Literary translation is not something that I ordinarily do, and I might never have tried it if I had never been to Zacatecas. When I was there some years ago, it was not yet a destination point for American or Canadian tourists, and hardly anyone spoke English. My high school Spanish did not cut it; all that remained in my mind were fragments of poetry, and it seemed unlikely that I would want to tell anyone that I had olives in my saddlebags. I’d never been anywhere that made me feel as alien; yet there was also something enchanted about the place that hit me hard. I felt that there was an intensely personal reason for me to be there, but I didn’t know what it was. It was like a city I knew from my dreams.

High in the mountains of central Mexico, Zacatecas was once rich, its silver mine one of the most productive in the world. Pancho Villa kicked ass there in the revolution. The core of the city with its beautifully preserved 18th century buildings had been declared a World Heritage Site. It smelled utterly strange to me—a mixture of unfamiliar flowers, cloyingly sweet, and the toxic reek of automobile exhaust. Many of the streets were narrow and steep. Folks stood on small balconies, or in their windows, looking down on what might be the world’s most constant and impenetrable traffic jam. In a wedding party, we followed a donkey laden with barrels of mezcal through narrow alleys up and away from that traffic, stopped whenever there was a big enough space and danced like fools. Those who were inclined to do so had shots of mezcal. I don’t know what the band was—mariachi, tamborazo, whatever—I remember blazing hot Mexican trumpets. Eventually we climbed to a field high above the city where a laughing fellow handed us bottles of cervesa from an ice-crammed garbage can. I haven’t been a drinker since my forties, so I passed on the mezcal, but I’ve got to admit that cervesa went down just fine. Then, ignoring the tourist guide warnings, I headed for the food table and ate everything I saw. My god, I thought, I love this place!

The wealthy citizens of Zacatecas endowed their city with several stunningly good museums, and one day I went looking for souvenirs in the Pedro Coronel gift shop. By then I’d read in tourist guides that Zacatecas was the home of a famous poet I’d never heard of—Ramón López Velarde—and there were his collected poems on the shelf. A young man working in the gift shop came over to see if he could be of help. I held up the book and asked, “¿Es bueno?” He mistook my ridiculous question as a sign that I could speak Spanish and began to tell me just how bueno López Velarde was—better than bueno, a national treasure. Trying to convey the intensity of his emotions, the young man paced up and down. His face began to quiver. He waved his arms in the air. He recited some of López Velarde’s poetry from memory. His eyes flooded with tears. Of course I bought the book.

Written in a language I could not read, that book sat in my bookcase for years, suggesting to me that there was something I was supposed to do with it. I read López Velarde in translation. The translators often prided themselves on their accuracy, but their poems felt flat to me. They might have got literally what López Velarde said, but their English had no magic, and I never found a translated poem that might make anyone cry. Samuel Beckett’s translations—in Mexican Poetry: An Anthology compiled by Octavio Paz—were better, but Beckett made López Velarde sound overwrought, impenetrable, and Gothic in the worst sense of the word.

I read about the poet. López Velarde was both a devout Catholic and a man obsessively interested in the ladies, an unhappy combination. He was raised in the state of Zacatecas but then, as a young man, moved to Mexico City where, according to Octavio Paz, he “met the devil.” He seems to have spent much of his poetic energy staring into his own conflicted heart; one of his poetry collections was titled “Zozobra” which Paz translates as “Disquiet” but others translate as “Anguish.” A traditionalist not overly fond of the Revolution, López Velarde nonetheless transformed Mexican poetry so thoroughly that nothing was ever the same again. I gathered that his work with its brilliant and bizarre imagery is excruciatingly difficult to translate.

The summer of 2020 we were locked down for COVID, and I had lots of time on my hands. One of López Velarde’s poems, “Humildemente,” had attracted me from the first time I’d read it in the Paz anthology, and I thought, why don’t I try to translate it? Because this was a game I was playing with myself, I could set the rules. I was not allowed to consult any of the Spanish speakers I knew. I was not allowed to look at Beckett’s translation, or at anyone else’s, until I was finished.
I don’t know about the rest of López Velarde’s work, but that particular poem was excruciatingly difficult to translate. I was trying to follow the advice that Pound has famously given to translators: Don’t tell us what he said; tell us what he meant. Well, in order to take a stab at what he meant, I most certainly had to start with what he said.

Missing in any of the translations of López Velarde that I had read was any sense of music, and there was music aplenty in the Spanish, particularly in the first five and the last five stanzas. On the other hand the six stanzas in the middle—a report on the world when the Lord shuts off its power—are as flat and declarative as newspaper headlines. I would try to get the same effect—which meant that sometimes I would allow myself to depart a bit from a literal translation if I had to. It took forever.

Humbly

Ramón López Velarde (1888 – 1921)

Translation by Keith Maillard

For my mother and sisters


When the final weariness
overtakes me, I will return,
like the crane in the proverb,
home to my people
to kneel in the plaza among
the roses and children’s hoops
and the elaborate fringes
on the silken shawls of the ladies.

I’ll kneel in the midst
of the grassy sidewalks
to sanctify the clock
in its distant bell tower,
with its circle of sorrow,
and its hands of gold,
for man and for beast,
as luckily drunk
on the rays of the sun,
I see the Divine in his furnace.

Embraced in an afternoon
light that embroiders
like the luminous threads
of an apostolic spider,
I know that my honour
is humble and humbled
lower than the hooves
of the gentle mules
that carry the Holy Sacrament.

“I know you, O Lord,
though you’re travelling incognito.
At the scent of your incense
I am deafened and speechless,
paralyzed and blind,
bathed in the balm of your presence.

“Your plangent procession
shuts off the power
to these passing moments
as though the streets
were a toy shop
that’s sold out of string.

“My cousin, still holding her needle,
rises behind her high window
to stand as still as a statue.

“The reliable postman
who brings us news of the world
has fallen into his postal bag.

“Genoveva’s wet bodice,
hung out to dry,
no longer dances
on the roof top.

“The hen and her chicks,
battered by rain, have stopped
playing their fairy tales.

“Don Blas’s forehead
is petrified, becomes one
with the sidewalk that’s cracked
by the roots of the ash trees.

“The oranges stop growing.
Quivering beneath your gaze,
I don’t know how much longer
I can go on living.

“Lord, my reckless heart
that has long searched
for arrogant apparitions
is stunned, calls out to you
that I am your grateful plaything.

“Because you have set
in my heart a magnet
shaped like a clover
and the passionate red of a poppy.


“But that same magnet
is humble and hidden
like the magnetized comb
girls use to collect hairpins
as they electrify
their hair in the gloom.

“Lord, this toy
with a heart like a magnet
loves you and makes his confession
with the intimate passion
of the roots that push open
the cracks in the secular sidewalk.

“Everything is on its knees
with its forehead in the dust.
My life is the passionate poppy,
its stem laid out before you
to die beneath your wheels.”

Humildemente

—Ramón López Velarde
(1888 – 1921)
A mi madre y a mis hermanas


Cuando me sobrevenga
el cansancio del fin,
me iré, como la grulla
del refrán, a mi pueblo,
a arrodillarme entre
las rosas de la plaza,
los aros de los niños
y los flecos de seda de los tápalos.

A arrodillarme en medio
de una banqueta herbosa,
cuando sacramentando
al reloj de la torre,
de redondel de luto
y manecillas de oro,
al hombre y a la bestia,
al azar que embriaga
y a los rayos del sol,
aparece en su estufa el Divínisimo.

Abrazado a la luz
de la tarde que borda,
como el hilo de una
apostólica araña,
he de decir mi prez
humillada y humilde,
más que las herraduras
de las mansas acémilas
que conducen al Santo Sacramento.

«Te conozco, Señor,
aunque viajas de incógnito,
y a tu paso de aromas
me quedo sordomudo,
paralítico y ciego,
por gozar tu balsámica presencia.


»Tu carroza sonora
apaga repentina
el breve movimiento,
cual si fueran las calles
una juguetería
que se quedó sin cuerda.

»Mi prima, con la aguja
en alto, tras sus vidrios,
está inmóvil con un gesto de estatua.

»El cartero aldeano,
que trae nuevas del mundo,
se ha hincado en su valija.

»El húmedo corpiño
de Genoveva, puesto
a secar, ya no baila
arriba del tejado.

»La gallina y sus pollos
pintados de granizo
interrumpen su fábula.

»La frente de don Blas
petrificóse junto
a la hinchada baldosa
que agrietan las raíces de los fresnos.

»Las naranjas cesaron
de crecer, y yo apenas
si palpito a tus ojos
para poder vivir este minuto.

»Señor, mi temerario
corazón que buscaba
arrogantes quimeras,
se anonada y te grita
que yo soy tu juguete agradecido.

»Porque me acompasaste
en el pecho un imán
de figura de trébol
y apasionada tinta de amapola.


»Pero ese mismo imán
es humilde y oculto,
como el peine imantado
con que las señoritas
levantan alfileres
y electrizan su pelo en la penumbra.

»Señor, este juguete
de corazón de imán,
te ama y te confiesa
con el íntimo ardor
de la raíz que empuja
y agrieta las baldosas seculares.

»Todo está de rodillas
y en el polvo las frentes;
mi vida es la amapola
pasional, y su tallo
doblégase efusivo
para morir debajo de tus ruedas».

By and large I was able to follow López Velarde quite closely. Finally, when I thought that my version was finished—or at least getting there—I read Beckett’s translation again. To my astonishment, I found that his translation was bad—not mediocre or uninspired, but outright bad. I mean terrible. The great Beckett? I consulted with Professor Google again and discovered that although Beckett had studied Spanish, he was not terribly familiar with it. He had never been to Spain, and his interest in Mexico was somewhat less than zero. He took on the translation job because he needed the money.

The first stanza is not particularly challenging, and Beckett makes it through okay, but in the second stanza he dooms himself. If you’re in a hurry, it’s easy to grab a word that looks like a cognate but isn’t. López Velarde’s poet-narrator kneels in the middle of “una banqueta,” that is, a bench, a stool, or a sidewalk—in this case a sidewalk, as will become clear later in the poem—but Beckett mistakes “banqueta” for “banquete” that does mean banquet, and gives us the ridiculous opening, “To kneel in the midst/ of a grassy feast.”

I can forgive Beckett for the utter mess he made of the challenging second stanza, for using the ancient and obscure word “houseling,” although hardly any English speaker, except perhaps in Ireland, would know that it refers to the administration of the Holy Sacrament—for tossing in some “orange blossoms” even though there is not an orange blossom to be seen in the original—for ignoring the word “estufa” which means “stove.” But I can’t forgive him for missing the main thrust of the entire poem.
Beckett ends the twelfth stanza saying that the poet’s heart “grovels and cries/ that I am thy beholden chattel.” Nothing in the Spanish refers even remotely to groveling, and “chattel” is simply the wrong word. A chattel is property—a horse, a dog, a slave is chattel. Then, from the basket of possible English words for “agradecido” Beckett choses “beholden” with its legalistic implications, as though to underline his point. But in order to say what the poet meant, you have to start with what the poet said, and that is not what López Velarde said. “Juguete” does not mean “chattel.” It means “toy.”

When the poet returns home to his “pueblo”—his village, his people—he’s returning to his childhood to kneel among the roses and the children’s hoops (“los aros de los niños”). He does more than bless the clock in the tower with its sad circles of time (“de redondel de luto”)—he sanctifies it (“sacramentando”), and he does it for all of us, men and beasts (“al hombre y a la bestia”). Then he is randomly, fortuitously, luckily (“al azar”) positioned to see the Divine in his (“estufa”), his stove—his furnace.
“Se anonada” tells us that the poet is overwhelmed, annihilated, slapped silly, stunned; (“y te grita”) and he yells, screams, calls out, “que yo soy tu juguete agradecido” —that I am your grateful toy. I can hear the poet’s delight. He is grateful to the Lord. Why? Because the Lord has given him a special gift. The entire poem has been leading up to that special gift. Humble and hidden in López Velarde’s heart is that exquisite red flower of a magnet. What does it draw to itself? All of the passion, the attention to every passing moment, the awareness of living life that makes us fully human.

How could Beckett have screwed it up as badly as he did? Of course I don’t know, but I can imagine it was something like this. He’s doing the job for the money, and however much they’re paying him, it’s surely not enough for him to sweat blood over every poem. In a hurry—just as he’d grabbed for a cognate and misread “banqueta”—he might have thought he’d got the whole gist of the poem when he was only halfway through it. Right, a Catholic boyhood—I know all about that. What a miserable time that was, all that groveling. Okay, that’s it, the poem’s done. He’s personalized it, made it partially his. A Mexican childhood has become an Irish one. It’s one of those poems that should be called “after”—not a poem translating the original but inspired by it. If he’d labeled it like that—After López Velarde—I would have no problem with it.

Good poetry pushes the boundaries of language, and translating poetry must be among our most difficult literary exercises. Imagine a continuum. On one end is a dead literal translation, one that is meant to tell us exactly what the poem said, and as to anything else—the meter, the rhymes and half rhymes, the assonances, the word play, the music of the original—well, forget it. On the other end are attempts to write a beautiful poem in the target language, and as to getting exactly what the original said, well, forget that. Somewhere in the middle of the continuum is the brave attempt to do both—which is what I have tried to do. Then, as a project totally separate from this continuum, there is the “after” poem—a creative interaction between the original poet and the inspired poet.

My friend Robin Skelton published, under the title of Dark Seasons, a selection of Georg Trakl’s poems. Right there in the book, under the title, it says, “Translated from the German.” “Your German must be really good,” I said to Robin. No, he told me, it wasn’t, but he checked everything with a colleague at the university. Clearly, to Robin, the most important thing was writing beautiful poetry in English, and that’s what he did. He gave me a copy of his book. Some years later I was teaching a poetry class that had a native speaker of German in it. I chose several of the poems in Robin’s book and passed out copies of the originals and Robin’s translations of them. My German student was delighted. He had read Trakl and knew the poems. With thoroughness and gusto, he began to disassemble Trakl’s German and explain to us what was going on. The more he talked, the more inadequate Robin’s translations seemed to be. There were all manner of twists and turns and nuances in the German that Robin had either missed or ignored. Maybe Robin would have been better off—more honest—if, instead of “Translated from the German” he had written, “After Georg Trakl.”

While I was translating “Humildemente,” I had a go at an after-poem myself. It began easily enough. I have a good sense of what “the final weariness” will feel like, and then I will surely want to return to my hometown, if only in memory. In Appalachia, it’s not the crane that always comes back; it’s the cat, so—

When at last I’ve finally crapped out,
I’ll come slinking back
like a scruffy ole tomcat
to West by God Virginia
to kneel in the streets among
the kids’ marbles and skip ropes

—and on and on until I simply can’t make it work anymore. Yes, I do know you, O Lord, though you’re travelling incognito, but not from seeing your statue in a Catholic procession. I did not have a Catholic childhood, but a bland and boring Presbyterian one. Our church did not observe Ash Wednesday. And then there’s Death. Crying out in joyous gratitude to the Lord as he runs over you with his chariot is not how an old man imagines Death.

Some ten years after we were in Zacatecas, the officials of the city erected a splendid monument to López Velarde—a hyper-realistic bronze sculpture. He’s sitting on a park bench, his legs crossed. A conservative young gentleman of his time, he’s wearing a three-piece suit and a tie. His hair has been recently cut, and it’s immaculately parted; his neat little moustache is carefully trimmed; he’s holding a small notebook and what looks like a pencil, though it could be a delicate pen. He’s gazing off into the distance, not pretentiously into the heavens but simply into the sky above his home; his eyes tell us what he’s doing. With a shock, I recognize that distant gaze from having done the same thing myself—he’s searching for the next word or the next line. He’s doing exactly what a poet should be doing. He’s writing.

He was dead at thirty-three, of pneumonia, they say, but it might well have been our previous pandemic, the persisting 1918 flu. I can read more about him, but only in English because I don’t read Spanish. I can try to get some sense of the appallingly difficult mixture of passion and restraint—the old-school formality—of his relationship to his beloved lady. I can try to share his sense of loss, of utter devastation, at all that had changed in his hometown after the revolution. I stare at the photographs of his statue. It’s so realistic that if you came upon it at twilight, you might take it for a real person. “Ramón,” I address him, “yours is a hugely important voice. You deserve to be known in the English-speaking world as well as Rilke.”

Literary translation is not an amusing game one can play like whiling away the time with a cross-word puzzle. To do justice to Ramón López Velarde, a translator must begin with respect—must see the man sitting there on his park bench in Zacetecas, writing—and know him for who he is. To be able to do that, the translator must be utterly saturated in Mexican culture. What I have learned by now is that I am hardly the one to be able to do that.

She comes to look, shakes her head. “Don’t worry about him, honey. He’s all right. He’s just on a bender. You step over him.”

I step over him. In West Virginia, you don’t tell a story just once, so I’ve heard the story many times—how once Ray got so drunk that he had to crawl home on all fours. “He doesn’t drink all that much,” my grandmother says, “but when he does, oh boy!”

“When he’s sober,” my mother says, “you couldn’t ask for a nicer guy.”

“That’s right,” my grandmother says. “They don’t come any nicer.”

They go on with the story. Yeah, Ray got so drunk once that he had to crawl on his hands and knees all the way across Front Street, and the neighbors were worried about him, so somebody went out to stop cars from running over him, and eventually someone—maybe it was Mr. Noyes, they can’t say—anyhow, someone helped him, took two men to get him up and into his apartment, so it was no wonder that he was laying outside our apartment in the hallway that morning. The point of the story is not merely to convey information or even to recycle good old neighborhood gossip—although it does both. The point of the story is to tell the story.

Here comes another one. When my grandmother was a young girl, she was cleaning up the kitchen and found my uncle Shelby’s sheet in the cupboard. Again, I was just a little kid when I first hear this story, so I didn’t know what it meant. His sheet? What sheet? “His Ku Klux Klan sheet. Scared me half to death,” my grandmother says.

“It wasn’t really the Klan,” my mother says. “It operated like a union. You didn’t have unions back in those days, and if anybody came around trying to organize the union, they’d be pulling their body out of the river. So the guys who worked on the railroad, or on the river, or in the mines, got together in the Klan. Sometimes there were even colored guys in the Klan.”

Stories. I grew up hearing stories. “I seen it rolling right along the riverbank there, a hoop snake,” my uncle Addison told me. “They grab their tails and hold them in their mouths, and they roll just like a hoop. The other thing they do is if they feel any danger, they swallow all their little baby snakes until the danger goes away, and then they spit them out again. Yep, they live in the woods around here, hoop snakes. And you heard about fireballs? Nobody knows what they are. Science hasn’t figured them out yet. They’re about as big around as basketballs, and they’re made out of fire, and they just roll right on down the road burning up everything in front of them.”

I was a few years older when I first met my cousin, John—old enough to know that his stories were not literally true, but they were darn fine stories anyway. “Yeah, we get tomato pickers in for the harvest, and we don’t have to give them any place to sleep. We just string out clothes lines and hang them over them ‘cause they’re all so bent over from picking tomatoes all day they can’t straighten up. Oh, and the other thing is, we don’t use ordinary window screens. Our mosquitoes are so big we use chicken wire. One time I saw a mosquito suck all the blood right out of a cat.”

My cousin John’s the one who painted his bedroom black and wouldn’t come out of it for months, maybe even a year. They had to leave his dinners outside his door. John’s father was my uncle Harley. He had a stack of business cards that said YCSISOYA. When anyone asked him what they meant, he told them gleefully: “YOU CAN’T SELL INSURANCE SITTING ON YOUR ASS!”

The first time I tasted beer I was settin’ with Uncle Harley on the steps of his place overlooking those fields of tomatoes. I was nine or ten. Some of his boys came by with a crock of draft beer—a good cold crock against that hot steamy day. In memory I can still feel the pourous texture of the crock and the droplets on it. Harley took a big drink, and then held it for me to have a go. Wow!

Harley’s wife, Aunt Martha, visited us every summer. I thoroughly enjoyed her company. On one of those visits she said about Wheeling, “This place is depressing even when the sun’s out.”
She always drank beer for lunch—a few saltine crackers and a couple wedges of Swiss cheese and a beer—or two—or some days who’s counting? After she and Harley were both long dead, my mother told me that Harley frequently got plastered and sexually assaulted her. Eventually she got the locksmith to put a big monster lock on her bedroom door, “Told him, you touch me one more time, I’m headed straight for the divorce court.”

In her old age, Martha stopped talking. She wouldn’t talk to my mother, her very own sister, on the phone. She wouldn’t talk to her children or her grandchildren. She wouldn’t talk to any of the staff in the old folk’s home. She wouldn’t talk to her doctors. They were considering giving her electroshock, but if they did, it didn’t work. She died in silence.

I’m sixteen and I’ve hitchhiked down the river to visit my buddy in Moundsville. His parents are out of town for the weekend so he and I and the boys drive out to the farm where his grandfather stashes all the booze that people give him. He’s a well-respected man, Grandpa, and people give him cases of stuff all the time, but he’s not a drinker. We find it in the barn, and we’re passing the bottles around, trying out the different flavors—gin, vodka, Scotch, bourbon, rye. Eventually we can’t stand up anymore, but my buddy can still get himself behind a driver’s wheel and we can still manage to cram ourselves into the car. Back at his house, my buddy has not reckoned on his older sister. “You’re drunk!”

“No shit!”

The boys and I just sit there pissed and stupefied as our buddy and his sister get into the world’s most operatic yelling match, airing every resentment either one of them has ever had about the other, and it finally drifts into my consciousness that I was supposed to be home hours ago. I haven’t got the faintest idea how I’m going to get back up the river. Sometime after 2:00 AM, the front doorbell rings. My buddy and his sister shut the fuck up instantly. The sister tiptoes over and opens the door, and there’s a man. He looks just like anybody. “Excuse me, ma’am,” he says, “can I borrow five bucks off you?”

Late last night when Willie come home,
knock knock knocking on the door,
slipping and sliding with his new shoes on,
Willie, don’t you slip no more.

Oh me, oh lordy my,
what’s gonna become of me?
Way downtown just a foolin’ around,
nobody to stand by me.

My mother told me that the Noyes house had secret tunnels in the basement, and those tunnels went all the way under the Ohio River. Now wait a minute. Are you out of your mind? There are no tunnels under the Ohio River at Wheeling.

Okay, now let me interrogate my own memory. Maybe she didn’t say under the river; maybe she said to the river. But anyhow, she said tunnels. She did not say vaults or storage lockers or cellar complexes or any other damn thing. She said tunnels. And yes, they were secret. What were they for?

They were part of the underground railroad, she told me, so slaves could get north to freedom, and they were also for Confederate soldiers who got separated from their units so they could get back down south to their own lines.

“Wait a minute,” I said. I was old enough by then to have some sense of how the world worked—or at least I thought I did. “Runaway slaves going north and lost Confederate soldiers going south? Both? That doesn’t make any sense.”

“We’ve always been for the underdog.”

Every few days my grandmother got on the phone to talk to other old ladies about the olden days; those old ladies were the only ones who could remember who was related to whom. As my grandmother kept getting older, the old ladies gradually died off until she was the only one left. Then she died too, leaving me with old letters, old photographs, incomprehensible pages of genealogical charts, and a business card that read:

Dogs that bite but never bark
Are sure surprises in the dark.

I also found the phone number of the old guy who used to organize the Thomas reunions back in the day. “You’ve got to see the cemetery in Clarington,” he told me. “We own that cemetery.” When I finally got there, I could see that he was right—every other gravestone had the name of someone related to me, and that was only the main cemetery. There was also the pioneer cemetery. It was slowly washing down the hill because nobody gave a shit. The carvings on the stones were so weathered they were hard to read, but I could make out most of them. I was related to almost everyone there.

On top of Wheeling Hill there’s a statue of an Indian. We did not say “Indigenous” in those days, and people in West Virginia still don’t. The Indian was welcoming people to the Ohio Valley—that’s what everyone said about him. “It’s terrible what we did to the Indians,” my mother told me. “We broke every treaty we ever made with them.” She was right.

George Washington was a rich man. He started out as a land surveyor, and he was always a land speculator. The first congress was a whole bunch of land speculators, couldn’t wait to get out into Ohio Country, make a few bucks. The Indians were warlike folks, you sure didn’t want to get yourself captured, but the settlers were worse. All the Indians wanted was to be left alone, but the settlers? Nobody ever had any intention of honoring any of those treaties. The Treaty of Paris? 1783? Nobody invited the Indians to that one. Washington wanted them gone. He had a plan for getting rid of them and it worked. The Battle of Fallen Timbers. The Treaty of Greenville. “My heart is a stone,” Tecumseh said, “heavy with sadness.”

If the Indians hadn’t been cleared out, there wouldn’t have been any dot of a town called Clarington at the end of a trail called Reuben’s Trace blazed by my grandmother’s grandfather, Reuben Thomas. He floated down on the inland waterways from what he always referred to as Old York State, and he claimed his land by tomahawk rights.

I was invited to give a talk at my old high school. When I was a student there, it was a boys’ military school, but it’s co-ed now, and I felt no connection to it. What severed the connection for me wasn’t that it had girls in it—I always thought it should have girls in it—no, what severed the connection for me was that it was no longer military.

Eeenie meenie miney mo
Let’s go back and count some more
Sound off! ONE, TWO.
Sound off! THREE FOUR.
Cadence count! One, two,
three, four,
one, two
THREE FOUR.

The students in what used to be my old high school seemed excessively polite, and they didn’t have much to say. I thought that the girls wore their skirts too short. I read from something of my writing set in West Virginia and said I would answer questions. One of the students told me he was from out of town. “I’m wondering if there’s a special culture in the Ohio Valley.” I said yes absolutely there was, but I’d be damned if I could define it. Afterward I asked my buddy Willie, the owner of Wheeling’s motorcycle shop. “We’re all family,” he said. “You’re in your cabin and somebody comes up on horseback and says the Indians are attacking down at Tom’s cabin, where do you want to be? You’re going straight to Tom’s cabin.”

Let’s see if I’ve got this right. We’re defining ourselves by killing Indians?

For a couple hundred years now scholars have been arguing about what exactly constitutes Appalachia—or if it even exists—but everyone who has ever drawn a map of that mythic region has included the entire state of West Virginia in it. Where’s that?

I could tell you about Hank Williams dying of a combination of drugs in the great sovereign state of West Virginia. I could tell you about Aaron Burr on Blennerhassett Island in the Ohio River in West Virginia and what he did there. I could tell you about Sara Jane Moore, born in Charleston, West Virginia, and how she tried to assassinate President Ford and came damn close to doing it. I could tell you about what a miserable childhood Charlie Manson had, growing up in McMechan, West Virginia. Then, moving on to the pathetic, I could tell you about William C. Marland, former governor of West Virginia, who vanished from public life and then was later found driving a taxicab in Pittsburgh. But I’m not going to tell you about any of that stuff.

At a book festival in Charleston, West Virginia, the novelist Lee Maynard was interrogated on the issue of hillbilly stereotypes. His books are crammed full of them. He looked straight out into the audience, engaging with it, looking people in the eye. “When you stop acting like that,” he said, “I’ll stop writing about it.”

One of my thesis students grew up in northern Florida, and that’s where she set her stories. I told her that I found something really familiar about them.

“Well,” she said, “a cracker’s a cracker.”

While writing this, I decided to look up Appalachia in Wiki. Under the heading Appalachian Literature, I found, by god, myself!

Many of the original settlers of West Virginia are what are called Borderers—they came from the border between England and Scotland. Quakers in Pennsylvania watched them walking by, headed for the hills of western Virginia, and didn’t care for them much. “The men all carry guns,” they said, “and the women wear their skirts too short.”

The last time I visited him, Willie showed me his guns. He’s got a couple of shotguns, quite a few rifles in various calibers, and several handguns. He made sure to show me the pink rifle he bought for his wife. “Hey,” I say, picking up a monster, “this looks like an assault rifle!” Yep, that’s exactly what it is, semi-automatic. He hands me a Glock. It fits into my hand perfectly. If you were ever a little kid playing bang-bang-you’re-dead, this is the gun that you imagined. The only possible use for a Glock would be to kill somebody with it. “Did you buy all these things?” I asked him.

“Naw, mostly people give them to me. This is a crazy state, Keith. I can walk around downtown with a bazooka in my hand, but I can’t carry an open glass of beer.” He also told me that he’d hardly ever fired any of those guns.

Okay, I’ve been trying my best to avoid it, but it looks like I’ve got to say a word or two about the Second Amendment of the Constitution of the United States of America. It reads: “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” For years now folks have been arguing about what exactly that means, and they’ve split into two main camps: the “individual rights” folks and the “collective rights” folks; I’m in the latter group and would ask, “Just what is it you don’t understand about ‘well regulated Militia’?” You will note that the Constitution does not say, “Armed individual citizens, being necessary so that they can express their dissatisfaction with life by shooting up the local grade school, the right of the people to keep and openly bear any weapon whatsoever, shall not be infringed.”

An eminent West Virginia historian has hazarded the opinion that it would have been better for the state if they had never found coal in it. Then it would have been a rural mountainous state of small farms that eventually turned into a tourist destination. But with coal, West Virginia became an internal colony of the United States. It made tons of money for a very few people, and much of that money left the state.

Come all you young fellows so young and so fine,
spend not your fortune in the dark dreary mine.

A union organizer in downstate West Virginia told me that what my mother had told me was true. “Back in those days if the word went around that you were organizing for the union, you were a dead man. They pulled lots of bodies out of the river. And that story about Black people being in the Klan? You know, I’ve heard that before, but I don’t know if it’s true or it’s just white people trying to make themselves feel better. But what is true is that the Klan functioned as a union down on the coalfields. Soon as they got a new mine operator in, the boys would burn the fiery cross on his lawn just so he knew what was what.”

The anthropologist Kathleen Stewart wrote a book about West Virginia—A Space on the Side of the Road. When she was getting her PhD, they soaked her in theory, and she absorbed it, but if you can manage to float through the theory parts, you’ll find some of the best writing anyone’s ever done about the state. She writes about how Appalachia “came to encode the ‘lowliness’ of an intractable Otherness itself; under the signs of ‘rednecks’ or ‘white trash’ it became the site of a culture that was irredeemably white, poor, rural, male, racist, illiterate, fundamentalist, inbred, alcoholic, violent…” Wow, how would you like to have that string of adjectives hanging around your neck? We could poke at any number of them, but let’s just start with “male.” You should remind yourself that the last time you seen little Maggie, she was settin’ on the banks of the sea, two pistols wrapped around her shoulders, and a banjo on her knee.

The big city historians used to claim that us poor ignorant hillbillies learned to play the banjo from the guys in the touring minstrel shows, but small-town Appalachian historians lately have been saying, wait a minute, that’s ridiculous. The banjo is an African instrument. I’m gonna repeat that. The banjo is an African instrument. Us poor ignorant hillbillies learned to play the banjo from the black folks who accompanied us as we walked away from the assholes in East Virginia and crossed the mountains. Those black folks started out as slaves but didn’t end up that way. Of course we learned to play the banjo. We’ve been playing it since long before the Civil War.

In Appalachia lots of motion runs sideways, and that’s where I’m headed now. The minstrel style of playing the banjo is called “stroke,” and it’s a downstroke style—you hit the strings with the back of the nail on your index finger—but it’s very different from the downstroke styles in Appalachia where it’s “clawhammer” and your thumb keeps bouncing off that pesky short string. The other interesting thing going on in the mountains was that the Spanish guitar had snuck in there, and some folks started up-picking the banjo, guitar style. Some folks used a three-finger up-picking approach and got very good at it.

Why did Bill Monroe choose “Molly and Tenbrooks” to record in 1947? We don’t know who wrote the song, but probably a Black man, and it recounts a horse race between the Kentucky horse, Ten Broeck, and California one, Mollie McCarty, in 1878. Here’s the singer addressing Kyper, the jockey:

Kyper, Kyper, Kyper my son
Give ol’ Tenbrooks the bridle an’ let ol’ Tenbrooks run
Let ol’ Tenbrooks run, oh Lord, let ol’ Tenbrooks run

Holy sweet suffering Jesus! What happens next is purely wonderful. It’s not just ol’ Tenbrooks we’re letting run here! Cut right through your brain. Nothing in the entire history of the world has ever sounded as good as this because what happens next is Earl Scruggs.

Okay, back to the point. Somewhere downstate I learned that when the POlice come around, there’s only one thing you should ever say to them: “I’m sorry, sir, but I don’t know NOTHING about it.”

My mother calls me up to tell me that a fireball blew up her TV. We’re not back in the olden days now. I’m a grown man; she’s in her eighties. “What do you mean, a fireball?”

“You know, Keith, a FIREBALL. We were having a terrible storm, and it rolled right down the chimney and across the carpet and blew the TV completely apart. It was sparking everywhere. I had to pull the plug. Lord, it scared the living daylights out of me!”

“A fireball? Was it round?”

“Oh, yes. It was perfectly round.”

“As big as a basketball?”

“Oh, no, not as big as that. But bigger than a baseball.”

“What did it do?”

“I told you, Keith. It rolled right down the chimney and across the rug. It left a scorch mark on the rug. It headed straight for the TV and blew it right up!”

I’m way down in the coalfields, way up on a mountain top where we can see the hills rolling away forever. It’s one of the most beautiful vistas I’ve ever seen in my life. We’re standing in the cemetery where my informant is pointing out all the stones with KKK cut into them. “When I was a little girl, I came to a funeral up here,” she tells me. “All the cars came up that road,” pointing, “and everybody was wearing their full Klan regalia. It was a sight to see.”

Last Wednesday night was stormy,
all filled with rain and sleet,
My dad had joined the Ku Klux
but Mom had lost his sheet.

There ain’t no flies on me.
There ain’t no flies on me.
There may be flies on the rest of you guys,
but there ain’t no flies on me.

I’m still way down in the coalfields but in another part of the state. My informant is a retired Black miner. When Mother Jones came to West Virginia to organize the miners, the Black miners told her that living in a company town and working in the mines was worse than slavery.

Me: “Was there racism in the union?” That is, the UMW of A, the United Mine Workers of America.

Retired Black Miner: “No, there wasn’t. We were all equal in the union.” Pause. “But I noticed that none of the white guys ever invited me to dinner.”

“Was there much Klan activity around here?”

“Hundreds of Black miners living here? Every one of them owning a gun? Are you kidding me?”

Dear Professor Maillard,

I’m writing to ask you to send me an autographed picture of yourself. That might seem like a strange request. I teach in the high school here in ____. We used to be a prosperous little town, but the mine closed down. Then, just a few years back, the lumber mill shut down too. There’s no work anywhere. My students are depressed and hopeless. I’ve taken a whole wall, and I put up pictures of people from West Virginia who have made good. I tell my students, see, it’s possible. I want to give them hope. So if you could send me an autographed picture of yourself, I would kindly appreciate it.

I’m a man of constant sorrow.
I’ve known trouble all my days.
I’m going back to West Virginia,
the place where I was born and raised.

My pal Willie lost his business in the great meltdown of 2008, but he’s still got his Civil War era farmhouse near Wheeling Crick. He and I are settin’ out by the barn, taking in the night, while his dog runs free. It’s a beautiful night.

The dog has treed a coon. “That’s the little bastard that’s been eating my apples,” Willie says. “I should get one of my guns and shoot him.” Pause. “But hell, that’s too much trouble.”

A number of things are on my mind, bothering me. “Keith,” Willie says, “just let the peace of West Virginia sink into your soul.” I do that. I didn’t know that was the last time I’d be in West Virginia.

©Keith Maillard, 2024

1964 was the year when the ‘60s had not yet crystalized into The Sixties but was about to—a feeling like the terrible atmosphere before a storm when you don’t even know yet that what’s coming is a storm. Freedom Summer flooded Mississippi with idealistic white kids. I had never engaged in any political activity in my life, but when I read that they had found the bodies of the three murdered civil rights workers, I knew that I was on a team. I thought: they have just killed three of us.

What else? Goldwater, of course, refusing to disavow extremists—and paving the way for Trump to take over the GOP years later. LBJ and the notorious Daisy Ad that was only run once, but that was plenty. It was “controversial,” so news programs reran it, and I saw it, and it scared the bejesus out of me just as it was supposed to. That was the first presidential election in which I was old enough to vote, and of course I voted for Lyndon Johnson, the peace candidate. (Insert bitter smiley face here.)

Lenore Rowntree, in her perceptive review of In the Defense of Liberty (in The British Columbia Review), tells us that she read my memoir, The Bridge, before she read the novel, and they go well together. “I am not suggesting Mason is an alter-ego for the author, but one knows with certainty from reading the memoir that Maillard has lived the life about which he writes in Defense. Reading the two books is greater than the sum of their parts.”

She’s right on both counts: I do know the life I’ve written into the novel, and it’s emphatically not a roman à clef. Both “fact” and “fiction” have Latin roots. A fact, originally, was something that was done, a fiction something that was formed—that is created. Fiction has its own truth, and anyone who writes it knows that.

Reviewing my novel in The Ubyssey, Thomas McLeod writes: “Suicide haunts every corner of this book, as Mason feels unable to go on living as a boy.” Three of my characters are what we would now call nonbinary, but we’re so far back in time that the language to talk about this stuff hadn’t been invented yet. If what you are isn’t even acknowledged to exist, then it’s difficult for you to feel fully human. That’s when suicide whispers in your ear.

McLeod continues: “Keith Maillard, being both queer and a senior citizen, is constantly reappraising and unraveling the standards that repressed his gender identity in his youth. The book is well worth a read, and is a refreshing reminder of the existence of open-minded counter-culturalists who are still standing by their principles.”

Thanks, Thomas.

In the Defense of Liberty is published by Freehand Books.

mare’s tails in the west. rain held off. not solitary by nature, listen to runoff without reading it. walk until you can’t. old friends gone

time to mourn, to remember particulate ice, rammed quick. time’s empty as mind, sunyata, and still we must act, scattered foam on the ocean.

asking again who digs the common, we wait for you, not our children but our grandchildren. time. you know us from dreams, show us your fire.

we are as we were but are still becoming. you overlap us, our ends your beginnings, time emptiness, emptiness interleave us. sleep in peace.

bluejay tap-dancing on deck. where is the lone ant dragging the dead wasp? I looked & the cat was gone, dent in cushion where she was lying.

©Keith Maillard, 2017

The only time I listen to pop music on the radio these days is when I’m driving. I don’t expect much, just something pleasant enough to keep me going with the traffic over the Burrard Street Bridge—something with a good beat, lyrics that are not too idiotic, and a catchy melody. Usually that’s what I get, but a few weeks ago I realized that radio music had gone dead for me. The only thing that kept me from switching over to a CD was one song. They didn’t play it often enough, and I kept waiting for it—the only good song on the radio.

I clearly remember the exact moment when I first got hooked on radio. A song came on with a sound unlike anything I’d ever heard, a song so insanely good that I had to turn up the volume and lean close to the brown Bakelite box in my grandmother’s kitchen. I knew that it was for kids my age in a way that no song had ever been before—Chuck Berry’s “Maybelline.” That’s so many years ago, and I’m still listening, listening for the Zeitgeist.

When the music on the radio goes dead, there’s something wrong in the world. I remember one of the worst years. Watergate, post-Nixon, Gerald Ford in the White House, the fall of Saigon, and I simply could not listen any longer to the music on the radio. Captain & Tennille, Glen Campbell, Freddy Fender, The Eagles, John Denver, The Bee Gees, The Doobie Brothers— Do I need to go on? Janis Ian, The Carpenters, Olivia Newton-John— I was always listening to something, so I slapped Dylan onto my turntable, and early Bowie and vintage Flat and Scruggs, but then, as a Christmas present, a dear friend gave me an album by someone I’d never heard of. I loved the picture on the cover—a young woman in a white shirt, a black jacket slung over her shoulder. Nobody had ever looked quite like that before, so Sally-Ann-cool and stunningly androgynous. Yeah, photographed by Robert Mapplethorpe, the great Patti Smith. She brought music back to life.

When I’m driving home, I know that I’m never going to hear a game-changer like “Horses” on commercial radio. All I want is a small ray of hope, and that’s exactly what I was getting from the only good song. Okay, so what was it? The phrase that stuck in my head was “the dark of the moon.” I Googled it, and all that gave me was the soundtrack to Transformers: The Dark of the Moon, and that sure wasn’t it. A day or so later I heard the song again and listened carefully. Ah, I’d heard it wrong. It was “the dark side of the moon.” Back to Google, and that gave me Pink Floyd. I felt like an idiot. What was I doing chasing a song that any media-savvy teenager could identify in ten seconds and I couldn’t?

In my car I toggle back and forth between KISS FM and VIRGIN RADIO. I read through both of their playlists, and not a single title had the word “moon” in it. Okay, so I could go through the playlists song by song, but there was a better way. I tuned my office radio to KISS and waited. Well into the second hour the song came on, and I pounced on it with my iPad. Shazam told me that it was “It Ain’t Me” by Kygo & Selena Gomez.

What? The moment I read it, the title conjured up Bob Dylan’s old-timey voice acquired from saturating himself in Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music. If you reach into the dusty burlap bag full of early Dylan tunes, you’ll find his anti-love songs carefully crafted to make girl-recipients feel like shit. “It Ain’t Me, Babe” is not the nastiest of them, but like the others it’s a perfect example of just how entitled guys felt themselves to be in 1963. So why would contemporary song writers want to invoke Dylan, and who were those song writers anyway? I had never heard of Kygo, but a quick search told me that he was a DJ and producer from Norway and a very big deal in the electronic dance music scene. All I knew about Gomez was that she was one of those unfortunately fortunate people who had been one of Disney’s child stars. How on earth had they managed to create the only good song on the radio? I listened to it on a headset. Gomez did not sound even remotely like Dylan. She was not singing about the moon. It was “the dark side of the morning.”

At roughly the same time that I was trying to chase down the only good song on the radio, the current occupant of the U. S. White House tossed 59 Tomahawk missiles into Syria to boost his approval rating. That, I thought, should put things into perspective. The songs I wanted to hear would be sites of resistance, created by kids on their laptops at four in the morning or boiled up by angry young musicians in a garage somewhere. Why was I wasting my time thinking about a song sung by Justin Bieber’s ex-girlfriend? But I couldn’t let it go.

Now that I had identified it, I could listen to “It Ain’t Me” as many times as I wanted. I’d liked it when it had been an elusive rough-edged memorandum squashed through the Dixie-cup speakers in my car and mixed with wind and traffic. I liked it even better when I could actually hear it. I liked the way it opened with an acoustic guitar and a bit of narrative about sipping whiskey neat in the Bowery—an opening so protracted and convincing that you’re sure you’re about to hear an alt-folk tune until the beat drops to inform you that this is actually electronic dance music— Oh, but hold on a minute. I’ve got to open a sidebar.

My elder daughter, with a superior tone in her voice, can’t resist telling me that her music, the music that she feels in her soul, is absolutely not EDM, it’s house. I cannot claim to fully understand what she means by that. “House” is short for “warehouse” because that’s where you went to immerse yourself in that stuff when it was brand new and subversive and created by Frankie Knuckles and other inner-city black guys in Chicago. House has come a long way since then, has split into multiple genres, and has become so identified with youth culture intertwined with drug culture that now, when an entire generation of North American white kids makes its list of things they’ve absolutely got to do before they die, an item most likely to be near the top will be getting fucked up in Ibiza.

Not long after its release “It Ain’t Me” generated its own Wikipedia entry that didn’t hesitate to label the song both EDM and house—“tropical house,” to be exact. Professor Google informed me that “tropical house” was a subgenre of “deep house,” which, in turn, was a subgenre of “house.” If I wanted an example, Edward Maya’s “Stereo Love” was tropical house. That was a song I knew. I’d liked it so well that I had downloaded not only the original but half a dozen remixes, and the comparison was clarifying. If you moved the beat back a few yards, brought the vocals forward, slowed the tempo a notch, brightened the whole works up, and threw in an acoustic riff—the accordion in “Stereo Love,” the guitar in “It Ain’t Me”—then, I gathered, you had “tropical house.” But why the arcane terminology? Maybe because being a sub-genre of a sub-genre is a lot cooler than simply being EDM—it adds to the mystique, creates an exclusive club of connoisseurs who can actually hear the distinctions.

Of the people who created “It Ain’t Me,” Selena Gomez is the most famous. Her primary contribution is singing the vocal. She had been aiming for another high-charting single, and “It Ain’t Me” gave it to her. Kygo—Kyrre Gørvell-Dahll—rose to fame, as many kids are doing these days, via his computer and has racked up three-hundred-million views on SoundCloud and YouTube. He’s so famous in Norway that he has his own clothing line. He sang back-up vocal on “It Ain’t Me” and is listed as one of the four producers. Everyone credits him with making the tune sound like EDM.

The nitty-gritty down-in-the-trenches work of actually writing the song was done by the three American professionals, and they’re the only members of the team credited with the lyrics. Brian Dong Ho Lee is the oldest of them. He’s had his name attached to hits by such artists as Carly Rae Jepsen and Lady Gaga and cowrote the Icona Pop smash “All night.” Andrew Watt has worked with a multitude of artists, including Justin Bieber and Skrillex. A performer as well as a song writer, Watt sings, plays bass and keyboards. Ali Tamposi is the youngest. She has contributed to songs by Kelly Clarkson, DJ Snake, Beyoncé, and Christine Aguliera—and also has had the misfortune of having sung backup vocals on a Nickelback album. If you add the two producers who are not given composition credit, seven people were actively involved in bringing “It Ain’t Me” into the world. Only two of these—Gomez and Tamposi—were women.

I found it depressing that it had taken such a large, high-powered, well-connected team to create “It Ain’t Me” and make it a commercial success. In my car, before I’d been able to make out much of the lyrics, I’d been alerted to the only good song on the radio by the sound of it—a little bit like every other good EDM tune I’d heard in the last two years but new and different enough to be interesting. Now that I could listen to it closely, I heard—in its shape, texture, and use of various techniques—nothing that hadn’t been done before, although what it did do, it did superbly well. You don’t write a hit tune by being ahead of the curve. You don’t write a hit tune even by being on the curve. You write a hit tune by being just a fraction of a beat behind it.

In case we can’t figure it out for ourselves, the Wiki entry for “It Ain’t Me” tells us what it’s about—“a breakup song with a theme of nostalgia.” Selena Gomez is positioned firmly in the center of this exercise; she “narrates the regret of a previous relationship ruined by her former lover’s habits of drinking and partying too often,” allowing her fans to read Justin Bieber into the story. To clinch the point, Ali Tamposi explains that it’s “about a woman finding the strength to walk away from a toxic relationship despite the pressure she receives from society to stand by her man.” The song is said to be “uplifting and empowering.”

So there I had it. The only good song on the radio was a commercial hit assembled by half a dozen seasoned professionals and packaged for easy consumption by girls and women looking for “empowerment.” But that wasn’t all of it. I could sense something more, something important. What about the Dylan reference that was perfectly obvious but nobody was mentioning?

Like any art form, song writing is a conversation. A multitude of voices, each marked with its own particular time and place and world view, live in the minds of song writers and interact with each other there. To look closely at any song we need to understand a conversation that’s already in progress. For the sake of simplicity, let’s call the narrator of Dylan’s tune “Dylan.” That’s okay so long as we don’t confuse this fictional narrative voice with the historical Bob Dylan. So a girl has been annoying Dylan by hanging out at his window, and he goes to considerable length to explain to her that “I’m not the one you want, babe, I’m not the one you need.” He tells her repeatedly:

No, no, no, it ain’t me, babe
It ain’t me you’re lookin’ for, babe

The narrator of “It Ain’t Me” asks, “Who’s gonna walk you through the dark side of the morning?” and answers, repeatedly:

“It ain’t me, no no.”

Texts refer to other texts—that’s their nature—and pop songs often blatantly refer to previous pop songs. As listeners simultaneously hear the new song and the history behind it, these cross-references can amplify a song’s resonance—as, for instance, Patti Smith’s “Land” referring not only to “Land of a Thousand Dances” but to the entire genre of rock ‘n’ roll. Any good song allows for multiple readings, and no single reading cancels out any other, so “It Ain’t Me, Babe,” can be read as one of Dylan’s dump-on-girls songs, but it can also be read as his rejection of the role of guru, prophet, or savior—a rejection he would state more succinctly later as “take this badge off of me.” The writers of “It Ain’t Me” must surely have felt these resonances, particularly as Kesha had recently used Bob Dylan’s words to do her talking to Dr. Luke—at least that’s the way much of her audience would have read her performance at the 2016 Billboard Music Awards. So what is this reference to Dylan being used to amplify?

Selena Gomez is facing the problem that all child stars must eventually face—how to grow up in public. It’s particularly hard for her because some of her predecessors have not exactly made a brilliant job of it. “It Ain’t Me” was released in February of 2017 and then, nicely timed, she appeared on the cover of the April Vogue with the caption: COOL, CANDID, COURAGEOUS SELENA GETS REAL. Vogue assigned Rob Haskell, one of their long-time writers, to do the accompanying feature article. Short of sending Humbert Humbert, they couldn’t have made a worse choice, and Haskell’s perviness and condescension have been trashed from one end of the net to the other. Particularly creepy is the way he deftly inserts himself into the story, as though to send us the message: “I get to hang with celebs and you don’t.” He’s cooking dinner with Gomez. Here she is commenting on her 110 million Instagram followers.

“People so badly wanted me to be authentic,” she says, laying a tortilla in sizzling oil, “and when that happened, finally, it was a huge release. I’m not different from what I put out there. I’ve been very vulnerable with my fans, and sometimes I say things I shouldn’t. But I have to be honest with them. I feel that’s a huge part of why I’m where I am.”

And where we are, Haskell tells us, is in the “They’re Just Like Us!” era of celebrity, and that does seem to be the point that Gomez keeps trying to make—that she is just like us. She talks about going into a residential therapy program. “You have no idea how incredible it felt to just be with six girls,” she says, “real people who couldn’t give two shits about who I was.” She talks about wanting to disappear. “Look, I love what I do, and I’m aware of how lucky I am, but— how can I say this without sounding weird? I just really can’t wait for people to forget about me.”

Like Burial maintaining his anonymity as long as he could or Claire Boucher writing “California,” maybe Selena Gomez was cooking dinner with Haskell as her way of resisting being transformed into one of those impenetrable images with which Debord says we mediate our social relations under spectacular capitalism. Or maybe it’s all hype, part of the game plan. But then again maybe it’s all true and she means every word she says. The problem is, we’ll never know because we aren’t at that dinner and we’re never going to be. By the end of the article “It Ain’t Me” is being spun as a comment on her breakup with Justin Bieber—although she’s never mentioned his name.

Before Gomez recorded “It Ain’t Me” she and Ali Tamposi met to go over the vocals. The Wiki entry tells us that they “shared a similar emotional vision” based on “their own personal experiences.” That was an important meeting. Gomez was going to have to sell the song. Her enormous fan base would only take her so far; if she wanted it high-charting, she was going to have to feel the song, occupy it, own it. Because she was given no credit on the lyrics, we know that she sang the words they gave her. It took a team to create this hit, and Gomez does her part of the job with élan—she’s so solidly into the song that if you didn’t know better, you might think that she wrote it herself.

“When I create,” Ali Tamposi tells us, “I come from a place of being a messenger from a higher power of some sort that shows me how to funnel out a message.” She’s being interviewed by Matthew Meadow in the February edition of the online journal YOUREDM. The headline bills her as ALI TAMPOSI, CO-WRITER ON SELENA GOMEZ & KYGO’S “IT AIN’T ME” She describes her collaboration with Watt and Lee as casual but focused. They “order food and talk about what’s going on in our lives.” Then the guys will pick up guitars “and we’ll all shout out melodies until we land on one.” Together they write lyrics; then she cuts the vocal, and that’s it.

It’s a combination of our experiences – we act as if we’re therapists for one another. If I’m going through something, Andrew and Brian will be my therapists and we’ll tap into that place and vice-versa. We’ll ask questions about that experience and it usually goes from there. We’ll be like ‘What did it actually feel like when you’re at the bar and waiting for that person to call you and they’re not calling?’ so it’s that type of vibe. It’s honest – everything that we write comes from past experiences that we’ve all felt. If it doesn’t come from that place, then it feels disconnected.

The lyrics to “It Ain’t Me” are exquisitely well crafted, every word carefully chosen. There are only two verses, and they have identical eight-line structures. Each opens with “I had a dream” and outlines the possibility of a bright future, but then a single word in the fourth line signals a turn—“nowhere” in the first verse, “never” in the second—and the remaining lines tell us that it’s not going to happen—because the narrator has had enough of her boyfriend’s shitty behaviour.

Let us imagine that the narrator of the song is someone much like Ali Tamposi. She is, after all, the only woman in the room. And then, having made this conjecture, I found another interview—done by Alyssa Bailey in the February 22 Elle—in which Tamposi admits that sipping whisky neat in the Bowery is her own experience: “Back then, when I used to drink, and I’d start in this relationship vibe, we were always at the Bowery, and we were good and high, it was high enough.”

But the problem is, as the song tells us, it’s never going to be high enough for the boyfriend.

I had a dream
We were sipping whiskey neat
Highest floor, The Bowery
Nowhere’s high enough
Somewhere along the lines
We stopped seeing eye to eye
You were staying out all night
And I had enough

In the second verse the line “never growing up” is beautifully double-voiced. In it, we can hear both the narrator now and the narrator back in the day.

I had a dream
We were back to seventeen
Summer nights and The Libertines
Never growing up
I’ll take with me
The Polaroids and the memories
But you know I’m gonna leave
Behind the worst of us

When she was seventeen, of course they were never going to grow up—no seventeen-year-old ever is—but to the narrator now, “never growing up” is exactly what her boyfriend is doing. She will take her good memories with her, along with the Polaroids, but she will leave behind “the worst of us.” She doesn’t have to spell out that worst; she can rely on the young women she’s addressing to fill in the details from their own experiences. She doesn’t care any longer where her boyfriend has been or where he’s going. When he gets back, she won’t be home.

Who’s gonna walk you

Through the dark side of the morning?

Who’s gonna rock you

When the sun won’t let you sleep?

Who’s waking up to drive you home

When you’re drunk and all alone?

Who’s gonna walk you

Through the dark side of the morning?

It ain’t me.

“I think the chorus has so many messages,” Tamposi tells the Elle interviewer, “especially right now, for this time period with this whole feminist movement… There’s a difference between standing by someone through a really dark period in their lives and being their support system.”

But it would be a mistake to attribute the song entirely to Tamposi. It took a team to write it.

We all individually connected with the message of the song and I feel like the places that we were in our lives during that time. We wrote the first verse and the chorus within 45 minutes and so then we had the engineer go out and find Kygo for another session….

I was just observing Kygo the second we pressed the spacebar [for the new track], and he heard it back, and his eyes were just going back from left to right, like he was just mapping out how he envisioned the production work. He completely lit up, and that’s the feeling that we were all looking for. It felt so good.

The feeling that they were looking for—yes—and reading that, something clicked for me. In Vogue, Gomez waxed eloquent about the residential therapy program she attended, and in her YOUREDM interview, referring to her two song-writing partners, Tamposi said, “We act as if we’re therapists for one another.” Therapists? When they were writing the lyrics—batting them back and forth—somebody probably said, “What rhymes with seventeen?”—and there are lots of things, actually, from caffeine to morphine to teens in the scene wearing jeans—so why that obscure UK band, the Libertines? Because of their drug problems, maybe—because that felt right? The song’s not just about alcohol; these are the writers who created that wonderful pun: “Somewhere along the lines.” In her Elle interview Tamposi tucked in a bit of information so unobtrusively that we could easily miss it—“when I used to drink.” They’re talking like people in recovery. The repeated word “grateful” at the end of their song sounds for all the world like the end of an AA meeting.

I’m right back where I started, driving in my car again, when I hear on the news that the current occupant of the US White House has just dropped the Mother of All Bombs in Afghanistan. Yes, there is something wrong in the world, and at the moment there is only one good song on the radio. So what is coming to us from the absolute center of mainstream pop music in the spring of 2017? “It Ain’t Me” isn’t really about dumping your asshole boyfriend. It’s about waking up and getting clean. Addressed to anyone who won’t grow up, who just doesn’t get it, the only good song says, “Thanks for the memories, but I’m not going to babysit you any more.” And you know, that’s a pretty good message.

©Keith Maillard, 2017



In happier times the setting sun

lacquered the waves in the harbor

now below the Lions the rain

has swelled the creeks into torrents

so many days of loneliness

and now desolation and no stove fire

I’d send a letter in a fish if I could

but everywhere rivers and mountains are endless

___

This poem is a collaboration between me, Yen Shu (991-1055), and, because I don’t read Chinese, the translator, Red Pine (Poems of the Masters, Copper Canyon Press). The image of the letter in a fish is Yen Shu’s. The personal elements that locate the poem on Vancouver’s North Shore are mine.

Dear Canadian Broadcasting Corporation,

Since I emigrated to Canada in 1970, I have been listening to CBC Radio. I listen to it in much of my down-time—while I’m cooking, doing the dishes, putting away my socks, or driving my car. I regard CBC Radio as an old reliable friend, and I am writing to you in the spirit of friendship. In recent years Q was one of my favourite shows. The host is gone, but the show continues, and that’s what I want to talk about.

Gone too are the days when your listeners were passive masses who would silently absorb anything emanating from cultural gurus or celebrities. We live in Internetland now, and we talk to each other, and that makes for a very different style of conversation. I regret to inform you that nothing you will ever do—either by way of internal investigation or media spin—is likely to convince the majority of us that CBC management was not to some degree complicit in the vile behaviour of the departed host, so I would like to suggest ways in which you could atone for your sins and convince us that things are, in fact, getting better.

It appears that much of the energy that went into making Q an excellent show came from the staff, so the first thing you could do is stop hiring on a contract basis and give dependable old-school jobs to the people who actually do the work. Then the next thing that you could do—and this seems to me a crucial move—is create a show run largely by women. In short, get a dozen or so talented young women in there, give them some financial security, and turn them loose. Out here in Internetland, such a move would go a long way toward saying, “I’m sorry.”

Q was about popular culture, and I believe that it should continue to be, and this is—as I’m sure you must have noticed by now—the age of Katniss Everdeen. As her story has swelled up into a multimillion dollar industry, it’s too easy to forget that it originated in the mind of a writer—Suzanne Collins—and that she was writing for teenage girls and knew her audience very well. Katniss must fight for her life while everyone is constantly watching—exactly like any girl in high school. Much like the women who fought for their lives in and around Q. Much like #YesAllWomen.

Lorde recently released the song she wrote for the soundtrack for the new Hunger Games movie. Here’s some of what she has to say in that song:

I got my fingers laced together and I made a little prison
And I’m locking up everyone who ever laid a finger on me

Lorde appeared on Q a while back. The host has been frequently praised for his interviewing skills, but he got nowhere with her. The interview was stiff, formal, uninteresting, and unenlightening. We never got a sense of who Lorde might be as a person. In comparison, check out Tavi Gevinson’s interview with her in Rookie. It’s great—warm, sparkling, fun, deeply human. It makes a difference when a seventeen-year-old woman is being interviewed by an eighteen-year-old woman.

Q liked to portray itself as daring and cutting-edge, but it played it safe too much of the time. The significant things going on in the culture—the exciting, fiery, paradigm-shifting things—blew right on by because Q was looking the wrong way. Lorde is super big now, but she came out of nowhere. She wouldn’t have made it onto Q when she was starting out from New Zealand by dumping her tunes onto the net for free.

We live in cities you’ll never see on screen
Not very pretty, but we sure know how to run things
Living in ruins of the palace within my dreams
And you know we’re on each other’s team

Perhaps one of the first guests on the newly resurrected Q could be Kate Zambreno, the author of Heroines. I would like to hear her talking about her notion that the girls have all the cultural energy now. In their blogposts and Tumblrs, she says, they’re changing the world. She’s right, of course, and those girls know that they’re on each other’s team.

Here are some more ideas for guests. How about a discussion with Grimes and Emily Haines on sexual harassment in the music industry? Perhaps Denise Balkissoon could be invited to discuss the blistering article she wrote in the Globe and Mail, the one in which she argued that this is not a watershed on violence against women. “All that’s different now is that we know one guy’s name, and that guy happens to be famous.”

Okay, so what about a host? Luckily, I have the perfect person for you—Lowell. Elizabeth Lowell Boland is savvy, smart, young (22), enormously talented, and Canadian—what more could you ask? If you’re not aware of her, switch over to Radio 3 and you’re bound to hear her singing: “L.G.B.T. L.O.V.E.” She knows about sexual abuse, having suffered it herself, and she’s not afraid to sing about it. She opens her up-beat dance tune, “Cloud 69,” by proclaiming, “Oh my god I think I need a girlfriend!” What Q needs—what all of us need—are more friends who are girls. That’s the main point I have been trying to make here—it’s their turn.

Wishing you the best for a bright and continuing future, I am, respectfully yours,

Keith Maillard

©Keith Maillard, 2014

Canadian novelist, Rohan O’Grady, dies at 91 is a headline you will not read in any Canadian newspaper. June Skinner, who wrote under that pen name, has never received the recognition her work deserves. She never thought of herself as either a pioneering Canadian novelist or as a unique woman of letters, but she was both. She began publishing when Canadian novels were thin on the ground, and the publishers who picked her up were not in Toronto but in London and New York. From 1961 to 1981 she wrote in complete isolation, living a quiet life as a wife and mother in West Vancouver.

June’s father, Fred O’Grady, was a man of legendary difficulty — a proud autodidact who read Pound and Joyce. June seems to have inherited from him both his love of literature and his DIY approach to education. She was happiest when she had a book open on her lap, and she read to fulfill no one’s curriculum. When she began writing fiction, she put down whatever passed through her mind with no thought to literary convention. Her approach was simple — she loved a good story, and she knew how to tell one.

The second Fred in June’s life was the man she married — Fred Skinner, a transplanted American who worked on the news desk of the Vancouver Sun. For 20 years she wrote her odd, compelling novels, and then she stopped writing them. It was a relief, she told me shortly after I married her daughter. June hated publishers. “They squeeze you dry,” she said. “Whatever you give them, it’s never enough.” No, she said, she never missed writing at all, but she always made sure to tell me how much she admired me for writing novels. She carefully never read a word I wrote, and I respected her for that.

Lets Kill Uncle is the best known of her books. Its protagonists are two children on an unnamed BC Gulf Island (which I happen to know is Saltspring where June lived in the 1920s). It has an old-school RCMP officer, a sentient cougar whose thoughts are reported to the reader, and an uncle who represents an unspeakable evil. Is it a YA, a Gothic, a work of magic realism, a twee bit of British-inflected colonial fiction, a thriller, a horror story, a satire, a wacky romp, or a bleak commentary on the terrors of childhood? It’s a little bit of all of the above, but none of those categories define it. I don’t care what you’ve read, you will never in your life have read anything quite like that crazy book. For the right kid at the right time, Let’s Kill Uncle can rearrange your mind for you — as it did for Theo Schell-Lambert who wrote about it in The Believer and brought June back to public attention – as it did for the British cartoonist and satirist, Martin Rowson, who wrote a magnificent tribute to it in The Guardian.

June was as eccentric as anything in her novels. She hated the sun and never went out in it without wearing a hat. She favoured leopard prints and amber. She filled her home with objects so extravagant that they transcended the notion of “kitsch.” My favorite was the nearly full-sized paper tiger just inside her front door —  you could drape your coat over him, if you had a mind to. She was enormously kind to our family, the perfect batty Nana who left wonderfully strange presents at our front door — Baroque glassware, a metal detector, enormous bottles of wretched white wine, outfits for Mary and the girls, some appropriate and some not so much.

In the late 1990s June began to suffer from dementia and eventually lost nearly all of her short-term memory, but she was always fully present in the moment and could recall long past events with absolute clarity. Almost as though the dementia had lifted a burden from her, she lived in the now — always happy, always reading even though she might not be able to tell you anything about what she’d just read, always glad to see us.

She spent her last three years in a care facility. Because she was unfailingly polite and never any trouble, she became a favourite of the staff, and they allowed her to operate on her own time just as she had at home. Because there was someone on duty 24/7, she could walk in circles through the halls all night long if she wanted to, and she often did. At the end of her life she became detached and wise. Even though she wouldn’t remember later what she’d said, her advice was always practical and sound, her stories always fascinating. Whenever we asked her how she was, she always answered, “I’m doing just fine now that you’re here!”

Seven weeks ago she stopped eating. We gradually realized that she might be nearing the end of her life. “The O’Gradys take a long time to die,” she told Mary proudly, and she did — lasted so long that we kept hoping for a miraculous reversal. I remember her giving me a dazzling smile as full and open as a child’s.

If anything can be said to be “pure,” June was pure Irish, and she died on St. Patrick’s Day, 2014, a little after 10 o’clock at night. Mary, who was with her, said that she died as gently as a whisper. Mary and I sat with her afterward. We were in the quiet sunroom and bathed in moonlight. Looking out through the high windows, we could see a clear bright sky scattered with stars. In death, June’s face was one of the most utterly beautiful I have ever seen. We talked to her, and about her, and cried at her loss, and I read her favorite poem, Robbie Burns’ “Flow Gently, Sweet Afton.” And as we sat there with her, we were transported into something as mysterious and magical as anything in any of her books. It was a time out of time — that moon-drenched night — and then in the second hour we knew that she had left us.

Wordless, I cannot write more of an elegy than this. We miss her terribly.

©Keith Maillard, 2014

Warning–this is a dark scene from Motet, the darkest of my novels. Some listeners might find it disturbing.

“Steve in Toronto” opens in a loft on Queen Street in Toronto in 1977. I am playing Steven Beuhl. The amazing young Vancouver actress, Ranae Miller, is playing the punk rocker, Annie Epoxy.

If you want to know what happens next, listen to Episode 10 of The Canadian Fiction Podcast in which I read the rest of the story and talk about it afterward with podcaster Erika Thorkelson.

If I were writing Motet now, Annie Epoxy would have a far bigger role in it. Reading the book again for the first time after twenty years, I found her a fascinating, complex character who deserves far more stage time than I originally gave her.

Steven Beuhl was just as twisted as I remembered him. Writing him was one of the most difficult assignments I’ve ever given myself. I was deeply immersed in Jung at the time, and I saw the project as “getting in touch with my shadow.” In Jungian theory, people who never get in touch with their shadow remain as naive as children—are constantly surprised by cruelty, injustice, or just plain evil in the world—and Motet is about evil. The characters are tempted, and they give in, do the wrong things, and bring down horrors upon themselves.

While I was writing the “Steve in Toronto” sections of Motet—over fifty pages—I deliberately lived the most regular of lives. I got up at the same time every morning, worked until late afternoon, went for a run, ate a modest dinner, watched mindless television, and went to bed early. I didn’t socialize much, and I didn’t drink at all. If I hadn’t lived like that, I couldn’t have allowed myself to go into Steve’s craziness. It took me two weeks. When it was over and I could move from the creative phase of the writing to the editing phase, I was enormously relieved.

PRODUCING STEVE IN TORONTO

I began mixing sound in the late 60s on Boston’s radio station WBUR and then continued to write sound-based pieces through the 70s and on into the 80s for CBC radio, working with several fine producers, the last of them the incomparable Don Mowatt. With “Steve in Toronto” I picked up where I left off—but was amazed to discover how wonderfully far the technology had evolved since back in the day when we cut miles and miles and miles of shiny brown tape.

When I first asked Renae Miller to play Annie Epoxy, she’d had only two major stage roles—as the lead in Cinderella (Exit 22) and as Liesl von Trapp in The Sound of Music (Gateway Theatre). I thought that she might enjoy playing someone who was utterly different from those characters—and she did!

It took me a long time to produce “Steve in Toronto” largely because I had to learn the new technology. I mixed it three times. The first mix was terrible, the second not too bad, and the third is the one I’ve posted here.

I love mixing sound, and I hope to do more audio dramas.

©Keith Maillard, 2014

To say that Doris Lessing had a huge impact on me is a monumental understatement.

I first read Lessing in 1970.

For two years I had been pouring all of my energy into the American antiwar movement, but now  the New Left was exploding into fiery fragments — bombs going off on campuses,  the Weatherman faction of SDS at the height of its insanity,  paranoia, bone-grinding fear, bleak nihilism. During those two years of activism I had not read fiction. I remembered the writers I used to love, felt a nostalgia for a lost time when an innocent sweetness had been possible, but in 1970 it was not possible to admire John Updike for his elegant prose. Then I read The Golden Notebook and suddenly there was Lessing in all of her fury and intensity — WAKE UP, this is serious, this is BLOODY serious, this MEANS SOMETHING.

Anna, her shredded character split into four notebooks – I had never seen anything like that. Every twist, turn and backtracking of Anna’s inner and outer lives  – I had never seen anything like that either. Lessing didn’t give a damn about beautiful language. She wasn’t creating art. She wasn’t writing “political” stories either. She exposed empty rhetoric, canned verbiage, correct positions. Lessing was not writing for a constituency. She was going after the truth with an unimaginable ferocity. Yes, I thought, fiction could mean something, could be real, could act as a lever in the world. Before America had interrupted me, I had been trying to write fiction. After reading Lessing, I thought that maybe I would try to write it again.

After The Golden Notebook, I read the Martha Quest novels – The Children of Violence – that ended with the magnificent Four Gated City. Lessing called that series a Bildungsroman. I had never seen that word before. I’d been piling up masses of paper about a character I called “John Dupre.” Maybe I could make that into a Bildungsroman. Maybe, like Lessing, I could make it into something real – not merely literature. My entire career as a writer is founded upon Doris Lessing.

Here is Anna confronting her Jungian analyst:

‘Look, if I said to you when I came in this afternoon: Yesterday I met a man at a party and I recognized in him the wolf, or the knight, or the monk, you’d nod and you’d smile, and we’d both feel the joy of recognition. But if I’d said: Yesterday I met a man at a party and suddenly he said something, and I thought: Yes, there’s a hint of something – there’s a crack in that man’s personality like a gap in the dam, and through that gap the future might pour into a different shape – terrible perhaps, or marvelous, but something new – if I said that, you’d frown.”

‘Did you meet such a man?’ She demanded, practically.

Doris Lessing has gone into Great Time. Alas and farewell.

©Keith Maillard, 2013