Word: plainsong
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...anathema, is trying to lay claim to the movie. But that is nonsense. What liberal would want to deny the compassion and courage of working-class heroes whom the left embraced, historically, long before the right? Very simply, World Trade Center is a powerful movie experience, a hymn in plainsong that glorifies that which is best in the American spirit...
Kent Haruf's previous novel wasn't just a book. It was a cause. When Plainsong was published five years ago, its gentle but indelible tale of people getting through life on the high plains of Colorado was adopted with a passion by independent booksellers, the same ones who had pushed Charles Frazier's Cold Mountain up the best-seller list. They did the trick for Plainsong too, which eventually was also nominated for a National Book Award...
...Eventide (Knopf; 300 pages), picks up their stories about 18 months later and follows them through an eventful autumn, winter and spring. The old bachelor McPheron brothers, Harold and Raymond, are now contending with the departure of Victoria Roubideaux, the pregnant teenager who came to live with them in Plainsong and has moved with her toddler daughter to another town to start college. There's a new focus on the slow-witted Luther and Betty Wallace, whose grasp of fundamental life skills--bill paying, food shopping, child rearing--is poor enough to put both of them forever in the keeping...
Woody Guthrie sang about Lewis and Clark country. Instead of his usual hobo's plainsong, Guthrie broke into an anthem that might have been written by the National Association of Manufacturers: "Roll on, Columbia, roll on/Roll on, Columbia, roll on/Your power is turning our darkness to dawn/So roll on, Columbia, roll on." Guthrie ardently wired up the dawn of Manifest Destiny to hydroelectric power: "Tom Jefferson's vision would not let him rest/An empire he saw in the Pacific Northwest/Sent Lewis and Clark and they did the rest/So roll on, Columbia, roll on." The beautiful, wild river made Guthrie...
...sonnet--its construction is rigidly decreed, but poets have demonstrated time and time again that it is possible to transcend the apparent limitations of the sonnet, for within its confines, one can say whatever one wishes. Likewise, Byrd showed that it was possible to outstep the ostensible boundaries for plainsong writing by imbuing it with a passion (perhaps a bit cerebral by Romantic standards, but potent passion nevertheless) that stemmed from his religious frustration as a staunch Roman Catholic in Anglican England. Similarly, though Bach was "only" a Lutheran, his music resonates with passion that many of his interpreters...