SOUNDTRACK: FRENCH, FRITH, KAISER, THOMPSON-“Bird in God’s Garden/Lost and Found” (1987).
The words are a poem by Rumi. It is a slow droney song that is primarily drums from John French. Thompson sings in his quieter style.
There are several different versions of this song. There’s an earlier unreleased version with Richard & Linda Thompson that is much quieter. I especially like this version because after every other verse they brighten things up with a dramatic five note string riff (or maybe it’s Kaiser on the sanshin) that seems to come out of nowhere.
They spice up the middle of the song with a rollicking traditional Irish sounding fiddle melody from Fred Frith’s “Lost and Found.” (Frith plays violin). It adds a bit of zing to an otherwise dirgey song.
After about three minutes of the slow thumping there’s a wonderfully rocking instrumental section complete with fiddles and bass playing some wild melodies.
It was recorded on the album Live, Love, Larf and Loaf and also appears on Thompson’s collection Watching the Dark (1993).
[READ: September 1, 2019] “Nell Zink’s Satire Raises the Stakes”
I have really enjoyed the Nell Zink books that I’ve read. I’ve even read an excerpt from Doxology, the book that’s reviewed in this essay.
What I like about this essay though is the summations of her writing and her earlier books.
Schwartz says that Zink looks at life from the fringes. She then summarizes her three impossible to summarize books in simple and amusing fashion:
“The Wallcreeper,” tells the story of a woman who leaves her husband to commit ecoterrorism while taking on a string of deadbeat lovers. In “Mislaid,” a white lesbian passes as black in order to get away from her gay husband. “Nicotine” follows squatters in New Jersey whose homes are divided by identitarian interests, such as feminism, indigenous rights, and smoking.
One plot hinges on buckets of feces; another features P.T.A. moms learning about Michel Foucault’s thoughts on sex. This satire is especially angled at those who want to turn the margins into a movement. “Why exactly 20-somethings are considered so vital to protest movements, I never figured out, seeing as how they never vote and have no money,” a character in “The Wallcreeper” reflects.
Schwartz says that Zink used to have an audience of one at a time until the famed interaction with Jonathan Franzen introduced her to a wider audience.
The excerpt that I read from Doxology was about Pam Bailey and Daniel Svoboda and their friend Joe Harris who start a band called Marmalade Sky. There was mention of the Iraq war in it, but the excerpt stopped pretty early.
The essay says that Joe releases successful music (that hadn’t happened in my excerpt) which is described as “Ruins meets Badfinger in a jar of Gerber’s” reads a review in an underground zine.
But this novel reaches far, much farther than I would have guessed. It starts in the 1980s, addresses Operation Desert Shield, September 11th and even our current White House occupant.
Pam has a daughter Flora and we follow her saga as well. A college trip to Ethiopia, internship for the Sierra Club, volunteering for the Green Party and Jill Stein.
The reviewer writes
Here the novel seems not to know whether it should compete with the news or outdo it.
In previous novels, Zink’s outrageousness almost seemed prophetic.
time has seen much of Zink’s satire confirmed by the news. Ecoterrorism loses the aura of absurdity when every month brings a new estimate of the coming death toll from our melting ice caps. Shortly after Zink published a novel about a white woman passing as black, Rachel Dolezal, a Washington State N.A.A.C.P. chapter president, revealed that she was born white but had built a career passing as African-American. These revelations point to Zink’s sharp eye and sense of timing. But they also raise the stakes. What happens to a satirist who sees her darkest visions made real?
I’m not so interested in whether or not she can outdo herself because I love her writing. I am very much looking forward to reading this novel.
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