Mary Karr's Blues

Well, that has to be the most electric Inprint reading I've attended, and not a small part of that success was the way that Mary Karr engaged with the audience--an extention of the way that she engages with the reader through the page (as she explained in the Q and A). The observation from the audience I was most taken by was when a gentleman pointed out that the Port Arthur area has produced a significant number of outstanding artists--not only Mary Karr, but the likes of Janis Joplin and Robert Rauschenberg. The gentleman wondered if Karr could explain this phenomenon. She had two theories: first, the colorful idiom of Texans--their natural talent for vivid expression; second, that in that kind of industrial town setting, where aesthetics were not very high on the priority list, some young people dove into an inner life (Auden's line about "Mad Ireland hurt[ing]" Yeats into poetry comes to mind).

Even though Rauschenberg and Jopin chose other modes of expression, I think we can see some other similarities with Karr, their fellow Port Arthurian. Rauschenberg became famous for his "combines," canvases that yoked together very disparate materials, and one of the rave reviews of Lit Rich Levy quoted from in his introductory remarks this evening noted Karr's ability to move, fast as quicksilver, from hilarity to tragedy. Certainly, in the excerpt she read tonight, we could hear how humor and heartache can combine in the same literary vision.

And then there's Janis Joplin. Janis, as we all know, sang the blues, and I think of Mary Karr as a blues singer too--if you think if the blues as Cornel West does: as a universal human form of expression. For Brother West, Bruce Springsteen is a bluesman, and so is Samuel Beckett (and it's the Beckett motto "fail better" that Mary Karr told us she has printed on a notecard above her desk). In an interview, Cornel West has said, "The blues responds to the catastrophic with compassion, without drinking from the cup of bitterness." And that, of course, is a major reason why Mark Karr's memoirs work--they refuse to drink from the cup of bitterness. For all the ... eccentricities, as she would say, that they report about her parents and other loved ones, they are loving remembrances.

Posted on Tue, January 12, 2010 by Robert Cremins

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1 comment (Add your own)

1. Lori Ziegelmeyer wrote:: Mary Karr was amazing! She was extremely gracious in signing her books and even surprised everyone by coming in early and mixing with the crowd. I think she, too, was glad to be home as many neighborhood people were in attendance (including two of her high school teachers). It was a night I'll never forget.
Wed, January 20, 2010 @ 9:49 PM

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