Saturday Night at the Oldies: Songs from a Passage in Thomas McGuane

Here is a passage from Thomas McGuane, Nothing but Blue Skies, Houghton-Mifflin, 1992, pp. 201-202, to which I have added hyperlinks.

He [Frank Copenhaver] turned on the radio and listened to an old song called "Big John": everybody falls down a mine shaft; nobody can get them out because of something too big to pry; Big John comes along and pries everybody loose but ends up getting stuck himself; end of Big John.  Frank guessed it was a story of what can happen to those on the top of the food chain.

On to an oldies station and the joy of finding Bob Dylan: "You've gotta lot of nerve to say you are my friend." No one compares with this guy, thought Frank.  I feel sorry for the young people of today with their stupid fucking tuneless horseshit; that may be a generational judgment but I seriously doubt it.  Frank paused in his thinking , then realized he was suiting up for his arrival in Missoula.  In a hurricane of logging trucks, he heard, out of a hole in the sky the voice of Sam Cooke: "But I do know that I love you." Frank began to sweat.  "And I know that if you love me too, what a wonderful world this would be."

[. . .]

All the little questions. Will they lose interest when you go broke? Sam Cooke: "Give me water, my work is so hard."  What work? Tough to believe both Sam Cooke and Otis Redding are dead.

Wandering the Sam Cooke wing of the musty mausoleum of moldy oldies, we may as well cue up Bring It On Home to Me and Cupid.

Literary Addendum

My go-to literary guys, one dead, the other alive, D. G. Myers and Patrick Kurp respectively,  have little to say about McGuane. Myers says nothing while Kurp reports, "I do remember reading the early novels of Thomas McGuane but I couldn’t tell you a thing about them."

Well, there are novels like that. I am now thinking of a novel I read a few years ago by a female, competently done, but I can't remember her name, or the title: forgettable and forgotten. To tell the truth, most of us will soon be forgotten no matter what we write or how well we write it: we're lucky if a few read us now. But if you are writing in the right spirit, it ought to be a matter of indifference to you whether you are read or not. Kerouac at one point spoke of "self-ultimacy." 

One novel I've never forgotten I read well over a half-century ago while an undergraduate. It made the cut at Myers' place, where we find:

Ivo Andrić, The Bridge on the Drina (Serbo-Croatian, 1945; English, 1959). Anyone still interested in the former Yugoslavia must read two books—Rebecca West’s magisterial two-volume travel book Black Lamb and Grey Falcon (1941) and the masterpiece of Serbian literature, published four years later. Compared to One Hundred Years of Solitude for its multi-generational sweep, Andrić’s novel is a hundred pages shorter, scrupulously avoids the magic in magical realism, and might be more accurately described as The Painted Bird with a conscience.

Comments

[Joe Odegaard]

Water boy, where are you hiding ?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AMnHOlxEy28

[BV]

Catacomb Boy, where do you dig this stuff up?

[Joe Odegaard]

Hi Brother Bill

I remembered that song from a Paul Robeson LP my folks had. My dad, who had a beautiful tenor voice, used to sing it. He used to sing John McCormack songs too. In fact the last song I heard him sing was a McCormack song, "Believe me if all thy endearing young charms," which he san at our wedding in 1992, in fact. Here it is:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wpO0mRwCTPE

[Hector]

I often think about the fact that Shakespeare - whom most people think of as having achieved literary 'immortality' if anyone has - only wrote around four hundred years ago, not a great amount of time even in the history of civilisation. Four hundred years before Shakespeare's time would only put you, roughly, in the time of St. Francis of Assisi, King John and Magna Carta.