For a couple of weeks now I've been making little things to carry around with me in my pocket (flannel birds, matchbox shrines) to make me feel better. And it works, but I realized yesterday that it's the making and not the carrrying that has the effect.
My new year's resolution is to make more art.
A quick plug: the best Christmas (or Hannukah, or birthday, or whatever) present I can think of.
Oxfam Unwrapped
Today I was listening to Kate Rusby's "Cowsong", about a boy with a cow who dallies with a girl he meets by the roadside and ends up losing both cow and trousers. I got to thinking: there's a lot of this scenario in English folksong. Boy meets girl, suggestive dialogue, they have sex in some bit of countryside. In the sad songs she winds up pregnant and deserted, in the happy ones they agree to meet and do it again. In the funny ones one of them is tricked - ha, he lost his trousers! Ha, he won't marry her because he already has a wife!
Was there this much casual pastoral sex in England of one and two centuries ago?
Pastoral, probably yes. Buildings were smaller and more crowded then, and there were no backseats of cars. I personally would not want to be always finding barns and bushes to hide in, but people must have managed. Some songs do attest to the difficulty of locating a convenient place:
"He looked east and he looked west,
He looked north so did he south,
But he could not find a privy place
For a lay in the devil's mouth."
Some of them make it sound quite nice, though:
Then lie thee down, my beam,
I'll not spoil thy gaudy shining gear:
I'll make a bed of fern,
And I'll gently press my Jenny there.
Let me lift thy petticoat,
And thy kercher too that hides thy bosom:
Show thy naked beauty's store—
Jenny alone's the lass that I adore!
But I'm pretty sure this wasn't happening as often as the songs suggest. Queer sex was too unspeakable to even appear in the songs. Before birth control, surely it took a great deal of stupidity for women to have random sex with men by the side of the road. There wasn't formalized education about it, but people living around livestock probably understood from an early age how mammals get pregnant.
Certainly people were having extramarital sex, but I doubt it was so often unpremeditated. Maybe it was more often carefully planned adultery, like in this tragic ballad:
"I have loved you, fair lady, full long and many's the day."
"And I have loved you, Little Musgrave, and never a word did say."
"I've a bower in Bucklesfordbury, it's my heart's delight.
I'll take you back there with me if you'll lie in me arms tonight."
But maybe people liked songs about casual sex because they weren't realistic. People make this stuff up because they'd like it to be real, not because they think it is. And throughout time, it's been very popular. Said the organizer of a Robert Burns festival, "What could be closer to the tradition of modern gangsta rap music? Yes, it's sexist; yes, it's offensive; and yes, it's gratuitous — it's identical in almost every respect." We'll end with some of that esteemed poet:
The night was dark, and thro the park
I cou'dna but convoy her;
Sweet Betsey fell, fal lal de ral!
I am a Fornicator.
It’s funny how many words there are for “dead.”
In a newspaper article, you may be a fatality. In another sort of newspaper article, you may be the late Mr. Walker. To your sister, you have passed away. To your pastor, you are the dearly departed. The post office prefers “deceased”.
Today at work I got a piece of returned mail with that word scrawled on it. Below was the post office’s sticker:
MOVED
LEFT NO FORWARDING ADDRESS
I just started three months of temp work for Oxfam America, which is great so far. I love the cause, I love the people, I even love the commute. But when you get down to it, data entry is always going to be data entry. And I had forgotten that when I’ve been doing monotonous computer work for a while, I start humming.
I think the lack of modern work songs is a big problem. Our ancestors had songs for laundry, marching, hoeing, weaving, working on chain gangs, you name it. Our modern monotonous tasks don’t have songs, but I find I’ve got to have something to occupy my mind a bit while my hands are doing their own thing on the keyboard.
The best attempt at this, of course, is Stan Rogers’ (dated) “White Collar Holler”:
Well, I rise up every mornin' at a quarter to eight,
Some woman who's my wife tells me not to be late.
I kiss the kids goodbye, can't remember their names,
And week after week it's always the same.
And it's whoa boys, can you code it (huh!)
Program it right,
Nothin' ever happens in this life of mine,
I'm haulin up the data on the Xerox line.
And it's code in the data, give the keyboard a punch.
Then cross-correlate and break for some lunch.
Correlate, tabulate, process and screen,
Program, printout, regress to the mean.
So, at the risk of driving the person at the next desk crazy, what songs do we need? I’ve long wanted a photocopying song.
Scene: Election day. Julia is standing the required 150 feet away from her polling place with a sign reading "Yes on 4! Save the economy and the planet."
Security guard: Hey, what's question four?
Julia: It's asking the legislature to take subsidies away from industries that pollute a lot and give the subsidies to building green jobs instead.
Guard: That sounds good. All that green stuff. You know, I bought a truck the other week, and the guy at the lot says you can have it in two colors, the blue one or the green one. (With a wise smile.) And I says to him, I'll take the green one. It seems like things are going in that direction, you know?
Uh, sir? It doesn't actually work like that.
juliawise07(at)gmail.com