101. BOURGEOIS BLUES

From the Archives

(May 2005) Found the words and chords to the old Leadbelly song "Bourgeois Blues" a while back and hashed out a tune on the guitar. I've never heard the recorded version, so don’t know if my approach is anything like Leadbelly's, but do like the one I created.

Listen here people, listen to me. Don’t try to find no home down in Washington, DC. Lawd it’s a bourgeois town. oh it's a bourgeois town. I got the bourgeois blues—gonna spread the news around.

White folks in Washington they know how to throw a colored man a nickel just to see him bow. Lawd it's a bourgeois town. Oh it's a bourgeois town. I got the bourgeois blues—gonna spread the news around.

Yeah.

I played it for a pal today and she said my voice is perfectly suited for rot-gut blues. Taught her a few chords too in the coruse of introducing her to Lucinda Williams’s and GIllian Welch's music.

I'm thinking Dm and A7 and B7 and G and C can take her a long ways with them—and everyone needs to learn how to play Lucinda's "Hot Love."

Lucinda’s songs aren’t even complicated really, and some of her rhymes make me laugh out loud. Example: The sun's so hot and my heart is thumping. Let me buy you a beer or somethin’. You’ve been traveling a hard road. Sit down Bill and lighten your load. .

I love her twang and her passion, and find her allusions to American poets wonderful.

Lucinda's father runs the Arkansas writing program and is a really good translator.

One of the poets associated with the program committed suicide years ago and this shows up in her songs from time to time (see "Lake Charles," "Pineola," and "Sweet Old World," especially).

So here’s a Miller Williams translation that I really like. The poem is by Nicanor Parra (1914–), a Chilean academic who refused to leave the country after the coup that brought Pinochet to power. Instead he established himself as a voice of dissent.

Carolyn Forché says that Parra's poetry "imparts a quality of multiple estrangement and exemplifies his deep commitment to what he calls anti-poetry—a rejection of poetic language and conventions” (from her brilliant compilation Against Forgetting: Twentieth-Century Poetry of Witness).

SENTENCES
by Nicanor Parra
(translated by Miller Williams)

Let’s no fool ourselves.
The automobile is a wheelchair
A lion is made of lambs
Poets have no biographies
Death is a collective habit
Children are born to be happy
Reality has a tendency to fade away
Fucking is a diabolical act
God is a good friend of the poor.

I scratched that poem onto a piece of silver paper with a nail and posted it on my bulletin board at work. People never fail to comment on it too.

•

In other news, I came across a sobering statistic about our depreciating currency today. The US's deficit in international transactions reached $666 billion in 2004, which is up 24 percent from 2003. That’s 5.7 percent of the economy (2–3 times what economists generally consider sustainable) ... but Shrub is a compassionate conservative looking after our money, right?

So here’s my obscure joke of the day: Q. What nationality are you? A. Depreciating currency.

97. WILD IDEA

From the Archives

(May 2005) I had this wild dream last night, probably because I reread my entry BIG ENGINE, LITTLE RADIATOR and so was thinking about the theory of evolution and subspecies that survive and subspecies that become extinct and those idiots in Kansas with their insistence on so-called intelligent design and that little mustard plant that fixed its own defective gene etc. etc. etc. instead of falling asleep.

Anyway, in my dream I was a scientist sitting at a wrought-iron table outside a little café—the sort of place Ernest Hemingway describes in “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place”—smoking a cigarette and drinking a java and doodling on a newspaper while pondering the world.

And I said to myself, Self, we classify groups in a long historical glance but what if humans are really divided into two or more groups? If, like Cain and Abel, we are subspecies competing for the same land, the same products, our own laws.

Maybe mutations in our genes, these massive evolutionary changes that differentiate us, account for our superstitions, our insistence on religion, the differences between the reptilian brains of, say, a Kansas City flat-earther and an wiccan dude working in the creative force in Seattle.

My dream question was a radical one: Is there only one form of human walking around or could we be a collection of subspecies competing for survival in a common environment?

Odd dream. Had to write it down as soon as I woke up because I knew THAT wouldn’t stay with me for long!

•

In other news, today I overheard a woman describe herself as having “free-hanging labia.” What a description! She also said, while describing a career change, “I feel like I’ve got my fanny hanging out there and everyone’s looking at my butt crack.”

The woman's got a way with descriptions.

LISTENING TO: That sexy Lucinda Williams song about masturbating: I take off my watch and my earrings, my bracelets and everything. Lie on my back and I moan at the ceiling Ohhhh my baby...