I cried. Sobbed. Wept. First Solstice without the man I was married to for more than four decades. I poured a second glass of his favorite cheap red wine. One should never drink alone.
But I don’t feel alone. Thanks, George. Thanks, Story Club. Happy Solstice.
Mary, you are a true gift to Story Club, and to the world. I always look forward to reading your thoughtful, insightful, and generous comments. So glad to be a part of this wonderful community.❤️
Thank you for the kindness, Mary. I'm so glad and grateful to be here as well. What a gift George gave us all, opening up this space to such depth of feeling. Wishing you my best as you walk through the new world you now live in. Words truly fail, but my heart is sending you love.
So sorry, Mary. I know this is tough, but you'll always find comfort here, along with intelligence & good humor, and maybe even some encouragement to get back in with your writing. Here's to you (glass of cheap red wine aloft)!
Hey, Mary, just thinking about you, glad you're in SC, hope you're okay. And here's to more cheap red wine---cures much if not quite everything. Cheers!
Yeah, that song's a killer. Got chills watching/listening to the Glen Hansard tribute. I mean, what a perfect sendoff. And now it seems I must blow the rest of the afternoon listening to Nick Cave perform as well. Hey, check out this version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qSkN4EXhBR8 It's live at Top of the Pops. Just beautiful. You know, only the Irish could make this song into a national treasure and most played song of the season. So much sadness shot straight through with joy. Amazing.
As far as your breakdown of the song/poem (and I think you have to add in the music as part of the analysis), I think you've got a good case. I'm thinking about the line that makes you cry, George. I find the next lines to be the ones that hit me the most. She says: "You took my dreams from me." And he replies: "I kept them with me babe." Oh the things we tell one another to get through our days.
And the music itself--the moment it takes off into an Irish jig and cements its identity right there. We are drunks, we're a mess, we've felt love and hate. But here we are, Irish to the core, dreams dashed perhaps, but still here.
Sending love to all of my Story Club cohorts and wishing a Happy Christmas to anyone who celebrates. My own winter celebration has come and gone--lighting candles during these dark, dark days, and hoping that love is strong enough to see us all through.
Goodbye Shane! Best worst teeth in all of Ireland.
But it's a heroic achievement Shane is confessing. "Knowing the man you were, loving you meant throwing away my aspirations," Kirsty says and Shane replies, "I picked up the tossed aspirations and satisfying them is the the thing I've cared about in this life." She and he both recognize his failure but also his love. It's the closest to redemption he can get.
it's been a million years since I read Ironweed. Absolutely no memory of it any more and no, I never saw the movie. But I'll take your word for it that this song brought that book to mind for you. I love it when one piece of art makes us think of another. Whether or not the man's treatment of the woman is heroic, as you write, well, that's one for each of us to ponder. I don't like analyzing songs too closely. They are all of a piece, mixing together lyrics, instruments, tempo, singing voice, emotion, and so on. And they are of a certain time and place. This song belongs to Ireland, and I love it, but i"m not Irish, so I can't make any big proclamations. Altogether, the song adds to something. What this song adds up to is for each of us to decide. It's a joyous pre-dirge, brutal and honest, full of life and the things we do to get by. But that's about as far as I'm willing to go.
I am with Mary on this one. It’s a terrific song, not least because there are two basic ways of understanding it: either keeping the dreams he stole from her excuses the theft, or it doesn’t. I am not a romantic, and it doesn’t. Romance is more in love with death and suffering than it is with the woman, and I do tend to file such attitudes under Male Atrocities. I do not love a good weep: when I cry, it’s devastation, and why would anyone love that.
I don't really believe in the afterlife, except in a metaphorical, Lincoln-in-the-Bardo sort of way, but I really do hope I'm wrong, and that there is a big boozy Irish heaven where Kirsty MacColl (another genius who died too young, in this case recklessly killed by a speedboat while trying to protect her children in the ocean) and Shane can sing together in a permanent state of joy. They both deserve it, for all the joy they have brought us with their music.
Sometimes, when things bite you so hard, it is hard to believe that anything could raise you to an emotional level beyond that in which you find yourself, pain, longing, a sense of hope and despair in the same moment to the words that you are listening to, the fallibility of being human and the depths to which things can bring you to as opposed to the heights that you rise to without quite understanding how you arrived at those heights, what a work of wonder is humanity
I recently read Claire Keegan's novella "Small Things Like These." I mention it because it's like the song in both its Christmas setting and the startling tears it can provoke. It is the rare story that keeps getting darker and darker and then astounds with its light. If you haven't read, give it a try.
Many years ago, I had that heart-wrenching, beautiful song on a compilation of excellent 80s music called Edge of Christmas. it was my favorite Christmas CD and I played it constantly. Every Christmas Eve, my amazing sister-in-law, Mary Beth, would fly in from Michigan and stay with us. My husband, her brother, conked out early (medical resident with no sleep), but she and I would stay up late in the night, putting out my children's presents and talking over amaretteo and sambuca. She was an environmental advocate in MI who did great, important work. THE most amazing human I've ever known--kind, wise, funny, caring.
In 2004, she was killed by a drunk driver who got off because he was more well known in the rural Michigan county she died in than she was. She'd been on her way to be with the love of her life when she was killed. She was 43. Her funeral was a huge event in Ann Arbor--the entire musical crowd turned out because they all knew her--her beloved played and sang in a bluegrass band.
Not long after, I read about how Kirsty MacColl had been killed several years before--by a careless boat owner who got off because he was rich. Somehow I've always connected Kirsty and my wonderful sister-in-law-and-in-heart, in my mind, both because of the unjust ways each was killed and denied justice, and because they had the same big-hearted joy in life.
At Mary Beth's funeral, one of the bands played a song you would love, I think, called "Blessed But Not Favored" -- written and originally performed by a group called Jeff and Vida.
it was a heart breaking, loving moment, and we danced in the aisles.
Thanks for your meditation on a beautiful song, my favorite Christmas Carol.
This song that I knew every note of, every waver to (along with every nuance of every song on that album) popped on the radio the other day (NPR) when driving and I was suddenly back in college, transformed.
Oh, the animation on her video is so beautiful! It saves my heart from crumbling to bits.
River makes me feel so homesick for my home in the Sierras (Truckee, California). Been stuck in LA for so many years ...wishing for a river to skate away ...
Oh, thanks, George. I was late to the Pogues, too. And, now thanks to you, a little weepy. Have a lovely Christmas---time to break out your fave, the Dickens, yes? Good wishes to you and your family & to all my Story Clubbing friends, old and new, for a cheering holiday & a better year ahead.
Thank you for deepening my appreciation for a man, his words, and his music. Finally joined Story Club today because of how you use any great writing to open a meaningful and limitless conversation.
George, apropos of the last part of Turgenev's "Singers", and because of the musical post, I thought I'd recommend Bernstein's lectures in Harvard 1973, where he talks about the Universal Grammar of musical phonemes. I'm watching right now and I can't help but be reminded of the boy singing out across the fields in search of his wayward brother... perhaps the root of all music, according to Bernstein. For my part, I'm a Dubliner, sitting here in Manchester, England, on call this Christmas and wishing I wasn't part of such a musical-poetical diaspora, because God it would break your heart sometimes. The Bernstein: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8fHi36dvTdE&list=PL6DY3I6m2_i8B3Wb3rxPNxXEPavny4QdD
Thanks for this, Sadneurons (hope that name isn't quite true). Great that the Norton Lectures are so accessible on YouTube & can watch them all. Hope your being on call for Christmas is more of a joy than a burden.
They way I described this song to my mother--it's on my Xmas mix--is, "It's about two people who may not be each other's problem, but they certainly aren't each other's solution."
BTW, you'll like this piece in the Times: "The Real Story Behind Shane MacGowan’s ‘Boys of the N.Y.P.D. Choir’" because, of course, the cops don't have a choir.
It's my personal favourite but a lot of my compatriots in Australia would vote for "How to make gravy" by Paul Kelly, a song so beloved that it has a day named after it (Gravy Day, 21st December). A father and husband in prison writes to his family back home preparing for Christmas. Including of course his gravy recipe.
I cried. Sobbed. Wept. First Solstice without the man I was married to for more than four decades. I poured a second glass of his favorite cheap red wine. One should never drink alone.
But I don’t feel alone. Thanks, George. Thanks, Story Club. Happy Solstice.
Sorry to hear this Mary - we are with you, for sure.
George, thank you. Your writing has seen me through some dark times. And I love Story Club. What a great place to be. Happy New Year to all.❤️
Aye Mary, you are never alone here.
Cheers!
Thank you, Ian. Story Club continues to be a gift and an inspiration. Now I’m off to nurse a hangover. Happy Holidays to all!❤️
Oh, Mary, I'm so sorry. I'm glad you're here. xo
Mary, you are a true gift to Story Club, and to the world. I always look forward to reading your thoughtful, insightful, and generous comments. So glad to be a part of this wonderful community.❤️
Thank you for the kindness, Mary. I'm so glad and grateful to be here as well. What a gift George gave us all, opening up this space to such depth of feeling. Wishing you my best as you walk through the new world you now live in. Words truly fail, but my heart is sending you love.
So sorry, Mary. I know this is tough, but you'll always find comfort here, along with intelligence & good humor, and maybe even some encouragement to get back in with your writing. Here's to you (glass of cheap red wine aloft)!
Lots of good humor here, lots of support. So happy to be among friends. Thank you, Story Club. Happy Holidays!❤️
Thank you, Rosanne. Story Club is a warm and welcoming place. A great community.❤️
Thanks for your message.
Thank you, Charlie! As we say here in Minnesota Viking land, Skol!❤️
Nesdrovia
Cin cin
Salute
Cheers
So sorry for you Mary. The beauty of sharing your sadness is seeing all the support you can find here. Today and every week with Story Club.
I have to add the Irish toast to Charlie's list - in honour of Shane - Slainte (Health - I don't know how to insert the fada - accent on the a here!)
Will any of these toasts give us a winning team?😆
Yes, assuredly
Mary, I am pleased to hear from another person who is affected by the power and vulnerability of this song
Thinking of you, Mary, and of all Story Club members who are grieving this holiday season.
Thank you, Lucy. Sending you my very best wishes for the New Year.❤️
Hey, Mary, just thinking about you, glad you're in SC, hope you're okay. And here's to more cheap red wine---cures much if not quite everything. Cheers!
send me your e-mail Emerald Green and I'll send you a Winter Solstice picture^^
Yeah, that song's a killer. Got chills watching/listening to the Glen Hansard tribute. I mean, what a perfect sendoff. And now it seems I must blow the rest of the afternoon listening to Nick Cave perform as well. Hey, check out this version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qSkN4EXhBR8 It's live at Top of the Pops. Just beautiful. You know, only the Irish could make this song into a national treasure and most played song of the season. So much sadness shot straight through with joy. Amazing.
As far as your breakdown of the song/poem (and I think you have to add in the music as part of the analysis), I think you've got a good case. I'm thinking about the line that makes you cry, George. I find the next lines to be the ones that hit me the most. She says: "You took my dreams from me." And he replies: "I kept them with me babe." Oh the things we tell one another to get through our days.
And the music itself--the moment it takes off into an Irish jig and cements its identity right there. We are drunks, we're a mess, we've felt love and hate. But here we are, Irish to the core, dreams dashed perhaps, but still here.
Sending love to all of my Story Club cohorts and wishing a Happy Christmas to anyone who celebrates. My own winter celebration has come and gone--lighting candles during these dark, dark days, and hoping that love is strong enough to see us all through.
Goodbye Shane! Best worst teeth in all of Ireland.
Merry Christmas, George.
But it's a heroic achievement Shane is confessing. "Knowing the man you were, loving you meant throwing away my aspirations," Kirsty says and Shane replies, "I picked up the tossed aspirations and satisfying them is the the thing I've cared about in this life." She and he both recognize his failure but also his love. It's the closest to redemption he can get.
Have you read Ironweed? Or the Film? Think of Jack and Meryl.
it's been a million years since I read Ironweed. Absolutely no memory of it any more and no, I never saw the movie. But I'll take your word for it that this song brought that book to mind for you. I love it when one piece of art makes us think of another. Whether or not the man's treatment of the woman is heroic, as you write, well, that's one for each of us to ponder. I don't like analyzing songs too closely. They are all of a piece, mixing together lyrics, instruments, tempo, singing voice, emotion, and so on. And they are of a certain time and place. This song belongs to Ireland, and I love it, but i"m not Irish, so I can't make any big proclamations. Altogether, the song adds to something. What this song adds up to is for each of us to decide. It's a joyous pre-dirge, brutal and honest, full of life and the things we do to get by. But that's about as far as I'm willing to go.
I am with Mary on this one. It’s a terrific song, not least because there are two basic ways of understanding it: either keeping the dreams he stole from her excuses the theft, or it doesn’t. I am not a romantic, and it doesn’t. Romance is more in love with death and suffering than it is with the woman, and I do tend to file such attitudes under Male Atrocities. I do not love a good weep: when I cry, it’s devastation, and why would anyone love that.
"Oh the things we tell one another to get through our days."
Now you're making me cry, Mary.
Paul Nelson, one of the editors of the recent anthology, Cascadia Zen, sent me a poem this morning.
Winter Solstice 2019
The fact is: the Light will increase
It always does. Whether we think it should
or not. No matter how determined
we are to be gloomy.
We may be sure that things
are worse than ever.
We may even be right.
But
HERE COMES THE SUN
Try & stop it.
Diane di Prima
Love it. The George Harrison/Beatles “Here Comes the Sun” still brings a glow no matter how many times I hear it.
Singing it now David. thanks. gloria
When I sing this song to my little cat, Missy Foos, she always starts purring :-)
How could she not?
Missy has a great musical ear ;-)
Try Now and Then while watching the boys over time^^
There are places I remember…
Thanks, me too.
THANKS FOR SHARING CHARLIE---HERE COMES THE SUN IT NEVER FAILS.
I don't really believe in the afterlife, except in a metaphorical, Lincoln-in-the-Bardo sort of way, but I really do hope I'm wrong, and that there is a big boozy Irish heaven where Kirsty MacColl (another genius who died too young, in this case recklessly killed by a speedboat while trying to protect her children in the ocean) and Shane can sing together in a permanent state of joy. They both deserve it, for all the joy they have brought us with their music.
John Prine too!
Long live John Prine!!
& Nanci Griffith!
...and they danced all night, to the fiddle and the banjo...at the Roseville Fair
Speed of the Sound of Loneliness!
Tom Waits in Kentucky Avenue
Sometimes, when things bite you so hard, it is hard to believe that anything could raise you to an emotional level beyond that in which you find yourself, pain, longing, a sense of hope and despair in the same moment to the words that you are listening to, the fallibility of being human and the depths to which things can bring you to as opposed to the heights that you rise to without quite understanding how you arrived at those heights, what a work of wonder is humanity
Happy holidays, George. You have changed a lot of lives this year! Enriched them.
I recently read Claire Keegan's novella "Small Things Like These." I mention it because it's like the song in both its Christmas setting and the startling tears it can provoke. It is the rare story that keeps getting darker and darker and then astounds with its light. If you haven't read, give it a try.
Yes, wonderful book.
A brilliant, gorgeous book. Transcendent.
Many years ago, I had that heart-wrenching, beautiful song on a compilation of excellent 80s music called Edge of Christmas. it was my favorite Christmas CD and I played it constantly. Every Christmas Eve, my amazing sister-in-law, Mary Beth, would fly in from Michigan and stay with us. My husband, her brother, conked out early (medical resident with no sleep), but she and I would stay up late in the night, putting out my children's presents and talking over amaretteo and sambuca. She was an environmental advocate in MI who did great, important work. THE most amazing human I've ever known--kind, wise, funny, caring.
In 2004, she was killed by a drunk driver who got off because he was more well known in the rural Michigan county she died in than she was. She'd been on her way to be with the love of her life when she was killed. She was 43. Her funeral was a huge event in Ann Arbor--the entire musical crowd turned out because they all knew her--her beloved played and sang in a bluegrass band.
Not long after, I read about how Kirsty MacColl had been killed several years before--by a careless boat owner who got off because he was rich. Somehow I've always connected Kirsty and my wonderful sister-in-law-and-in-heart, in my mind, both because of the unjust ways each was killed and denied justice, and because they had the same big-hearted joy in life.
At Mary Beth's funeral, one of the bands played a song you would love, I think, called "Blessed But Not Favored" -- written and originally performed by a group called Jeff and Vida.
it was a heart breaking, loving moment, and we danced in the aisles.
Thanks for your meditation on a beautiful song, my favorite Christmas Carol.
Here it is, from the funeral. The only other song that makes me as weepy this time of year is Joni Mitchell's "River (It's Coming on Christmas")".
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q10tr1xi3NE
Yes. Even the mention of the title makes me weep. River.
This song that I knew every note of, every waver to (along with every nuance of every song on that album) popped on the radio the other day (NPR) when driving and I was suddenly back in college, transformed.
She does that, doesn't she---especially that song.
Oh, the animation on her video is so beautiful! It saves my heart from crumbling to bits.
River makes me feel so homesick for my home in the Sierras (Truckee, California). Been stuck in LA for so many years ...wishing for a river to skate away ...
The Pogues 'Rainy Night in Soho' is a beaut too. 'You're the measure of my dreams' gets me every time x
Oh, thanks, George. I was late to the Pogues, too. And, now thanks to you, a little weepy. Have a lovely Christmas---time to break out your fave, the Dickens, yes? Good wishes to you and your family & to all my Story Clubbing friends, old and new, for a cheering holiday & a better year ahead.
Thank you for deepening my appreciation for a man, his words, and his music. Finally joined Story Club today because of how you use any great writing to open a meaningful and limitless conversation.
Beautiful George. Best to you and your family.
May all our texts reverb with hope, for the holidays and beyond.
New reader here, and grateful for this post.
George, apropos of the last part of Turgenev's "Singers", and because of the musical post, I thought I'd recommend Bernstein's lectures in Harvard 1973, where he talks about the Universal Grammar of musical phonemes. I'm watching right now and I can't help but be reminded of the boy singing out across the fields in search of his wayward brother... perhaps the root of all music, according to Bernstein. For my part, I'm a Dubliner, sitting here in Manchester, England, on call this Christmas and wishing I wasn't part of such a musical-poetical diaspora, because God it would break your heart sometimes. The Bernstein: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8fHi36dvTdE&list=PL6DY3I6m2_i8B3Wb3rxPNxXEPavny4QdD
Dublin South.
The specific place of my father's nascence. New Year's Eve, all being well, we'll be making a modest trip to visit my parent's grave. Imagine.
50 years ago. I see him ever more clearly, yet ever more lately, joined by that her who is my, and my brother's, mother.
Tempus fugit?
Thanks for this, Sadneurons (hope that name isn't quite true). Great that the Norton Lectures are so accessible on YouTube & can watch them all. Hope your being on call for Christmas is more of a joy than a burden.
I cried now even just reading his words on the page.
Thank you (always! x squillions!) for giving vocabulary and credence to the belief that hopeful works can be honest, too.
They way I described this song to my mother--it's on my Xmas mix--is, "It's about two people who may not be each other's problem, but they certainly aren't each other's solution."
BTW, you'll like this piece in the Times: "The Real Story Behind Shane MacGowan’s ‘Boys of the N.Y.P.D. Choir’" because, of course, the cops don't have a choir.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/01/nyregion/shane-mcgowan-nypd-choir.html
They do now - Shane’s imagination was a powerful thing: https://youtu.be/TFC2V4o2k_Q?si=fVNsWqxPNXDsqgTi
It's my personal favourite but a lot of my compatriots in Australia would vote for "How to make gravy" by Paul Kelly, a song so beloved that it has a day named after it (Gravy Day, 21st December). A father and husband in prison writes to his family back home preparing for Christmas. Including of course his gravy recipe.
and of course that bit about his brother not stabbing him in the back, dancing too close with his wife...