Townes Van Zandt

I've been listening to this new CD that mr. Whorton bequeathed upon my humble self (I only have two physical CDs in my car, as all of the rest of my music is Ipodded and Ibooked. I guess I need to buy an Itrip) But I think that 'Many a Fine Lady' is, perhaps, one of the best songs. Ever. It's like 'Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands' meets 'Tangled up in Blue' in a duskier, softer, more ethereal setting. More subtle, too. It's full of interesting inverted weighty syntax that sneaks up on you in this empty longing way. Townes' melodies and rhythms usually seem to linger just outside of what your folk-and-pop brain expects. Few realize the intricacies and meaning-creation that happens with reference to variations in Phrasing that meet and then undercut expectations in emotionally significant ways. It's what makes Dylan so great, and Townes does it too, but his is a less obvious departure from regular rhythm, and it's also in his Melodies as well in a way that Dylan's songs aren't. Even after listening to his songs for so long, I have a hard time remember, exactly, the melodies and lyrics. My brain always automatically tries to turn it into a more standardized timing and word-construction, so that my brain creates its own, simpler, steadier melodies and phrasings in my head, and when I try to sing along, the words I thought I knew are just slightly different.

A good example of this subtle inversion of syntax comes in the first lines of one of my favorite songs, 'Many a Fine Lady:'

There's many a fine lady that's laid down beside me
With their flesh made of velvet, and their eyes made of rain.
Some tried to hold me, to hurt me, to hide me.
Some turned away not to look back again.

Seems simple enough, but a line like 'Some turned away not to look back again' is constructed in a way that is new to both spoken speech and sung speech, but it Seems familiar upon first read/listen. I won't even get into the highly effective beautiful fuzzed melding of love-relationships (so reflective of the way we actually remember our lovers and would-be-lovers and wanted-lovers) created by 'their flesh made of velvet, and their eyes made of rain.' This is a perfect set up for the song's purpose of later melancholically remembering a particular melancholy lady who stood out from the rest.

Another such syntactically brilliant line comes near the end of the song, (after its weakest stanza that uses the word 'creature' inadvisably):

"no longer gypsy-like sadness unending". Yummy, eh?

But the best, best line of the song (perhaps of All Time) sneaks up on you in the middle. After a few beautiful metaphors, similes, and descriptions that are unnew in image but new in expression, Townes pops in this beauty.
I have shivered sublimely Every Time when hearing the following line (and I've listened to the song upwards of two dozen times, often back-to-back or within)

Our words like a mountain stood lonely and lofty
With her face like a daydream, and her hair like the shaul.
Worn by the mourner who steals away softly
From those who would have him mourn nothing at all.

I could go on and on about it, but doesn't it just make you want to lift your hands up to your head and breathe ecstatically some strange guttural sound??? It's like 'hydrogen jukebox,' but better.


Anyway kiddoes, I am quite tired. Had a hike that lasted into the wee hours of the morn a couple of days ago, and didn't get to sleep until (literally) 5 a.m. Still recovering from that, and still my feet are eternally cold. This was happening to me in Austin too, and over the summer in Colorado. Don't know what the dealie is, yo.

More about the crazy children later, but basic impressions were close to expectations, except the kids weren't as aggressive/intimidating as I was afraid of, and the days are much more regimented than summer-camp-life. It is jail for these dudes, after all.

vacant into vacant...

I just went out on a hike by myself. My fingers are still slightly cold, and thus the typing is tortenduous. (I am entering into old age, and, as such, there are often times when I know the word I want to use but only come up with vague synonyms/homonyms of that word. So I have decided to write down the strange conflated word that comes into my head instead of torturing myself trying to figure out that I meant to say (and, yes, as we speak I am going to thesaurus.com to figure out the word I meant to say instead of tortendous...it actually ends with an 'ed', I think.) ...labored, that's the word. labored. I may like tortenduous better. I think this may be the beginning of an aspect of my new way of generating meaning within poetry (not that doing this alone is new, but perhaps doing it in a slightly unintentional way may be. Anyway, it's something I'll work with).

So this was a 3-hour hike...I started quite late in the day as Mitch came over to hang out whilst waiting for his girl to show up, and I was busy reading on the porch and downloading music. I think Townes Van Zandt may be my next big discovery. I went to gem Lake, which is a bit over 2 miles and uphill most of the way. I needed something short and easy that wouldn't be too dangerous in the dark (sun starts setting just after five) and gem lake has some cool rock formations around it that I could iditiocally climb up alone by myself at night. Luckily the weather is perfect and the rocks were not wet. I actually didn't make it to the lake. About 300 yards from Gem, I saw a pretty sweet route up the rocky face that looked to be about just the right difficulty for what I was in the mood for. And I figured that if I was going to do some bouldering/lower-fifth class free-climbing, I should do it before it got completely dark. The rocks were an interesting mix of mesaish, blockish, and shragged (sounds like jagged). The interesting thing about going quasi-climbing when you haven't been on rock much in a long time is that you're not quite sure of your sense of steepness/easiness/dangerousness/I am now nessing every word like my oild professor David LIndstrom who gave me A's on everything because I was a good essay-writer, even though I hardly ever read any of the books I was essaying about.

One of my main possible problems is that I have a tendency to be Very comfortable going Up most things, but going down freaks me out a lot more. Everything just looks steeper annd traction doesn't seem to work in the same way.

So I kept going up rock, finding short spurts of superhuman jazz energy bouncing up rocks and jogging up slabs of steep rock and crackling my hand into cracks and crags and having a jolly good ol' time, then the point where you can't move anymore, aren't sure if you can go up iin the line of sight right before your eyes, you look up, you look down, you go 'oh shit, that's a long way, and oh fucking shit, I'm not sure if I can go down it.' So then what do you do? Well, you keep going up, because you know you can keep going Up and because movement ad focusing on the handholds and footholds directly in front of you somehow makes you less aware of the freakiness and possible idiocy of what you're doing, envisioning yourself like that Park Ranger last year who died in the Mummy Range, probably doing something similar, and when you do take too long of a moment you see a movie of yourself tumbling down the mountain and then feel your soul slipping from your body, hovering above it like some snowcloud mangel (sounds like angel), and you see your blood feel the crack and slip of bone the thud off brain against stone your mother crying your father crying the medics journalists talking about how idiotic you are, ex-girlfriends lamenting your death and wishing that they had someehow stopped it and realizing their deep abiding love for you but oh no it's too late, and the stars that are actually now forming in the sky in the mind are much darker and you go up that way.

So that's why you keep moving until you reach the point where there's a slightly inverted (is that the right word for something more than 90 degrees) cliff that you probably Could get over, because there's a foothold there and it's not too high and really if you weren't such a pansy brett you could stand without using your hands on the rock at the base of it, swing your leg that way, thrust your arms up, push and clutch and pull and then, bam, you're over and you're okay.

Coming to some sort of my senses, I decided to go down (a long slab of rock at that angle that is just shallow enough to be able to navigate and just steep enough to freak the shit out of you, especially when the slab is long and ends in a cliff down to a bunch of big wragged boulders, and you're alone and it's getting darker by the moment and thankfully it's not too cold so that the shiv ering you feel in your hands is mostly from slight bits of fear). It scared me, which is a good feeling. I respond well to climbing-rocks fear. The chemicals fill me with a good feeeling, a sense of being alive, and it's not nauseating. Because I was thinking to myself "I'm scared in a way I havent' been in a long time, and I love being scared like this. Well, actually, I am scared in social situations sometimes, or maybe nervous is a better word, and isn't that something equivalent? Shouldn't i get a similar feeling of accomplishment and rush and confidence through from when I face those things?) But the truth is that those sorts of social fears (and, say, driving the car fast) fears make me somewhat nauseous, And tend to increase my insecurity/nervousness when I have gotten through them. I say 'damn, I'm glad I made it through that, I dont' want to do That again' and play over and over again in my mind insecure thoughts...as opposed to when climbing up a mountain in dark, and while I'm doing it I'm scared and blissed, and while I'm not doing it I'm confident happy and think to myself 'damn I should do that more often.' So maybe there's something about certain types of fear that certain people are attracted to, and then certain types of fear that they aren't. The question is to what extent we expose ourselves/fill ourselves with bravery to confront both of those kinds of fear. Isn't it More brave to do that which you are afraid of And which you don't really want to do? I don't know...sometimes those things Drain me, whereas I most often feel empowered and energized when doing things that make me scared in a way I enjoy and gain confidence from. Hrrmmm, holes in that line of reasoning, but they can be filled with my psychoses.

On the way down, in the dark, I momentarily lost track of the trail (there are a lot of small adjunctulet trails that are attached to the main trail for the purpose of starandcity viewing. (I wonder where Mitch is? He and his woman went hiking, and it's darkdark out, and they're not back yet. Hopefully he's getting laid. He'll be back tonight, though. His car and his pants are here.)

I looked around for a while to find the main trail, but I gave up in the dark, and decided to just bushwhack down the mountain. That's what I came out here for, right? To be somewhat challenged, to feel a bit afraid, to exist in a state of awareness due to the spookiness and need for attention causated by my situation? And, anyway, it's Gem Lake, so the worst thing that can happen is that I hike to the road and then have to walk a little ways to find my car. Well, that, or I could break my ankle or get attacked from the mountainbearlionelksatan lurking behind the trees. Might as well take my chances, I mean, Aragorn wouldn't be afraid, would he? And he was a frikkin' Pansy.

So I bushwhacked down in the dark, eventually finding the trail (which I assumed would happen.) It was fun, slightly slow-going, but there weren't many downed trees and I was next to large rockmations so that there was a general lack of treelessness and therefore just enough light to make out what was up to 20 feet in front of me.

So, I did that, and I also thought about how to save the world with my new art. Welll, maybe not mine, maybe someone elses' art, but facilitated by myself. I imagined that i was the head of an English department at either a very new or very renowned university (renowned...weird...is that how you spell that word? seems very strange). And I thought about the best Visual art ever created, imo (stands for in meta's opinion), which was of course all them great Italian artists, and I imagined what I assumed to be the artistic set-up of those times, which was the apprenticeship. We really don't have apprenticeships, and I think we suffer for it. So, viewing poetry as a craft with a long history and with a number of skills that need to be learned from masters, the apprenticeship would make sense. I thought about a number of variations in terms of the setup of this, but you have the students come to your university, and probably for the first year have an intense system of teaching and workshopping and Directed writing (teaching the basics of how to write in a number of forms, getting down and dirty with all of the things that, quite frankly, I've not beeen taught yet about linguistics and thoughtforms and all sorts of all that jazz). When I was having an interview with a journalist in my head, he mentioned that some people would view the setup as something as a bootcamp. And I said don't you think that in the literary world we could always do with more discipline, with more structure, more guidance, especially when students are younger? What do they have to grow off of if they don't get the basics and then some...How can they rebel or truly experiment when they haven't experienced a steady regimen of exercises and training methods that aren't Natural for them. Why should Frustration and belaboredness be a bad thing for an artist?

So, anyway, there's an intense first year or few years of some kind, and then the poet gets matched up with One mentor who is a master of the craft, and that mentor teaches the student one on one, giving him or her exercises, assigning projects, engaging in discussions and lectures, etc.etc.etc. . And the student has to do what he or she says (within reason), or else they can dropout or fail if they don't like it. "There is no freedom in art" as T.S. Eliot said, and if someone can't hold up under the specific direction of an older wiser person who is in some way a master, then they probably aren't going to have the talentballsshunugina to make something worthwhile. And, if they can do it, then they should go and do it outside of the context of school.

There would be a good amount of 'studio' time, some of which would be spent doing whatever the mentor wanted the student to do, and some of it spent doing whatever the student wanted to do.

So, yeah, that's my idea. It would be a long program, possibly six years, that would end with an MFA. Can't buck the system all the way, if you know what I'm saying. You know, maybe the first two years are standard Englishy workshoppy literaturey stuff, the second two years are in-depth focused training in the art and craft of writing, and the third two years would be the apprenticeship.

You dig what I'm sayin'?