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Lucinda Williams has been touring lately in concerts that mark the 20th anniversary of her Car Wheels on a Gravel Road album from 1998. This video is from her September performance in Port Chester, New York.

Anyone who has seen Williams in the past will, I think, attest that she can be a hesitant or reluctant performer. In this concert, she discusses the background for the writing of many of her songs. I’ve never seen her either on video or in live performance more relaxed, warm, and charming.

If you’re a Lucinda fan, and haven’t seen her on this tour, I recommend this video.

There’s a twist at the end of Jason Isbell’s song “Live Oak” that the Internet, or a corner of it anyway, debates. 

The song involves a man who’s drifted into a farming community and entered into a relationship with a woman. The setting would appear to be the North Central Plains before World War II. 

In his past, the narrator was part of a gang that robbed a Great Lakes freighter and killed two men. When rumors of that crime comes to his new farming community, he expects the woman he’s in a relationship with to be repulsed. Instead he discovers she might have seen this potential violence in him all along, and it drew her to him in the first place. The narrative unfolds with the economy of a Sherwood Anderson short story in a little over three minutes.

The online debate involves the last verse in which the woman dies, the man buries her and heads on further south. At least some listeners believe he kills his lover at the end. In their view the song is a murder story and a Gothic one at that. 

I’m going to say this is flatly wrong, but I want to make a further point: the “reading” of the song that turns it into a murder story involves a mistaken approach to reading (or listening), one that is at least a first cousin of the more troubling tendency toward conspiracy theories that are now being inflamed regularly on the Internet near you.

So what’s wrong with the murder theory of the song? After all, lines early in the song tell us: “I never held a lover in my arms or in my gaze/ So I found another victim every couple days.”

And there’s the possibility that the narrator’s an unreliable one: when he thinks his lover is intrigued or excited by his murderous past, she may actually be fearful. He thinks she’ll expose him, so he kills her.

But I imagine you see the problem with this line of reasoning instantly. You have to create new narrative elements—his discovering her fear, his deciding only murder will get him out of the problem, and you have to ignore (and what you have to ignore is just as big as what you have to add) that there’s no hint that the narrator’s remorse is not real and deeply felt, or that his love for the woman is insincere. Nor are there internal hints that his assessment of her reactions is off base. (And you also have to ignore the metaphorical reading of those lines about “another victim every couple days.”)

The murder theory involves faulty inferential thinking. The reading goes beyond what’s implied. But it’s worse than that: it also makes its untoward leaps based on a biased preference, the preference for the sensational murder story over other alternatives. 

This preference is rooted in psychology: by going beyond what is inferred, the reader/listener seizes power, erasing the narration’s force (and for that matter the author’s command—though as you’ll see in a second I’ll call that command into question). The reader/listener collapses the story’s mystery, the nuance that creates its real power and substitutes their own sensational fantasies.

This is where the overlap with conspiracy theorizing comes in. Conspiracy theories offer a way to erase the world and substitute our preferences. Erasing the story (about the actual world or a close approach to it) is satisfying because it puts to rest the unsettling vibration of uncertainty that the song, the story, the world sets up in us. By adding the bonus of allowing us to fill the now voided space (of story/song/world) with our own take, we gain the myriad satisfactions that come with confirming our preconceived views. All is right with the world. Indeed we’re in control of it.

As far as I know, Isbell has refused to say what happens in the song, and has even joked about it. I’m going to suggest that what he thinks happens, if he even has an opinion, would be interesting to know but would not sweep aside other interpretations. 

The idea that the author’s opinion about their work is not definitive turns out to be a controversial one—as I’ve come to understand as a teacher of writing. My students greet me with astonished disbelief when I suggest that the author might not know any more about a story than the reader. Yet I believe this is true. Words escape our intentions—anyone who thinks carefully about language, will I believe come to this conclusion.

Perhaps you’re telling yourself right now that while arguing for open-endedness, uncertainty, and the irreducibility of stories, I’ve reduced the song to my favored interpretation. 

So first of all, I’m not making a case for limitless, roll-your-own open-endedness. Stories have real gravitational fields that pull in settling directions. 

But I’ll willingly muddy the waters. I’m against the murder theory, but I don’t think it’s wholly absent from the song. That earlier line about victims and the last verse describing her burial must raise in the listener the question of whether the narrator in fact killed her (though the care he takes in that burial and the evident time it would take argues against the murder thesis). 

Rather I’ll say the hints of violence in the song are the way the narrator’s violent past and potentially violent present vibrate or radiate in the story. The murder possibility helps create the song’s emotional complexity, it just doesn’t determine its plot.

Here’s the lyrics. The song opens with the chorus:

There’s a man who walks beside me

he is who I used to be

And I wonder if she sees him 

and confuses him with me

And I wonder who she’s pining for 

on nights I’m not around

Could it be the man who did the things I’m living down

I was rougher than the timber shipping out of Fond du Lac

When I headed south at seventeen, the sheriff on my back

I’d never held a lover in my arms or in my gaze

So I found another victim every couple days

But the night I fell in love with her, I made my weakness known

To the fighters and the farmers digging dusty fields alone

The jealous innuendos of the lonely-hearted men

Let me know what kind of country I was sleeping in

Well you couldn’t stay a loner on the plains before the war

When my neighbors took to slightin’ me, I had to ask what for

Rumors of my wickedness had reached our little town

Soon she’d heard about the boys I used to hang around

We’d robbed a great-lakes freighter, killed a couple men aboard

When I told her, her eyes flickered like the sharp steel of a sword

All the things that she’d suspected, I’d expected her to fear

Was the truth that drew her to me when I landed here

There’s a man who walks beside me he is who I used to be

And I wonder if she sees him and confuses him with me

And I wonder who she’s pining for on nights I’m not around

Could it be the man who did the things I’m living down

Well I carved her cross from live oak and her box from short-leaf pine

And buried her so deep, she’d touch the water table line

And picked up what I needed and I headed south again

To myself, I wondered, “Would I ever find another friend”

There’s a man who walks beside her, he is who I used to be

And I wonder if she sees him and confuses him with me

Visages of War -- Salvador Dalí

The details of my dream are not so important. My unit was in the mountains in a column of jeeps (but old-style WWII jeeps). Suddenly we were under attack, an ambush, machine gun fire raking the road, bullets pocking the hood of the jeep—it happened with crushing rapidity, no drama, no buildup, and then I was wounded. I knew that it was probably fatal, though I felt very little pain. I crawled under the jeep.

What happened next is why I’m recounting what was otherwise a pretty silly dream—perhaps sparked by all the stories about the U.S. withdrawal from Iraq. The point of view suddenly shifted. I was now part of the ‘we’ of the unit. The voice at this point became novelistic. It was some time after the attack, and we were in a duty room or barracks, and we were all hoping for the survival of our fellow, the wounded soldier. Indeed the unit’s morale had become deeply tied up in the fate of the wounded man, who was nonetheless in grave condition. It was clear to us that things could go either way.

Then came news that the soldier would survive, though he was to be limited physically in some undisclosed way, and we were happy and relieved. At about this time, I partially woke up. It often happens this way: when the narrative improbability of a dream reaches a certain level, the only way to keep the story intact is to enter a semi-conscious state—which allows me to maneuver the dream’s unwieldy violations of logic a few steps forward in half sleep.

Speaking to a doctor would be of great online prescription for cialis help. The search for the ideal pharmacological therapy for erectile dysfunction treatment, prices for cialis the receiver is taught to practice some breathing techniques, so that during the procedure the receiver remains tension free and calm. Today, shilajit getting viagra in australia anti aging pills for men is nothing to be ashamed of. Many women fear that the partner free generic viagra will despise herself, so they suppress the real reactions and emotions to show self-respect. Once I was fully awake, I understood that I’d had a somewhat embarrassing adolescent dream: about being a soldier, about facing death, etc. Except for the odd part: that narrative shift. I recognized that it had to do with deflecting the burden, the anxiety of the injury I suffered. The ‘we’ narrator allowed the dream to linger on; confronted with my fate on the battlefield I would have woken up immediately.

Yet this was only part of the dream’s mechanism. Its full significance only dawned on me when I realized that its structure more or less mimes the national response to the wounding of soldiers in the current and recent national wars. (I won’t call them ‘warriors’ because this seems part of the same phenomenon.)

The unconscious shift of narrative focus allowed me to turn the dream of my own wounding into a feel-good story, into a story about the well-being and morale of the rest of us; it allowed me to avoid facing the wound and its consequences. Something like this feels familiar in current news stories about wounded soldiers, which all seem to suggest in different ways that the good spirits of the wounded, their perseverance, and their survival against the odds are our good spirits, our perseverance, and our survival against the odds—though without our ever having to suffer the inconvenience of actual risk or harm.

Seeing this, I was reminded that it would be a mistake to believe that the illogic of dreams is confined to them. As Delmore Schwartz reminded us, in dreams begin responsibilities. But in my case, my dream hinted at an irresponsibility that runs much deeper than my petty and self-serving unconscious.

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