Racing Turtles

The song that’s been in my head for the last month and change is Beeswing by the folk-rock legend Richard Thompson. It’s become kind of a modern folk standard - in Ireland, particularly, as far as I can tell. Richard Thompson is one of those people who you suspect of being a genius and also of being an asshole. He’s got a famous Bitter Divorce Record to his name but he may be the only person to have recorded one with the woman he was divorcing. He has never been as famous or as rich as his talent would suggest he should be and he seems very aware of it.  He’s one of my favorite guitarists.

Beeswing itself is your classic song about a girl which is actually about the guy singing, his regrets at the road not taken, growing old, etc.  Here’s Richard:

Man, I’d like to be able to play like that.

It isn’t the first result that comes up when you search for Beeswing on YouTube, though.  That one belongs to Christy Moore:

Christy is another folk-rock legend, but he’s even less rich and famous than Richard.  He’s a leftist and an Irish republican, also, whereas Richard is your standard liberal who wasn’t too proud to accept an OBE.  In this video Christy never mentions who wrote the song - he’s only singing it as a tribute to his dead friend, who liked it - and he also fixes it.  He removes Richard’s beautiful but showy guitarwork, rearranges the verses, snips little words here and adds them in there.  He streamlines it, clarifies it, takes out the weirdly violent part, and manages to make the song, in some way, about its putative subject.  I wonder if he did this pointedly or if he was just a craftsman at his work. 

In doing this he created a fork in the song’s history.  There are covers of both versions online - for the most part, the polished ones follow Richard’s, the raw ones follow Christy’s.   Some of the latter seem to be reaching for a third subject of the song, which isn’t wistfulness for a girl who symbolizes an imagined lost freedom or genuine tenderness for the actual woman but anger at the system that makes you pay such a steep price for the chains that you refuse.

So the Irish own this song now. 

This post doesn’t have a moral - it’s just me clearing out my latest mini-fixation to make room for the next one.  But it’s always good to remember that you lose ownership of your art the second you put it in front of other people, and that it doesn’t ultimately matter what you meant by it if someone looks at it and sees something better.

This is a lovely song and I went looking for more versions and found Grace Petrie’s, which re-interprets the song as being about the price of queer non-conformity:

Which I think is pretty neat.

Nobody on the left ever wants to hear this, but a large part of the reason we keep losing elections is that we have chased away moderates and constantly act like their very presence is poison. There’s a persistent delusion on the left that we’re some kind of silent majority and it’s just not true. We’re not a large group, and we do need to loop someone else in if we ever want to form any kind of government at all. Elections are not protest movements for a reason. They are in fact a terrible time for such a thing. Especially in a multi-party system where there is always another potential choice just around the corner and nobody is obligated to buy what you’re selling, no matter how convinced you are the only moral option is what you believe. If you want to convert someone to the cause it has to happen long before that. And if you can’t, but they are willing to stand with you this time? Then that’s gonna have to be good enough. They don’t have to be your best friend. They don’t have to be your comrade.

I saw a woman on twitter who’d just joined the Democratic Socialists of America talking about how if she hadn’t gone to an in person meeting she never, ever would have done it because their online presence fucking sucks, filled with frothing keyboard warriors constantly screaming about guillotines and violence and brutal revolution. And then she went to a meeting and it was all sensible, helpful people doing things like paying off parking tickets for those in need or arranging for necessities like food or rent to be covered. I think about this a lot, how bad the left’s advertising is. We can’t spit contempt in everyone’s face and then expect their help when the time comes. That’s not how human nature works. And yes, the internet has definitely made this phenomenon worse.

I don’t care about the revolution. The revolution does not exist. I care about getting useful politicians into a position where they might help somebody. I care about practicality. All these glorious and correct ideas mean dick shit if nobody ever gets to actually use them.

I think a surprising amount of writers don’t realize that tragedies are supposed to be cathartic. They’re intended to result in a purging of emotion, a luxurious cry; the sorrow caused by a great tragedy is akin to fear caused by a good horror movie – it’s a “safe” sorrow, one that is actually satisfying to the audience. It can still be beautiful! It’s isn’t supposed to just be salting the earth so nothing can grow.

But that’s how you get grimdark: writers who don’t realize that they’re supposed to be doing something with the audience instead of to the audience.