James Agee, Neko Case, innocence, and old jazz records

I always meant this blog to be, among other things, your go-to site for James Agee links, so here's one from PopMatters:

In a little-known short story by James Agee, a poet and soldier has returned home from the Second World War, and in an effort to reestablish something of ease with his estranged wife has unearthed his collection of old jazz records. Bringing out these records proves sad and complicated, as he discovers that the associations bound up with the music are no longer common between them and that his own memories, fantasies, and experiences evoked by the music seem only to make grosser, wider, the chasm separating that life from this one. He finds that the person he was is an anachronism, lost and missing. For Agee, such are the depths reached as music cores into time, or as time into music: so inextricable are the two, as they cause our most fundamental notions of identity and history to twist together, revealing everything or nothing.

This is where “1928 Story” begins. Back home, trying but lost, the poet-soldier recoils from the records he truly thought of as his, records that had, before, marked him out in the world and made him feel good and right. Now they feel weird and kind of wrong. Wrong because the senses of world they suggest are too innocent. This is an innocence, he says, “that has no business being so innocent.” But Agee doesn’t really tell this story; he doesn’t really tell the story of a soldier making a go of it after the war, not explicitly anyway. The story he tells is really of those days spent discovering in the first place the music that after the war, after all, haunts.

The essay is actually about Fox Confessor Brings the Flood; read the whole thing for insights like these two:

When [Neko Case] sings, for example, “Hey pretty baby, get high with me / We can go to my sister’s if we say we’ll watch the baby”, it seems as though a whole, complex, involved, and moving story has been told about something really good and probably doomed. And it is this both-ness of good and doom that characterizes the world of the song, and also characterizes whatever borders may be sensed around the whole of the album as well.

. . . After the line, “I leave the party at three a.m.”, Case takes an almost-breath, slight—a moment, just—but that almost-breath is big, and seems bigger in memory, because it’s a prelude to one of the record’s most rewarding and genuine moments of joy. A breath, a pause, then: “Alone, thank God.” [...] In this instance, the unexpected and the possible take on the shape of humor. And humor, well, in a country song, is grace.