A Quick Post on Remembering

Bill Lindsey has a post up on his blog now in memory of his brother, who died in 1991. The post starts with a poem, which Bill wrote in honor of a priest and friend. “In my heart I’ve carved a shrine,” he writes, “where red carnations vie with daffodils / to chant you to your rest.” But despite the speaker’s attempts to remember, the poem concludes: “That shrine within my heart / holds one bloom fewer every day.” Below his poem, Bill emphasizes the importance of remembrance in the face of this need to move on, and both his poem and his comments stand as a type of resistance to this human tendency to let go.

My mom died six years ago today. Like Bill, I’ve been wrestling with questions of how to remember a person, too— and not just because of the impending anniversary, but because my stepfather is moving to a new, smaller house, and so he’s having to go through boxes of mom’s stuff to decide what to keep, what to send to me, what to sell, and what to get rid of. We’ve been able to put off these decisions for a long time, but now the deal is this: we’ve got to get rid of stuff.

So I’ve been getting texts with pictures of things—a framed print that hung on the dining room wall of our house in Charleston; a paper towel rack that mom made when she went through her carpentry phase while living in Spain. These things are coming from storage, from deep in the attic. Lots of them I haven’t seen since I was eleven or twelve. My mom felt no need to have them out in her big house in Tulsa. But shouldn’t they be more important to me? I mean, yes, that paper towel holder is kind of ugly. But mom made it. And no, we don’t have room for that print in our house, and even mom didn’t have it on her walls for the last twenty years of her life. But it’s something she chose, when she was about my age, because it fit her style in a certain moment of her life. Doesn’t that moment deserve to be remembered?

Every time my stepdad asks me if I want to keep something, and I tell him no, I feel like I’m willfully dropping a petal of mom’s memory. I tell myself I’ve got enough to remember her already: albums and albums of photos, her doctoral diploma, her copy of the Book of Common Prayer. And I tell myself that she wouldn’t care. And she wouldn’t: when I look around my house, I know I wouldn’t want anyone to keep everything hanging on my walls in memory of me. And then there’s the bare reality that a framed print is not a flower petal—it’s a big, bulky thing that has to be housed somewhere, and I just don’t have any space right now.

But Bill’s post was helpful, too, in highlighting the importance of words, actions, and rituals for remembrance. It was two years ago today that I started going to church again semi-regularly—to my church, the church in which mom raised me—and it was because I had been flipping through that Book of Common Prayer, and reading the words, and I suddenly had a strong urge to hear those words and, more, to participate in those words. I had an urge for communion.

And I went to church, and I found it. And I still find it there, most of all in the words. Even last Sunday, six years removed from mom’s passing, kneeling and saying the Prayer of Humble Access brought us together. The “we” of the first line was for me not just the congregation present but the “we” of my mother and me at Christ Church in Mount Pleasant, at St. Andrew’s in Fort Worth, at St. Anne’s in Atlanta.    

So, as important as that passed-down copy of the BCP, the physical thing, is to me, it means much less to me than the words it contains. Because we remember each other not with things, but with words.

And, as much as I write this blog for others, to advocate and persuade, I also write it for myself, to remember: little things, like the article that captured my attention last Tuesday, and big things, like what it’s like to be married to H this year, what it’s like to have a four-year-old daughter. And my mom.

Here are a few posts where she’s showed up, from both here and the other places I write. I’m posting them again, just for remembrance’s sake:

Penelope Casas, 1943 - 2013 (pterodáctilo, August 23, 2013)

Of Manly Tables and Girly Drinks (letters to the catholic right, May 4, 2014)

This University of Alabama Sorority Thing (letters to the catholic right, September 17, 2013)

Three Essays on Ideal Families (letters to the catholic right, August 10, 2013)

From the Gulf (July 31, 2013)

Crow Pot Pie Christianity

Even though most of my writing wrestles with Catholicism, I’m not a Roman Catholic. As I’ve made clear. As a teenager, I made it clear to the administration at my Catholic high school, too. Nonetheless, owing I guess to their saintly Francis-like ecumenism, when I was a senior they let me (a heathen!) run a lecture at the freshman retreat on the subject of music and faith.

I say I “ran” it, but I guess they didn’t trust me all the way, because they had me co-present with a youth leader from a local Catholic church. Still, it was a big event for me, my first experience standing in front of a classroom. I wrote a detailed lesson plan, anticipated questions I might get, even thought of contingency plans in case the school’s CD player malfunctioned.

The youth leader’s presentation was what you’d expect: he tried to sell Contemporary Christian music to the freshmen by convincing them that wholesome music could be cool. I took the opposite tack. My thesis was that the act of taking these bare materials (notes and words and effects) and trying to turn them into something with meaning necessarily takes a sort of faith and that, therefore, music is almost by definition religious. My point was that we can find faith all over in music. For examples, I played Lenny Kravitz and Jimi Hendrix, and I argued that Stevie Ray Vaughan’s version of “Little Wing” is essentially a prayer.

(Listen again if it’s been a while and tell me if you disagree)

I thought of this recently when a friend from those days sent me a link to his new band’s demo, which reminded me a little of a Denton-based band called Slobberbone.

I first saw Slobberbone at the Impala in Fort Worth after my junior prom. In fact, it was the night the Impala opened, and the show had been publicized for weeks. Jello Biafra was going to be there. 

Except my date and I got there late, long after Jello had gone, when there were only about ten people left in the Impala’s back room, watching this country-punk band fall apart on stage. The band members seemed beyond drunk. At one point, the bassist, who is about six-foot-ten, just sat down on the stage, while playing, and then tipped over on his back. He kept playing from the floor. 

The next day I found their CD, Crow Pot Pie, at CD Warehouse on Berry Street and listened to it almost daily for the next year or so.

I looked them up on Spotify after my friend sent me his demo to see if they sounded the way I remembered. One thing I had forgotten is just how thoroughly Christian language and themes run through their songs. I don’t mean that you can interpret them as Christian if you try—I mean that Christianity is an unmistakable obsession in their lyrics.

In “Stumblin,’ they sing, “So I picked a fight with Jesus Christ / Now I’m thinkin’ I was wrong.”

And in “No Man Among Men,”: “I know I ain’t no man among men / Jesus, I pray you’ll take me in.” 

Then, in “Dunk You in the River”: “I finally found a drink to wash away all the world’s sins / And I’ll dunk you in the river once again.”

How did I miss that? I bet I didn’t really miss it, exactly. I think their religious emphasis probably just didn’t stand out. For an Episcopalian acolyte attending a Catholic school in an Evangelical city, hearing about God—even if it was hearing someone reject him—was pretty normal. There was no such thing as secular or agnostic there. The champions of the Fort Worth music scene in those days were the Toadies, who certainly fit Flannery O’Connor’s description of the South: they were God-haunted. Listen to the songs off of Rubbernecker. No word matters more in those songs than Jesus. On the other side of the metroplex, the biggest name in Dallas music was the Reverend Horton Heat, who parodied baptisms on his album covers and exorcisms at his concerts.  

But back to Slobberbone. Understand, this is a band I remember as an absolute human train wreck (that I loved!). Their songs are politically incorrect, often violent, occasionally leaning towards a (hopefully) tongue-in-cheek misogyny. In no way am I endorsing them as moral exemplars, anymore than I would endorse Billy Joe Shaver or someone like that.  Still, while songwriter Brent Best doesn’t seem to take much seriously, I don’t detect a lot of irony when he’s singing about religion.  

And I have no idea what Best’s faith (or lack of faith) is like. I don’t know what Cormac McCarthy believes, either, or what Fyodor Dostoevsky did (I mean, officially he was Orthodox, but c’mon. Don’t you wonder?). When Best sings “He said trust in me I’m the King of Kings, and you my friend are in a rut / But what I was looking for was the King of Beers, so I said won’t you be my Bud” I don’t know if he wants me to cheer or shake my head. But I know that if I’m going to learn anything about religion it’s probably going to come from someone like that: someone who sometimes feels like blowing off Jesus for a twelve-pack of Budweiser. Or let me rephrase that: if you can’t sing about that twelve-pack like maybe it’s the better choice, then I’m afraid we might not be wrestling with the same questions.

Las Fallas, Valencia 1979

Found in one of my parents' old photo albums.

Alain de Botton on being/not being a critic

Wrestling with the dissertation these days. This quote, from Joshua Rothman's New Yorker profile of Alain de Botton's "art as therapy" project, is helping energize me by reminding me of why I'm doing all this work. Just replace "art" with "literature" in my case.

“What are you supposed to do if you love art?” he asked. “Do you become a scholar of art? Do you become an art critic? Do you write about art? Our answer is that one should try to take the values that one admires in works of art and enact them, and make them more vivid in the world. It’s too easy to ‘love art,’ and to not love the things that art actually loves. But the point is to try and love the things that the artists we love loved. Don’t just love the artist,” he said. “Don’t just love the work they produced. Love what they loved.” Inside the museum, these ideas had seemed contentious. Outside, on Seventieth Street—where trees waved in the breeze, and clouds glowed behind them—they seemed less so.

You Should Pick Up the Old 97's/ Waylon Jennings Collaboration

(This happened.)

Texas Monthly/ The NY Times has an oral history up of the 1996 collaboration between Waylon Jennings and the Old 97's:

In 1996, five Texans met in Nashville to record two songs together. At the time, the four members of the Dallas band Old 97’s were awaiting the release of their major-label debut for Elektra Records, “Too Far To Care.” But already they were considered too loud for country, too country for rock. It was a struggle that the fifth Texan in the room, Waylon Jennings, knew all too well.

The fruits of that meeting, versions of "The Other Shoe"* and "The Iron Road", are being released today by Ominvore Recordings, along with four Old 97's demos. Get to a record store!

Previous posts on the Old 97's here and here.


*"The Other Shoe" is my all-time favorite Old 97's song. Except maybe for "Salome". Or "Big Brown Eyes". Anyway, Waylon had good taste.

  

Sites to See

I just want to highlight some super-cool scholarly and texan and scholarly-texan-type things going on around the web:

First, if you're reading James Joyce or planning a trip to Dublin, you have to visit Jasmine Mulliken's meticulously-researched Mapping Dubliners Project, which features online maps of every place referenced in Dubliners and mapped routes of all of the collection's characters. Jasmine also writes a blog, spotlighting a new place from the book each week, with notes on its history and its role in the text.

Second, the Harry Ransom Center has a blog! How did I not know about this until now? It's full of fascinating commentary on the center's holdings--I learned about it the day Michael Gilmore wrote about the famous scuffle between Ernest Hemingway and Max Eastman, which took place in the office of Hemingway's editor after Eastman challenged Hemingway's manhood. The story is unbelievable, and Gilmore's posts reminds me of exactly why I love archival work. 

Finally, I knew Hannah Gamble in Houston, and now she's blowing up on the national poetry scene. She'll be featured in next month's Poetry and she's doing a reading at the KGB Bar in New York tonight. Her 2012 collection "Your Invitation to a Modest Breakfast" garnered this great review from Anna Journey at the Kenyon Review.  And you can see her at the top of this post, reading a poem and being interviewed by her former professor Richard Jackson. 

Happy birthday, Freddie King!

Texas has produced a lot of great bluesmen (and blueswomen). Happy birthday to one of the best: the Texas Cannonball, Freddie King, seen above with Clarence "Gatemouth" Brown. King would have been 79 today.