Song by Tome Lehrer

 

It's weird, when you think about it. The silent e in English, from what I understand, results from the Great Vowel Shift, or rather the incomplete nature of the shift. The only other languages I know of with a silent e are French and Portuguese, where it almost exclusively changes the consonant sound. In fact in French there usually pretty much is no final consonant sound unless the consonant is followed by an e.

As for Tom Lehrer, his career as a satirical songwriter was legendary but very short. The couple of songs he wrote for The Electric Company were an odd but welcome coda.

Goodness gracious

One unfortunate aspect of wokeness is what it's done to the protest song. I'll spare your ears the audiovisual proof, but you can find it on your own. Songwriters with Something to Say now try to say it in academic jargon. But for the song to be any good it has to work on a primal level. Lennon understood that, as did Gil Scott Heron. Even that schmuck Bono knows it.

Sam Kriss recently took on the definition of woke. His article/essay begs to be read, and I think he gets a lot of it right. Especially in woke not really being a politics, at least not in the sense of trying to get things done. As for whether it's really dying, as he claims, that's a complex subject. All those DEI departments aren't going anywhere overnight, but the vacuity of the underlying philosophy has been exposed.

One hopes, anyway. CNN shows some signs of desperation when it tries to take the term "digital blackface" mainstream. The idea that using images of black people from popular culture is akin to blackface is a willful misunderstanding of online―or any―communication. If you express ridicule with a gif of Robert Downey as Tony Stark rolling his eyes, you're not actually claiming to be an obscenely wealthy man with substance abuse problems, played by same.

Weird science

I just finished reading Philp K. Dick's The Simulacra. Kind of a weird read because a lot of elements of it feel like predictions of what the world is like now. I know it doesn't work like that, but it's still an eerie feeling.

One thing amuses me, though. A set of characters run into mutans whose teeth are messed up so that they can't eat meat. One of the regular human characters says that makes them like Neanderthals.

I don't know how long scientists clung to the idea that Neanderthals were obligate vegetarians, but it must have landed with a thud.

de Vere-y idea

I know I've tackled this topic before, but Matthew Gasda has written a very good interrogation of Oxfordianism. That's one of the more popular alternate-Shakespeare theories, which tend to start with the assumption that Shakespeare was too much of a dumb poor nobody to have written his plays or sonnets. This one revolves around Edward de Vere, the Duke of Oxford. 

Curtis Yarvin supports it, which fits with what I know of him, i.e. his self-conception as a new Machiavelli. Gasda points out the appeal theories like this have to people who subscribe to a stratified view of society: a place for everything and everyone in his place. The plays are about royals and great leaders. What would a commoner know of that?

This bothers me beyond the class snobbery angle. To say that Shakespeare's writings on high-born figures must have meant that he was a court regular is to reduce them to gossip. Read a few passages from, say, King Lear. Does that sound right to you?

Suitable or unsuitable

Idle speculation department.

I'm currently temping at a CPA office. Well trained professionals in this place. There's a good chance that some of the employees, at least at the executive level, are actual millionaires. Some of the customers definitely are, and some of them drop off their tax paperwork in person.

In the weeks I've been working there, I don't remember seeing any of the men who work there in suits. Someone who came in for a meeting, but that's a rare exception. And a couple of women wear what could be called suits, but female formal/office wear is a more flexible concept. The men may wear the same jacketless slacks/dress shirt combo I do, if more tailored. Or, occasionally, just a homey jeans and sweatshirt thing. I don't know how much of this is "WFH" comes to the office, a process accelerated by COVID lockdowns. It could also be part of a more gradual process. 

Men's style blogs and magazine articles sometimes venture into "what comes after the suit." It tends to be the old standard, but less of it. Sometimes the blazer-over-tee look that I associate with Paul Simon. 

My educated guess is that the suit will survive for some time longer as a formal standard of menswear, albeit more honored in the breach. This will hold until some other costume is formalized to replace it. Which doesn't show signs of happening just yet.

Man in the sun

 

Salvador Dali was a devotee of Giorgio de Chirico. You can see why. Chirico's work looked to have found the building blocks of reality in unfinished mannequins and eerily sunny streets.

Chirico, a modernist before the war, became an outspoken opponent of modernism and a conservative painter The weird thing is that his art didn't look much different on either side of the time gap.

Worst of bad options

The thing about elderly millenial guys who went from Vice 1.0 hipsters to Current Thing progressives is that most of them were not “bush era leftists”. Most guys like this don’t know basic stuff like “neocons are all democrats now” because they were apolitical before Trump

— Silenced on Site (@77_steeze) March 18, 2023

This accounts for a lot, I think. Everything is political now. Nothing is political now. Which is to say you can do "politics" now without knowing anything about issues or history. That might be the predominant way it's done now.

A lot of Americans ignored politics for their whole lives but managed to osmose the idea that it's hip and righteous to have sympathy with Democrats and antipathy toward Republicans. This tendency was solidified by the rise of Donald Trump, but that's because Trump has a gaudy interior decorator and his suits never seem to fit. It's all aesthetics.

Of course if you want to talk about aesthetics you can appreciate or create art. But who cares about art?

Colorful day

Today was the first St. Patrick's Day in some time where I remembered to wear something green. A cardigan that usually only comes out on the weekend. A handful of people at the office I'm working at did the same. Mostly women, but not all.

It's an unusual custom, if fun. There are, if I'm not mistaken, more saints than there are days in the year. For the majority of them we don't dress any special way.

Into the vacuum

Matt Taibbi, recently in the news, wrote a book a few years back called Hate Inc. In it he analyzed the business model of the modern news media as hooking viewers and readers by confirming their own biases and amplifying them. It brings them success in the current social and technological landscape, but at the price of driving hostilities among the public. 

True, and the promotion of hate gets both more deliberate and more desperate―junkie-like―over time. The self-regarding art critic Jerry Saltz illustrates this. (Word to the wise: When Pauline Kael said she only knew one person who voted for Nixon, it wasn't a brag.)

There's another, related, problem, though. Reporting, with a few heartening exceptions, is dead. CNN isn't invested in it the way the scores of shuttered local newspapers were. The lefty newsweeklies that have also been vanishing were better with it than Vox and Gawker. And so on. When there's no one around to look into the details on little stories, narrative becomes the only thing that matters.

O moon

"Alabama Song" from The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahogany. The Doors doing a version of this song went a long way to convince me there was more to them than I had thought. The original is incredible too.

Kurt Weill's wife, Lotte Lenya was greatly admired by his then-collaborator Brecht as well. She was also a terrifying Bond villain in From Russia with Love.

It lives

Last weekend I went to the place where I usually have breakfast on Saturday, only to find that they had just closed, during what would generally still be a busy time for them. Today I went back and the lady who runs the place and waits the tables apologized and said she had closed early because it was her son's ninth birthday. Obviously I couldn't fault her for that, temporary inconvenience aside.

Here's where it gets interesting. I asked her if they had gone anywhere. She said they took him to a video arcade.

Which, on paper, doesn't seem like it would be a big deal. Most families have a gaming console of some kind, or a computer that's game-compatible, and usually both. Plus if/when kids start carrying phones, they can download games onto that. So there's no way you have to go to a video arcade to play video games.

The conclusion I'd come to is that it survives as a social outlet. You can play anywhere. You go there to play in person with your friends. 

There's a lesson there for businesses that have been declared obsolescent. And maybe for the rest of us, too.

What is there?

The definition of "masscult": 

noun

the forms of culture, as music, drama, and literature, as selected, interpreted, and popularized by the mass media for dissemination to the widest possible audience.

Which raises the question of whether there is such a thing anymore. The companies that own broadcast TV networks are more interested in their streamers. Movies nominated for Academy Awards have barely caused a ripple (and the fact that the most recent exception is the 36-years-later sequel to Top Gun also speaks volumes). And while radio is middlebrow to a fault, it's not so much devoted to current music.

Does it matter if there's not a widespread popular culture? It might. You have to wonder if the absence is  a factor driving political polarization.

Popular song

 

I always liked this song when I was a kid, and I still do. It's not likely to see a mainstream revival anytime soon, though. People routinely say that the past was a less enlightened time, and sure, you can find evidence of that. But recent history has tested the hypothesis that finding more stuff to be offended about makes you more enlightened. The results have not been great.

On the bright side, wherever Ol' Hank is now, he's beyond caring about cancellation.

Robinson

I got a book from the library recently (shocker). Namely, Collected Poems by Edward Arlington Robinson. It apparently is all of his published poems, or at least a large number, running to over 1,000 pages. 

Robinson is probably best known for "Richard Cory", a character profile in verse with a rather bleak twist at the end. Paul Simon reworked it into a Simon and Garfunkel song. He's very good in general at mixing poetic fancy with a natural sense of breath. Not naturalistic, but he sounds human.

Maybe I'll put up an example later in the week. His "Ben Jonson Entertains a Man from Stratford" is a standout, but way too long for me to retype.

ADDENDUM: I'll vouch for this one.

JOHN GORHAM

“Tell me what you’re doing over here, John Gorham,

Sighing hard and seeming to be sorry when you’re not;

Make me laugh or let me go now, for long faces in the moonlight

Are a sign for me to say again a word that you forgot.”—

 

“I’m over here to tell you what the moon already

May have said or maybe shouted ever since a year ago;

I’m over here to tell you what you are, Jane Wayland,

And to make you rather sorry, I should say, for being so.”—

 

“Tell me what you’re saying to me now, John Gorham,

Or you’ll never see as much of me as ribbons any more;

I’ll vanish in as many ways as I have toes and fingers,

And you’ll not follow far for one where flocks have been before.”—

 

“I’m sorry now you never saw the flocks, Jane Wayland,

But you’re the one to make of them as many as you need.

And then about the vanishing. It’s I who mean to vanish;

And when I’m here no longer you’ll be done with me indeed.”—

 

“That’s a way to tell me what I am, John Gorham!

How am I to know myself until I make you smile?

Try to look as if the moon were making faces at you,

And a little more as if you meant to stay a little while.”—

 

“You are what it is that over rose-blown gardens

Makes a pretty flutter for a season in the sun;

You are what it is that with a mouse, Jane Wayland,

Catches him and lets him go and eats him up for fun.”—

 

“Sure I never took you for a mouse, John Gorham;

All you say is easy, but so far from being true

That I wish you wouldn’t ever be again the one to think so;

For it isn’t cats and butterflies that I would be to you.”—

 

“All your little animals are in one picture—

One I’ve had before me since a year ago to-night;

And the picture where they live will be of you, Jane Wayland,

Till you find a way to kill them or to keep them out of sight.”—

 

“Won’t you ever see me as I am, John Gorham,

Leaving out the foolishness and all I never meant?

Somewhere in me there’s a woman, if you know the way to find her.

Will you like me any better if I prove it and repent?”—

 

“I doubt if I shall ever have the time, Jane Wayland;

And I daresay all this moonlight lying round us might as well

Fall for nothing on the shards of broken urns that are forgotten,

As on two that have no longer much of anything to tell.”

Welcome to Hell, kid*

* For reference.

When a smart person gains a lot of money and fame, there's a danger that they'll start overestimating their own intelligence. There's an even greater chance that they'll get an inflated sense of their own persuasiveness. Scott Adams, a onetime high school valedictorian and MBA, has long been going down that road, sharing his accumulated wisdom in a way that leads to fights and embarrassing videos. What happened most recently was just that the problem came to a head. 

Kat Rosenfield has a good rundown. The way elites have been deliberately trying to degrade racial relations is worthy of discussion. Scott Adams may have been on his way to that point when he tripped over his laces and faceplanted. Will he ever get another chance?

It's true, too, that it's asinine to present a statement like "It's okay to be white" as some kind of litmus test. Like we need fucking permission now? Jesus.

Ink

Leading off with the admission that I haven't read anything by Matthew Salesses. I'm not evaluating him as a writer anyway. I do suspect that he's the stepson of Joh Salesses, a soldier, writer, and educator who was a Vice President at my alma mater. That's neither hear nor there, though.

There's a fraction of a good idea in his claim that a story doesn't really need conflict. Conflict is something that writing classes and books stress. And I do think that authors may lean too hard on it, when it's just one aspect of the story. You might be better off writing a first draft without thinking too much about conflict and change, and adding them later as needed.  

But of course that's very different from abandoning them en masse, especially on a racial or cultural basis. "Decolonization" is something of an Orwellian term anyway.