack of wild dogs,” as one participant remembers it. Did you do things like that in high school? I didn’t think so.

Others have pointed out that this incident was not entirely unique. They noted how Romney seems to have taken particular joy in guiding a teacher with poor eyesight into a glass door (Gail Collins in the Times), and still others conclude that his claim not to remember the haircutting attack is perhaps as bad as the event itself (Charles M. Blow, also in the Times, among others).

But I’d like to come at this story from a slightly different angle. Here’s what I propose: I’d like to recall an incident of bullying I observed as a child growing up in Texas at roughly the same time that Romney was attending prep school in Michigan. I’d then like to suggest that this incident was an example of a culture of bullying then present in Texas that seemed as normal and natural to its perpetrators and victims as it did to its audience—and bullying is primitive theater, let’s not forget that. I’d then further like to take a leap and suggest that the Texas I grew up in helped shape the personality of George W. Bush, the Republican figure Romney most resembles, despite their widely variant styles and personalities, and that Bush and Romney both share a propensity for playing the bully.

•

When Mitt Romney was in high school I was a student in a North Dallas junior high. Every day after lunch several hundred of us were turned loose to roam across a large asphalt playground behind the school gym. There was a boy named Robert Jacobson who played among us (name changed to protect, even after all these years). Robert suffered some unidentified disorder or incapacity—probably undiagnosed, given the times. He walked on his toes and did not connect appropriately with others. He just stood out. His nickname—and it was his only name on the playground—was Twinkletoes. During lunch kids would throw pennies, and Robert would chase them, running in an awkward stiff legged gait, high on his toes, his arms flung out, unbent at the elbows, after the pennies. Day after day. It was only years later that I realized the significance of the pennies: Robert was of course Jewish. And as everyone around me seemed to know, Jews will chase pennies.

So there you have it. A crude anti-Semitism. A vicious mocking game aimed at someone who was defenseless. I’ve pondered over the years how I didn’t understand the meaning of the pennies. I believe some part of me must have known. Yet I knew better than to know. Because another part of me, equally buried, understood only too well the threat of violence and retribution that lay behind the playground game, and recognized my lack of immunity. I was no hero. I witnessed but did nothing.

•

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George W. Bush grew up in this world too, in Midland, Texas, a few hundred miles west of the playground where Robert chased his pennies. And of course that doesn’t make him guilty of anything. But this was the same George Bush who built his career around the notion of his being shaped and formed by his Texas boyhood, his values and perceptions of life arising out of his Midland roots. And so when I say that George Bush was immersed in his boyhood in the same culture I was, I’m just saying what he’s saying. Except that I’m adding that I suspect that what he learned in his Texas youth, in addition to all those heroic qualities we heard about endlessly in his political campaigns, was the fondness for reprisal and dominance that are the core of bullying, its thrill of reaching through the boundaries of another’s selfhood and violating it with impunity, its assertion of ownership—of the Other, but also of the cultural landscape itself, territoriality being one of its key features.

Am I right? Was George Bush manufactured as a bully in his West Texas boyhood? No way to prove it. We know of his subsequent actions: how he laughingly mocked Karla Faye Tucker, the woman whose death sentence he refused to commute. We know about his ready resort to violence—and this readiness lies behind all bullying. Of his childhood, no certainty. But what I do know is the milieu in which he operated. I know that it was a common sport among West Texas boys in those days to run down (as in run over and kill) jackrabbits and wild dogs in their cars and trucks on the back roads and ranch lands. (I knew a man in East Texas who would cruise its black tops at night running over possums who had come out to sleep on warm asphalt—running them over at slow speed and then watching in the red glare of his taillights as they writhed.)

Nor am I claiming that George Bush went on those hunts after rabbits and wild dogs in West Texas, or that he was violent in the way that man in East Texas was. I take him at his word—and not in the smarmy way of members of his political party when they comment on Obama’s religious beliefs—when he speaks of compassionate conservatism. It was no false veneer. Liberals mistook him by assuming hypocrisy where something more complicated was going on.

No, I believe George W. Bush believed in his compassionate conservatism without reservation. But I also suspect his views were an elaborate psychic countermeasure against the brutality he grew up with, whose wrongness he must have sensed. For I feel certain, looking at what Bush became, and his fearful reaction after 9/11, his authorizing of torture and his swaggering across the international stage (his administration peopled with the kind of full-on bullies that the doubtful bully often surrounds himself with—the Cheneys and Boltons who would do the real dirty work), that this man’s moral outlook, as he grew up in a Texas whose politics were being shaped by the nascent John Birch Society, in a Texas where racism and anti-Semitism comprised an almost universal lingua franca, was formed through a series of reactions to the violence and bullying he saw around him—that toxic mix of fear and complicity, of signing up because not signing up meant a fall into oblivion, and demurral because some part of every person withdraws, at least at first.

•

Back to George Romney. So we now know that Romney was definitively an abuser in his childhood. The idea—repeated by that amiable bully Bill O’Reilly, whose whole career has been built on the pleasures viewers receive in seeing the defenseless attacked (c.f. his comments on New Orleans flood victims as they were literally scrambling to survive on rooftops)—is that what happens in childhood should stay in childhood. But of course what happens in childhood doesn’t stay in childhood. It creeps into the land beyond, only perhaps papered over with a civilizing veneer, or sluiced into a socially acceptable direction, unless a kind of conversion experience, built on deep awareness, intervenes. Romney has clearly not experienced such an intervention, about this or any of the other many episodes of bullying and teasing he engaged in. That is the true shame of his silence and denial in his response to the Washington Post story.

Romney is very different from Bush: a real man of business, whereas Bush was always closer to the greeter at the casino, the guy who was content to keep the touts happy and then get teary-eyed and sentimental when the big winners raked it in. Romney by contrast was far closer to the genuine article—in fact not so much a businessman as the financial world’s variant of the old-fashioned industrialist, an occupant of the highest rung of the food chain, who believes himself to be entitled to every bit of it.

Yet both of them are bullies in their own way, and this comes as no surprise. For in this new century, and for a variety of perhaps complicated but also obvious reasons (the electorate’s compensation for feelings of powerlessness, old-fashioned rage at the possibility of displacement and diminishment of privilege) can it really be possible to imagine the Grand Old Party, now transformed into something that would have made those Birchers in the ’60s proud, nominating anyone for president who is not a bully?

The war began on television nine years ago this week, and I’m wondering what we remember about it. I mean not the war and all that came after, but specifically its beginning: the Shock and Awe bombing campaign that started on March 21, and the fighting that continued in the coming days. And by remembering I mean something more than that vague sense we have of a long-ago episode from an old TV program long since canceled. I mean do we really remember what it felt like and what we thought, as the first concussions ripped the night air of Baghdad? Because in fact, those first days of the war were as bizarre as any moments ever recorded on live television, and now, nine years later, it’s as if this deeply strange experience we all lived through has just disappeared. Never to be spoken of.

•

The key was that it was all televised, and televised more specifically as though it were a theatrical event produced for public consumption. We can summon, if we try, the strangeness of the time: how arcs of light poured out of our television sets in living rooms and offices, in waiting areas and barrooms, in airports and kitchens, the explosions seeming almost to rock the rooms we lived in. And it was true: cameras were everywhere, including, astoundingly in Baghdad itself, at the very nexus point of the violence. (If you balk at the idea that television was all important, consider that a war of retribution in Afghanistan had already been fought, a war which, due to local conditions, had failed to offer the satisfying theatrical experience that Iraq produced on its opening night alone.)

This second round thus had its own aesthetic logic and became necessary as a matter of art. Those blooms of fire over Baghdad—retribution, caught in the camera’s lens—were the direct payout for the debt of fire over New York. The visuals were what really mattered. For many—and perhaps this is what is most troubling—the raw wounds of 9/11 were being healed that night.

•

And who can forget what followed in the coming days, as the first week of battle unfolded? How the television lens carried us on a vertiginous carnival ride into the heart of battle. We were all there, caught behind the lens. One moment: tanks roaring across the desert—dust, noise, and the thrilling disorientation of war spilling into our living rooms. A wind-whipped correspondent shouting into a microphone. A troop carrier blasts past. Soldiers dig in the sand. Fast cut to a carrier deck. The war whoop of an F-18 careening into flight and suddenly we’re on board the aircraft, the horizon tilting, the great dusty landmass of Iraq below. (A television correspondent actually asked one of the pilots returning from a sortie, “How was your performance tonight?”)

A second quick cut, and now we’re in a oil field, burning, and even before we’ve had a chance to imagine the acrid smell of the smoke, we fast cut to a small arms gun battle on the outskirts of some village, a scene so rich in imagery and drama, people will say it’s better than Saving Private Ryan. (And people will actually say this.) And then the coup de grâce, the most thrilling images of all, because it’s so like a video game: film from a helicopter gunship, or a Warthog, of an Iraqi soldier or a lone station wagon on the ground, and we watch as the gun sights lock, sudden trails of the weapons smoking through the air, the erasure in the sand of the human being, the vehicle, reduced to ant lion hill smudges, all calmly recorded in the neutral eye of the lens. (And I heard young men, and more than one—and this is pure fact—talking gleefully about these images. Did you see that? they said. They wiped that fucker out! Laughing.)

•

In some instances canadian pharmacy cialis there is no guarantee the treatment will even arrive. At the international market level they offer prescription drugs and generatic medications at the rates lower than of Canadian pharmacy. samples of levitra At movement online cialis pills our website the body generates and exhales in an atmosphere much more carbon dioxide than at rest. Don’t drive or operate any machinery soon after taking this medicine cialis prescription cost as it causes dizziness and drowsiness. All of it then was performance, but really all of it (and here I’m borrowing from Slavoj Žižek, the philosopher and social theorist): not only those on the stage (the Iraqis, Saddam, the troops, George W., Cheney, and Rumsfeld), but us (the audience). We were performing too—as though the theater itself with cast and audience had been set up on a still larger stage. And that’s the key point. Not who we were performing for—read Žižek if you want elaboration on that point. But that we too, the watchers, were participating in a performance that thematically advanced a single idea: that we, like the townspeople in the old Westerns, had witnessed justice being done.

•

In Zarathustra, human beings distorted by the spirit of revenge are called tarantulas. And their motto: “Let it be the very justice of the world to become full of our vengeance.” And so Iraq became full of our vengeance.

•

There is a kind of embarrassment in having been swept away by an aesthetic spectacle that we later acknowledge to have been meretricious. Our teen-age enthusiasms we sometimes look back upon with a benevolent but knowing eye. More problematic are the memories of more humiliating enthusiasms. These we simply suppress, living as though they never happened, even as they remain part of the ocean floor we travel over.

I submit that those early days of the Iraq war fall into this second category of pure suppression. Obviously, under such conditions, there’s no possibility of reckoning or contrition. And why should there be? If we were to acknowledge our wrongs, we would deprive ourselves of the right to witness future performances of similar spectacles. Somewhere in the farther reaches of the psyche we want to hold on to a ticket to a later run of the same play, with only a few scenes changed, and with a new cast. That ticket is our right to violence without regret. It may be bad art, but it’s the art we need to justify our lashing out and our indifference to the meaning of our own conduct.

•

In the days following the opening of the Iraq campaign, I had just moved into an apartment in the Adams Morgan neighborhood of Washington, D.C. It was an odd time to be in an unfamiliar neighborhood, with the different sounds, the feel of daily life new and strange—and all punctuated, illuminated by those flashes of light pouring out of the screen into the living room.

It was a damp chilly March, but not so cold that the windows couldn’t be left open, and I remember night after night in the kitchen as I cleaned up, listening to the call of a bird just outside, and night after night, the same bird calling. Its whistle was clear and pure, and I soon realized its two-note call was always the same: a minor third, starting at the tonic. A mournful, lonely sound. I’ve never heard such a call, before or since, but listening to that brief song, repeated again and again in the otherwise silent night, an eerie sense invaded me. This became the music of my spring, the music for me that played contrapuntally against the sounds of that faraway battle pouring out of the TV screen. The blue notes, the music of elegy and regret.

And the trees mourned the year's passing ...

9. Two words: parking ticket. Two times. Ouch.

8. For the third year in a row my efforts to memorize the Biblical book of Genesis shuddered to a stop at the scene where the giants come down to earth and have sex with the humans. I don’t know why. I just can’t get past it.

7. One night I saw the new moon with the old moon in her arms.

6. A catastrophic moment: wait, I’m drawing a blank here. But trust me, it happened.

5. After taking an over-the-counter allergy med before bedtime last spring, I awoke with a start in the middle of the night with an entire poem etched in my consciousness. I had the feeling that a Sprite or Muse had dipped my brain in fairy dust in which the words had been traced with the index finger of an angel. For a moment I considered getting up and writing down the poem, but it seemed so fresh and clear in my mind, and I was very sleepy. Assuming I would remember it in the morning, I slipped back into a contented sleep knowing that when I awoke the history of poetry was about to undergo a shattering change. Alas, in the cold light of day, the poem had vanished. I remember only one phrase: a damsel with a dulcimer. Hell of line, too.
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4. One day I looked out the window. Something I don’t do that often. Out of fear. About what I might see. About what might be out there. Or in here. That I couldn’t see until I looked out there. Bad cycle.

5a. During an “Internet search,” I realized the “damsel with a dulcimer” line was from a famous poem from the Past.

3. My novel, The Doom Prophecy, was not picked up by a publisher—once again.

2. A potted basil plant in my windowsill began sprouting roses. I think so at least. Or perhaps this was only a dream.

1. And the number one thing that happened to me in 2011: I stole a kiss from the new moon while the old moon lay in her arms.

From their balcony Wall Street grandees drink champagne and mock OWS protesters

By now the evidence that a bifurcated economy has risen out of the ashes of the 2008 financial crisis—its upper branch expanding and healthy and its lower branch contracting and seriously ill—is overwhelming. The news stories documenting this reality come like pulses of blood from the lower depths: Price increases of only a few cents on basic necessities at Walmart lead buyers to stop purchasing products; a quaint sales technique from the distant past, layaway plans, are back; and consumer confidence has crashed to historic lows. Conversely, like showers of gold and jewels out of the high heavens, comes news of skyrocketing prices on luxury goods, feverish sales in high end Manhattan apartments, and the best market in years in yacht sales.

These facts get repeated often enough, but like peanut shells thrown at the rhinoceros in the zoo, they bounce off harmlessly. The news of—shhhh—endemic inequality is almost a new kind of fact, a ghost fact that ought to be of normal density and opacity yet somehow becomes weightless and transparent.

This invisible density, like dark matter, affects the public discourse, but in a distorted way. A discomfort seizes its denizens who react by longing for a return to a mythic status quo ante that in fact endorses the status quo hic et nunc.

Facing the truth means first facing—I started to say elementary economic reality—but it’s more basic than that. Call it simple math. Here’s the formula. The accrual of wealth at the upper margin—driven in significant measure by a transfer of money from the lower and middle registers—collapses the markets that those in the middle and at the bottom might otherwise compete in. To put this another way: The old route to social mobility was to build a better mousetrap. But the rich have no need of a better mousetrap, and the rest of us can’t afford one.

Is there hope? Well, it turns out there is, and it was hiding in plain sight all along. I discovered the solution to our economic woes indulging one of my favorite pastimes: thumbing through the endless mounds of old yellowing New York Times editions I keep stacked in my living room. I stumbled upon the following headline on this article dated November 27, 2010: “Some Very Creative Economic Fix-Its.”
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In the article, Professor Andrew Caplin of New York University speculated about a new economy that he believes is emerging in the U.S. He told the Times: “Unfortunately, there will be income inequality. But enough people will make money that those who don’t would do well, in as much as they understand the needs of that group.” (italics mine)

The phrasing is somewhat convoluted, but the meaning is clear. If all the money is at the top, then the rest of us will survive the Darwinian free-for-all best by learning to enjoy servicing the rich. The Times went on to summarize Caplin’s views: “[The professor] says he expects a rise in what he calls ‘artisanal services,’ like cooks, nutritionists, small-scale farmers. He sees services emerging that aid the wealthy at the intersection of health and genetic science. He imagines a rise in technology services, too—experts who keep clients current about technology which can advance their interests in business, in the media, on search engines and so on.”

So memo to the rehashed flower children of Occupy Wall Street: Put down your pitchforks, and take up a broom—no, I don’t mean the kind you sweep the streets with but the smaller variety used by valets to brush the coats of their masters. Make yourself useful to the Wall Street grandees, the kind who were seen drinking champagne from a balcony during the early days of the misguided OWS protest. There are shoes to be shined and champagne glasses to be replenished. Whole new industries and specialties will spring up: Nose hair trimmers to the rich and famous. Ear wax removers. Foot massage specialists whose hands have been specially softened by nightly dips in hog lard. Highly skilled experts will make very satisfactory livings managing the rectal well-being of the elite. Additional favors will no doubt pay favorable rates. As for artist, some adjustments will be necessary. For musicians, soothing ditties with modest dance beats; for painters, a new vogue in heroic portraiture; for satirists, scathing portrayals of the lazy poor.

It’s quite simple really. Everyone agrees the country needs a course correction. Professor Caplin has given us the bearing. So quit your griping; there’s money to be made out there, y’all. Forward, then, to our glorious future.

It’s a bit strange to find yourself mugged by a record album. At a certain age, that is. Young, it’s normal. But that obsessive, slightly sweaty, adolescent quality that goes along with getting a song stuck in the cerebral cortex in a way that feels like infatuation—that’s unexpected. And yet here I am under the sway of one Polly Jean Harvey and the record she released earlier this year: Let England Shake. My embarrassment doesn’t end there: I’ve been vaguely aware of P.J. for a couple of decades without ever really listening, so not only am I a sudden fan, I’m a late fan. It could hardly get worse. (Though in my own defense, Let England Shake hasn’t made that big a splash in the US market—nothing like Adele. I can’t imagine why.)

Faced with the incomprehensible—on so many levels—I turned to old behavior. Yes, just as I did ‘back in the day’ when I fell in love with a record, I went to Dick Clark’s American Bandstand, the place where teens can let the nation know what they’re thinking about ‘pop’ music. It was good to be back in old Studio B. Dick must have remembered me from way back when, because I was hustled right up on the bandstand, where, preliminaries over, Dick took me through the paces of the old ritual:

Dick: What makes this record special?
Me: Lyrics and beats, Dick!
Dick: Can you dance to it?
Me: Absolutely!
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Me: Best record since Sgt. Pepper. Or maybe Trout Mask Replica. Anyway, also Early Velvet and Lou Reed of Dirty Blvd.
Dick: [slight puzzlement noted] Ah, great. Best lyric?
Me: So many, Dick. How about: ‘Goddamn Europeans/Take me back to beautiful England/And the gray damp filthiness/Of ages and battered books/And fog rolling down behind mountains/On the graveyards and dead sea captains.’
Dick: [puzzlement increasing] Yeah. Okay. Overall thoughts?
Me: An examination limning the role of violence in producing culture, nationhood, the self in the tradition of Macbeth—a work almost entirely unique in the history of pop culture rich in reference that ranges from Gallipoli and the Great War to Iraq, from Pound to Eddie Cochran.
Dick: [frozen smile, suddenly brightening into something genuine] Time for a commercial break!