76 Days and Counting Down...

What am I doing to prepare for law school? Listening to folk music.

I know, I'm supposed to be reading A Civil Action, or a biography of a supreme court justice, or watching Paper Chase or working on a political campaign or touring Europe by bicycle. But for some reason I'm more interested in Clarence Ashley even than in reading about the latest atrocity George Bush's country's army has committed over in ... wherever the hell they are.

So interested, in fact, that I'm wading through Greil Marcus's overwrought and barely comprehensible book, The Old, Weird America. This, at least, should be good practice for law school.

In Marcus's vision of ... whatever he happens to be talking about... the words take over. It's a tradition, seemingly, of rock criticism, that it be all purple and cosmic and that it build so elaborately upon both the music and the critic's idiosyncratic perception of the music that the two become one in the mind of the reader... so that if one hasn't actually heard the music in question, if it is not fresh in one's mind, one runs the risk of being sucked down in the purple quicksand. And quicksand takes forever to get out of your clothes and hair.

Here's Marcus on the fragmentary nature of some folk lyrics:

What appears to be a singer's random assemblage of fragments to fit a certain melody line may be, for that singer, an assemblage of fragments that melody called forth. It may be a sermon delivered by the singer's subconscious, his or her second mind. It may be a heretic's way of saying what could never be said out loud, a mask over a boiling face.

Holy shit. A boiling face? And then -

The banjo could be from another song or another world. The music seems to have been found in the middle of some greater song: it is inexorable. The opening and closing flourishes on the banjo seem false, because the figures in the music make no progress, go from no one place to any other; the sound was here before the singer started and it will be here when he's gone...

And so on, and on, until Clarence Ashley looms up in your mind, archetypal, almost demonic, beyond good and evil, picking on the strings of his banjo as if they were the strings of your soul, if your soul had strings, only it doesn't.

Oh, but then - to your great relief - you listen to the song. And it's just a song. Thank God. Maybe my sleep tonight will be untroubled.

It's not just him, though - it's Lester Bangs, everyone on Rolling Stone's staff (past, present, and future), in fact seemingly it's everyone who writes about music. Here's Robert Cantwell, quoted by Marcus:

Listen to 'I Wish I Was a Mole in the Ground' again and again... learn to play the banjo and sing it yourself over and over again, study every printed version, give up your career and maybe your family, and you will not fathom it.

Oooh... spooky. Deep. Even true. Though of course the song is also - and perhaps more signficantly - just a song, in a world of songs, about any one of which one could say the same thing.

Hundreds of pages of this may be more than I can stand.

It's good, though.