[Caption: “I want you to start thinking good thoughts about someone new at our house. I want you to start thinking good thoughts about a pussy cat.” Cartoon by George Booth, from his 1975 collection, Think Good Thoughts About a Pussy Cat.]
From whiskey river’s commonplace book:
Sojourns in the Parallel World
We live our lives of human passions,
cruelties, dreams, concepts,
crimes and the exercise of virtue
in and beside a world devoid
of our preoccupations, free
from apprehension — though affected,
certainly, by our actions. A world
parallel to our own though overlapping.
We call it “Nature”; only reluctantly
admitting ourselves to be “Nature” too.
Whenever we lose track of our own obsessions,
our self-concerns, because we drift for a minute,
an hour even, of pure (almost pure)
response to that insouciant life:
cloud, bird, fox, the flow of light, the dancing
pilgrimage of water, vast stillness
of spellbound ephemerae on a lit windowpane,
animal voices, mineral hum, wind
conversing with rain, ocean with rock, stuttering
of fire to coal — then something tethered
in us, hobbled like a donkey on its patch
of gnawed grass and thistles, breaks free.
No one discovers
just where we’ve been, when we’re caught up again
into our own sphere (where we must
return, indeed, to evolve our destinies)
— but we have changed, a little.
(Denise Levertov [source])
…and:
Things to Think
Think in ways you’ve never thought before
If the phone rings, think of it as carrying a message
Larger than anything you’ve ever heard,
Vaster than a hundred lines of Yeats.Think that someone may bring a bear to your door,
Maybe wounded and deranged; or think that a moose
Has risen out of the lake, and he’s carrying on his antlers
A child of your own whom you’ve never seen.When someone knocks on the door, think that he’s about
To give you something large: tell you you’re forgiven,
Or that it’s not necessary to work all the time, or that it’s
Been decided that if you lie down no one will die.
(Robert Bly [source])
Not from whiskey river:
The added confidence that comes from trying to help people can also help you with investors. One of the founders of Chatterous told me recently that he and his cofounder had decided that this service was something the world needed, so they were going to keep working on it no matter what, even if they had to move back to Canada and live in their parents’ basements.
Once they realized this, they stopped caring so much what investors thought about them. They still met with them, but they weren’t going to die if they didn’t get their money. And you know what? The investors got a lot more interested. They could sense that the Chatterouses were going to do this startup with or without them.
If you’re really committed and your startup is cheap to run, you become very hard to kill. And practically all startups, even the most successful, come close to death at some point. So if doing good for people gives you a sense of mission that makes you harder to kill, that alone more than compensates for whatever you lose by not choosing a more selfish project.
(Paul Graham, on the value to a new company of, well, thinking good)
Finally… Surely one of the longest-running bands in rock history is the British boogie-rock group called Status Quo (also known as simply the Quo, or plain-old Quo). They’ve been around under one name or the other since the early ’60s, adopting the Status Quo name in 1967; most recently, they played a couple of months ago at the UK’s annual Glastonbury music festival. According to the BBC:
Veteran rock group Status Quo have had more hit singles than any other band in UK chart history, according to research published by Guinness World Records.
The band has scored 61 chart successes, dating from “Pictures of Matchstick Men” in 1968 to “You’ll Come Around” in 2004.
Here are the top ten in the most-UK-singles list as of 2005, when the BBC article was published; you’ll probably recognize a few of these names, which will give you some perspective on Status Quo’s achievement:
- Status Quo – 61
- Queen – 52
- Rolling Stones – 51
- UB40 – 51
- U2 – 40
- Depeche Mode – 40
- Bee Gees – 38
- Pet Shop Boys – 38
- REM – 38
- Manic Street Preachers – 37
(source: Guinness World Records, via the above BBC report)
Most of Status Quo’s singles include vocals. Their first release of a straight-up instrumental was the one below, “Good Thinking,” from 1971.
DarcKnyt says
Okay, I’m completely surprised by this information. If asked, I wouldn’t have been able to name a band with more chart hits than The Rolling Stones. How uninformed is that?
Of course, I don’t live in the UK, so perhaps I can be excused.
This is a fascinating article though. I enjoyed it.
Have a great weekend, and think good thoughts.
cynth says
I thought of the above cartoon as an early birthday present. You introduced me to Booth cartoons and forever after I think of this line when I look at the cat in residence…knowing that no dog was ever asked this question. Thanks, too for the info on Status Quo.
Recaptcha: oratorio HR?
John says
Darc: “Uninformed” is harsh. If you actually look at Wikipedia’s Status Quo discography of singles, you’ll see (just focusing on the first column, which is the UK column) that it’s not as though all of those 61 hits have been like in the top 10 or anything. And they’ve charted just twice in the US — nothing higher than #12, nothing later than 1968.
That said, still awfully impressive!
You have a great weekend too. From your blog post today, I gather you’re feeling pretty kick-up-your-heels on the writing front!
John says
cynth: Whoa. Now that’s what I call posting at the same time!
As soon as I hit on the title for this blog post, I knew what image I’d have to use at the top. Took me a while to figure out what bookshelf to look at in order to find it, though… the curse of the overly-booked.
Maybe you could recreate the cartoon with your cat, just substituting “…about a puppy dog” in the caption. Booth did great cats as well as dogs, and I rather picture the cat having, like, legs and tail and fur standing straight out in all directions.
Aww. My own reCaptcha says “writer and.” And… database analyst? raconteur? left-hander? former Boy?
jules says
Random comment: “Think that someone may bring a bear to your door” makes me think of Margo Lanagan’s TENDER MORSELS. I’d be curious to know what you think of that read. It was kind of a love-it or hate-it book in the world of YA lit.
Froog says
Well, the big surprise was that The Beatles didn’t make that list.
I discover that they released comparatively few singles in the UK : only 21, while they were together; around twice as many in the US. And they were all or mostly double A-sides! So, if it’s hit songs you’re counting rather than just hit releases, I think they’d be up there.
Amazing how many of their album songs are as well known as the singles.
I was a little surprised that Queen had quite that many – but I suppose they were active nearly three times as long as the Beatles (and have continued to release stuff since Freddie’s death). I think they have the record for most weeks on the album charts in the UK, and probably on the singles charts too. I’d guess they might also be able to claim some kind of aggregate record for chart position – an astonishing number of top 10 and top 20 hits in their catalogue.
They might well have the record for most No. 2’s as well. Off the top of my head, I think Killer Queen, Somebody To Love, We Are The Champions andRadio GaGa all just missed the top spot in the UK.
John says
Jules: I think you’ve mentioned Tender Morsels before, either here or over at 7-Imp. I was fascinated by it then and still am; thanks for the reminder.
It turns out to be available on Google Books as a limited preview. On the very first page of the prologue, the author comes out of the gate with a (literal) bang… The young male narrator has apparently just lost his virginity to a girl named Hotty Annie:
That’s quite an opener (and they’re not even the very first paragraphs)! The rhythm of language reminds me of Russell Hoban’s sorta-kinda-English in Riddley Walker, which I really liked.
Froog: I wondered about the Beatles, too. I remember hearing some DJ mention, back in the 1980s, that as a band (not counting solo efforts) their total recorded output constituted only about 10 hours of music. That still baffles and amazes me.
As for Queen, well… I don’t know why, but I’ve always been befuddled by them. So many people whose musical tastes I respect go on (and on) about them — about Freddie Mercury’s vocal range, about their arrangements, and so on. But I just, don’t, get them.
Froog says
Well, Queen never really cracked America, for some reason.
Popular music has to happen at the right time, and in the right circumstances to get its hooks into you. Queen became huge just as I was becoming fully conscious of the world (say, about 9 or 10 years of age). I might have missed out, been less exposed, except that my brother – nearly 7 years older – became a huge fan and played them to death. That sort of put me off at first, but then…. well, the music’s so good, it sort of gets under your skin.
Also, they were not just lyrically quite far out there but also in their public image and stage performance. Freddie went through a range of camp/biker/cabaret personas that I didn’t even begin to understand at the time, but immediately liked because they made my parents so obviously uncomfortable.
And you also have to like the fact (another one of their weird “records”, I suspect) that they were all graduates – perhaps a unique circumstance, at least amongst bands of major achievement. Brian May, the guitarist, has a Master’s or perhaps even a Doctorate (in Astrophysics!), and is now honorary Chancellor of Liverpool University.
And then there was the live performance thing. I saw them live myself twice, and live on TV during Live Aid, and in a couple of great live concert movies in big screen cinemas. Best live band ever. Being so tight together muscially, and so cool in front of stadium crowds, and being able to reproduce their familiar hits so accurately and impressively in that environment but also being to riff off on them a bit….. and Freddie. Awesome. They were victims of their success in a way, because they had so many HUGE hits, by the end of the 70s there were a dozen or more songs everyone expected them to play in every concert, and it didn’t leave a lot of space for new stuff. One of the best filmed actually, (hard to find now – not sure if it’s ever been released on DVD, though I saw a snatch of it on YouTube a year or so ago) is a new year’s concert they played – in Brighton, I think – either the year Bohemian Rhapsody came out or the year before. A BBC thing, I think. May’s soloing on Brighton Rock – doing multi-tracking live on stage with home-made effects pedals and tape loop delays – was just mind-blowing.
Sorry – you touched on one of my “enthusiasms” there.
Status Quo – rather less so…
Particularly weird, lovely Recaptcha here – 186,671, 906 goofs!
Froog says
Ah, (continuing in Queen-bore mode…) Crazy Little Thing Called Love was another of their big hits that peaked at No. 2. I have a feeling Another One Bites The Dust might have been too. And maybe one or two of their post-Freddie releases. They had a few No. 3, 4, or 5 hits as well. That’s an astonishing run of “near misses”. After Bo Rap it was becoming a bit of a running joke among their fans that they would never have a No. 1 again. They did eventually manage it, rather surprisingly, with the David Bowie jam Under Pressure. And then again, much later, with the highly anticipated (but not really very good) swansong Innuendo.