Lands

Camping is different from backpacking in this: While camping, I had my banjo and a book to read. Which was good, because I wasn't spending the majority of the day's hours walking to the next place where I could sleep and find water. So I needed something to do.

I. Summerland

In my continuing effort to read his complete works, I brought along Michael Chabon's YA novel, Summerland. It's 500 pages, so I thought it would do for the four days. I forgot that it's a YA novel. After day one, I had to ration my consumption, finishing the night before we left.

It's not a great book -- The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay and The Mysteries of Pittsburgh are, as far as my reading has taken me, Chabon's best. It is, as one New York Times reviewer disparaged, "busy," but it is tons of fun, and the NYT reviewer must have some sort of axe to grind, because it does not deserve the kind of punishment that he gives it.

That said, you have to want it to all hang together. In a great book, it would all hang together on its own, but this lack makes sense to me; the book is about the power of stories, about "valorizing the mundane," as Denise Iris, my filmmaking professor says (about things in general, not about this book). It makes sense that, like fairies, the book's power will not become evident until you believe in it.

II. This Land

In How to Play the Five-String Banjo, Pete Seeger includes a chart for "This Land Is Your Land," the old Woody Guthrie favorite. More because it was easy than because I chose it, it became the first song I've played on the banjo. That said, it's a great first banjo tune for me: "As I went walking that ribbon of highway..." "I rolled and rambled / and I followed my footsteps..." it fits with this upcoming (traveling) stage of my summer.

"This Land..." is used as a patriotic anthem, so it's often forgotten that Woody was not always a big fan of American style capitalism/democracy. Consider this, my favorite verse:

There was a big high wall there, it tried to stop me / there was a sign there, sayin' "private property" / but on the other side, it didn't say nothin' / This land [or that side] was made for you and me.

There are, according to wikipedia two other "controversial" verses, both of which I love and hope to learn soon. Here they are:

Nobody living can ever stop me,

As I go walking that freedom highway;

Nobody living can ever make me turn back

This land was made for you and me.

In the squares of the city, In the shadow of a steeple;

By the relief office, I'd seen my people.

As they stood there hungry, I stood there asking,

Is this land made for you and me?

Your Help Needed:

1) I realize I'm using no consistent style for titles of movies, songs, books, etc. Any favorite styles out there anyone? MLA? APA? Chicago?

2) Seeger writes out this "This Land" in C, using C, F, and G7 chords. But the G7 sounds off to me. Anyone with music theory knowledge want to recommend a different chord? Or is my drummer's tin ear doing me in, and the G7 is fine?

Bildungsroman

It was in an attempt to read the complete works of John Steinbeck that I ended up embroiled in an attempt to read the complete works of Michael Chabon. I don't know how I got from St to Ch, but I left the Swarthmore branch of the Delaware County Public Library system with "The Short Reign of Pippin IV" and "The Yiddish Policemen's Union." Having already read "Kavalier and Clay," I moved on to "Gentlemen of the Road" and "The Final Solution," but it wasn't until two days after graduation that I finished Chabon's first novel, "The Mysteries of Pittsburgh." It's a bildungsroman, set during the summer after its protagonist's college graduation.

It was one day after graduation that "Pittsburgh" set me to wondering if I wasn't missing out on some important and formative adolescent angst. I was washing the furniture on the patio, preparing for my own graduation party when it hit me that, unlike the protagonist of almost every bildungsroman out there, I feel good about my life. The remorse that overtook me when I thought of what I was missing out on (transformative journeys, brief and ill-fated loves, deep psychological traumas, nostalgic walks through old neighborhoods) quickly became an angst of its own, thus paradoxically assuaging my fears. The kernel my autobiographical bildungsroman is there, in the lack of a kernel for my autobiographical bildungsroman, I thought. I laughed at my recursive post-(yet still eminently indicative of)-Swarthmore thinking. This dispelled the angst.

At the party, my various aunts, uncles, cousins, and family friends all asked me some variation on this question "what's next?" My cousin Chris, just becoming a freshman at the same high school I attended, asked a very different question: "So, uh, Greg, what are you gonna be?" I was, at first, annoyed. Such a question begs a one-word answer, something out of a children's book or The Village People's costume department: Astronaut. Doctor. Firefighter. "Vagabond," I said.

I like Chris's question because I don't know the answer, and I am still in debate with myself over whether it is a question to which I can or should try to know the answer. In one sense, I'm gonna be the conglomerate of the answers to "what's next?". In another, sense, "what are you gonna be?" could give a framework for answering "what's next?"

Regardless, this moment before "next" is one that, today, feels like promise. As I lay in my hammock reading Chabon's early short fiction, I thought about what a time it was: A time to read complete works. A time to track down a banjo on the cheap. A time to decide to buy (or not buy) a car. A time like the time at the beginning of a bildungsroman.

FOR DISCUSSION:
What is the plural of bildungsroman? Bildungsromans? Bildungsromane? Bildungsromanen?
Do you have or know of anyone who has a cheap-yet-functional banjo and/or car with which you/they are willing to part?