Much will be gained if the Washington Review of Books succeeds in transforming your hysterical misery into common unhappiness.
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In The Paris Review, Stephen King [This is a Maine newsletter. —Steve] on the “Chattanooga Choo Choo”:
There’s poetry, and there’s doggerel. The latter perfectly describes most lyrics of the early rock and roll era, where arms inevitably rhymes with charms and baby is followed by don’t mean maybe. This is miles from Wallace Stevens, Adrienne Rich, or Edgar Allan Poe. Even the lyrics of sophisticated pop writers (I’m thinking of Paul Simon and Bruce Springsteen) have a tendency to look dead on the page. That is probably also the case with “Chattanooga Choo Choo,” although these lyrics fall in a gray area that’s neither poetry nor doggerel. They charm with rhymes that delight both the heart and mind, especially if you have a sense of humor. The very name of the song is alliterative, but that alliteration is combined with the childish word for “passenger train.” The combo is, as I say, both sophisticated and naïve. It’s daddy-cool.
[“Chattanooga” has a lot to do with it. Back in 2012 Stephen Akey wrote in The Millions about Chuck Berry, who was also writing neither poetry nor doggerel as a lyricist:
The catalog of place names in the first verse of “Sweet Little Sixteen,” for instance, is echt-country, yet the song itself is as stolid a twelve-bar blues as any composition by, say, Willie Dixon, who, as a matter of fact, played bass on it. So where are they rockin’? “They’re really rockin’ in Boston / In Pittsburgh, PA / Deep in the heart of Texas / And round the ’Frisco Bay / All over St. Louis / And down in New Orleans / All the cats want to dance with / Sweet Little Sixteen.”
You could draw a pretty comprehensive map of America from the poetry of place names in Chuck Berry’s songs. Norfolk, Virginia; downtown Birmingham; Houston town; Albuquerque; Los Angeles: they’re all there in “The Promised Land,” inventoried with great good humor even when the traveler encounters, as we all do from time to time, “motor trouble that turned into a struggle.”
Much of American songwriting is milking good place names for all they’re worth; both Stephen Foster and George Gershwin made good use of “Swanee,” for example. —Steve]
In Harper’s, Max Norman on Cesare Pavese:
The peculiar, often charming, sometimes baffling result is the key to all Pavese’s mythologies, and not just because of its dense jumble of borrowings from Homer, Herodotus, Sophocles, and especially Lucian, or its overt imitation of Leopardi, who also wrote dialogues. Here, in a form equal parts poetic, novelistic, and dramatic, Pavese’s images grow back into myths, just as la donna della voce rauca has become Artemis. But these myths, particularly in Zallman Proctor’s relaxed, often funny translation, are unpretentiously told. Old Greeks and gods—some famous, like Achilles and Patroclus, others whom even a classicist might struggle to recognize—chat and complain about their condition like real people or clever schoolboys. Pavese stripped away the ancient particulars to get at what he described as the “problem” underneath, the “cruxes” that animate them and can’t be translated into another form. Mythology, Pavese writes in the book’s preface, is “a language, an expressive mode—which is to say, it’s not random, it’s a hothouse of symbols that belongs, like all languages do, to a specific set of references that can’t be conveyed any other way.”
In Liberties, David Polansky on Éric Rohmer:
Rebecca West has a remarkable line that applies very well to Rohmer’s characters: “As we grow older and see the ends of stories as well as their beginnings, we realize that to the people who take part in them it is almost of greater importance that they should be stories, that they should form a recognizable pattern, than that they should be happy or tragic.” Some of their stories conclude more happily than others, but what connects them all is that they are intensely conscious of themselves as shaping the narratives of their own lives. And it is partly this self-consciousness that makes them of such interest to us. They want their actions to form a continuous expression of a certain idea of their own characters, and this extends to their choice of mates, both male and female. Though they may deceive themselves in this or that particular, almost no one in Rohmer’s films is simply indifferent to the direction of their lives—and their love lives especially. As Rohmer himself remarked, “My intention was not to film raw events, but the narrative that someone makes of them.”
[Previous Rohmer discussion in basically every issue of the WRB. (There’s no official list of WRB guys, which would really just be a list of “my guys,” but if there were he’d be on it. If you’ve been reading this for long enough you can come up with the other names on the list.)
There’s an awareness in that final quote of how to make the limits of art work to the art’s advantage. You can’t film raw events, after all, and in any kind of traditional filmmaking you’re depicting some kind of narrative. Why not, then, align the narrative you are inventing with the narrative your characters are inventing for themselves? —Steve]
[Behind the paywall are even more links to the best and most interesting writing from the past few days, Upcoming books, What we’re reading, and Critical notes. Today’s specials:
A Poem by John Betjeman and how to loudly invoke other poems to good effect
Also in the poem section: obsolete jobs we didn’t get enough art about and an American’s take on “Slough”
I investigate whether everything is, somehow, still secretly about the 1890s
If you’re interested in any of that, and if you want to support the WRB in making the lifelong task of literacy not take anyone’s entire day, please subscribe.
And if you’re already a subscriber, thank you very much. Why not share the WRB with your friends and acquaintances? The best way to support us is by subscribing, but the second-best is by sharing the WRB with other people. —Steve]
