’12 Stories’ a music album by Brandy Clark (2013)

Today I want to talk about the powerful new music album ’12 Stories’ by Brandy Clark which is probably the finest United States country album in at least a quarter century. Besides performing on them, Brandy Clark wrote all the songs on this excellent album. Here is a video of her song ‘Stripes’. But first a little background.

Back on March 10, 2003, on the eve of the United States invasion of Iraq, Natalie Maines of the country group the Dixie Chicks said during a concert in London, “Just so you know, we’re on the good side with y’all. We do not want this war, this violence, and we’re ashamed that the President of the United States is from Texas.”

The powers-that-be in country music were so offended by this statement that they stomped down hard on Natalie and the Dixie Chicks, and by the end of that month Dixie Chicks songs were no longer being played on any country radio station in the United States.  The company that sponsored their concerts, Lipton Tea, dropped them.  Yet one of the true country legends, Merle Haggard, defended their right to voice an opinion and condemned the verbal witch-hunt and lynching.  His defense went to little avail.

Then it was up to the big-time radio executives and record producers to enforce right-wing conformity on country music.  Clear Channel Communications, Inc owns at least 850 radio stations in the United States, by far the most of any corporation.  Many of these stations play country music.  On their news talk stations, Clear Channel airs among others Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, and Sean Hannity,

These executives succeeded beyond their wildest dreams in making sure country artists toed the line of conservative ‘Tea Party’ orthodoxy.  The only politics allowed were displays of militaristic patriotism.   Also there could be no hint of trouble in RedState land. Anything implying that the standard of living of working class whites might be declining had to be avoided.  As far as men and women were concerned, there could be no honest talk of severe problems in relationships.

Many country artists just wanted to avoid any controversy by not getting into anything controversial at all.  Thus we wind up with bubbleheads in cowboy hats singing lame party anthems and songs that don’t even sound like country songs.

Of course this went against everything that country music was in the past which frequently dealt with the real problems of real people, but this was the ‘New Country’ music.

Now along comes Brandy Clark.

She writes songs about real people with real problems.  She observes the people around her and finds that things aren’t so great in RedState land.  As the title indicates, here are twelve stories about the traditional subjects of country music like cheating, drinking, and divorce, and living in general.

We load our kids up in our new used car
And after church we hit the mini mart
Behind the counter up there on the wall
It reads 200 million on the power ball

….

So we pray to Jesus and play the Lotto.

                         From ‘Pray to Jesus’ by Brandy Clark 

The amazing thing about Brandy Clark is that she is not selling anything; she’s just carefully observing the way things are.  This is what the great country artists of the past did, but which the country artists of today are not allowed to do. 

As far as the relations between men and women, again things aren’t so good.  It’s that ‘liquored up lust’.

He was getting drunk just like the day before
The day she got divorced

Didn’t feel any different than it ever had
She wasn’t that sorry, wasn’t that sad
Couldn’t love him any less or hate him anymore
The day she got divorced

                     From ‘The Day She Got Divorced’ by Brandy Clark

I got a new job, I gave up smoking’
Changed my lipstick, and those roses opened
I let my hair grow down past my shoulders
All while you were hungover

                     From ‘Hungover’ by Brandy Clark

 Every one of these twelve songs is a classic country song that I listened to over and over.  The wording in these songs is brilliant.  It was fascinating and refreshing to get Brandy Clark’s take on life today.  It has been a long time since I’ve said that about any country artist. I suppose the closest artist from the past to Brandy Clark would be Loretta Lynn. Brandy Clark’s singing and the music on this album are excellent too.

There are other female artists who are pushing the envelope like Miranda Lambert and Kacey Musgraves, both of whom have recorded Brandy Clark songs.  It would be wonderful if some male country artist would come along and write songs with similar honesty, courage, and insight as Brandy Clark.     

All that remains for Brandy Clark to do is to say something that offends Clear Channel and the Koch Brothers. 

‘Orfeo’ by Richard Powers  (2014) – 375 pages

It happens.  Several of the novels by American author Richard Powers have moved me to enthusiasm before, but his latest, ‘Orfeo’, has left me somewhat cool and indifferent. My lack of enthusiasm for ‘Orfeo’ may be more my fault than his.  Let me explain.

My ignorance of modern avant garde music composition is so overwhelming that only Powers could get me to read a novel about this subject.  First even the music of the great classical composers like Beethoven, Bach, and Brahms holds little interest for me.  My music tastes are so low and unformed, I need the human voice in a composition in order to appreciate it at all, and thus I can only appreciate a few operas out of the entire world of classical music. Thus the experiments in classical composition of the last fifty years have seemed to me somewhere between scams and shams.  John Cage, Philip Glass, Steve Reich, John Adams.  In my ignorance, I ask ‘Didn’t classical music stop a hundred years ago?’  Like so many others, my musical tastes run to rock-and-roll or pretty pop tunes, not this avant garde classical stuff.  However Richard Powers has a way of making ostensibly uninteresting subjects exciting, so I decided to read ‘Orfeo’.

‘Orfeo’ is about a man who has spent his entire life composing experimental classical music.  He could have had an ordinary successful life as a chemist, but instead he has devoted his life to composing music to which very few people want to listen.   Now seventy years old, he has developed a new interest in do-it-yourself genetic engineering.  He is attempting to splice a music composition into a living cell.  Googling the word ‘ricin’ has gotten him into big trouble with Homeland Security who suspect him of bio-terrorism. As he awaits apprehension, we get the story of his life in flashbacks which are in chronological order.

Thus we have the two major themes of the novel.  A man devotes his life to being creative in the field of classical music but apparently has little to show for it in the end.  The second theme is that creativity by its very nature is original, subversive and thus suspect.   The following line from ‘Orfeo’ is in regard to the Fifth Symphony of Shostakovich which he wrote after being denounced by Stalin:

“It spoke of whatever is left, after the worst that humans did to each other.”

The power of music.  Both of these themes are meaningful and resound with me   I suppose if I had had more empathy for the composers of modern classical music, I would have liked this novel much better than I did.   Not until the above vignette on Shostakovich did Powers get me excited by his subject.

There are other weaknesses to the work which I probably wouldn’t have noticed if I had been more gung ho on this novel.  The story of this man’s life is pretty standard fare with a girl friend here, a wife there, a daughter, a divorce, and so on.  I suppose the point was to make this man’s life as normal and ordinary as possible except for his obsession with creative music composition, but this made for some quite shopworn story lines.  The female characters  seemed particularly predictable. 

Despite my lack of appreciation for ‘Orfeo’, Richard Powers is a writer I will probably return to.  He is intelligent, passionate, and spirited so that even his failures are more interesting than most writers’ successes. 

‘The Constant Wife’  a play by W. Somerset Maugham  (1926)  – 67 pages

Here we have a drawing room comedy of manners about marital infidelity or, as Charles Isherwood puts it in the New York Times, ‘an unromantic comedy’.  All of the friends of Constance Middleton wonder if they should tell her that her doctor husband John is having an affair with her young best friend Marie-Louise.   Consider the following exchange between Constance’s sister Martha and their mother Mrs. Culver.

Martha: She ought to know the truth, because it is the truth.

Mrs. Culver: Of course the truth is an excellent thing, but before one tells it one should be quite sure that one does so for the advantage of the person who hears it rather than for one’s own self-satisfaction.

Martha: Mother, Constance is a very unhappy person.

Mrs. Culver: Nonsense.  She eats well, she sleeps well, dresses well, and she’s losing weight.  No woman can be unhappy in those circumstances.

When Constance asks ‘How does one know one is in love?’, her mother Mrs. Culver comes back with ‘Could you use his toothbrush?’   That would seem to be as good a practical test of love as any.

And then there are these lines from the wandering husband.

John: Women are funny.  When they’ve tired of you, they tell you so without a moment’s hesitation and if you don’t like it you can lump it.  But if you’re tired of them you’re a brute and a beast and boiling oil’s too good for you.

The dialogue in ‘The Constant Wife’ is sharp, witty, and a continual delight.  The play was written in 1926, and certain of the attitudes towards men and women and sex you may find antiquated.   But do we find the attitudes in Moliere, Jane Austen, or even William Shakespeare antiquated?  This play proves that clever repartee in the battle of the sexes can age well and still make an audience or reader laugh today.  Perhaps the fact that Maugham was a homosexual gave him an outsider’s humorous perspective on marriage, although he himself was also married for 12 years.  

The sparkling comedic playwright is a side of W. Somerset Maugham that I was unfamiliar with before.  Most of his novels and stories have a more serious point to them.  However ironic twists abound in his work, and I should have guessed he could do comedy.  In his thirties, Maugham was the toast of the London West End theatre district, and at one time he had four plays running in London simultaneously.

For a long time these plays of Maugham were considered old-fashioned and hopelessly outdated.  Perhaps most authors go through this phase where their work is somewhat ignored and replaced by newer more modern writers.  However at some point, a few people begin to recognize the real qualities of some of these writers from the past, and their works come back again into fashion despite their age.   Since 2000, three of Maugham’s novels have been made into movies (‘Up at the Villa’, ‘Being Julia’, and ‘The Painted Veil’).  Also the play ‘The Constant Wife’ lives on, having been staged several times in various places since 2000.  

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‘The Hired Man’ by Aminatta Forna  (2013)  – 293 pages

Did you know that Croatia is the 18^th most popular tourist destination in the world?  As you can see from the map of Croatia, it has a long coastline with many large islands along the Adriatic Sea across from Italy.

The novel ‘The Hired Man’ by Aminatta Forna takes place in current times around the small town of Gost in Croatia.  An English family has purchased a house there to remodel and resell at a substantial profit to tourists.  The wife, Laura, and the two children, Matthew and Grace, have come for the summer to begin work on the house.  When they arrive there, they meet a local handyman Duro Kolek who lives near their purchased house.  Soon Laura hires him to help with the remodeling.  The entire novel is told from the point of view of Duro, the local Croatian.

The style of ‘The Hired Man’ reminds me very much of the style of ‘The Remains of the Day’ by Kazuo Ishiguro which I and many others consider one of the great novels of the last quarter century.  Actually all three of Ishiguro’s first three novels, ‘A Pale View of Hills’ and ‘An Artist of the Floating World’ as well as ‘The Remains of the Day’ are written in this style. (By the way how about Kazuo Ishiguro for the Nobel?)  Since ‘The Hired Man’ has the style also, let me describe it.

The story begins quite simply.  In the case of ‘The Hired Man’, Duro begins working at the house and gets to know Laura and the two children.  There is an undercurrent of an innocent attachment between Duro and Laura.  The day-to-day interaction between Duro and the family is told in methodical fashion and the tourist setting seems almost idyllic.

But then the sad complicated history of Gost and Croatia slowly begins to intrude on the idyll.  Since the story is told in allegorical form (like ‘The Remains of the Day’), don’t expect the particulars on the recent history of Croatia. ‘The Hired Man’ does not have the facts or the details about the troubles in Croatia in the 1990s.  All we learn is that there are differences between groups of people within the same neighborhood.  We can all relate to that.  These differences may be ethnic, political, racial, religious, economic, or some combination of these.  Apparently in rural Croatia it got to the point where some of these neighborhood groups formed militias to take care of the problem.

Apparently today in Croatia the problems have subsided, and they are intent on turning their country into a world-class tourist destination.  However sometimes the conflicts of the past come back to haunt. 

For me to compare ‘The Hired Man’ to ‘The Remains of the Day’ is high praise, and ‘The Hired Man’ is indeed an impressive novel.  Originally I wondered why Aminatta Forna, a Scottish-born English writer, would write a novel set in Croatia.  However just as Kazuo Ishiguro as an outsider had strong insight into upper class English society, Forna as an outsider has strong insight into modern Croatia.    If you’ve liked the work of Kazuo Ishiguro before, you will definitely like ‘The Hired Man’.     

‘The Tortoise and the Hare’ by Elizabeth Jenkins  (1954)  –  252 pages

One could make an entire literary career just by rediscovering excellent but overlooked English woman writers from the previous century.   Elizabeth Jenkins was another fine writer who merits being highlighted.  What fame she has mostly rests upon her twelve biographies including her 1958 biography of Elizabeth I, ‘Elizabeth the Great’.  She also penned a biography of Jane Austen in 1938, was involved in the establishment of the Jane Austen Society, and worked to purchase Austen’s home in Chawton which later became the Jane Austen’s House Museum.

Besides the biographies, Jenkins also wrote twelve novels of which ‘The Tortoise and the Hare’ is perhaps the most noted.  In the introduction to this novel, Hilary Mantel writes of Elizabeth Jenkins, “What she offers us does not date: descriptive grace and narrative pulse, dry humour and moral discrimination, tempered elegance and emotional force.”

‘The Tortoise and the Hare’ is the story of a love triangle with an unusual twist.  It takes place in a well-to-do neighborhood of lawyers and doctors. After long years spent of education and apprenticeship in their twenties and early thirties, these professional men finally could marry, settle down, and live in a prosperous area.   They would marry a young pretty trophy wife to go with their hard-won affluence.  Only later would they discover that their trophy was somewhat tarnished when these men found they had nothing in common with their young wives and they could hardly talk to each other.

The novel is written from the perspective of 38-year-old Imogen Gresham, wife of 52-year-old lawyer Evelyn. They and their 11-year-old son Gavin live in a fine estate.  With the fourteen years difference in age between husband and wife, Imogen is one of these beautiful trophy wives.

In this story the husband forsakes the younger woman who is his wife for an older woman he can be buddies with.  One day Imogen discovers that her husband has taken an interest in a neighbor woman Blanche.  Imogen can’t figure out why Evelyn has become enamored of Blanche, because Blanche is as old as he is and not attractive; stout and tweedy.  But Blanche is a ‘sport’. She shares the same interests as Evelyn, she shares his business and right-wing political views, and she is very rich.  Soon he is looking for every excuse to go to Blanche’s house leaving Imogen home taking care of their obnoxious kid Gavin.   Blanche knows she has the upper hand in  Evelyn’s attentions, and she rubs it in by doing everything possible to make Imogen’s life miserable.

The story in ‘The Tortoise and the Hare’ rings true. One can feel the pain of Imogen’s predicament of being left behind while her husband runs off on fishing trips and horse races with this older woman Blanche.  Imogen does have her small coterie of friends with whom she can confide her problems.  These conversations further our insight and empathy for the situation.  As for the character Blanche, Elizabeth Jenkins does an excellent portrayal of a mean ruthless husband-stealer who is still true to life.

I believe one of the reasons this novel was a hard-sell and not that popular in the United States was simply a matter of character names.  In the United States, ‘Evelyn’ is solely a woman’s name.  We are not accustomed to men named Evelyn.  Even for me it took a number of pages to adapt to a man named Evelyn.  Also one of Imogen’s closest woman friends is Cecil.  In the United States ‘Cecil’ is solely a man’s name.

‘The Tortoise and the Hare’ held my interest throughout which is quite an accomplishment for a novel that is sixty years old.  It kept me turning the pages.

‘How the Light Gets In’ by Louise Penny (2013) – 404 pages

“There’s a crack in everything; that’s how the light gets in” – ‘Anthem’ by Leonard Cohen

I don’t read a lot of mysteries, but I keep my eyes and ears open for superior books of any genre.  When I saw that the mystery ‘How the Light Gets In’ was appearing on many of the lists for Best Fiction of 2013, I decided this was a novel I would read.  As it turns out, ‘How the Light Gets In’ is an excellent book of fiction regardless of category.

First, this novel has several eccentric colorful characters and an exotic location in the small (fictional?) town of Three Pines in French-speaking Quebec.  The murder mystery is a mash up on probably the most famous true story to come out of this area of Canada, the Dionne quintuplets.  The story of the Dionne quintuplets and how the Canadian government took them over is intriguing in itself.      

However the main reason to read this book is the strong lead of Chief Inspector Armond Gamache. He is not only trying to solve a murder case.  Rot and corruption have beset the very top executive levels of his own department, the crime investigation unit.  His bosses are out to destroy Inspector Gamache.  His department  “was now a culture that rewarded cruelty. That promoted it.”  Gamache must fight his own bosses in order to save himself, his friends, his family and even the city of Montreal.

 “Armand Gamache had always held unfashionable beliefs. He believed that light would banish the shadows. That kindness was more powerful than cruelty, and that goodness existed, even in the most desperate places.”

 The ‘corruption in high places’ storyline leads this novel to go well beyond its mystery genre.  The stakes are high; this is a suspenseful page-turner.

Quebec is the largest province in Canada extending from the Arctic Circle to the border of the United States.  The area where ‘How the Light Gets In’ takes place, the picturesque little village of Three Pines, is actually south of much of Maine.  The influence of the French culture and language makes this a fascinating different locale for the story.  The local characters including Ruth and her pet duck Rosa will stay in your mind.   

This is a gripping thriller of a man and his friends fighting against nearly insurmountable odds in a life-and-death struggle with powerful enemies.  It is not necessary to have read the other Inspector Gamache books to appreciate this story.  I have not read any other of the works of Louise Penny, but after reading ‘How the Light Gets In’, I will certainly come back to her.

‘Appointment in Samarra’ by John O’Hara   (1934) – 251 pages

Have you ever taken such an active dislike of someone that you get an uncontrollable urge to severely embarrass that person in public?  That is how Julian English, the protagonist of “Appointment in Samarra”, first gets into trouble.

 “Why, he wondered, did he hate Harry Reilly?  Why couldn’t he stand him? What was there about Reilly that caused him to say to himself: ‘If he starts one more of those moth-eaten stories I’ll throw this drink in his face.’  But he knew he would not throw this drink or any other drink in Harry Reilly’s face.  Still it was fun to think about it.”

 But later that night he does throw the drink in his face.  This is only the first incident in the two-day downfall of Julian English.

The title ‘Appointment in Samarra’ sounds like a foreign thriller filled with adventure and intrigue, an exotic story of spies.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  Instead, as John Updike wrote in his introduction, this novel is “a picture of a man destroyed by drink and pride”.  The novel takes place in the year 1930, a year after the stock market crashed and three years before the end of Prohibition.

Julian English is a successful young businessman in the fictional small town of Gibbsville, Pennsylvania.    He is the director of the Cadillac dealership and is a member of the local country club.

 “In a town the size of Gibbsville — 24,032, estimated 1930 census — the children of the rich live within two or three squares of the children of parents who are not rich, not even by Gibbsville standards. This makes for a spurious democracy, especially among boys, which may or may not be better than no democracy at all.”

 He has a loving wife Caroline    But Julian’s own worst enemy is himself.  And alcohol.  John O’Hara’s story here is a lot raunchier and lowdown than Fitzgerald or Hemingway,   Julian has a couple of tacky sexual encounters on his way to the bottom.  Perhaps these sleazy encounters were included to paint a real picture of the times, although they did ruffle the feathers of a lot of critics and readers.

According to Fran Lebowitz, the author John O’Hara is underrated, “because every single person who knew him hated him.”  His personality was abrasive and unpleasant, but he managed to have over 200 stories published in the New Yorker. Many consider his short stories his greatest accomplishment, although five of his novels were turned into movies.    He is known for his strong dialogue and insights into the night life of the socially ambitious.  As opposed to other writers of his time, O’Hara wrote about the crude and nasty side of his characters.  Lorin Stein writes in the New Yorker, “O’Hara’s tackiness is his great advantage over more respectable writers of his time.”

To find out what life was like in the United States in the 1920s and 1930s, during Prohibition and the Great Depression, read F. Scott Fitzgerald, Sinclair Lewis, John Steinbeck, and, yes, John O’Hara.

‘My Struggle – Book One’ by Karl Ove Knausgaard (2009) – 441 pages          Translated by Don Bartlett

‘My Struggle’ is a book that individual readers either love or hate.  Considering the high expectations I had. I’m surprised to find myself in the second category. This novel / memoir was a severe disappointment for me. 

The first five pages of ‘My Struggle’ are spectacularly good, a tour de force on the subject of death.  It is the next 436 pages that disappoint.  After those first few pages, I expected a book with plenty of depth and many insights about life and the human condition.   Instead the rest of the novel / memoir is banal and mundane with the author making no attempt to shape his material into a meaningful story.

I believe a large part of the problem lies in the title the author has chosen.  It is ‘My Struggle’, not ‘Our Struggle’ or ‘Their Struggle’.  The writing here is self-centered, self-absorbed, and self-indulgent.  None of the other characters besides the author is developed to any extent, and any characterizations they are given are due to the pet peeves or personal aversions of the author himself.     

The main character in ‘My Struggle’ is named Karl Ove Knausgaard, the same name as the author himself.  That is why I hesitate to call this book a novel.   Besides there is no organized plot, just a couple of remembrances told in great detail.  The exact wording of conversations that occurred twenty years ago is given, and the precise weather conditions and visual descriptions of nature and buildings then are given.  No one could remember scenes in such detail, so I hesitate to call this book a memoir.  That is why I’m calling it a novel / memoir. 

Knausgaard’s memory of events is detailed in the extreme.  Every little item is recalled regardless of any relation to the story.  I found these meanderings irritating; nothing is too small or irrelevant to be included in ‘My Struggle’.  Even though all the stuff here is very readable, it is annoying to have to plow through all this meaningless junk.

There are two main story lines in Book 1.  First we have the sixteen year old boy Karl Ove Knausgaard celebrating New Year’s Eve by hiding some bottles of beer in the woods which he and his friends will drink later that night.  I could not figure out what the point of this story was except to show Karl Ove as a red-blooded normal Scandinavian boy. Nothing about this boy indicates he is worthy of our attention. There certainly is no struggle or conflict in this story.  That story goes on interminably for about 150 pages. 

The next storyline is 200 pages devoted to Karl Ove returning to his grandmother’s house after his father dies.  Apparently in real life, his family is suing the author for the depiction of the grandmother here as a nearly senile incontinent alcoholic. I did find the depiction of the grandmother in the book particularly nasty and heavy-handed.   If Knausgaard had taken the trouble to turn this book into fiction, he wouldn’t have this lawsuit problem.

I can’t figure out why critics are falling all over themselves praising ‘My Struggle’ which in its entirety is six books and 3600 pages.  Judging from my reading of Book One, the book seems to be unshaped memoir with little or no effort made to leave out irrelevant or mundane details.  I would have much preferred a 500 page novel with a strong plot and several well-defined characters rather than these unformed self-important memories, but I doubt the author would be capable of that.         

‘The Property’ by Rutu Modan   (2013) – 222 pages – Translated by Jessica Cohen

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Here is another graphic novel meant for adults, not children.  The cover depicts an old Warsaw cemetery where the aged monuments are festooned with candles.  Mrs. Regina Segal is returning to Warsaw, the place of her birth, from Israel where she has lived for more than 70 years.  The rest of her whole family was murdered in the Holocaust, and Mrs. Segal is going to Warsaw to take back her family’s property.   She is accompanied by her granddaughter Mica.

Despite its subject, this is a warm and humorous story.  The drawings in this graphic novel are subdued, meant for adults, and not the wild and crazy stuff put in comics for young people.  The realistic tale is also for adults with no superheroes or ultra-violence.  It is a pleasant good-humored story about a grandmother and her granddaughter on their visit to Warsaw.   I liked it a lot.  Graphic novels should not only be for young people; the artwork can add another dimension to adults’ enjoyment of fiction as well.

Among the pleasures of this book are the characters they meet on their trip.  There is the annoying family friend Avram Yagodnik, the helpful young man Tomasz from Warsaw, and the old man from the old neighborhood Mr. Gorski.  The tone of ‘The Property’ is amiable and romantic.  For the grandmother this is a trip back to her past, but for the granddaughter it is a new adventure.   

The setting is Warsaw, Poland, a city still recovering, still dealing with events that occurred seventy years ago.   

 ‘The Property’ contains one attribute that is missing from most comic books, subtlety.  In how many comic books is the main character a grandmother?

Being no artist myself, I hope this trend of graphic novels for adults continues.  I’ve read several in the past few years including ‘Tamara Drewe’, ‘Dotter of Her Father’s Eyes’, ‘Gemma Bovary’, ‘Journalism’, ‘Blankets’, and ‘Poem Strip’ as well as ‘The Property’.  Each one of these graphic novels has been an original delight for me.