Yearly Archives: 2006

wichita linemen

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I have a number of versions of “Wichita Lineman”, the song written by Jimmy Webb & popularized by Glen Campbell. Here, as an exercise, I’m going to attempt to go through them all & say something about each one. Hopefully the process will teach me something about repetition and variation; I’m also interested in originality, and the idea of standards.

(Also, I need some content to play with on Drupal. That’s the most proximate reason. (The sharpminded may notice that this site is not actually running Drupal which is true – I didn’t care quite enough about Drupal to sort out its confusion and then I moved everything to Drupal including the first six entries or so which I actually wrote a while ago and then forgot about while I was busy doing other things.))

Why “Wichita Lineman”? It’s a nice song, first of all. It’s not a song I can claim to know anything much about – it came out & was popular well a decade before I was born. While I had heard of the song – most specifically in the context of the title of the KLF’s “Wichita Lineman Was a Song I Once Heard”, a track on Chill Out, an album I’ve played more often than just about any – I don’t think I’d actually heard the song, to my conscious knowledge anyway, until I downloaded Glen Campbell’s version a couple of years ago out of curiosity. It’s strange that I never would have heard it, but I don’t think that I had.

As of this writing, I’ve got somewhere over 50 versions, three-and-a-half hours worth. Most – but not all – of these are by artists I don’t know, or don’t know particularly well, if at all. This is somehow nice: there are an enormous range of interpretations, only fixed around a basic structure. They range in time over the past 37 years. Some are very nice; some are abysmal.

Alas, I am a very slow writer.

Precedents for this project (or a bibliography):

  • Raymond Queneau, Exercises in Style
  • Michael Daddino’s “Send in the Clones”, which started off doing roughly the same thing for “Send in the Clowns”
  • Glenn McDonald’s The War Against Silence for its inspiring magnitude.
  • Allmusic’s review of Glen Campbell’s version

death by water

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PHLEBAS the Phoenician, a fortnight dead,
Forgot the cry of gulls, and the deep seas swell
And the profit and loss.
                          A current under sea
Picked his bones in whispers. As he rose and fell
He passed the stages of his age and youth
Entering the whirlpool.
                          Gentile or Jew
O you who turn the wheel and look to windward,
Consider Phlebas, who was once handsome and tall as you.

(T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land.)

start

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“We can safely assert, even, that human civilization has added no essential feature to the general idea of play. Animals play just like men. We have only to watch young dogs to see that all the essentials of human play are present in their merry gambols. They invite one another to play by a certain ceremoniousness of attitude and gesture. They keep to the rule that you shall not bite, or not bite hard, your brother’s ear. They pretend to get terribly angry. And – what is most important – in all these doings they plainly experience tremendous fun and enjoyment. Such rompings of young dogs are only one of the simpler forms of animal play. There are other, much more highly developed forms: regular contests and beautiful performances before an admiring public.”

(Johan Huizinga, Homo ludens: a study of the play element in culture.)

found epigraphs, cont’d.

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“. . . Kearns had the fortune to meet the two fighters who in my opinion had the best ring names of all time – Honey Melody and Mysterious Billy Smith. Smith was also a welterweight champion. ‘He was always doing something mysterious,’ Kearns says. ‘Like he would step on your foot, and when you looked down, he would bite you on the ear. If I had a fighter like that now, I could lick heavyweights. . . .”

(A. J. Liebling, The Sweet Science, p.69, quoted in Alice Notley’s notes on Ted Berrigan’s “Sonnet XIX”.)

eagleton for [some other] day

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“. . . but he suffered from the empiricist illustion that what was real was what you could smell with your own fingers. Samuel Johnson held much the same view – and if Johnson is the kind of ‘character’ the English adore, it is not only because they take a stoutly individualist delight in the idiosyncratic, but because a ‘character’ represents the tangible truth of a person rather than the abstract truth of an idea.

Hence the English obsession with biography, which is among other things a covert anti-intellectualism.”

(Terry Eagleton, “Reach-Me-Down Romantic” in the London Review of Books, 19 June 2003)

mandeville

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“Though Sir John Mandeville (in his Travels, among the earliest and most heroic of plagiaries in the French) confessed, “Of Paradise I cannot speak properly, for I was not there”: what matter? Here above, the concrete cliffs had disappeared, only their lights studding darkness which posed as space and postured firmament.”

(The Recognitions, p. 387.)

the girl (ii)

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The girl (II)

On a bench along an avenue sat a girl. All around her lay gardens with charming houses inside, and the girl, you might say, was lovely to look at.

Everyone who saw her sitting quietly on her own had a desire to engage her in conversation. Soon someone stepped up and offered her a book to read. Thanking him, she turned down his offer, however, saying she wished nothing more than to sit quietly.

The rejected one withdrew, and then another courteous individual approached to ask whether he might have the pleasure of inviting her to dinner.

Her response to this generous petition was to reply that she had no desire to eat, she was luxuriating in the simplicity of her wants, which afforded her complete satisfaction with herself and the world around her. She thought it more pleasant to sit quietly than go to a restaurant.

When the inquirer had left, there appeared before her attractive face a person who tried to persuade her to venture a gondola ride with him.

Such an excursion would lead to something else unnecessary, she instructively brought forth, adding she would rather think quietly upon her bench about some arbitrary matter than be prevailed upon to amuse herself.

When the chivalrous one had left the scene of his efforts to be gallant and generous, she was offered a bouquet of flowers. She shook her head, stating she wished to sit quietly and not so much as stir a finger to accept this small tribute, which might allow her to give herself airs.

Small birds were trilling in the treetops, the sun shone down the avenue, people strolled to and fro, and water swam past the girl.

She was grateful to the sun, the twittering she found delightful, and the people she compared to the water that came and went.

(Robert Walser, trans. Susan Bernovsky)