Verlyn Klinkenborg, on this cold weather

It's all a paradox, a cold that feels absolutely rigid but which nonetheless seeps through ill-fitting windows, between clapboards, and along uninsulated, pipe chases. People listen superstitiously to the sounds in their heating ducts, to the banging of their radiators, afraid of silence. They turn the keys in their cars with trepidation. It's an old world this cold week.

Verlyn Klinkenborg, The Rural Life

Sadly, Klinkenborg's "The Rural Life" column for the New York Times came to an end on Christmas of last year after a 17-year run. I always enjoy going back to those columns and the two books drawn from them, especially in January and February when reading takes up an inordinate amount of my time.

Song of the Week: Is My Morning Jacket a Jam Band?

My wife and I have a recurring argument about whether My Morning Jacket is a jam band. The eternal argument, at its core, comes down to this: Neither of us are into jam bands. I love MMJ. She, er, does not.

"We're not sure how to address this question."

The bottom line is this: Yes, they are fond of the extended jam - often profusely, and many times in the studio as well as live. This, to me at least, is when they are their, well, not best. And roughly half of any given album tends to plod along at tempos ranging from slow-burning to gooey. And yes, go to their live shows and you can probably be ready for some serious noodling. (No, not this noodling.) But know this: a MMJ live show is positively transcendent, and in that context every single jam is worth it.

But, again in my own opinion, they are at their best, at least on record, when they work against their own jammy tendencies and force themselves to work within actual song structures. And at their best, they are one of the greatest bands in the world. This is sometimes as simple as adding a little melody, sometimes simply picking up the pace, sometimes taking us into dark places.

"Mahgeetah," my favorite MMJ song, actually supports both sides of our argument. Great melody, driving rhythm with some satisfying changeups, and some fret-burning guitar work that rides the line between stunning and self-indulgent perfectly, though it's actually a much better song if you cut it off with exactly one minute to go, when Jim James' Flying V straight into jamland.

Of course, live the outro makes perfect sense, especially stretched out with some Angus Young-worthy guitar burning. This is from the Okonokos live recording, with a slice of vintage weird MMJ humor thrown in at the end:

New Resident Dad Post: Mermaid's Garden

"A year ago this month, I began working with Mark Usewicz and Bianca Piccillo, the couple who run Mermaid’s Garden, one of the first of a growing number of CSF’s (community-supported fisheries) in Brooklyn. Begun in the summer of 2012 and modeled on CSA’s (community-supported agriculture), which have now established themselves as a viable urban market model for local, small-scale farmers, Mermaid’s Garden runs seven weekly pickups in Brooklyn, where its 365 members pick up a “share” of a different fish (or shellfish substitution) harvested by the many North-Atlantic small-boat fisherman who have relationships with Mark and Bianca."

Read more here!

Song of the Week: Nanci Griffith's "Spin on a Red Brick Floor"

I believe Nanci Griffith has, along with Joan Baez and Emmylou Harris and many other female singers with crystalline voices, had her sweet side overly praised at the expense of her social awareness and sense of humor. Baez, perhaps the most purely gifted singer of the Sixties folk movement, is typically relegated to the status of Dylan's girlfriend in Dont Look Back; to this I always respond with the story of someone telling her and Dylan, at some hotel in the Catskills I believe, that they made a great couple, to which she replied, "A couple of what?" And whenever I hear Emmylou I think of my friend Melissa, a mild-mannered native Kentuckian from Oldham County who is now a museum curator here in NYC, whose rebel yell I only hear when she lets loose when karaokeing an Emmylou tune.

But this week's song isn't by Baez or Emmylou, it's by the grand dame of sharp-toothed charm, Nanci Griffith. I fell in love with her voice while working at Adventure Bookstore over Christmas breaks in Lawrence, when they always had Flyer playing. I saw her play at Liberty Hall one summer in the mid-Nineties with my friend Jon Laura, blushing when she let loose with a profanity-laced tirade against the venue or the hotel she'd stay or something else I can't remember. Jon Laura, who had come there with me only reluctantly, talked about that show for the rest of the summer.

Anyway, this is my favorite of many of my favorites of hers, "Spin on a Red Brick Floor."

Keep an ear out for one of my all-time favorite lines, "New York City kinda brings out the stupids in me," and for a visual check out another live version, with Mark O'connor on fiddle and Lyle Lovett singing harmony:

RIP Pete Seeger: 1919-2014

In case you haven't heard, Pete Seeger died this morning, in the dark night of the soul around 3am. I can't say I was surprised to see the news all over my Facebook wall (he was 94 after all) but I am grieving. It goes against my every authorial instinct to say this, but...We lost a piece of America today, a living embodiment of some of the best things about our past century: the civil rights movement, some of the earliest days of recorded folk music, the environmental movement, nonviolent resistance (he was one of many on McCarthy's blacklist). I think, because of this, it's easy to think of him more as an ideal than as a man. Even if you're one of the many people who had the fortune of meeting him.

In my own Pete Seeger Story, Pete was actually more of a role player. Over Thanksgiving of 2001, I had my first out-of-town visitor after September 11, my friend Sara. I'd spent much of the previous couple of months robotically going to my market research job on 25th Street, looking south out the big 12th-floor picture window at the big empty space where I'd watched both towers fall with my co-workers, and having two or three panic attacks a day. Downtown had been partially reopened for the holidays, and my cousin Walt invited me and Sara to join the walking tour he was giving with Shorewalkers, a nonprofit group that holds various walks (they call them "saunters") around the city. This was, if I'm remembering correctly, their first walk through the downtown ruins around Ground Zero. I was just as interested in seeing Walt himself, for only the second time since he'd led his entire floor down and out of the tower where he worked, escaping with them just minutes before their tower collapsed.

When we arrived Walt said, "Looks like Pete came out." I shuffled through my mind, trying to think of what Petes he knew. Then a man who looked maybe seventy years old walked up, looking snug and spry in his outdoor gear.  "Good day for a walk, Walt," he said. Walt introduced us to him. "It's very nice to meet you," he said, then began walking briskly ahead of us.

That was all the conversation we had, because he spent the rest of the walk well ahead of the rest of the group. Sara, Walt, and I walked along the downtown riverfront in silence, past buildings with all their windows blown out, hundreds of Missing Person photos with phone numbers to call if they were found, and military ships in the harbor surrounding it all. All the time, in the distance in front of us was the vague silhouette of old Pete Seeger, ingesting it all in solitude, undoubtedly integrating it into his own mythology that had already been shaped by some of the grandest transformations in our young nation's history. I think we all felt a little safer, more secure in our future, with that figure in front of us.

Reading Arlo Guthrie's tribute to Pete on his Facebook page this morning, I think about  seeing Arlo at Castle Clinton in 2009 with my wife and daughter when my daughter was only a couple months old, and about Arlo's dad, and the way all of them - Pete, Woody, Arlo - have shaped my own personal mythology. And I know Arlo said it best at the end of that Facebook post:

"Well, of course he passed away!" I'm telling everyone this morning. "But that doesn't mean he's gone."

CAPS LOCK RANT - Against Saved by the Bell

TODAY I SAW THAT A CERTAIN HIPSTER BAR IN MY NEIGHBORHOOD IS HAVING A PROMOTION INVOLVING SCREENINGS OF SAVED BY THE BELL. THIS IS WRONG. HIPSTERISM HAS REACHED AN ENTIRELY NEW REALM OF POST-IRONY WHEN IT DECIDED TO INCORPORATE THIS BLIGHTED POCKMARK ON THE NINETIES INTO ITS REALM OF SARCASTOSTALGIA. I PERSONALLY LOVE THE NINETIES - IT'S PROBABLY MY SECOND (MAYBE THIRD) FAVORITE DECADE - BUT THIS SHOW IS NOT REPRESENTATIVE OF ANYTHING GOOD ABOUT THE NINETIES. IN FACT, LIKE FULL HOUSE, FAMILY MATTERS, EVEN FRESH PRINCE OF BEL AIR, IT'S REPRESENTATIVE OF THE DYING CORPORATE EIGHTIES OF BAD SITCOMS WE ALL HAD TO PRETEND TO LAUGH AT THAT THE ADVENT OF THE INTERNET AS MAINSTREAM MEDIA AND THE RISE OF INDEPENDENT CINEMA/MUSIC/PUBLISHING SUPPOSEDLY FREED US FROM. SO IT'S ESPECIALLY IRONIC THAT HIPSTER IRONY HAS LED YOUNG PEOPLE WHO DESPERATELY WANT TO SEEM NEW AND DIFFERENT BACK TO THE WORST OF MAINSTREAM CORPORATE MEDIA PROGRAMMING. BAD SWEATERS AND FEATHERED HAIR, EVEN WORN IRONICALLY, ARE STILL BAD SWEATERS AND FEATHERED HAIR. IF YOU'RE NOT IN JUNIOR HIGH (AND LET'S NOT KID OURSELVES, BAYSIDE IS A JUNIOR HIGH MASQUERADING AS A HIGH SCHOOL), YOU HAVE NO EXCUSE.

Song of the Week: Robert Belfour's "My Baby's Gone"

I'm currently revising my piece "Converting the Lovebugs" about my post-Katrina relief trip to Louisiana and Mississippi for my book manuscript (which is why I'm taking it down from the site for now - sorry about that). This, in conjunction with a marathon watching of Treme, has had me waxing nostalgic quite a lot lately about my time I've spent in New Orleans. I wrote a couple of pieces for The List and the Story on this, one of which is this:

Every spring I took a bus to Louisville, then drove with my friends Andrew and Todd from Louisville to New Orleans, starting with the Kentucky Derby and ending at Jazz Fest. We’d sit on the banks of the Mississippi, hop railroad cars, listen to Robert Belfour at the Circle Bar or Anders Osborne at the Rock 'n' Bowl, and stay in hostels for $25 a night. Every year at least one of us was broke.

I find that now, for whatever reason, Belfour is the guy I equate with whatever it is I've idealized about the South and about myself. In fact, this photo of me with him at the Circle Bar has become a symbol of the youth I've lost, my Jungian animus, or something else that I can't yet find a name for.

Here's my personal favorite song of Belfour's, "My Baby's Gone." For all I know he's still alive. I'd love to see and hear him again.

From Katherine Dunn's "Geek Love"

There are those whose own vulgar normality is so apparent and stultifying that they strive to escape it. They affect flamboyant behavior and claim originality according to the fashionable eccentricities of their time. They claim brains or talent or indifference to mores in desperate attempts to deny their own mediocrity. These are frequently artists and performers, adventurers and wide-life devotees.

Then there are those who feel their own strangeness and are terrified by it. They struggle toward normalcy. They suffer to exactly that degree that they are unable to appear normal to others, or to convince themselves that their aberration does not exist. These are true freaks, who appear, almost always, conventional and dull.

- Arturo the Seal-Boy

Song of the Week: Don Walser's "Yodel Polka"

I wrote this eulogy for Walser on my MySpace page when he died in 2006:

When I was very young, growing up with my grandparents and my mom, my favorite thing to do at night was to sit with my grandpa.  Out on the porch swing in Eudora, Kansas, we'd listen to the high school games drifting over from the stadium across the road, or to Royals games on the radio. Even better, I'd listen to his crafty Arkansas-inflected voice tell of hearing Hitler shouting orders at his prison camp during WWII, his working days loading and unloading docks, or skipping out of work to fish for channel cats (grandma would sigh and shake her head if she was on the porch with us).  But my favorite things to listen to were his budget tapes of the only music he recognized.

Grandpa wasn't a music snob, but neither was he interested in any new stuff coming out (including my Twisted Sister and Motley Crue tapes, despite my many attempts at sneaking them into his tape player).  Like his memories, his musical tastes were trapped in a time warp that ended around the time he started having children.

I'm sure he listened to others, but I can only remember four voices coming out of his tape player - Johnny Cash, Tennessee Ernie Ford, Bob Wills & His Texas Playboys, and Louis Armstrong.  He would talk about each like he used to know them. Wills was his buddy during the war; he was so proud of Johnny and Tennessee Ernie, seeing them grow up with him and make good; Satchelmouth the negro with a voice like a frog. These four - the Big Four as I now call them - were to be the foundation of a musical fixation that's plagued me since.

It took me a few years of hair metal in junior high, CCM© in high school, and Nineties alternative in college, but I eventually came back to the Big Four.  It was partially due to Cash's stunning Rubin-produced comeback album American Recordings, but it was just as much because of an old guy named Don Walser, whose first proper album came out the same year.

Walser in many ways was like my grandpa.  For one, they were both, well, large. During a radio broadcast in the 90s one announcer said Walser made the studio shake when he got going on an uptempo tune; my grandpa, on the other hand, with his skinny legs was more like an apple balanced on toothpicks.  They were both military men as well. Walser's lifetime service with the National Guard was what kept him from regularly recording until his retirement in the early Nineties, while my grandpa was an army man, a fact I never thought so important until he received the traditional seven gun salute at his funeral and my grandma received all her ensuing medical care through the VA (my, how times change).  But most importantly to me, their love of music was informed most by their love of people.

When I first listened to Walser's joyous, haunting yodel – yes, yodel – it couldn't have been further from what I was into at the time.  There was no menace to him, for one thing.  Quite the opposite, in fact – I heard him once and felt like he was family.  He also would have been unbearably sentimental, if it wasn't so obvious he fundamentally believed every corny line he delivered like scripture.

And I believed him – loved him – from the first chorus he belted.  When I heard him sing about John Deere tractors, I heard my grandpa telling me about picking beans and okra on big nameless farms outside Ola, Arkansas.  When he sings Cherokee Maiden, I think of my great-great grandpa courting the Sioux girl out of her tribe to dilute her blood to 1/16 by the time I arrived. Hearing him sing of his beloved Patricia Jane, I see the B&W picture of my grandparents sitting together in the sun, my grandpa's goofy grin offsetting my grandma's coy half-smile.  When I hear Don Walser, I see my grandpa.

Don Walser died in September of 2006 at 72 years of age, following Satchmo in 1972, Wills in 1975, Tennessee Ernie in 1991, Cash in 2003, and my grandpa in 1997.  I'm listening to a rebroadcast of an old WFMU show he did in support of his first album, and I realize I've just passed another stage of life – all my idols are now gone.  And being as I don't believe in any gods, the afterimage of my idols will now have to suffice.

RIP, Don. If I'm wrong and there is a heaven, say hello to Grandpa.  And thank God there is no time there, as I imagine you two may be talking awhile.

New Resident Dad Post: What Is Child Abuse?

"This, I think, is one of the stickiest sides to the ongoing discussion of whether corporal punishment has any place in modern child-rearing. From one angle, programmed physical punishment gives a child a sense of immediate consequences for her or his actions; from another, it instills fear in the child of the parents and—even worse, I think—teaches them to obey authority for fear of retribution, which is a microcosm of most dystopian governments of the world."

Read the rest here!

Listen to me talk with Ian Bodkin on Written in Small Spaces!

So, last week I got the chance to talk with my buddy Ian Bodkin on his podcast, Written in Small Spaces. And when I say talk I mean...I can talk, man. And Ian really gave me the mic: I talk about essaying as process, how my old works affects my new work, the relationship between music and my writing, and eventually some of the fallout with my family from my recent List and the Story series.

Listen to the podcast here!

Song of the Week: M. Ward's "To Go Home"

So from now on, every Friday I'll post my Song of the Week. The only criteria will be that I like, no love these songs. I'll give you entirely subjective reasons why, including hyperbole, unauthorized artist background, unsubstantiated dicta, and uncomfortable details from my personal life. You will listen to these songs, and enjoy. First up is my vote for the Greatest Song of All Time.

A few reasons I might not be waxing hyperbolic in declaring this perhaps the greatest song on record:

• Its themes, as implied in the title and borne out in the lyrics, are both child-like and eternal; to wit: "I'll be true to you, oh yeah you know I will/I'll be true to you forever, or until/I go home."
• Speaking of lyrics, it's penned by Daniel Johnston!
• Neko Case sings backup!
• M. Ward's solo stuff is roughly 4 1/2 times better than his stuff with She & Him, which is also great.
• If you can listen to it without moving spasmodically, you should audition to be an extra on one of the most popular shows on television.
• Finally, I first heard it when getting to know Pandora, where I first heard M. Ward, and my wife, who developed a shared love of his music with me. Both are personal favorites of mine.

Where do we go from here?

Well, the year is drawing to a close, and with my resolutions in the books it's time to start planning for the new year. I have a few ideas for ways to use the blog (besides the things I just post randomly), but I'd also love to hear from you, Dear Reader!

First, I'll be continuing to add to and revise The List and the Story. I haven't decided whether to schedule updates (maybe once a week or so) or just post additions and changes as they happen; will update when I figure this out.

I'm hard at work putting together my book manuscript, so you'll probably hear my progress with that as well.

A totally new thing I'm going to do is the "Song of the Week" - once a week (still deciding when) I'll post a song I love and tell you why I love it. I did something like this last year with the Leiber/Stoller Brenda Lee vehicle "Is That All There Is?" and want to do it more, just because.

Also, I figure to keep posting my CAPS LOCK RANTS, perhaps with more frequency as the world periodically annoys me.

I'll also be updating the look of the site over the next month or two. I'm unsure as yet whether that will entail a complete overhaul or some minor adjustments; I'd love to hear what works for you, and what doesn't?

And finally, what would you like me to do with the site, content-wise? Tell me what you want, and I'll try to deliver. I want to make you happy, Dear Reader.

My New Year's Resolutions

1) Somehow get back into running form without dipping below the average body weight of a woman my age.

2) You'll have to allow me to go all OCD on you for this one...I've now kept a writing log since 2008, at first just keeping a word count while taking notes on the projects I was working on. A couple years later I started keeping track of hours I spent editing, and this year I also started logging the hours I spent in submissions and self-promotion (which of course included developing this website). Here are my numbers for this year:

My goal for next year will be at least 50,000 words written, 125 editing hours, and 200 hours of self-promotion. I equate for myself roughly 250 words to an hour of work, so this means devoting a total of 475 hours next year (roughly 40 hours a month) to my craft. I'm fine with some variation of the itemized numbers (who knows if I'll spend more or less time editing than writing, and all those hours of self-promotion are dependent on publisher/audience interest) as long as I hit the magic number of 475.

3) Control my OCD impulses so I don't drive my wife crazy. I think the main way I can do this is by making my writing goals quantifiable and clear, so I hit 'em and quit 'em on any given day.

4) Finally, the most important and least quantifiable goal...Holistically integrate my life so that my writing reflects who I am and I live my life honestly, lovingly, and fairly with my wife, children, family, friends, and subjects.

Happy New Year, loves!

The List and the Story: Complete!

Well, complete is probably the wrong word. I'll be working out some issues with my mother and aunt next week about some details of All You Need to Know, and the nature of the project means it will always be shifting and expanding as my life does. That said, The List and the Story has a shape and form now, and I hope it has a cohesion and moves people as it continues its development.

I thought I'd give some deets on readership over the last four months of posting these things, if only because I find these things interesting and gratifying. I began work on my author site last January, so it's been up for essentially a year now. As you can see below, from January -April I essentially had no audience, which was fine because I essentially had no content on the website; I was putting up links to my work, and figuring out how I wanted to use the blog. From May-August, as I started updating my blog more frequently, I averaged 200-250 visits and 300-400 pages views. Finally, from September-December, the time I've been posting almost daily updates to The List and the Story, I've seen a huge spike in both visits (over 1,000 average monthly) and page views (around 1,800 average). Squarespace (my ISP) also adding the Audience Size tracking mechanism in September, which I haven't completely figured out; that's the bottom line which suddenly comes to life in September.

Anyway, I'm not sure how interesting this will be to most of my readers (especially the non-writer variety), but I found it fascinating, especially as I begin thinking this week about how to proceed with the website and blog in the New Year. I'll be posting a few ideas, and probably asking for some, in the next few days; would love to hear anyone's thoughts.

All You Need to Know: In which that's all you need to know

I was the ring bearer at my mother’s wedding to Greg Proctor in 1978. I wore a turquoise leisure suit with a ruffled shirt. In the pictures I look happy. My mother looks harried, her smiles fake. The night before, her future husband had gone to a bachelor party and never come home. Her sister told her that morning that her husband, who was at the party, told her Greg Proctor received a blowjob from a stripper while they all watched. My mother tells me now she almost called off the wedding that morning, almost just took me up in her arms and ran. “But I wanted you and me to be a family, to be whole,” she says. “And I never wanted to give you up again. That’s all you really need to know.”

Just added to All You Need to Know

All You Need to Know: In which the story tells itself

One’s conception of time is perhaps the most defining characteristic of one’s worldview. It’s also the primary method by which one decides how to organize a list or tell a story. For some, perhaps most, time is a linear progression of events leading to an inevitable end; however we feel about the end, it’s final, and there is a vague sense of satisfaction in this. If a story doesn’t have an end, it might not even be a story. For others, time is a fragmented, endless and random series of occurrences that one can hope not to make sense of, but only to live through. And still others equate time with organic life—a cyclic progression and return, where there are no beginnings or endings, only markers. How we arrange these markers is how we construct meaning.

Just added to All You Need to Know

All You Need to Know: In which she waffles, then decides

I don’t remember the first time I met Greg Proctor, but I remember the first thing I said about him to my mother: “I hate him.” My mother told him I said that and then broke up with him. She tells me I cried that night. Within a month, she accepted his marriage proposal. Now, decades after divorcing Greg Proctor, she says marrying him was the worst decision she ever made, but she did it because she wanted so desperately for me to have a father. I think she also wanted me to have only one mother.

Just added to All You Need to Know

All You Need to Know: In which children are destoyed by god and man

Before he met my mother, Greg Proctor was engaged to a woman named Angie, who miscarried two of his children. He told me numerous times while raising me that he wished he’d married Angie.

Just added to All You Need to Know

All You Need to Know: In which Dostoyevski apotheosizes

“As a general rule, people, even the wicked, are much more naïve and simple-hearted than we suppose. As are we ourselves.” Dostoyevski wrote this in The Brothers Karamazov about Fyodor Karamazov, the unrepentantly disgusting father prone to acts of extreme violence against every person who loves him, particularly his sons. When he is murdered every son is a suspect, because every son had a motive to kill him. But this father, when he’s not acting out his misanthropic impulses, feels intensely and morosely sorry for himself, and is terribly sentimental. He doesn’t understand why the world seems so intent on destroying him, and he wants only for those he loves to love him. He’s a drunk, even when he’s not drinking. And if he’s evil then the world, this unforgiving world that’s given him every reason to hate it when all he wanted was to be loved, is the reason.

Just added to All You Need to Know