I LIKE A GERSHWIN TUNE

Lake Michigan Diary 49

Without even noticing I was doing it, I have been reading and re-reading literature about and around the American Civil War, perhaps because of what fills my mind and ears here in the non-natural world.  I’m reading The Red Badge of Courage for the first time and there is this entire chapter dedicated to the unnatural and terrifying sound of the “Rebel Yell”. You can go on YouTube and find actual recordings of the Rebel Yell.  Crane tries with all his skills to describe the scream, its call from the Confederates, high and shrill like coyotes howling, and the Union response, “subdued cheers, snarls, imprecations, prayers, a wild barbaric song”. There is a tall “philosophical” soldier in the battle next to our young hero, and “from his lips came a black procession of curious oaths.”

This week on New Yorker’s Fiction Podcast, a chapter from Chris Adrian’s great and strange novel Gob’s Grief was read and discussed, a passage in which an imagined Walt Whitman is bringing oranges and bread loaves to the field hospitals near the battle, and befriends Hank, who is going to protect the last leg he has no matter what.  He screams for a gun to shoot the surgeon who cut off the first one. 

In the kitchen I’m listening to the news this morning; it sounds as if I am hearing the yells and calls of democracy slipping away before our very eyes,

But on the dock at Jarvis beach, while walking the dog, I watched as a guy played some Gershwin on his clarinet for about ten minutes. Then suddenly he stripped down to a Speedo, looking all guy who can look good in a Speedo, and then he jumped in the lake.