Tuesday Tune: "Salt in the Wound" by Delta Spirit

From week to week, I know I tend to slide into hyperbolic enthusiasm when it comes to the Tuesday Tunes I post.  Judging by the spittle-flecked intensity of my praise, you'd think every tune was "the best song EVER!!"  (That's partly true, because why else would I interrupt a books blog to wax giddy about music unless they were songs that hammered my heart with love?)

I don't know if Delta Spirit's "Salt in the Wound" is the Best.  Song.  Ever.  But it sure struck a chord with me when I heard it for the first time five days ago.  I was driving through the streets of Helena, Montana when it came on my iPod's random playlist.  I had to pull over to avoid an accident.

"Salt in the Wound" is a powerful, haunting meditation about finding our place in the world of good and evil and the in-between moral territory where most of us live.  From the start, lead singer Matthew Vasquez's voice trembles with longing and uncertainty.

I want to get an answer
To why I was even born
No one here can tell me
What's been haunting me all my life
Well this rat race has left me limping
As I balance on the edge of the knife

Why am I here?
Oh what should I do?
Well is this the point I'm trying to prove?

Three seconds before the song ended, I was hitting the Repeat button on my iPod.  The song filled my car, entered my head, and lodged in my heart.  It ended, I hit Repeat again.  And again.  And again.  Even by the fifth consecutive time through, I wasn't sick of it--but, in the interest of keeping traffic flowing through Helena, I moved on to the next song.

I have other Delta Spirit songs buried on my iPod (including "Bushwick Blues" and "Trashcan"), but none of them grabbed me with such immediate insistence as this one.  The band hails from Southern California, but you'd swear they came from the edge of the backwoods of the worlds populated by the likes of Flannery O'Connor and James Dickey.  Not that they're rednecks by any means--no, that's not it.  But when I listen to them, I get a down-to-earth folk vibe that calls to mind "Jesus Saves" signs tacked to the trunks of kudzu-choked telephone poles.  In an interview from three years ago, Patrol Magazine said of the band: "With a clear cutting sound born out of everything right in Americana folklore, Delta Spirit wields words with a prophetic precision that evokes comparisons to Cash, Springsteen and the omnipresent Dylan."*  I'd also suggest that Delta Spirit revives U2 at the Joshua Tree peak of its career.

The spiritual wrestling match of "Salt in the Wound" reaches its apogee in this stanza as Vasquez sings,

If there's a god in my head
Then there's a devil too
How can I tell the difference
When they both claim to be true?
Maybe God is God
Maybe the Devil is me
Well I just throw my chains on
And tell myself that I'm free

"Salt in the Wound" reverberates inside me in much the same way I felt the first time I read Flannery O'Connor, James Dickey, Richard Hugo, and John Updike.  Like those writers--pillars in my literary education--the song finds no easy answers to Why We Are Here, but the journey along that switch-backed road to understanding is beautiful to behold every step of the way.

Well the earth is so tender and cruel
Well if you're not there it's still so beautiful

Give a listen (like last week's Tuesday Tune, this is a bare-bones video):



If you'd like to purchase "Salt in the Wound" from Amazon, CLICK HERE.


*That interview, which I read after I'd written this blog post, reinforces my suspicions about how the band purposefully infuses its lyrics with spirituality ("God is [a] great mystery that’s beyond our comprehension and we’re all at different places in understanding him, we haven’t made a basic structure for what we all believe as a band.  We are haunted by him though, and he appears in places we don’t expect him to be.").

Oh, and Flannery O'Connor makes a cameo, too.

Reading With My Octopus Hands

The girl working in the coffee shop was having a good day and, in a voice that could cut through steel, she made sure the rest of us knew it.

"It's one of those mornings where everything just seems to go zippah-dee-doo-dah, y'know?" she said to her co-worker as she pulled a lever on the espresso machine and hissed steam into a waiting customer's cappuccino.  "Got a good night's sleep, had the leftover blintzes from yesterday my Mom put in the fridge, and didn't have any traffic on the way into work.  You ever have a day like that?" she asked the other girl.  Without waiting for an answer, she plunged into a further rundown of her morning; she was like a loud, living, breathing DayPlanner as she talked about what she was going to do with the rest of her day.  She chattered and babbled at a volume that was decidedly not an "inside voice."  The espressos hissed and steamed.  The rest of the customers talked among themselves at elevated pitches in order to be heard above the rising tide of noise.

I, for one, wished everyone would shut the fuck up.

I was sitting in a corner table with my Kindle and I was struggling to read David Mitchell's The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet.  Just when I was getting myself re-immersed in 18th-century samurai Japan, Little Miss Chirpy would pull me back out with her breathless description of the shade of black fingernail polish which, oh-em-gee, totally coordinated with her Ramones T-shirt that morning.

So she was having a good day.  Fine.  Big whoop.  I uncharitably wished she'd had a paper cut and fought with her boyfriend before coming to work so she would retreat into sullen, depressed silence.

Maybe it was just me.  Maybe I was having a hard time concentrating on Jacob's thousand autumns because there were already too many other narratives crowding my head.  At that moment, I was simultaneously reading three other books and it was driving me batshit.

*

I sank back into the bathtub, the warmth lapping over my shoulders and stomach and tried to focus on the book I was holding six inches above the water.  The Lover's Dictionary was a delightful little book about love and commitment.  It was easy to read, each page devoted to a single word and its micro-fiction definition.  The narrator and his girlfriend were funny, smart people and I really wanted to get to know them better.

It's just that I was distracted by thoughts of Jacob de Zoet and a certain "Radioactive Lady" in Tallahassee.

*     *

I sat at the desk in the hotel room with my copy of Elizabeth Stuckey-French's novel The Revenge of the Radioactive Lady propped in front of me.  The story revolves around an elderly woman named Marylou who, as a young mother, had been a guinea pig in a medical study of the 1950s where she drank radioactive cocktails which eventually caused the early death of her daughter.  Now she was in Florida, seeking retribution from the doctor who'd done her wrong all those decades ago.

Every morning when Marylou and her Welsh corgi, Buster, left their house at 22 Reeve's Court and set out on their walk toward Wilson Spriggs's house at 2208 Friar's Way, Marylou chanted to herself: Today's the day. Today's the day. Today's the day he'll suffer and die. Every morning she fully believed that by the time she'd walked the three blocks to Wilson's house she'd have figured out how to--

ThumpThumpThump!  What sounded like a herd of elephants (but turned out to be a high school wrestling team) ran across the floor of the room above me in the Hampton Inn.  I was pulled out of the book by the rumble from the ceiling.  So much for Marylou in Tallahassee....

Then, of course, I started thinking about the witty repartee those dictionary-lovers might toss back and forth in a situation like this.  And then my mind turned to Jacob and how he needed to defend himself against the Japanese feudal lords at that Dutch trading outpost.

*     *     *

I'm skimming low across a Montana wheat field with Richard Hugo.  For the past six months, I've gotten into the habit of reading at least one or two poems each day from Making Certain It Goes On.  Hugo's poetry folds me into the very page it's printed on and I go with him to the bar in Philipsburg, to the waters of Kicking Horse Reservoir, to the field where grass is placated by the wind and

         Someone may be out there
riding undulating light our way.
Wherever we live, we sleep here
where cattle sleep beside the full canal.
We slept here young in poems.

I linger over that last line, rolling it across the tongue, trying to fully absorb its beauty.

Then I make the mistake of looking up from the collection of Hugo's poetry.  Across my hotel room, I see the Radioactive Lady, The Lover's Dictionary, and my Kindle in a haphazard stack next to my computer.  They're all waiting for me.  They each in separate voices are calling to me, each trying to overshout the other, each vying for my increasingly crumbled attention.

I wish they'd shut the fuck up.

*     *     *     *

How did I get to this point?  When did I become a reader fragmented between narratives?  Why was I now sipping from my books when I should be gulping?

Some of it started when I took on the role of a book reviewer to multiple publications.  While I was reading one book for The Barnes and Noble Review, another assignment with a tighter deadline would come in from New West, and I'd feel forced to start working my way through that second book even as I was trying to finish the first book.

Then I started finding more and more books to add to my Must-Read list, taking recommendations from enthusiastic readers on Twitter and at BookBalloon, not to mention getting hooked by new books arriving daily from publishers who hoped I'd take a look at what they had to offer.  I called my To-Be-Read stack Mount Everest; then, as it grew and I realized what I was getting myself into, I renamed it Mount Never Rest.  The more I started to read new books, the farther away the finish line moved for each book.  At this rate, I would be a perpetual book starter but never a book finisher.

Make no mistake, you and I both live in a distracted society.  By now, the media has reported that story to death: video-game culture, attention-deficit, flashing billboards, micro-fiction, 140-character autobiographies, blah blah blah....In the competition for our attention, the once-interesting things in life have scattered into tiny atomic particles.  Deep thought has diluted and the short and shrill has become the momentary attention-getter.  In fact, since you started reading this, I'm willing to bet you had your eyes pulled off the screen at least three different times.

And now I was allowing myself to fall victim to turning books into wading pools.  Why, when there were so many TV shows to watch and news feeds to browse, was I making life hard for myself by reading four books at the same time, reading in the shallows with each one?

Overcommitment, for one thing.  Psychologically, I'm a "pleaser" and I hate to let anyone down--particularly editors who would like to have me review certain books by a certain date.  Before I knew it, my calendar bulged with assignments.

And then, in what seemed like mutual conspiracy, this year the publishing industry published a full roster of books which looked really, really interesting.  I was captivated by covers and hooked by plot summaries.  I started adding book after book to Mount Never Rest, trying to work out a reasonable schedule for myself--a schedule that quickly collapsed when I got books like The Instructions and Skippy Dies, thick volumes of daunting length.

I logged onto Twitter and tweeted at the #fridayreads group about how I was reading all these books at the same time "with octopus arms."  Funny, yeah, but nobody's laughing here.

I wasn't always like this.  There was a time when I was a monogamous reader, faithful to only one book at a time.  Ah, those were the days.  Back then, I could plow through War and Peace and keep the cast of characters straight in my head (well, almost).  Now, if I attempted that same thing, I would need a PowerPoint flow chart to help me navigate Napoleonic Russia.

The answer is, of course, to read faster.  Read faster, and live less.  Winnow down my time here on earth to the bare essentials of working my eyes across a page, line by line.  Take a speed-reading course, forsake responsibility, shirk my marriage, eat only peanut-butter sandwiches on whole-wheat bread.  That's unrealistic and (especially in the case of the shirked wife) completely undesirable.

Or, I could just stop taking on new books.  Finish these four, yes, but then pare it all back down to one book.  The way it used to be.  When all the pieces of my brain were in place and my reading was richer, deeper.

Yes, but....yes, but....I'm attracted to the next pretty book that comes along, clicking its high heels, swinging its hips, tossing its hair, pursing its lips.  I follow, I grab, I open to the first page, I start to read.  At this point, I have the image of my face getting too close to the nozzle of a vacuum cleaner.  I'm sucked in.

And inside the book is where I want to stay, at the peril of losing control of everything else that really matters in life.  Committed readers are much like meth addicts in this regard.

Here is what my factory-piston brain is trying to convince me I should do: lean closer to the book, assimilate into The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, concentrate deeply on samurai Japan and let everything else slip to the background in a whisper: the chatty barista, the herd of high school athletes, the wind moving through Richard Hugo's grass.

Ah.  Hugo's grass.  That reminds me, I haven't read my "daily poem" this morning.  And after I'm through with that, I think I hear the Radioactive Lady tapping her foot.  She's waiting for me to come back to her...

Driving Montana: Richard Hugo on the landscape

Driving Montana

The day is a woman who loves you.  Open.
Deer drink close to the road and magpies
spray from your car.  Miles from any town
your radio comes in strong, unlikely
Mozart from Belgrade rock and roll
from Butte.  Whatever the next number
you want to hear it.  Never has your Buick
found this forward a gear.  Even
the tuna salad in Reedpoint is good.

Towns arrive ahead of imagined schedule
Absorakee at one.  Or arrive so late--
Silesia at nine--you recreate the day.
Where did you stop along the road
and have fun?  Was there a runaway horse?
Did you park at that house, the one
alone in a void of grain, white with green
trim and red fence, where you know you lived
once?  You remembered the ringing creek,
the soft brown forms of far off bison.
You must have stayed hours, then drove on.
In the motel you know you’d never seen it before.

Tomorrow will open again, the sky wide
as the mouth of a wild girl, friable
clouds you lose yourself to.  You are lost
in miles of land without people, without
one fear of being found, in the dash
of rabbits, soar of antelope, swirl
merge and clatter of streams.
                                    --Richard Hugo
 
 
I think I've mentioned before that I like to start off the day by reading a poem.  For the past six months, Richard Hugo has been my morning-coffee companion.  Poem by poem, I'm working my way through Making Certain It Goes On.  Hugo's descriptions of war, Scotland, and especially Montana have been jewels I roll around on my tongue.  Since my work takes me throughout the western half of the state, I do "drive Montana" a lot--I-90 is my Main Street--and I can vouch that Hugo gets the details precisely right--the "spray" of magpies taking flight from your approaching car, the house in the "void of grain," the sky "wide as the mouth of a wild girl."  It's all there just beyond my windshield.  I've yet to try the tuna salad in Reedpoint, but I have no doubt it's good.

When Hugo moved to Montana to teach at the university in Missoula in 1964, he quickly found a connection with the land and its residents.  Life in Milltown, the small community east of Missoula, proved to be too violent for Hugo's first wife Barbara and she moved home to Seattle.  The poet threw himself into teaching students and transforming Missoula into what eventually became known as "the Paris of the Rockies."  As William Kittredge writes in his introduction to Making Certain It Goes On:  "Natural and direct and informed, funny and utterly open, always honest, if occasionally maudlin, he was soon reinventing the possibilities of literature in Montana for another generation.  Montana, he told students, resonated."
 
Hugo took the Big Sky and made it his own and now the state belongs to him.  You cannot drive anywhere within these borders without coming to the realization that you are traveling through a landscape that is no longer just rivers and granite and wheat, it has become the words of Richard Hugo.  We drive on roads paved with his language.
 

*     *     *     *     *

 
Before I go, let me also mention this fine essay by Charles Finn, "The Milltown Union Bar Revisited," which recently appeared at New West.  Finn pays a visit to the "working-class watering hole" made famous by Hugo in his poem with the mountain goat staring at barflies from behind plexiglass.  Finn is looking for any remaining traces of the poet in the fake mahogany walls and the chipped veneer of the bar top.  He doesn't find him, of course, but he's okay with that.  The bar must adapt to changing times; it's up to us to find the Hugo left inside ourselves.
 
 
Photo: Dusk outside Boulder, MT, June 16, 2009.

Be It Resolved: Booking the Year Ahead

My reading habits are sporadic, flighty, and subject to change at the next FedEx delivery to my front door.  The best way to describe it is a dog chasing a butterfly through a meadow: snapping his teeth at first one butterfly then, as another crosses his field of vision, suddenly dodging after that one, and the next, and the next.

I have an unnatural perception of my books, treating them less as objects and more as creatures with feelings that can be hurt.  For instance, if I have a book in my To-Read Stack and it has, after many months of patient waiting, finally made its way to the summit, ready to be the next one to be opened and read, but then I suddenly come into possession of a book that absolutely demands my absolute attention and I put that volume at the top of Mount TRS, I'll carry around a heavy guilt for that poor book that almost got read.  I'll make some lame excuses about the importance of the newcomer, the interloper book--something like, "You don't understand, this is Philip Roth.  I can't turn him away"--and equally lame promises of "Someday soon, I'll get around to reading you.  Please don't be angry with me."

Now you understand why I've been in therapy for most of my adult life.

This past week, in a fit of typical year-end rejuvenation, I decided to completely rearrange and reconsider my To-Read Stack.  I cut out about a dozen books, but still it looms dangerously high on my desk.  (I've promised myself that if it ever reaches the point where Mount TRS looks like it will avalanche down on me and cause physical harm--perhaps even death--then I will either subtract more books and deal with the guilt or else move the stack to another location.)

So, today I've decided to give you a brief geologic analysis of the stacks.  First the long view.  I believe you've met my desk before:

Now let's zoom in for a closer look (clicking any of these photos will give you an enlarged view):

This pile is a combination of books I've been assigned to review for New West (the first four fishing-related books) and three books I've started this past year but never finished, due to any number of new books catching my attention like the aforementioned butterflies.  I suspect this stack will take me well into February to finish (he says optimistically and just a tad foolishly).

With the exception of the Library of America Lynd Ward boxed set on top, this stack mostly consists of books written by friends and internet acquaintances.  Starting at the top and working my way down: A Father and an Island by O. Alan Weltzein, 600 Hours of Edward and The Summer Son by Craig Lancaster, Volt by Alan Heathcock, Quiet Americans by Erika Dreifus, The Ringer by Jenny Shank, Dog on the Cross by Aaron Gwyn, This is Not the Story You Think It Is by Laura Munson, In the Devil's Territory by Kyle Minor, Stranded by Jen Dutton (she and I went to grad school together), and Tim Sandlin's Gro Vont Trilogy (Social Blunders, Sorrow Floats, and Skipped Parts).  Note to any of these author-friends reading this: the order of this stack is not necessarily the order in which I'll read them, and there is a small chance I won't get around to reading them (see the Butterfly Caveat above).  In which case, feel free to heap copious amounts on guilt on my shoulders.  For me, guilt is as much a carrot as it is a stick on my hindquarters.

By the way, if any of those books look like something you might want to read, I encourage you to follow the links and add them to your shopping cart.  Having read at least a small portion of each book, I can assure you that your money will be well spent.  Who knows, maybe you'll even get around to reading them before me.

This stack starts off with a beautiful little edition of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland which I bought sometime in the past 18 months.  It fits neatly in the palm of my hand and has all the original John Tenniel illustrations.  I've never read Alice and this edition practically demands that I do so (instead of "DRINK ME," it says "READ ME").

Traveling downward, I come to the Montana section of Mount TRS: a history of Butte (Copper Camp), The Pass by Thomas Savage (which the aforementioned Alan Weltzein has been urging me to read for more than a year now), Everything by Kevin Canty, Half in Love by Maile Meloy, another Butte history (The War of the Copper Kings by Carl B. Glasscock), Blood Knot by Pete Fromm, Red Rover by Deirdre McNamer, and The Car That Brought You Here Still Runs by Frances McCue (which I'll probably read after I finish the collection of Richard Hugo poems I've been working my way through this year).

Then comes a novel about Charles Dickens and the doomed Arctic explorer John Franklin: Wanting by Richard Flanagan.  The next book, Then Came the Evening, is by an Idaho writer, Brian Hart, I heard read at this year's Montana Festival of the Book.  I liked what I heard so much that I ran out of the room and immediately bought Hart's novel at the festival bookstore.  Next comes another short story collection I've been wanting to read, What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us by Laura van den Berg.  Another ambitious reading project for 2011 is the Library of America collection of Flannery O'Connor's novels and short stories, along with Brad Gooch's biography of Miss O'Connor.  Besides Charles Dickens, Flannery O'Connor has had the deepest influence on my own writing and I've been dying to read this highly-acclaimed biography.

When during my interview with Thomas McGuane I confessed that I had never read anything by Philip Roth, he insisted that I read American Pastoral.  And you know, when Captain Berserko insists, you have no choice but to obey.

And finally, three novels which are the biggest and brightest butterflies currently occupying my attention:  Aurorarama by Jean-Christophe Valtat, Full Dark, No Stars by Stephen King, and The Four Fingers of Death by Rick Moody (apart from a couple of short stories, I've never read anything by Mr. Moody, so this looks like a good place to start).

Of all the stacks, this is the one which will likely receive the most attention; it's full of books that have either received rave reviews, are by authors I know and trust, or which practically carry the threat of death if I don't read them soon.  Not one to take such threats lightly, I'll be grabbing from this stack frequently in 2011.  At the top, we have two short story collections by Lewis Nordan, The All-Girl Football Team and Welcome to the Arrow-Catcher Fair.  These are both books I read years ago and which deserve a second go-through this year.  I'm a huge fan of Lewis Nordan--one of the most under-read, under-appreciated contemporary American writers.  I've said it before and I'll say it again, Nordan is the only writer I know who can break your heart while herniating you with laughter.

That thick unbound brick of pages you see beneath the Nordan books is the uncorrected proof of Adam Levin's The Instructions I received from McSweeney's some months ago.  When it comes time to actually read this 1,030-page behemoth, I'll probably open up the wallet and shell out a few clams for the hardbound version.  I doubt this unbound proof could survive the three weeks it will take me to read it.

 From there, the must-reads in the stack are: Tinkers by Paul Harding, Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov, Skippy Dies by Paul Murray, The Fates Will Find Their Way by Hannah Pitard, The Illumination by Kevin Brockmeier, Witches on the Road Tonight by Sheri Holman, Give Me Your Heart by Joyce Carol Oates (which is also this week's Friday Freebie--enter NOW), Gryphon by Charles Baxter, Long, Last, Happy by Barry Hannah, Room by Emma Donoghue, Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned by Wells Tower, the Volokhonsky-Pevear translation of Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak, Sunnyside by Glen David Gold, and Last Night in Twisted River by John Irving.

 Whew!  (pats brow with handkerchief)

 Not shown in these photos are a couple of books I have queued up on my Kindle (The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet by David Mitchell and My American Unhappiness by Dean Bakopoulos) and on order from Amazon (Lord of Misrule by Jaimy Gordon and Unbroken by Laura Hillenbrand).

First, however, is this year's Agatha Christie.  I always try to start off the New Year with a cozy whodunit from the Queen of Crime.  This year, I think it will be The Seven Dials Mystery.

 So, there you have it: my overambitious, slightly unrealistic reading plan for 2011.  Given the fact that I only read an average of 50 books a year (this year, I managed to sneak in 52), there's a good chance many of these spines won't be cracked.  And then I'll spend the rest of the time wallowing in guilt.

 What about you?  What are you looking forward to reading in the coming year?