Summertime

Melanie said someday she's going to move where it is always summer. This is a dream she has, with moving her trailer out of the park and into an open field in the country with her boyfriend (soon to be her husband; she's only 19 and I'll never really know how it got this way, but there you are).

If it was summer too much of the year I'd ache from scratching bug bites and crisping in the sun; and beautiful things, too many of them, could warp and jade me.

The last time I puked I think I'd eaten too many raspberries.

I do crave a sun-splattered swimming hole and open spaces open arms and a bronzed American boy with nearly a panic-stricken love of everything, the one that used to paralyze me cuz I thought I was the only one. In a worse way, I crave the moonlit walks and the feeling of no tomorrow that summer brought only when I was little, before I knew what it meant.

Chords:

It uses a cowboy-chord structure--instead of bar chords, just move the shapes up and down the fretboard.

   Bm/A                    Am7              
-----------          -----------
| | | | | X  1st     | | | | O |
-----------          -----------
| | | | O x  2nd     | | O | | |
-----------          -----------
| | O O | x          | | | | | |
-----------
| | | | | x


Am    Bm/A    Am7          Bm/A
                           Summer--
Am    Bm/A    Am7          Bm/A    
time               and the livin's
Am    Bm/A    Am7          Bm/A          
Easy                       Fish are 
Dm                         
jumpin' and the cotton is 
E7                                   
High...................You're daddy's 
Am    Bm/A    Am7          Bm/A    
Rich              and your momma's good
Am    Bm/A    Am7          Bm/A    
Lookin'                    so
C                 F     E7
Hush little baby, Don't you
Am    Bm/A    Am7          Bm/A    
Cry

"Summertime" is a 2009 work of fiction by J.M. Coetzee, a South African writer who won the 2003 Nobel Prize for literature. The book takes the form of a series of interviews of Coetzee's acquaintances by a biographer who is writing a posthumous biography of Coetzee.

This is an unusual format to write fiction in, and I am either particularly well- or ill-placed to appreciate it. I knew nothing about Coetzee before reading the book, other than that he is of the age and nationality of the character described in the book. I do not know how much else the character Coetzee and the author Coetzee have in common, whether in objective or subjective terms. This book draws a picture of Coetzee that is not particularly flattering. It describes an ineffectual, awkward and somewhat hypocritical man. Through the fictional biographer's interviews of two ex-mistresses, a cousin, a colleague, and a woman that Coetzee was infatuated with, we get a story of a man who was a womanizer who was detached from his emotions, and of a thinker who was in denial of the social realities of Apartheid.

I perhaps don't get the joke. To me, writing a fictional biography of yourself where you criticize yourself seems to be a somewhat self-indulgent move, and the unflattering portrayal, rather than seeming honest, seems like a coy way to deflect criticism. Perhaps those who are more familiar with the real life of Coetzee and his works will see strata of irony present in this depiction that do not occur to me.

One of the more relevant points I got from this book is that Coetzee is described as being a skilled writer who lacked passion or originality, and could not produce anything momentous. This seems interesting in light of the fact that Coetzee won a Nobel Prize: an award that has been given, over the past two decades or so, mostly to literary craftsmen without wide popular appeal. And it does seem telling that the Nobel Prize in recent years has not gone to writers who could show us fear in a handful of dust or tell us that Hell is other people, but to writers who write coy, self-deprecatory works of experimental fiction.