u/311TruthMovement

https://themountaingoats.fandom.com/wiki/Song_for_an_Old_Friend

This was always my favorite track on Bitter Melon Farm

Continuing on with a stream of consciousness response to the daily song in "This Year" (John Darnielle's recent book, not the song), as I start this post I don’t yet know what I’m going to say but that feels very early TMG. I did a few days in a row for January, a few in Feb, definitely can't and won't keep up but probably will keep doing it here and there through this year (2026).

My hope, as some people have already done: my thoughts are just me babbling and you post your own response in the comments, your own take on the song that day.

I'd love for someone else to post the day/song as the main subject and I just add a comment (or nothing). But I have kept my intermittent posting going in order to keep a daily discussion tracking with the book.

I also feel I should probably repost that tediously long intro each time, as much as it's tediously long.

—

We're getting towards wrapping up The Sunset Tree era, a few days after "This Year (the song" and "Up the Wolves," sitting amidst some rarities and totally unreleased/non-existent-beyond-words tracks.

The exact midpoint of the year is July 2 at 1pm, so we are getting very close to being halfway through this book.

John's career arc being what it is from the POV of June 2026, this feels like the meat of the book, if such a book can be anything more than 365 relatively even slices.

In JD's life as it's shared with us, the events and surrounding times in these songs feel like the center of gravity. Pale Green Things is a bookend, an outer barrier to that gravitational pull of a supernova. As he's mentioned many times, "This Year (the song" and "The Sunset Tree" will be what's mentioned in his obituary. I have to imagine what actually has shaped his life in his 50s, now almost 60, is much more his two sons and managing family life while being a touring musician. I just checked and Phleng Phuea Chiwit is still listed as TMG's genre when you just Google them, what I have to imagine is something of a nod to his wife having Thai ancestry and various aspects of that probably being a big part of their family life. An older generation would have said he should have been over all that shit on TST well before his 30s, and aside from "that voice," what I've often heard from people who don’t like TMG is "he's whining" (which of course ties into "that voice"). As a dad to a 4-year-old, trust me, I am deeply not a fan of "the whining," and like most of you who would bother to read this far, I find TMG to be a source of deep strength amidst life throwing what it has at you, not remotely whining, more of a willingness to see what the hurricane can blast at you and saying amor fati amidst all of it.

But I can get why someone hearing just TST, not listening very closely, would just hear "a bunch of whining."

Pale Green Things is probably not part of what that non-fan-casual-listener's takeaway would entail: it's quiet and asks you to lean in, it's not a song that will grab you and win you over as your first TMG song that you love, it's part of the package if you decide to buy into the package.

I might call it the red team analysis of the rest of the album (maybe I'd include Love Love Love in that outlook). Songs like This Year and Hast Thou Considered the Tetrapod feel mostly in the teen moment as much as they're an older person remembering it, and you could say "well exactly the same is true of Pale Green Things," it's just coming from a quiet and reflective place that can only come through distance of time.

My money is on no, it will come back with no documents related to Charlie Sheen and it was entirely an urban legend that seemed like the sort of bullshit he'd do. But maybe some of it was real.

There's all these worries and warnings out there, news about new policies and vague policies and yet-to-be-determined-policies, and I’m curious:

have you, yourself, been cornered and told you have to pay taxes (to the country you've been staying in, not your home country, while working remotely) or receive some punishment/penalty?

A few months back, u/d-r-i-g posted asking about this essay — https://www.reddit.com/r/themountaingoats/comments/1ru997j/does_anyone_have_the_essay_john_wrote_about_gass/ — and I finally got an email with it from The Dalkey Archive.

It's pasted below.

I have made my way through this book, not the only book recommendation I've taken from JD but certainly the most exhausting one, and it is a TASK. The fact that it's a task is part of the essence of the book.

It's quoted in the liner notes of The Sunset Tree and JD has referenced in many ways over the years.

—

BIG BOOKS: AN AMERICAN STORY

by John Darnielle

Americans like big books, with reservations, because Americans have lots of reservations. Americans like a big book when it tells a good story that covers a lot of chronological ground: these they call “epics” when the books are big enough and span several generations’ worth of time. John Jakes trafficked almost exclusively in this fare, and he sold hundreds of millions of books to Americans who couldn’t wait to compare them to their successful adaptations for television, that most American medium. 

Americans also like a big book when it’s daring in this way, or in that way, but not usually in more way ways than those. Pynchon sells books, though not so many as David Foster Wallace; House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski enjoys a long afterlife on store and library shelves nationwide. Bolaño had to die first, but Americans were happy to take note of him for leaving behind 2666, a big book if ever there was one. A big book tells Americans that an author is thinking big, and, moreover, gives them something to think about its author. William T. Vollman, one of our most rigorous thinkers, has spent his life refining his ideas about humanity and in particular about Americans, but has also, in so doing, succeeded in pushing boundaries of bigness so far that his biggest book, Imperial, can only be read by the 3,500 people lucky enough to have a copy of the unabridged edition: and so his books get reviews and even, deservingly, win an award or two, but few American reviewers of his work fail to lead without mentioning that his books are quite big. 

But Americans did not rush to enter The Tunnel when it was finally printed by Knopf in 1995, after many of years of looming publication. It was met, on the one side, with expressions of admiration, respect, interest: those who approved, yes, the very word one might use when signing off on a project about which one hoped never to hear again—and, on the other, by somewhat dramatic white flags of defeat. “It will be years before we know what to make of it,” wrote Robert Kelly in The New York Times. Robert Alter’s memorable pan, in The New Republic, bewails Gass’s book-long insistence that fascism lives in the human heart and that its emergence into human history is a function of this physiological phenomenon, and that this aspect of humanity emerges crudely, hideously, profanely, and in mundanities. Alter contrasts Gass unfavorably with a writer he considers possessed of greater moral clarity, the French novelist Louis-Ferdinand Céline, who published more than a thousand pages of virulently antisemitic pamphlets in his lifetime. Alter considers Céline’s narrators more “authentic” than Gass’s William Kohler, who diagrams his farts. I suppose he has a point: Céline’s works are the works of an antisemite. They show us how the antisemite wishes to present his face to the world. The Tunnel, by contrast, shows us that figure’s actual face, for hundreds of pages on end and without mercy, and without the makeup most fascists put on before going out among the public. Its admirers were many, rightly enthralled by the barrelhouse music of Gass’s prose—sentences in which no word goes unpunished, no phrase is free enough to flee the infamy of its object. These words of praise festoon the first page of the 1995 paperback edition, celebrating the pyrotechnic wonder of Gass’s accomplishment.  

I, like anyone who’s read Gass, am enthralled by his prose. But as of 2025, it seems fair to me to say that Kohler’s case for authenticity—which is to say, the case for Gass as grim fortune teller—is strong. The membrane, never so sturdy, has been permeated; the infected cell is happily reproducing: across Europe and here at home, and who knows where and when it will be content to say: enough; we are making America great again: at airport security, a former midwestern governor repeats her party’s talking points on a loop overhead while we wait to remove our shoes; AM talk radio hosts receive the presidential medal of freedom for their tireless work in the burgeoning field of yelling about things that annoy them; the Oval Office is gilt, and the tawdriness is the point: we have emerged from the tunnel, into the light that William Kohler sought. “So this is why you were digging holes in the basement floor,” says Martha when she finally gleans the scope of Kohler’s work: that though his words be many, and beautiful in their way, he is undermining the integrity of the house, filling its drawers with dirt, plotting an escape that will serve him and him alone. Yes. This is why. To do the work of the filling, and of the dirt. 

To be clear about all this, brief as it is: William Gass was one of the most fearsome prose stylists of the twentieth century. Every sentence gleams, every plot point draws blood, every image arrives in rich relief. These sentences and plot points and images are a rich feast for any reader with an appetite. But to lose oneself in the sauce is to miss the fat in this fulsome fare, the gut punch in the geschmack: “the cruelty is the point,” as Adam Serwer wrote in 2018, a point from which we are easily distracted, a destination from which we let ourselves be led away because we don’t want to look. Read, then, The Tunnel as a story about a child whose hurt his now-huge host seeks to force-feed to the world; the story of a man with a job he hates and a wife as lost to him as he is within himself and to the tendencies he has cultivated therein: obscene poems; gardens of remembered resentments; greenhouses of shame with their glass panels gleaming. 

It is an American story. Gass has garbed it in the mystery of his craft, but beneath all that, it is only a mirror whose polish offends absolutely anyone who stands before it. That is why it took so long to write, and why its cult will remain small but fervent. When you work with mercury, the poison eventually gets in.