What’s in a Song: I Get Along Without You Very Well
(Part 1)

by 10 Comments

[Another in an occasional series on popular songs with appeal across the generations. This post will be broken into two parts; Part 2, about this song’s composition, appears tomorrow [edit to add:] or the next day Thursday.]

There’s a trick performed by some songwriters — I don’t know the term for it, if there is one — in which they “overstuff” their lyrics’ lines with extra syllables.

This is similar to what, in poetry, is called sprung rhythm: “verse” which mimics the rhythm of natural speech.

It also calls to mind a sly little bit of business by Alexander Pope. In demonstrating the awkwardness of so-called alexandrine meter — twelve syllables per line — Pope once, as Wikipedia says, “famously characterized the alexandrine’s potential to slow or speed the flow of a poem in two rhyming couplets consisting of an iambic pentameter followed by an alexandrine.” One of these two couplets goes:

A needless alexandrine ends the song
that like a wounded snake, drags its slow length along.

See the way that second line seems overloaded with syllables? That’s pretty much the idea I’m getting at here.

In a song, though, the effect can be either subtler or more ponderous, as the words follow the underlying instrumentation — and depending on the singer’s skill. It’s not like we’re just reading the words on a page, free to imagine, if we want, that the line breaks and meter don’t count at all: it has to “sound right.”

So let’s start out with the lyrics, then, to “I Get Along Without You Very Well” (Hoagy Carmichael*, 1939):

I get along without you very well,
Of course I do,
Except when soft rains fall
And drip from leaves, then I recall
The thrill of being sheltered in your arms.
Of course, I do.
But I get along without you very well.

I’ve forgotten you just like I should,
Of course I have,
Except to hear your name,
Or someone’s laugh that is the same,
But I’ve forgotten you just like I should.

What a guy, what a fool am I.
To think my breaking heart could kid the moon.
What’s in store? Should I phone once more?
No, it’s best that I stick to my tune.

I get along without you very well,
Of course I do.
Except perhaps in spring.
But I should never think of spring,
For that would surely break my heart in two.

[Read more…]

Humatons, Arise

by 2 Comments

A disaster which befalls the Internet from time to time is the expiration of Web sites tied not to any particular domain name, but to the sites’ owners.

I’m thinking here of generically-formed URLs, like:

www.someisp.com/~username

Generally, when you get an email address from an ISP you also get some nominal amount of Web space, like 10MB or so, whose address is something like the above. Inevitably, some users make better use of this facility than others. And it’s those odd little back corners of the Web in jeopardy.

I recently came across such a site, called The Kooks Museum. This is a site built by one Donna Kossy, in support of her 1994 book Kooks: A Guide to the Outer Limits of Human Belief. What does she mean by “kooks”? As she happily quotes from the introduction to the book:

What distinguishes “kook” from other dismissive and stigmatizing terms? The various words denoting insanity — “crazy,” “psychotic,” “schizophrenic,” etc. — are not, for my purposes, interchangeable with “kook.” An obsessed murderer may be considered psychopathic or crazy, but more often than not these words categorize action, not belief. The obsessed serial killer is not necessarily a kook.

We must also distinguish kooks from quacks, frauds and hoaxers, for kooks are invariably sincere. Their main intent is not to deceive or defraud; to the contrary, they are trying to impart an essential truth. A kook’s thoughts rarely turn to profit; some squander personal fortunes to investigate or spread The Word. A New Age personality who channels a wise entity from the Pleiades is not a kook if his channeled voice is designed to attract funds.

Finally, it is important to differentiate a kook from an eccentric. An eccentric is defined as someone with an unorthodox lifestyle, which may or may not include unorthodox beliefs. Is a hermit a kook? Can we call a scatological fetishist a kook? Not necessarily, especially if they haven’t codified their own preferences as an eternal truth.

Is this not a useful set of definitions? Is The Kooks Museum not a site worthy of a more permanent home?

I say yes to both questions. (God forbid someone clicking on that hyperlink above should someday be greeted with a dread “404 – Not Found” page.)

In the meantime, here are some samples of the, um, authors and their works commemorated there.

[Read more…]

Dream Talk

by 6 Comments


Somewhere around here we’ve got one of those little reference books to help you interpret your dreams. You know the ones — structured sort of like a thesaurus, so when you look up a word or phrase (“coffee,” say, or “horror movie” or “lava lamp”) you get an instant read on what that object or experience represents. Especially if you look up more than one dream-thing at a time, and combine the interpretations. (“You are concerned about sleeping too much” + “You need more Citizen Kane and less hockey-mask Jason in your life” + “You vaguely remember your life of 30-40 years ago” = “Dude…”)

I need to find it to look up my two most recent (remembered) dreams. At least they were on different days, so there’s no chance (is there?) that they’re related. Both had a curious visual quality to them — not quite animated, and not quite like viewed as an old scratchy film, but not not quite not animated or scratchy, either.

Sunday morning, minutes before waking

I dream that I am lying in bed, and that I am in that pleasant half-conscious state where one has the option of getting out of bed right that moment or drowsing a little longer. In the dream, I opt to get out of bed finally when I hear dream-voices.

In the dream’s master bathroom, our next-door neighbor (whom I will call Mrs. L) is discussing something with The Missus. Mrs. L has a clipboard in one hand, which she consults or annotates from time to time, and I get the distinct impression that Mrs. L is our landlady (although we don’t rent this house).

My dream-self gets out of bed. Uncharacteristically — so uncharacteristically that I know this must be a dream — I’m not self-conscious about standing there in my underwear. I kind of give the women a little finger-wave and then, because I obviously can’t use the master bathroom at the moment, I walk briskly down the short hall to the guest bathroom.

But you know, there’s something odd about this guest bathroom. Or rather, some things.

The tub is gone. There is no sign a tub ever occupied that part of the bathroom: the wall is blank, the tile floor extends right up to the wall. There is nothing at all in that roughly 3’x6′ area. Nothing hangs on the wall. It’s just… empty.

There is no toilet.

The vanity is lower, only about thigh-high or so, and not as broad as the real thing. It’s like a two-thirds-scale model vanity, in fact. No mirror is on the wall above it.

Everywhere — around the edges where the vanity meets the wall and floors, between the tiles — the grout is fresh.

“Uh, honey?” my dream-self calls. “What happened to the guest bathroom?”

The Missus materializes at my side. “Oh,” she explains, “the pipes were clogged.”

And that’s when I woke up.
[Read more…]

Haunted by What’s Inside

by 4 Comments

Inside Looking Out, by Trish Bilch (click for original)From whiskey river:

People talk about the discontent in the world and about existential anxiety as if it were something new! Everyone at every period in history felt it. You have only to read the Greek and Latin authors! It is not true that the individual with his emotional life no longer feels himself the center of the world! What do you think really interests people from morning to night if it isn’t their feelings, their work and love — especially love.

(Alberto Giacometti)

Not cited at whiskey river, but the above quotation continues:

…They read the newspaper maybe ten minutes a day, they see that a satellite is orbiting around the moon, and then they immediately start talking again about work, and love. And not only that: often somebody will commit suicide because of love problems. And that means that if an individual would rather die than live without a person he loves, then the power of emotion does still dominate the world.

(cited by Reinhold Hohl in Giacometti: A Biography in Pictures)

[Read more…]

“To Love Is to Suffer.” And So On.

by 11 Comments

In Kate’s post today, she tackles Valentine’s Day a couple days early. (Determined to beat the rush, perhaps. You probably didn’t know the Internet charges a premium on Valentine’s-Day blog posts about love and sex.) But her post’s title reminded me of this film.

In the clip below, Diane Keaton’s character, Sonia, seems bored of the manifold loves-me/loves-me-not/loves-her/loves-him/does-not-either details in her cousin’s monologue. Yet it turns out she was listening all along and offers an analysis which cannot be refuted, if only because it can’t be understood.

I Tought I Taw…

by 6 Comments

I’ll go out on a limb here: Twitter “tweets” are the Schrödinger’s cats of Internet phenomena. In general, they exist or do not exist as long as you ignore Twitter altogether; when you actively pay attention, though, each tweet instantly crystallizes into a state of aliveness (Whoa, How about that, Ha!, or Hmm…) or death — forgotten at once. (My own experience indicates that tweets, on average, have a half-life of about two-thirds of a second before the inevitable decay into memes, interstitials, youtubes, and other elementary particles.)

So I haven’t enthusiastically leapt aboard the USS Twitter yet. Life’s too ephemeral as it is, y’know? That said, I do like seeing what others get out of (and sometimes put into) it.

For example, there’s Jon, of the newly (to me) discovered Ransom Note Typography blog (subtitle: “Discontinue Use If Rash Develops”). In a late-December post, Jon exhaustively documents his favorite tweets from 2008. After a brief introduction describing his criteria for selection, he lays out his month-by-month catalog of several tweets per month.

Here’s a small sample:
[Read more…]

Impossibilities

by 3 Comments

Let’s pretend you have never, but never (ridiculous, I know, but bear with me) wandered through the Seven Impossible Things Before Breakfast blog which I often mention here. Consequently, you don’t know anything about their structured interviews with (mostly) children’s-book illustrators and authors.

Maybe even further, even more basically, you don’t know that the blog’s title alludes to Lewis Carroll. (In which case, go here* and scroll down a bit.)

Imagine now that you’re an author or illustrator who doesn’t know any of that stuff, and you’ve been approached for a 7-Imp online interview. So when you run into the very first sentence of the request, you’re immediately baffled. Mind you, now, I’ve no idea how the first sentence actually reads, but let’s suppose the request opens something like this:

Dear You,

We would like to feature you in an upcoming interview for the Seven Impossible Things blog…

What runs through your head then?

Right. As it apparently ran through the great Ed Young’s head when invited to his recent interview there (#79!). Born in Tientsin, China, grown up in Shanghai, a survivor of the Japanese occupation in WW2, he is drawn to questions of philosophy. So his first response — even before Yes or No — is a simple question, but it comes out weighted with unintended significance:

[Read more…]

The Blogger as Essayist (and Lens)

by 6 Comments

E.B. White, bemused to find himself hereReal 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:

[Read more…]

Insufficient World and Time

by 6 Comments

Jeez, when I get backed up from stuff at work and stuff at home and stuff everywhere in between, the first casualty is obviously the blog. I’ve got a couple things simmering in draft form but don’t know if I’ll get to one of them today.

In the meantime, please play quietly among yourselves.

And yes, I am watching you. So behave.

Verified by MonsterInsights