I Just Read About That…

SOUNDTRACK: LINDA THOMPSON-“Love’s for Babies and Fools” (2013).

After two pop songs, here’s a major bummer from Linda Thompson.  Thompson is a fascinating figure.  She was married to Richard Thompson and made many albums with him.  They split very acrimoniously and them Linda suffered from psychogenic dysphonia, which rendered her incapable of singing.  She stopped singing for 11 years.  Now with botox injections into her throat she can sing again, but cannot perform live. She released an album n 2002 (Richard played guitar on a track) and another album in 2007.  Now’s she’s back and Richard plays on this song as well.

In the grand tradition of folk music, Linda’s lyrics are achingly straightforward and powerful:

My father is a traveler, he has a cuckold’s luck,  my mother is a queen but her hands are tied with blood. I’ve a brother in the graveyard, my sister has the blues.  I care only for myself.  Love’s for babies and fools.

The guitar work is beautiful, the song itself is beautiful and depressing at the same time.

Linda’s voice has always been unique—almost otherworldly and yet ordinary at the same time.  It’s strange and mesmerizing.  Welcome back Linda.

[READ: October 1, 2013] “A Different Kind of Father”

This is an excerpt from a new book by Franzen. The book itself is fascinating.  It is a translation of a “Nestroy and Posterity” a somewhat obscure essay from 1912 by the Austrian satirist Karl Kraus.  Franzen’s book is called The Kraus Project and in addition to the translation, Franzen includes a ton of footnotes that are all personal, like this one.  The book is 300 some pages and it sounds like the majority of it is footnotes.  [For those who like to keep track of Franzen’s connections to David Foster Wallace, of course this collection with footnotes does make one think of DFW.  Interestingly, Franzen talks about a book he was writing in 1981 (long before he met DFW which had a main character whose name was Wallace Wallace Wallace].

This footnote (no context is given) is all about the concept of thriving as a man by surpassing your father.  Be that literal or figurative (or literary).  In the case of Kraus, Franzen says, he is denying false paternity.  It was believed that Kraus was the literary son of Heinrich Heine, but Kraus tries to annihilate Heine by dismissing his successes and impugning his character.  However, Johann Nestroy was also a precursor to Kraus but Nestroy was a somewhat neglected and undervalued one, and so Kraus seeks to place Nestroy as his surrogate father.

Then Franzen talks about himself.  In 1981 he won a Fulbright to west Berlin (evidently they gave far more to Germany than any other country so he played the odds ell). Franzen knew he could never compete with his father in the same line of work (his father was a highly regarded railroad man), so he went in a different direction: fiction.  Franzen wished to be a writer and he had learned about Thomas Pynchon from criticisms by Harold Bloom.  Thus Pynchon became his surrogate father.  But Pynchon is a hard man to live up to so Franzen spent much of his time bashing his head against the wall and trying (in vain) to imitate Pynchon.  I’d love to see some of the bad Pynchon that Franzen tried to write–his then girlfriend (named V. which is surely not a Pynchon coincidence) called Gravity’s Rainbow the ultimate boy novel, a rockets and erections book (which… fair enough).

What is so entertaining about this footnote is that Franzen reveals that he has documented proof of his attempts because he and V. (who applied for a Fulbright in a less welcoming country and did not get it) were both destined to be writers.  So they knew their correspondence worked as both a journal and as a safe haven for posterity (they kept carbons of all of their letters [I love Franzen’s pretentiousness]).

So he quotes from his letters at length and they are interesting and embarrassing for him (and I applaud him for including them).

Franzen also talks about how he was engaged to V. but never told his family (because he knew it was a bad idea).  His latest excuse was that his mother had just gotten sick and he didn’t wan to make her any worse.  So, basically Franzen was faking a lot of things–lying about the engagement, trying to be Pynchon although he couldn’t and even saying he was studying German when he really wasn’t–he was writing an English novel.

This is why you should never skip the footnotes–it’s where the most interesting stuff lies.

Interestingly, a friend just send me a brief interview with Franzen, in which he talks about some of the issues of fathers and sons (and mothers and sons) in the context of his novel Freedom.  He also talks about David Foster Wallace’s suicide.