No, alas — not here to report anything like the conclusion of Seems to Fit. Just sharing a tidbit from the irrepressible xkcd webcomic. The first three panels of today’s contribution to the collective wisdom are above; click the image to see the final panel.
What’s in a Song: Begin the Beguine (2)
[This is another in an occasional series on popular songs with long histories. Part 1 — which focused on the song’s composition and lyrics — appeared on Wednesday.]
How many times and by which performers has “Begin the Beguine” been covered? It is to laugh.
The most comprehensive list I’ve seen was on the page of information at the WICN radio station’s site which I mentioned in Part (1) of this post. That list includes around 118 names “and many others” (I can’t swear to the count — I counted it once but am damned if I’ll put myself through that again :). Among those names — and aside from the dozens of Big Bands who jumped on the song following Artie Shaw’s success with it — were artists as varied as Chet Atkins, Liberace, Frankie Lyman & The Teenagers, Julio Iglesias, Django Reinhardt, Coleman Hawkins, Lalo Schifrin, Mario Lanza…
One thing you notice from many of these covers is how heavily their pacing and rhythm have been influenced by the Shaw swing-band version. But how close was that version to Cole Porter’s intentions?
Let’s refer again to Porter himself, who once wrote of the dance called the beguine (emphasis added): “I was very much taken by the rhythm of the dance, the rhythm was practically that of the already popular rumba but much faster.” Compare this with the writeup by the anonymous WICN writer (emphasis added): “It is similar to a rumba, but slower, with dance moves performed smoothly and deliberately. Like many Latin dances, the beguine emphasizes the ability to roll the hips to evoke sensuality while performing the steps.”
(Yeah — no wonder so many artists have covered “Beguine”: apparently there’s enough leeway for them to do whatever the heck they want with it.)
Being Here (Today)
From whiskey river (first 3+ lines not included there):
from The Ninth Duino Elegy
Why, if this interval of being can be spent serenely
in the form of a laurel, slightly darker than all
other green, with tiny waves on the edges
of every leaf (like the smile of a breeze)–: why then
have to be human–and, escaping from fate,
keep longing for fate?. . .Oh not because happiness exists,
that too-hasty profit snatched from approaching loss.
Not out of curiosity, not as practice for the heart, which
would exist in the laurel too. . . . .But because truly being here is so much; because everything here
apparently needs us, this fleeting world, which in some
strange way
keeps calling to us. Us, the most fleeting of all.
Once for each thing. Just once; no more. And we too,
just once. And never again. But to have been
this once, completely, even if only once:
to have been at one with the earth, seems beyond undoing.
(Rainer Maria Rilke, c. 1922 [source])
…and:
There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then one of them looks over at the other and says, “What the hell is water?”
(David Foster Wallace, 2005 commencement address at Kenyon College [source])
Always Pause Before Opening the Door
I do love a punchline — or a cartoon caption — which makes me pause for a split-second before making me snort. (Score another for the Bizarro strip.)The Blogger as Essayist (and Lens)
Real post for the day imminent. In the meantime, I think this quotation deserves a post of its own:
The essayist is a self-liberated man, sustained by the childish belief that everything he thinks about, everything that happens to him, is of general interest. He is a fellow who thoroughly enjoys his work, just as people who take bird walks enjoy theirs. Each excursion of the essayist, each new “attempt,” differs from the last and takes him into new country. This delights him. Only a person who is congenitally self-centered has the effrontery and the stamina to write essays. There are as many kinds of essays as there are human attitudes or poses, as many essay flavors as there are Howard Johnson ice creams. The essayist arises in the morning and, if he has work to do, selects his garb from an unusually extensive wardrobe: he can pull on any sort of shirt, be any sort of person — philosopher, scold, jester, raconteur, confidant, pundit, devil’s advocate, enthusiast.
[…]I think some people find the essay the last resort of the egoist, a much too self-conscious and self-serving form for their taste; they feel that it is presumptuous of a writer to assume that his little excursions or his small observations will interest the reader. There is some justice in their complaint. I have always been aware that I am by nature self-absorbed and egoistical; to write of myself to the extent I have done indicates a too great attention to my own life, not enough to the lives of others.
That’s E.B. White, talking to me (and maybe you) across the decades — about blogging.
And if White’s not talking to you, maybe the inimitable xkcd is:
“… 3… 2… 1… 0… I Said ZERO, Dammit, ZERO!”
[This post’s title alludes to this little tidbit of news: 2008 will last
a second longer than most years.]
The New Year, per usual, calls to mind resolutions about what we hope will come within the next 365ish days. I’ll get to that in a moment.
First, though, I want to note that whatever else it stands for, December 31 also marks the anniversary of a pop-culture phenomenon’s passing. I speak of the final Calvin & Hobbes strip, December 31, 1995.
The frames reproduced in this post aren’t from that last strip. Its creator, Bill Watterson, had for years fought with newspapers about the constraints imposed on cartoonists by conventional newspaper page size and layout. Eventually he won that battle, at least for his Sunday strips, and the final one (like many others preceding it) shows the result: a gorgeous sprawl of irregularly-sized and completely non-rectangular moments in his characters’ lives, much of the space simply blank. The idea of either (a) reducing the whole strip to fit RAMH‘s layout or (b) slicing it up for the same reason, well, it just felt blasphemous.
Leaving a Light On the Reality of Writing
[Don’t assume the above is the whole story. Click the image to see the
complete strip from Shannon Wheeler’s “How to Be Happy” series.]
Like me, you have probably heard more than once the assertion — pronounced in a gentle voice, at the end of a radio commercial (for the Motel 6 chain) consisting entirely of nothing but that gentle voice — “We’ll leave the light on for you.” Like me, you may have assumed that the speaker, self-identified as a “Tom Bodett,” either founded or at least owns or otherwise presides over Motel 6.
Not so. Here’s how Wikipedia summarizes his work: “…an American author, voice actor and radio host.” Far from having any official capacity for Motel 6, he’s just its “current spokesman.” (Many more details can be found at Bodett’s own site.)
In a commentary broadcast a couple years ago on Bob Edwards’s XM Radio program, Bodett talked about a side of “the writing life” which will be painfully familiar to just about anyone who’s attempted to take it seriously. Bodett himself is kidding. Sort of:
From Keith Knight’s Mouth to God’s Ear, Please
Cartoonist Keith Knight is a regular contributor to my favorite monthly magazine, The Funny Times. To break the routine from his main comic strip, called The K Chronicles, he occasionally does a strip called “Life’s Little Victories.” He builds these strips from ideas submitted by readers — little one- or two-panel ideas describing the little things that make life worth living.
From the weekly Funny Times “Take a Break” cartoon email newsletter, here’s a recent and highly relevant collection of such victories (numbers 265 through 270), applicable across the political spectrum:
!?$%*#@!!
I’ve always liked punctuation; some would say I like it a little too much. For my junior-college newspaper, I wrote an opinion column called something melodramatic and “clever” like “The Outspeaker.” […checking yearbook… yeah, that was it, all right] I was convinced that the only thing anyone would notice about the column was the eloquence and subtlety with which I wrote. So I was quite surprised and confused, then, when my journalism instructor and newspaper advisor presented me with a bogus certificate, awarding me a prize for “parentheses, colons, and dashes.”
As you may know, tomorrow, 2008-09-24 is National Punctuation Day in the US. It seemed a good day to trot out some typographical trivia.
Overwhelmed by Ursula Vernon
Okay, look — so I don’t have kids of my own, and my niece and nephews and stepkids are all grown and the next generation is still somewhere out on the misty horizon.
But I keep coming across these nominally “children’s” books which I then wish I had a non-adult excuse to read. Much of the credit (or blame) for this must be placed at the doorstep of the Seven Impossible Things Before Breakfast blog, whose focus is principally (but not exclusively) on children’s and young-adult books. (The 7-Imp innkeepers, Eisha and Jules, are school librarians.)
Once a week, 7-Imp features the work of a single children’s-book illustrator. This week, the subject was one Ursula Vernon.
Vernon apparently came to children’s books after first succeeding in the Web comics world, as the writer and artist behind Digger, which she describes thusly:
…it is a story about a particularly no-nonsense wombat who finds herself stuck on the wrong end of a one-way tunnel in a strange land where nonsense seems to be the specialty. Now with the help of a talking statue of a god, an outcast hyena, a shadow-being of undeterminate origin, and an oracular slug she seeks to find out where she is and how to go about getting back to her Warren.
That sounds rather… well, precious — right up until you hit the “outcast hyena/oracular slug” part. And indeed, despite her fascination with cute and furry creatures, Vernon does apparently have a knack for putting them in dire straits, depicting them as dangerous characters, and at the very least writing — and writing damn well — about them.
The picture at the top right, for example, is titled “Overwhelmed.” I discovered this and other outstanding bits of her work in her gallery at the DeviantArt site, where she says of “Overwhelmed,” briefly:
And once again, we prove that Ursula trying to do angst = hamsters.
Oh, well. At least they’re expressive little buggers.
