Town and country
There’s a Bill Callahan song in which his protagonist worries about not being able to change: “Whenever I get dressed up, I feel like an ex-con trying to make good.” Only that’s not how it’s sung. It has important pauses, so important, in fact, that you might be tempted to say caesuras, not pauses, since the word “pauses” itself has insufficient pausal value.
Imagine Van Morrison at his most theatrical, hand poised to conjure the band back in, but with the high drama sucked out of the lacuna (or caesura (or pause)). Where Van is high drama, Callahan is murmurs and significance.
So a more accurate gloss on the lyric is “Whenever/I get dressed up/I feel like/an ex-con/trine’oo make/goo-od.” There, you can better see how the content is mirrored in the unnatural, chopped-up delivery. In the mangled “trying to,” you get the old familiarity with fruitless effort, like a judge delivering one more sentence. You get tantalising distance, in the shade of elongation of “good.”
But this isn’t my pitch about the value of Bill Callahan and Smog. It’s just that the line reminds me how I feel about the country, all its solid things.
It’s natural to think of town and country as binary opposites. But I don’t think that picture’s right. The country is right there beside the town, in view, and too far to touch with trembling fingers. You’d have to reach and take a grasp of it, like a solid thing.
There’s another line at the end of that Bill Callahan song—“But out on the street, I feel like a robot by the river”—and then, with a pause, the sucker punch—“looking for a drink.”
A detail from Faulkner’s bedroom, where I was thinking about solid things.
