Punk > Recent Status Updates

On THANK YOU MARIO BUT OUR PRINCESS IS IN ANOTHER CASTLE: It’s a simple song about how Toad must feel inside when Mario beats Bowser, which is to say, it’s a song about being surprised to see someone whose absence from your life has been a total catastrophe: personally, physically, spiritually, emotionally, practically, vertically, horizontally, Game Over.

This is one of Chiyo-ni's best known Buddhist haiku and is supposedly expressing the peace of detachment, but I just love how dismissive it is:

anyway
leave it to the wind—
dry pampas grass

Got this back from the library just in time to finish up the winter section:

falling down laughing
at others falling down—
snow viewing

"Every war has its hotel," Cohen opined. "Tom Friedman said that, though I can’t say he ever said anything else I agreed with."

Lines from "Family Happiness" that as Darnielle put it "look down the line toward “No Children":

I hope the stars don’t even bother to come out tonight.
I hope we both freeze to death.

"One reason I began performing under a collective name was to put distance between what I was doing and the confessional mode of songwriting. I prefer that my stories speak for themselves. They seem stronger to me when they do."

I still haven't heard any of these early songs out in the wild (i.e. without looking for them), and I haven't heard Horseradish Road at all, but on the page it very much sounds like a Mountain Goats song.

"Financial ruin is an almost irresistible theme for me; as soon as I feel tempted to drain a character’s bank account, I do it, whether owing to bank error or poor money management skills on their part, it does me no force, I must have their money, the better to flush it down the toilet for them."

Guys, I just really enjoy John Darnielle's whole thing. On "Commandante": "There is a tradition, from the earliest folk musics, of songs in which the speaker boasts of his talents, or his successes, or his sexual prowess. There is a tradition in Mountain Goats songs of boasting about having, e.g., “a storage locker full of cow figurines.” This song is as firmly inside that tradition as you can get."

"One longstanding aesthetic goal of mine is to be writing in poetic language that comes out sounding like speech—there are a lot of ways to think about poetry, and about how it relates to speech, and still more ways to think about how song does or doesn’t differ from poetry in how it does or doesn’t resemble speech."

Darnielle on his initial resistance to including lyrics in his liner notes and a song that addressed both "you" and "You": "There is something hilarious—no, something fun to me—about working in a communicative medium while expressing, in that medium, a palpable ambivalence toward the whole project of communication."

NEW BRITAIN :
You’ve had it up to here with my west country talk.
You can hardly understand a word I say.
The shortest tree around here is a hundred feet tall.
It’s going to rain today.

Darnielle: I like this narrator who steps into the frame and immediately makes four declarations of which he seems absolutely convinced: supposition, accusation, declaration, prediction.

"We all have things we like best about ourselves. Sometimes these line up with the things others like best in us, and sometimes not. “Stories that take place against a backdrop of hazily defined political tension and that seem to be careening toward an unhappy resolution for all involved” is probably not high on anybody’s list of most desired qualities in a Mountain Goats song, but on my list it’s very high indeed."

"The most remarkable thing about you standing in the doorway is that it’s you, and that you’re standing in the doorway"—I read that line in "Going to Georgia" and felt like I was close to a Mountain Goats breakthrough, but–what it really is–as I discovered paging backwards through this book is that he just likes to have people standing in doorways or near them or by a window.

Managed to squeeze in a few more poems before my loan expired. Now on page 189.

Now THIS has to go back to the library and I'm going to switch to the ebook that was magically available but still won't get me through to the end because you really can't read more than five or six pages of this at a time. My Currently Reading list is going to be a mess of half-read books for a while. (Jk, it already is.)

This book is about to self-destruct, so for future reference, I'm on page 184.

but for their voices
the herons would disappear—
this morning's snow

"He stood there, one hand still on Arkasha’s shoulder, feeling like an army that had outrun its supply lines."

I feel like many of Chiyo-ni's haiku depend on their zen exhibitionism and don't offer much to the non-enlightened reader. But occasionally I find one that is enjoyable or meaningful even without the zen background, like the previous gourd poem, and this one:

autumn field—
some grasses flower
some don't

Chiyo-ni's other famous haiku:

a hundred gourds
from the heart
of one vine

Chiyo-ni's most famous haiku:

morning glory–
the well-bucket entangled
I ask for water

the mosquito net
with a corner untied—
ah, the moon

I don't care what this poem is really about, something zen, I'm sure, or that there's some question of whether Chiyo-ni even wrote it, I just love how it sounds like the moon's snuck inside the netting.

And "These Mornings," written in 1944, is still chillingly relevant today:

https://worldliteraturetoday.org/blog...

"At the Bomb Testing Site" is one of my favorite Stafford poems. It's all about the lizard elbows.

change of kimono:
showing only her back
to the blossom's fragrance

cool breeze–
enclosed in my kimono sleeves
till falling asleep

the coolness–
of the bottom of her kimono
in the bamboo grove

Darnielle on "Going to Wisconsin": It seems like a lot of nonsense, but I would defend it in court—"the boat wasn't real, and this is how I feel. / You don't know where you're going until you arrive" is practically a precis for my method for the next, what, thirty years? Some of these early songs get me into a dreamy state where I imagine nothing, nothing of my work surviving, except this.

keeping cool–
in the deep night
strangers on the bridge