Disparates: essays by Patrick Madden

Author:Patrick Madden
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
Published: 2020-04-06T00:00:00+00:00

… about whom we know nothing more than what the song suggests (she seems to be keeping her husband prisoner in a belfry, in a kind of simple twist on Jane Eyre, perhaps). Given that the song is only superficially inspired by the movie’s title, it would be fruitless to seek intentional connections there. Perhaps, though, I might note the resonances between this appropriation and Ramirez and Luna’s fanciful rendering of Alfonsina’s last act: art is not life, even when drawn from life, or inspired by fragments of an external reality, but it diverges purposefully and is transformed, perhaps even transforms the material from whence it derives, so that hearers or readers, quite innocently, may eventually come to conflate the one with the other, or create connections unintended and invisible to the creators, or the livers. Perhaps there is something here about the inscrutability of representations, or presentations, such as one finds, to varying degrees, in characters both fictional and non-. Something about the need to make the attempt anyway, despite the impossibility of complete understanding. Something about the elusive, illusive variable effects of songs, which both reduce and expand, can only suggest, and yet convey quite a bit of… what? … emotion?

But an essay is not a song, so in the very least, I hold myself to the expectation that I not fabricate beyond the facts, as best I can ascertain them (an interesting word, ascertain, “to make certain,” a concept antagonistic to good essayistic meandering), and I try not to make certain but to make sense. Somewhat.

No me gustan las canciones porque mienten

Porque todo se resuelve en tres minutos

I don’t like songs because they lie

Because everything’s resolved in three minutes

—ANDRES CALAMARO, “Mi rock perdido”

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