{"id":1041,"date":"2024-01-06T16:44:04","date_gmt":"2024-01-06T16:44:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2024\/01\/06\/saturday-night-at-the-oldies-songs-from-a-passage-in-thomas-mcguane\/"},"modified":"2024-01-06T16:44:04","modified_gmt":"2024-01-06T16:44:04","slug":"saturday-night-at-the-oldies-songs-from-a-passage-in-thomas-mcguane","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2024\/01\/06\/saturday-night-at-the-oldies-songs-from-a-passage-in-thomas-mcguane\/","title":{"rendered":"Saturday Night at the Oldies: Songs from a Passage in Thomas McGuane"},"content":{"rendered":"

Here is a passage from Thomas McGuane, Nothing but Blue Skies<\/em>, Houghton-Mifflin, 1992, pp. 201-202, to which I have added hyperlinks.<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

He [Frank Copenhaver] turned on the radio and listened to an old song called "Big John"<\/a>: 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.<\/span><\/p>\n

On to an oldies station and the joy of finding Bob Dylan: "You've gotta lot of nerve to say you are my friend."<\/a> 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." <\/a>Frank began to sweat.  "And I know that if you love me too, what a wonderful world this would be."<\/span><\/p>\n

[. . .]<\/span><\/p>\n

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

Wandering the Sam Cooke wing of the musty mausoleum of moldy oldies, we may as well cue up Bring It On Home to Me<\/a> and Cupid.<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

Literary Addendum<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n

My go-to literary guys, one dead, the other alive, D. G. Myers<\/a> and Patrick Kurp respectively,  have little to say about McGuane. Myers says nothing while Kurp<\/a> reports, "I do remember reading the early novels of Thomas McGuane but I couldn\u2019t tell you a thing about them."<\/span><\/p>\n

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." <\/span><\/p>\n

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<\/a> we find:<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

Ivo Andri\u0107, The Bridge on the Drina<\/em><\/strong> (Serbo-Croatian, 1945; English, 1959). Anyone still interested in the former Yugoslavia must read two books\u2014Rebecca West\u2019s magisterial two-volume travel book Black Lamb and Grey Falcon<\/em> (1941) and the masterpiece of Serbian literature, published four years later. Compared to One Hundred Years of Solitude<\/em> for its multi-generational sweep, Andri\u0107\u2019s novel<\/a> is a hundred pages shorter, scrupulously avoids the magic in magical realism, and might be more accurately described as The Painted Bird<\/em> with a conscience.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 … Continue reading “Saturday Night at the Oldies: Songs from a Passage in Thomas McGuane”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[40,18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1041","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-literary-matters","category-music"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1041","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1041"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1041\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1041"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1041"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1041"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}