Asakiyume mita

Playlist for a ghost story that is just about finished:

( A Land of Deepest Shade )

I decided I had to take the plunge and actually finish some of the many, many things I've started reading. They are all things I desperately want to read, but if you have enough things you desperately want to read, you can end up dreading reading, because they all demand your attention, and if you're reading one, you're slighting another--and so it's easier just not to read at all. In my case, anyway. This doesn't seem to be a problem for people on my friends list, who are all prodigious readers.

In any case, to that end, I'm closing in on the last few pages of King Spruce, which I've decided I quite like, and not just because it sometimes makes me laugh when it surely doesn't intend to, as with the concept of.... the man-promise:

"Brother Dwight! Brother Dwight!" she half sobbed. "Oh, Brother Dwight, I didn't know--I didn't realize--I didn't understand, or I would have held you back until you had torn these two arms from my shoulders. I prayed for you and watched for you. They buy their logs with blood up there. but it shall not be with your blood, Dwight. I have hated father all these days. He knew what you were going back to, and didn't stop you!"

"It was all my own affair, little girl," Wade returned, gently--"my duty, to which I was bound by fair man-promise."

Not just man-promise, but fair man-promise! Let us now pause for a moment to contemplate foul man-promise.

...

Didn't that send a shiver up your spine?

Speaking of thought-provoking phrases, we had the news on the other day, and the ninja girl remarked, "I really hate the phrase 'grow the economy.'"

"Yeah," I said, "It kind of makes you think of grow lights and illicit cultivation. Like, 'The energy consumption was suspicious, and when the DEA investigated, they found a bumper crop of economy being grown in the basement. A spokesperson estimated that that much economy would probably fetch half a million dollars on the open market.'"

I'm very slowly making my way through King Spruce, the 1908 novel that I found by the side of the road. Among other things, it very earnestly teaches the reader about the state of the logging and timber industry in Maine at the turn of the century, and among the details are mention of clans of ne'er-do-wells--portrayed the way gypsies or hillbilly moonshiners might be portrayed, if the setting were elsewhere--who squat on the land and are periodically forcibly resettled by the lumber barons. The lumber barons hate these folks because of their habit of setting fires to encourage blueberry bushes to produce:

There she lays before you, ten thousand acres like a tinder-box in this weather, dry since middle August. You've seen some of the slash. But you've seen only a little of it. Under those trees as far as eye can see there's the slash of tree cuttin's. Tops propped on their boughs like wood in a fireplace. Draught like a furnace! ... And about all those dod-fired Diggers down there know or care about property interests is that a burn makes blueberries grow, and blueberries are worth six cents a quart! They have done it in other places. They're inbred till they've got water for blood and sponges for brains. When the hankerin' for blueberries catches 'em they'll put the torch to that undergrowth and refuse, and if the wind helps and the rain don't stop it they'll set a fire that will run to Pogey Notch like racin' hosses.
--Holman Day King Spruce (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1908), page 86

Fascinating for the power dynamic and the competing interests.

And I've also been listening to some of Jean Ritchie's folksongs, and came across this gem, "Lazy John"

Lazy John, Lazy John
Will you marry me?

How can I marry you?
No hat to wear

Up she jumped and away she ran
Down to the market square
There she found a hat
For Lazy John to wear...

He continues to raise sartorially related objections: namely, he has no shirt, no trousers, no socks, and no shoes, and our lovestruck young woman, who enjoys a trip to the market square as much as the next person and can't, apparently, see the pattern being established (else she could forestall the socks and shoes by getting them when she picked up the trousers), goes and buys him each thing.

Finally she asks,

Lazy John, Lazy John
Will you marry me?

To which he replies--with surely heartfelt sadness....

How can I marry you
With a wife and ten children at home?

I suspect he's off to light the mountainside next, so he can set his ten children to picking blueberries come spring.