You say goodbye, and I say hello

Okay, I guess, for some, spoilers ahead. Again.

But you may know this already. After a number of adventures with his friend Dr. John Watson fought directly with his most formidable foe, Professor Moriarty. Both went over the Reichenbach Falls. This battle, depicted in "The Final Problem", meant the end of Sherlock Holmes.

Except! Years later, Holmes reentered Watson's life, alive and well, with an explanation of how he'd survived and what he'd been doing in the time since. See "The Empty House." It may have been the first retcon. While there were mythical figures with contradictory stories, it was almost unheard of for a single author to publicly change his depiction of what had happened.*

Arthur Conan Doyle hoped for an august literary career and he intended for Sherlock Holmes to be but a small part of it. That's why he attempted to kill his own creation to begin with. Obviously, he couldn't quite pull it off. Holmes was just too big. Although some speculate that he kept some ambiguity from the outset so that he'd still have his options open. It's a plausible idea.

*At the start of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Huck says that Twain "stretched some things" in Tom Sawyer, but as far as I can recall nothing in the later book specifically contradicts anything in the earlier one.

So long ago, not long ago at all

 

The pillars, at least 200 in total, were raised into sockets and linked by walls of rough stone. Each is a unique work of sculpture, carved with images from the world of dangerous carnivores and poisonous reptiles, as well as game species, waterfowl, and small scavengers. Animal forms project from the rock in varying depths of relief: some hover coyly on the surface, others emerge boldly into three dimensions. These often nightmarish creatures follow divergent orientations, some marching to the horizon, others working their way down into the earth. In places, the pillar itself becomes a sort of standing body, with human-like limbs and clothing.

The above passage is from The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity, by the now-late David Graeber and the not-late David Wengrow. It's a thick book, with a lot going on in the endnotes as well. I'm not taking the book as gospel, but it's chock full of interesting stuff and brings up some interesting questions about how humanity's social organization came to be what it is. 

Göbekli Tepe really is an eye-opening site, as well. This is when people were still using flint tools, or something very like them. And they managed to erect a collection of pillars like this? It almost looks like a postmodern art installation, but the animal world must have been very immediate to its builders. Graeber and Wengrow note that the population around this site shows no signs of being agricultural. Whatever lifestyle they had, it didn't dim their imagination.

Defeated

I don't like to run up the white flag on reading a book, but sometimes it must be done.

I liked Mark Z. Danielewski's House of Leaves. It was spooky and about the right level of challenging.

But his next novel, Only Revolutions, I don't know. It's about two young lovers who take off in a car and after that you're guess is as good as mine. The book is two-sided, with each of the main characters starting their narrative at one end and finishing up at the other. That is, I guess, supposed to provide alternating perspectives on the same events. Unfortunately almost nothing either character says makes sense, so that's kind of a bust.

What happened here? Did Danielewski take a heavy dose of acid, ramble into a tape recorder, and then say, "Fuck it, that's my new book"? Was he told that he could be the next James Joyce, and interpret that as "Be less coherent"? Maybe the film rights negotiations for House of Leaves bored him so he responded by a book no sane film studio would want to adapt?

Still, I'm glad it was published. Better too much leeway than too little.

...but not too much tomfoolery

Tom Lehrer finally slipped this mortal coil this past weekend, aged 97. It was a fairly lowkey news item, in part because this was at the end of the week when we also lost Ozzy, the Hulkster, and Theo Huxtable. 

But there's another reason, implicit in Harry Briggs's memorial piece. Which, as a side note, mentions Lehrer having "no interest" in Stephen Sondheim, which is a little strange since Sondheim introduced him in what may have been his last live performance. But never mind. No, as Briggs notes, Lehrer "effectively vanished from the public eye half a century ago."

The idea that satire became obsolete the day that Henry Kissinger won the Nobel Peace Prize makes a good cover for Lehrer's retirement from songwriting. But it's more that satire is a limited resource. Mark Russell spent decades doing concerts, crafting parody songs for every political occasion. On one level you have to admire his persistence, but how much of this stuff lasted?

Lehrer recorded four albums, with his first live album being basically just the second studio album plus an audience. Then two more songs in the 70s for The Electric Company. But the best of these songs struck at the heart of basic situations to reveal what was appalling and funny about them. He had no need to keep up with the political Joneses. 

Outrival of the fittest

I have a vague but persistent memory from about forty years ago. It was a commercial with a song―too pompous to accept the designation "jingle"―whose lyrics went something like "You're the first to come in in the morning/The last to leave at night." I think it might have been a beer commercial, in which case it could have been a tribute to those hearty executives who clock in at 7:30, already buzzed.

But I feel like that marked a turning point in the culture. Advertising up until that point had mostly focused on the question of "What can we do for you?" The "you" was conceptualized as a general man in the street, or woman, depending on the product.

But then the "you" started becoming more specified, and more grandiose. If you were watching a commercial for a running shoe, you had to be an elite athlete. If it was a car ad, you had to have the most important places to go. How much of this was actually true? Well, the business was never about truth. But it's weird, the extent to which one of the products you were now expected to buy was yourself.

 

Schoolhouse Rock generally had little to do with rock music, but it had its charm. At this point it's kind of a window into a bygone media world. That kind of loose animation would only be seen at a film festival now, or at least would be unable to make it to TV.

Bob Dorough and Blossom Dearie, two hip jazz icons from the midcentury period, both got exposure to very young listeners this way. Above are a Dearie song from Schoolhouse Rock and one from an early album of hers. I don't know how many of us 70s kids became fans of hers, but she was still recording and touring into the 2000s. Must have been doing something right.

Roll with it

The blogroll at the bottom of this blog is a little on the antiquated side. A lot of the other blogs have either been taken offline entirely or have been static with no updates since, like, 2011. When I click on one it tells me that the blog is invitation only and I'm not invited, which seems rude at first but it's also apparent the author abandoned Blogspot for Substack. Also, if we're being honest, my interests have changed since I started.

But changing it over isn't much of a priority. If I prune a few, what do I replace them with? Who are the new faces in the game? Blogging has become a minority interest, and I'm one of the last standing.