js_thrill | This Year 365 songs: January 29th (Reply)

Today we are Going to Monaco (More exciting than Cleveland!)

Am I going to make it through the whole year doing this? A good question. I am enjoying doing it, for the most part, but at the same time, I have yet to work out a plan for what to do when I travel. The book is not small, and I don't want to drag it with me on every trip I take.

One thing that keeps striking me about the annotations is that Darnielle writes about the narratives and characters in these songs with the same lack of knowledge that we, the average listeners, would have. What he likes about the narrative voice of this song is that he doesn't know exactly what's going on. I know he is not alone among authors in having that sort of relationship to his writing, but it is intriguing to me, for an author to leave things in the space between "there is no answer, because I have not written one" and "there is an answer, but I didn't make it explicit in the lyrics". The true "death of the author"-ish position would be a third option: "there is an answer (or more than one), but it comes from audience and context", but he doesn't write about it that way either. It reads more like there is a definitive story which he has only partially glimpsed, and no one has the information to settle some of these questions of ambiguity.