https://harpers.org/archive/2013/10/bartoks-monster/
Good read about Béla Bartók's background, teetotaller, going around villages to record the peasant songs on wax cylinders, a machine devised by Edison.
The style of the writer is a bit Hunter S. Thompson, I feel, mixing his own subjective feelings and somewhat pálinka inspired ramblings with what he is witnessing.
I register my rambling in Jake's brow in the rearview mirror. He is listening, murmuring uh-huh, mmm-hmm, but something in the mirror makes me think what I often think, which is that when I fell off that train table as a child I never stopped falling. Somewhere, many miles down, I am still falling through the basement floor.
The guitar is cradled in her lap. Not to mince words, but at the indeterminate, arbitrary moment she takes up strumming the thing, it is horrid. Far more droning and monotonous than the drunken neighbor the night before. She holds the broken neck and bangs away. Just the barest rhythm on three open strings. A chopping thungk thungk thungk thungk thungk. At first it is merely boring, but then it starts to have an untoward effect on my afternoon hangover
Before I say just how untoward, I should take a moment to properly describe the fully heathen condition of the old woman's guitar. It really is the beatest, gonest guitar I ever did see. It looks like something that might have been salvaged from the junk wharf on a river, under a bridge, after a flood. The fretboard is nailed on, and the neck itself is wired onto the body with what I imagine is a busted string, which may say something about the priority accorded the placement of said strings. The body is patched with pieces of bile-green plastic, maybe cannibalized from an old jerrican.
Whereas the guitarist at the pensione had two chords, here there are no chord changes. Just an unsteady wham on three witchy strings. She is the cosmic brute steady. The braying, uncooperative mule of time. Another bestial image comes to my mind, of a very dull-witted rabbit. A rabbit that has been cornered, and in its panic hurls and thuds itself against a wall, and if the guitar is the rabbit, the violin is the old man clumsily trying to get a snare around its neck, and, listening, one can only root for the old man to snare it as quickly as possible, or, failing that, for the rabbit to finally break its neck by hurling itself against the wall, you don't really care which, only that it stops. Needless to say, it does not.
