The Best of Joanna Newsom

But always up the mountainside you're clambering
Groping blindly, hungry for anything:
Picking through your pocket linings - well, what is this?
Scrap of sassafras, eh Sisyphus?

***

so;
my bride
here is my hand, where is your paw?
try and understand my plan, Ursala
my heart is a furnace
full of love that's just, and earnest
now; you know that we must unlearn this
allegiance to a life of service
and no longer answer to that heartless
hay-monger, nor be his accomplice
(that charlatan, with artless hustling!)
but; Ursala, we've got to eat something
and earn our keep, while still within
the borders of the land that man has girded
(all double-bolted and tightfisted!)
until we reach the open country
a-steeped in milk and honey

will you keep your fancy clothes on, for me?
can you bear a little longer to wear that leash?
my love, I swear by the air I breathe:
sooner or later, you'll bare your teeth

***

Last week our picture window produced a half-word
Heavy and hollow, hit by a brown bird
We stood and watched her gape like a rattlesnake
And pant and labour over every intake

I said a sort of prayer for some sort of rare grace
Then thought I ought to take her to a higher place
Said: "dog nor vulture nor cat shall toy with you
And though you die, bird, you will have a fine view"

Then in my hot hand
She slumped her sick weight
We tramped through the poison oak
Heartbroke and inchoate

The dogs were snapping
So you cuffed their collars
While I climbed the tree-house
Then how I hollered!
Cause she'd lain, as still as a stone, in my palm, for a lifetime or two

Then, saw the treetops, cocked her head and up and flew
(while, back in the world that moves, often
According to the hoarding of these clues
Dogs still run roughly around
Little tufts of finch-down)

The cities we passed were a flickering wasteland
But his hand in my hand made them hale and harmless
While down in the lowlands the crops are all coming;
We have everything
Life is thundering blissful towards death
In a stampede of his fumbling green gentleness

Joanna Newsom: Master of Assonance

2006 brought us Ys, Joanna Newsom's second full-length album and a welcome evolution from her debut in The Milk-Eyed Mender. Van Dyke Parks contributes full orchestral arrangements to the five lengthy songs in Ys, rounding out Newsom's departure from Mender's folksy minimalism. Luckily, lyrical prowess accompanies her instrumental maturation, delivering an unprecedented blend of lush soundscapes and inspiring poetry.

Newsom is undoubtedly a master of assonance. Her lines flux and weave with a phonic waggishness that makes them at once memorable and moving. They're sometimes reminiscent of hip-hop, relying on a bouncing slant-rhyme scheme that renders more congruous lines than you would expect:

It was a dark dream, darlin', it's over
The firebreather is beneath the clover
Beneath his breathing there is cold clay, forever
A toothless hound-dog choking on a feather
...
Awful atoll
O, incalculable indiscreetness and sorrow!
Bawl, bellow:
Sibyl sea-cow, all done up in a bow

Toddle and roll;
Teeth an impalpable bit of leather
While yarrow, heather and hollyhock
Awkwardly molt along the shore

Despite her structural playfulness, Newsom conjures a somber ambiance, expressing frustrations with the dualities of body and spirit, desire and fulfillment, pragmatism and idealism. She yearns for past idylls, pastures, kith and kin, while metropolitan modernity drifts in the distance as a "flickering wasteland." Yet she acknowledges our confinement within cosmic and individual schemes, and abandons the plaintive mode for a se la vie mentality:

Stay by the gate you are given, and
Remain in your place for your season...
Loving Him, we move within His borders,
Just asterisms in the stars set order
We could stand for a century
Starin' with our heads cocked
In the broad daylight at this thing -
Joy
Landlocked
In bodies that don't keep
Dumbstruck with the sweetness of being
Till we don't be
Told; take this,
Eat this

Newsom champions those who make the most of their earthly provisions in spite of inherent limitations. Like her lovers in "Only Skin" that "shuck and jive" in a doorway, we too are expected to find joy within solid perimeters; our bodies, our lives and capacities must be reflexively contented. If ingenuousness can help in this endeavor, it's found in Joanna's skipping stones and treehouses. But, as she shows us in "Cosmia," voluntary innocence is only a half-truth, and spiritual freedom is still thwarted by a very prominent corporality:

Water were your limbs, and the fire was your hair
And then the moonlight caught your eye
And you rose through the air
Well, if you've seen true light, then this is my prayer:
Will you call me when you get there?

It's this kind of "left behind" sentiment that puts Newsom out of joint with her desired existence and at odds with mainstream fare. Her music, depicted as a "white dove made with love," suffers at the hands of the profiteering industry - an avaricious conquistador that leaves the once pure bird "stuffed now with sawdust and diamonds."

But Newsom's birds can always fly, as long as they remain in their own kingdom, away from the world that "moves often according to the hoarding of these clues":

And though you die, bird, you shall have a fine view...

Cause she'd lain, as still as a stone, in my palm, for a lifetime or two
Then, saw the treetops, cocked her head and up and flew

Live Blog: Samuel Pepys Reading Featuring John Dufresne

Thursday, March 27, 2008

7:02 - The bookstore is already overcrowded. Several hopefuls glance around in bewildered anxiety, hoping some extra chairs will fall from the heavens.

7:04 - Said chairs arrive from an unknown seraph. Tom DeMarchi passes around his student checklist, revealing the reason for the squeezin'.

7:08 - DeMarchi introduces Laurie Cornelius, who speaks about Dufresne's impact on her life
"I lived in a world of my own creation, and I probably should have sought psychological help."
"His stories revolve around the writer at work...Dufresne taught me that we are not so strange, that writing stories is really okay..."

7:14 - John Dufresne takes the podium. He's relaxed, a bit disheveled, and unassuming. He cracks open his book of short stories, Johnny Too Bad, and begins reading one of them, "Epithalamion."

Somewhere between 7:14 and 7:20- I lose track of time amid the nearly-tangible ecstasy that poured from his mouth:
"Lovers don't finally meet somewhere, they're in each other all along."
"In infinite space, even the most unlikely events must, in fact, take place somewhere."

7:20 - He drops a flurry of pop-culture references, clothing brands, etc. during a character profile. Despite their attention-grabbing acerbity, they help a bunch with concrete characterization. Just flashy enough to show how flashy the character is.

7:24 - "On Tuesday night Brandi dreamed of Texaco..."

7:28 - "She wondered what would happen to her other self, on the distant planet Earth..."

7:29 - Dufresne finishes the story and talks about the real people who inspired his characters. He tells us that in real life, Rodo reached into his pocket for an engagement ring and a condom fell out. Everyone laughs.

7:30 - He begins a new story from Requiem, Mass.

7:32 - "Thing 1 had a rock band called 'Glorious Sunrise' that had a racy underground hit called 'A Glands in Your Direction.'"

7:36 - Drastic mood shift. Topic veers from quirky characterization to spousal abuse, a wheelchair-bound wife careens down a flight of chairs, a philandering husband leaves her broken and immobile on the floor. The narrator speculates that the husband later killed her.

7:41 - Concludes this story and reads a brief(?) snippet from "Geography," also from Requiem, Mass.

"Once again hypochondria had murdered sleep."
"I could do what I liked to do. I could make things up."

7:47 - After a lengthy passage of encyclopedic details, Dufresne takes a breath, looks at the audience and says, "You see the problem with memoir?"

7:49 - The Q & A begins. This post will reveal the A's.
"You love your characters but you're not nice to them."
"Writing fiction is a pathetic cry for love and affection."

7:52 - Cites as early influences: Salinger, Harper Lee, Dostoevsky, Kerouac, Faulkner, and tawdry gossip from his mother and aunts.

7:57 - "You write better than you think you can if you revise...revise at least 20 times."

7:58 - "It's the best day when all the words come."

8:02 - Discusses writing Naked Came the Manatee, a collaboration with twelve other authors in which each author writes a chapter. Dufresne's chapter introduces Fidel Castro to the storyline, a bold and apparently controversial move for the book's small readership. Dufresne admits that part of his motivation was to complicate Carl Hiaasen's job of writing a suitable conclusion.

8:05 - Conclusion, applause, exeunt.

Defense of Sloth

Sloth is a deadly sin?

---"I consider America responsible for the shame of our age: the glorification of work, that stupid ideology which has engendered the idea of material progress and the disdain of every utopia or poetry tending toward the perfection of the human soul... I cannot help opposing those influences... with the most violent lunge forward, the idea, and the most creative of actions, idleness."
-Tristan Tzara


---"And for that poor Ambition - it springs
From a man's little heart's short fever-fit;
For Poesy! - no, - she has not a joy, -
At least for me, - so sweet as drowsy noons,
And evenings steep'd in honied indolence..."
-John Keats, "Ode on Indolence"


---"Apart from the pulling and hauling stands what I am,

Stands amused, complacent, compassionating, idle, unitary,
Looks down, is erect, or bends an arm on an impalpable certain rest,
Looking with side-curved head curious what will come next,
Both in and out of the game and watching and wondering at it.

Backward I see in my own days where I sweated through fog with
linguists and contenders,
I have no mockings or arguments, I witness and wait."

-Walt Whitman, "Song of Myself"

---"Ambition is a poor excuse for not having sense enough to be lazy."

-Charlie McCarthy

Into the Void(3): Curing the Conflict

Studies reveal that artists are commonly plagued by mental illness, which results in both fantastic art and memorable quietus.

While any degree of madness arguably works to the creative mind's advantage, it also stigmatizes its social manifestation. The artist shares a certain opprobrium with the outcast and the criminalized, and his behaviors are labeled with almost clinical distance: hypergraphic, logophilic, anti-social, bipolar, erratic, noncomformist, etc. Of course, many poets encounter no trouble sequestering their private temperament from their public persona. Others find the act to be an agonizing performance, and still others make no attempt to divide the two. This is the categorical difference (respectively) between the likes of Emerson's intellectual equanimity, Sartre's "l'enfer, c'est les autres," and Ginsberg's homoerotic impudence. In varying degrees, each involves a clash of the private and the public. Sometimes such a war just isn't sustainable.

The artist takes more than he is given, devotes his body to sloth and his mind to violent crusades. The individual imagination puts him at odds with a pragmatic world that demands economy, action, and industry. When emotional resonance is labeled "strange," or worse, "useless" by the dominant ideology, the poet is stripped of his social validity (unless he can play the part above). This devaluation is either effacing or pugnacious; it disavows the artistic mindset or puts it at odds with social orthodoxy.

Orthodoxy requires uniformity. It tells us a tree is a tree, that light doesn't slant, and that proverbs cannot come from Hell. The poet is Faust, Prometheus untethered, a proud Satan shrugging off his nimbus.

The poet is a kinsman in the clouds
Who scoffs at archers, loves a stormy day;
But on the ground, among the hooting crowds,
He cannot walk, his wings are in the way.
-Charles Baudelaire

He is a hero to fellow demons. He cannot comprehend business. He may kill himself to cure these conflicts:

Private vs. Public
Sloth vs. Industry
Creation vs. Consumerism
Exile vs. Acceptance
Internal vs. External
Individual vs. Communal

Stasis in darkness.
Then the substanceless blue
Pour of tor and distances.

God's lioness,
How one we grow,
Pivot of heels and knees! ---The furrow

Splits and passes, sister to
The brown arc
Of the neck I cannot catch,

Nigger-eye
Berries cast dark
Hooks ---

Black sweet blood mouthfuls,
Shadows.
Something else

Hauls me through air ---
Thighs, hair;
Flakes from my heels.

White
Godiva, I unpeel ---
Dead hands, dead stringencies.

And now I
Foam to wheat, a glitter of seas.
The child's cry

Melts in the wall.
And I
Am the arrow,

The dew that flies,
Suicidal, at one with the drive
Into the red

Eye, the cauldron of morning.

-"Ariel," by Sylvia Plath

Into the Void(2): Elevated to Madness

Looking at Wikipedia's list of suicides is a shocking reminder of the poet's affinity with the reaper. But what drives our best and brightest to divorce this life in monoxide trysts? What is the impetus to self-sacrifice? Studies reveal that artists are commonly plagued by mental illness, which results in both fantastic art and memorable quietus.

This works to their advantage in craft, but may become self-defeating in practical life.

+ The poet makes himself a seer by a long, prodigious, and rational disordering of all the senses. Every form of love, of suffering, of madness; he searches himself, he consumes all the poisons in him, and keeps only their quintessences.
-Arthur Rimbaud

The poetic process is thus an act of distillation, an ingestion of the raw world in all of its agonizing grit. It is an all-too-intimate relation with nature and an homage to the unseen. A good poet turns reality into fantasy, and what is given into what is taken. The poet is a valiant conduit to mysteries that lie beneath the hard rock. He plays shashdara and wins, courts Pandora, opens the gates of Les Paradis Artificiel. He wields the power he finds, and channels it onto the page. His mysteries possess him, and he is reduced (or elevated?) to madness.

+ I accustomed myself to simple hallucination; I saw quite deliberately a mosque instead of a factory, a drummer's school conducted by angels, carriages on the highways of the sky, a salon at the bottom of a lake; monsters, mysteries, a vaudeville poster raising horrors before my eyes.
-Arthur Rimbaud

And this is all part of the artistic paradox. The vision of the poet blinds him to proprietary success. His subjective reality is a collective fiction. He is married passionately to life, but seeks death as relief from its blistering intensity. He ensures immortality through death.

On the other hand, it could be pure narcissism that pushes a poet to the edge. A lifetime of unenthusiastic reception is quickly cured by an untimely (and grossly public) death. I'm sure over half of Plath's readership came to know her through her morbid suicide, and even Thompson sprang from gonzo-counterculture obscurity to the limelight of his sacrificial altar in 2005.

But the fact remains: troubled lives make for good literature.

Into the Void: Early Entry

The artist's attraction to suicide is a startling reality. Although often described as a blanket misconception, the stereotype of "artist as self-destructive" is becoming more concretely typical. Research conducted by James C. Kaufman at the Learning Research Institute in California has determined that poets die younger than other artists, and are more susceptible to depression and suicidal tendencies:

''It's a whole confluence of reasons. If you ruminate more, you're more likely to be depressed, and poets ruminate. Poets peak young. They write alone."

Roughly 20 percent of the studied 1,987 dead writers died by suicide. These include but are not limited to: Thomas Chatterton, Paul Celon, Charles Clegg, Hart Crane, John Gould Fletcher, Heinrich von Kleist, Virginia Woolf, Sigmund Freud, Sylvia Plath, and Hunter S. Thompson.

Wikipedia includes a list of historically-notable suicides. Even a cursory glance will make it disturbingly evident - the artist is statistically doomed to a self-inflicted demise.

Sylvia Plath Reads "Ariel"

Lexiconfusion: "discursive"

This adjective can get you into a bit of trouble, especially when characterizing someone else's work.

Discursive

1 a: moving from topic to topic without order : rambling b: proceeding coherently from topic to topic
2: marked by analytical reasoning
3: of or relating to discourse <discursive practices>

Note the conflict between a and b in the first sense. The definitions are directly opposed, and can mean the difference between panning and praising (depending on the work).

Scenario 1: A scholar strives to "proceed coherently" in his thesis, and avoids "rambling" at all costs. A critic calls his writing discursive. How should he react?

Scenario 2: A poet aims to disorient his readers with parataxis and stream-of-consciousness. A critic pans his work for being too discursive. Should he assume the critic understood his aim but thought it was overdone? Or should he think the critic missed the point altogether? Or should he worry that the critic understood the point but believed him to be a failure at the art of meaningful rambling?

Note: Definition came from Merriam-Webster Online