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Thursday, September 21, 2006

Rhetorical Thursday

Michael Bérubé and Janet Lyon were married 21 years ago today.

image
Photo Credit:  Jamie Bérubé

But that’s not what we’re here to blog about!  This is Rhetorical Thursday, and you should have expected us to open with the occupatio gambit.  We have an important announcement.

Because of the overwhelming public response to Rhetorical Occasions, this blog is temporarily suspending Liberal Thursday, the new feature in which we reply to readings, reviews, and graphic novel adaptations of What’s Liberal About the Liberal Arts?  Liberal Thursday will be back next Thursday, unless it is suspended again.

In its stead, we offer this brief announcement from the marketing department.  The public-attitude survey is complete, and Rhetorical Occasions has now been field-tested with a series of carefully chosen focus groups.  According to marketing, the book cover is not going over because:

(a) it features a great big fat looming ghostly head;
(b) it looks too much like a faded Che t-shirt;
(c) it is not violent enough;
(d) it has a great big fat looming ghostly head on it;
(e) it looks back at you when you pick it up;
(f) men are not wearing enough hats these days;
(g) the image is that of a great big fat looming ghostly head; and
(h) the single eye in the head winks when you hold the book at an angle.

At first, we considered hitting the side of the book repeatedly with a sledgehammer in order to make it look mean,* but the logistics of this option proved too daunting.  Accordingly, UNC Press has decided to do to the cover design of Rhetorical Occasions what Capitol Records did with the original cover art for the Beatles’ Yesterday and Today LP.  We are pleased to report, as well, that michaelberube.com site administrator Kurt Nelson has stepped into the breach to provide us with an alternate cover.  We believe this new cover addresses our readers’ primary concerns about the book, particularly with regard to (c) above, and we note that it required only a slight alteration of the book’s title, while subtly retaining the “head” theme of the original cover.  The mockup of the new cover is available here.

Arbitrary But Fun Friday will appear this week as scheduled.
_____________________________

* Readers who do not recognize the allusion are hereby advised that Slapshot is freely available for rental or purchase, and that it is one of the best sports movies ever made.

Posted by Michael on 09/21 at 02:44 PM
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Wednesday, September 20, 2006

Suitable for any occasion

It appears that Chris Clarke’s latest masterpiece, the graphic-novel version of What’s Liberal About the Liberal Arts?, has been reposted on various Internets servers without any attribution or acknowledgment.  This is a travesty—and it should remind us all that with this so-called “net neutrality” and these kids today, unscrupulous cyberpirates can take an Internet that’s not even theirs and put it into a tube where it can clog up somebody else’s Internet that’s still waiting to be made into a graphic novel.  Or, as Chris himself points out, “there was a time when you could steal images from something and then add text to them that riffed on another guy’s hard work and put the result somewhere and people would respect your property.”

Well, I’m not going to take this lying down.  I’m going to do the only thing I know how to do:  announce the arrival of another new book!

A whole box full of Rhetorical Occasions: Essays on Humans and the Humanities just arrived on my doorstep.  This book is not yet available in graphic-novel form, so if you want to find out what happens at the end, you’ll just have to go see for yourself.  I will, however, provide the table of contents here, so that you can get some general idea about which humans and humanities I talk about:

Part One: Physics

(This section is mostly about the Sokal Hoax and its aftermath.  There are smarter discussions of the hoax out there, sure, but mine is the only one in which you can find a sentence that ends with ten igneous rocks that rotate voluptuous velvet ocelots with friendly tomato juice—and a brief discussion of Dirac’s Large Numbers Hypothesis, at no extra charge.)

1.  The Sokal Hoax for Beginners
2.  The Return of Realism and the Future of Contingency
3.  Of Fine Clothes and Naked Emperors
4.  The Utility of the Arts and Humanities

Part Two: Positions

(This section is about various figures and fields in the humanities: Stanley Fish on the interpretation of interpretation, Martha Nussbaum on education and cosmopolitanism, American Studies in the Cold War and the present, and Thomas Frank’s take on cultural studies.  Mix and match!)

5.  There is Nothing Inside the Text; or, Why No One’s Heard of Wolfgang Iser
6.  Citizens of the World, Unite: Martha Nussbaum’s Plan for Cultivating Humanity
7.  American Studies without Exceptions
8.  Idolatries of the Marketplace: Thomas Frank, Cultural Studies, and the Voice of the People

Part Three: Professions

(This section consists of shorter essays on teaching, lecturing, and some distinctive features of Life on Campus.)

9.  Days of Future Past
10.  Teaching to the Six
11. Working for the U.: On the Rhetoric of “Affiliation”
12.  Dream a Little Dream
13.  Professing and Parenting
14.  Speaking of Speakers
15.  Universities Should Be Open for Business
16.  Analyze, Don’t Summarize
17.  The Top 10 Contradictory Things about Popular Culture
18.  The Elvis Costello Problem

Part Four: Politics

(From a review essay on Richard Rorty’s Achieving Our Country to a review essay on Paul Berman’s Terror and Liberalism and all the turmoil in between, this section consists of my essays on debates in and about the American left.)

19.  The Lefts before September 11
20.  Nation and Narration
21.  Can the Left Get Iraq Right?
22.  For a Better—and Broader—Antiwar Movement
23.  Fighting Liberals
24.  The Loyalties of American Studies

Part Five: Posts

(Essays drawn directly from this humble blog!  No fair hunting through the archives to find them here.)

25.  Azkaban Blogging
26.  Back in Les États-Unis
27.  Vacation Reading II
28.  Republican National Convention, Second Night
29.  More Plans for Democrats in Distress
30.  The Beinart Effect
31.  Theory Tuesday II
32.  Theory Tuesday III
33.  Was I Ever Wrong

Best of all, Rhetorical Occasions is endorsed by Krusty the Clown, who says, “I heartily endorse this event or product or collection of essays.”

Now, about that book cover.

It’s just asking for trouble, I know it.  I mean, it’s my great big fat looming head, which, however ghostly and gray-tinged, is still big and fat and looming.  I don’t know what to tell you, except that my initial suggestions for the cover (all of which had to do with “rhetoric” or “speaking” or “occasions” or “occupatio”) were so terrible that we eventually decided just to go with an author photo and leave it at that.  I didn’t realize, at first, that the photo would wind up being a big fat ghostly head, but I suppose it’s appropriate, since, as my family members have often remarked over the years, I do indeed have a big fat head.  (UNC Press threatened to make a bobblehead of me and label it “actual size,” and they wouldn’t have been far off, either.) But the question remains as to how many people will want to read a collection of my essays that has a great big looming ghostly me-face on the cover.  I can think of only two answers.

One is that if you buy thirty or forty copies of the book, line them up face out (literally!) on a bookshelf, and repeat the words “rhetorical occasions, rhetorical occasions, rhetorical occasions” over and over, you’ll find that you soon leave yourself utterly and travel in a trancelike state to pure objective reception of the outer world. Sounds silly and pretentiously spirituel, I know. But it worked for me.

The other is that these books are quite sturdy and provide excellent material for dart practice and pin-the-tail-on games.  The book paper, including its paper cover, meets the guidelines for permanence and durability set out by the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources and the International Darts Federation, so let fly! 

As for why I am publishing two books this fall, one close on the heels of the other: I thought we were clear on this, everyone.  This blog has made it clear time and time again that our goal is world domination by 2009, and let’s be realistic about this, all right?  There’s just no way to achieve world domination on that kind of schedule by publishing just one book at a time.

Actually, some of the essays go together quite well with What’s Liberal About the Liberal Arts? But then, I was tweaking the second section and rewriting much of the Sokal section (and writing the first essay entirely from scratch) in 2005 whenever I wasn’t writing Liberal Arts, so there’s no surprise there.  And just as I was finishing the book, there was some encouraging science news in the reality-based community, and then this blog found itself hosting a discussion of science-studies scholar Steve Fuller’s strange defense of Intelligent Design, to which I finally replied the day after I mailed off the manuscript of Rhetorical Occasions.  So it all makes sense somehow.

Except for the Kandinsky mural in the Student Union building.  That’s all Chris Clarke’s work, and I had nothing to do with it.

Posted by Michael on 09/20 at 10:23 AM
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Tuesday, September 19, 2006

What’s graphic about the graphic arts?

I was going to shift gears today and blog about baseball, because it has become increasingly apparent that the major leagues are headed for a crisis of world-historical proportions, and they need my help now.

The crisis is this: the entire National League sucks.  With the exception of the Mets, who have finally, finally ended the fifteen-year long national nightmare that was the Atlanta Braves’ domination of the National League East, the National League does not have a single team worthy of playing in the postseason.  And don’t try to tell me that the amazing Padres have blistered the league by winning 23 of 44 since August 1 (true!), or that the surprising and almost-.500 Marlins are a formidable 40-35 at home (also true!), or that the redoubtable Cardinals would be kind of good if they had some pitchers (maybe true!), or that the sparkling Dodgers managed to squeak by the amazing Padres last night. Give it up already.  None of those teams should be allowed in a playoff.  Yeah, we understand that the National League has been flirting for some time with ways of sneaking a 79-83 team into the big dance.  But that’s precisely why this madness has to stop.  Now.

Meanwhile, in the American League, the defending-champion and always-entertaining White Sox and their charmingly non compos mentis manager are going to be squeezed out of the fun by a lethal combination of hungry young Twins and Tigers, late-blooming A’s (I keep asking Oaktown Girl this every year, but when is someone going to inform that club that the season begins in April, not August?), and juggernaut Steinbrenners.  It’s just not right.

So I was going to propose the following solution: at the end of the regular season on October 1, the Mets and the AL leader (currently the Yanks) will get a bye, while the White Sox play the Tigers and the A’s play the Twins.  But extra special box seats will be reserved for the Cardinals, Dodgers, and Padres, so that they don’t miss out entirely on the action.

But it turns out that I can’t blog about any of that, because the impudent and talented (not to say “spunky") Chris Clarke has gone to the enormous trouble of publishing the graphic novel edition of What’s Liberal About the Liberal Arts? I’ve included a hyperlink to this important document on the right sidebar, under the new heading, “Adaptations into other media.” (I use the plural “adaptations” because I’m still hoping that a certain commenter whose initials are N.L.—no, not you, National League! you suck!—will come up with the opera version by the end of the year.) But I thought I owed it to Chris, and to Literature, to table my perfunctory baseball blogging and direct you to this beautiful and inspirational story of brave and hardworking teaching assistants at the People’s Revolutionary State University.

Thank you, Chris.  On behalf of everyone at PRSU, I am deeply touched.

Posted by Michael on 09/19 at 10:43 AM
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Monday, September 18, 2006

Over the weekend

When I heard that a prominent conservative blogger had gone after a young feminist blogger because she had dared to have breasts in the vicinity of former President Clinton in the course of a meeting between Clinton and liberal bloggers (“she wears a tight knit top that draws attention to her breasts and stands right in front of him and positions herself to make her breasts as obvious as possible”), I thought, “well, what do you expect from these Dorito-flecked guys typing in their mothers’ basements—they literally have nothing better to do.”

But when I learned that the blogger in question was not a Dorito-flecked guy typing in his mother’s basement but a tenured law professor, I thought, “wow, that’s remarkably pathetic.  That might be one of the most pathetic things I’ve ever seen on the Internets.”

And when I saw that the tenured law professor was a woman who was chastising the young liberal blogger in the name of feminism, while writing, “Jessica should have worn a beret. Blue dress would have been good too” and “Jessica looks like Paula Jones,” I thought, “good lord, that’s more disingenuous and gratuitously vile than I can say.  I’m so sorry this professor was asked by the Chronicle of Higher Education to participate in the same forum on academic blogging in which I appeared back in July.”

And then when I discovered that the tenured law professor was replying to people who’d pointed out that there was nothing exceptional about Jessica’s clothing or the photo in which she appeared by telling them to face reality, and replying to Jessica directly (who’d pointed out that the professor was attacking her for her appearance) by telling her not to flatter herself, I thought, “heaven help us, that’s positively delusional.”

And then when I got word that the tenured law professor had upped the ante by insisting that the young feminist’s blog was “one of those blogs that are all about using breasts for extra attention,” I thought, “good grief, wait until the poor clueless dear hears about the talented young feminist writers who work at Bust magazine.  She’s liable to blow a gasket, she is.”

And then when I realized that the tenured law professor had unleashed hundreds of nasty comments about interns and Monicarama on her own blog (none of which she bothered to check or moderate) as well as sparking far more disgusting attacks on the young feminist by truly unhinged right-wing bloggers, I thought, “my stars, what truly despicable aggression-by-proxy this tenured law professor is engaging in.  I suppose some people don’t have anything else to blog about, though—it’s not as if they can write lovely things about all our successes in Iraq or all the wonderful work their leader has done in New Orleans.  I suppose it makes sense, in a sad and twisted kind of way, that they wallow in their little fantasies about Monica, especially since that pusillanimous Senate refused to treat them to the spectacle of having Monica re-enact her “encounters” with Clinton on the Senate floor, which is what they really wanted all along.  It’s their version of partying like it’s 1999, and for some of them, it’s all they have left.”

But then, finally, when I found out that the tenured law professor who’d started all this pettiness and viciousness was now complaining self-pityingly about her critics’ unpleasantness and partisanship and incivility, I knew what we were dealing with. 

Because when I became the director of a humanities center at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1997, I was required to attend an “administrator orientation.” To my surprise, “administrator orientation” consisted of two days’ worth of learning how to deal with unfair and/or unbalanced professors and staff, who, we were told, would make our lives hell at the very first opportunity.  (And you know what?  Even though my center had no permanent faculty and only two staff members, the orientation leaders were entirely right about this.) And one remark from that orientation has stayed with me for almost ten years.

A bully, we were told, is someone who knocks you down and takes your lunch money.

An academic bully is someone who runs into you, falls backward, claims injury, and sues you for your lunch money.

So, Jessica, I’m so sorry you’ve been run into by one of our academic bullies.  We’ll do what we can on our end to shun them, and we hope it’ll help.

Note for commenters:  this blog does not tolerate comments about anybody’s physical appearance, unless of course you want to point out in passing that U. No. looks a little bit like Zod.

Posted by Michael on 09/18 at 09:35 AM
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Sunday, September 17, 2006

Sunday sockpuppet postscript

I know I should take it easy on poor Lee Siegel.  The guy has undergone the singular misfortune of making himself a laughingstock just before his book of collected reviews and essays was published, and that can’t be pleasant. 

So I understand why he’s had to make the rounds of the New York print media and answer embarrassing questions about his sprezzatural alter ego.  It’s got to be a painful exercise, because even as Siegel tries to blame his fatuousness and self-regard on the blogosphere in the most remarkably fatuous and self-regarding ways (“I assumed an alias, I guess, because I didn’t want to stoop to their level, not realizing that I was stooping to their level”), he has to do so in articles that inform people—especially those people who don’t read “web” “logs”—that he’d spent a few months of his life praising himself as brave and brilliant and handsome and witty and charming and talented and also really brilliant.  Even the New York Observer profile, in the course of hailing him (oddly) as “an increasingly rare breed—a combative intellectual generalist” (quoi?—there are entire neighborhoods in New York zoned CIG-1 specifically for combative intellectual generalists), had to let its readers in on the back story:

Mr. Siegel was first drawn into Internet anonymity last February, after his condescending column offering advice to Jon Stewart before he hosted the Oscars inspired dozens of nasty comments in response. Under the heading “Siegel is my hero,” the first of 15 posts by “sprezzatura” read: “How angry people get when a powerful critic says he doesn’t like their favorite show! Like little babies. Such fragile egos …. Siegel is brave, brilliant, and wittier than Stewart will ever be. Take that, you bunch of immature, abusive sheep.” It followed later with: “Groupthink from a mob of bullies cowering behind their user-name aliases. Groupthink! Groupthink! Naaa naaa naaa-naaa naaa!”

So for a moment, I had a soupçon of sympathy for the guy.  Really, I did.

And then this morning I find that I’m cheek-by-jowl with him in the Sunday Times Magazine.  That’s me in “The Way We Live Now,” and that’s him in the“Questions For” feature.  Quelle surprise!  C’est bizarre!  Et quelle coincidence!

All right, just one thing.  I actually don’t want to get on Mr. Siegel’s case—there are far greater evils in the world, like smooth jazz.  But this one thing vexed me mightily:

Did you feel that you were doing something ethically questionable when you posted, for instance, a comment by Sprezzatura that carried the headline “Siegel Is My Hero”?

Every man is a hero to his alias.

Now, come on already with the attempt at light-wit cleverness. People!  Citizens!  Stop him before he alludes again!

Because the allusion here is to the phrase “no man is a hero to his valet.” We got that.  But, of course, that line suggests that the valet sees the clay feet underneath the heroic dress, whereas Siegel slyly (but not that slyly) suggests that all of us have heroic self-images that we’d indulge if only we could get away with it.  “Come, come,” Siegel’s repartee says, “we would all name our sockpuppets ‘sprezzatura’ if given the opportunity, would we not?”

Er, no.  I’m afraid you’re alone on this one, Mr. Siegel.  My own personal sockpuppet is called “Cyberpunk Composite Entities,” and I invented it on this sinuous thread last February.  When I asked people to stop calling U. No. D. Ho., Rich Puchalsky wrote in to say,

Can I still keep calling him “Horowitz” and speculating about him as a sort of cyberpunk composite entity?

To which Cyberpunk Composite Entities replied,

We really wish you wouldn’t pawn him off on us.  What did we do to deserve this?

CCE then mysteriously appeared this past May in this twisted thread over at The Poor Man Institute for Freedom and Democracy and a Pony, in which a commenter named “nobody” wrote, rather nastily,

Oh man, I truly do hope Dr Bérubé sees fit to kick Siegel’s sorry pompous ass.

To which I replied, in my own name,

You know, I’ve long believed that nobody reads my archives.

To which a person now calling himself “dr nobody” said,

Now that’s what I call service! And with an eerily prescient post too. Thank you, sir. Your archives are truly incomparable.

Well, that degree of synchronicity, combined with praise for my incomparable archives, must’ve smelled a bit funny, so a commenter named “Thomas Nephew” appeared a couple of hours later to demand an explanation:

Admit it, Berube—you’re nobody.

To which I replied, under the name “Cyberpunk Composite Entities,”

I admit it three or four times a day, Thomas, but I’d never choose it as a blog comment name. Nobody would.

I signed that comment with my own url, though.  And everybody left the room happy.

OK, so now you know.  For every man is a cyberpunk composite entity to his . . . uh . . . to his . . . oh, never mind.

Posted by Michael on 09/17 at 07:05 PM
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Friday, September 15, 2006

ABF Friday:  Mordant Celebration edition!

One year ago today I was having one of the better times of my life.  I was in northern California, attending the wedding ceremony of my old friend Larry Gallagher, whom I’d met in college and with whom I’d played some fine music back in the day, and Catherine Shaddix, whom he’d met back in the more recent (mid-90s) day at the Mount Baldy Zen Center.  It was a thoroughly Buddhist ceremony—nothing wasted, everything fun, very moving vows, and a hilarious discussion afterwards about whether the Vipassana ideal of lovingkindness wasn’t too difficult for us mere humans to achieve (and, relatedly, whether it was a bad idea to have a belief system in which one was constantly weighed in one’s own scales and found wanting, what with all those “hindrances” in the way) and whether Buddhists might not be better off with a more realistic outlook that involved 80 percent lovingkindness and 20 percent revenge.

One of the highlights of the weekend for me was playing music again with Larry and other-former-bandmate Oren Bloedow and about seven or eight terrific musicians (“terrific” here meaning “much much better at playing music than I am”).  I had neglected to bring my hi-hat cymbals with me to San Francisco, and I was frantically writing this review essay on the trip and meeting the delightful Chris Clarke along the way, so part of the weekend involved a series of Madcap Adventures that I did not fail to detail on this blog last year.  (Dang, I just reread that post and got all wistful.) I hadn’t played music in public for about six years, and I haven’t played since.  I don’t know why.

And, as I wrote in that post, our set ended on a most fun and kinda-ironic (and therefore even more fun) note:

My part of the evening was capped off when word got around the crowd that no one in the United States could be properly married until the band played “Celebration,” whereupon we all got back up on stage and played a seven-minute jam that included an extended solo so remarkable that half the musicians spun around and said, WTF? as one of the guitarists took the tune to places it had never been.  As we ended sharply on “everyone around the world, come on”—improbably, since we had never played the song before—Kid B brought the celebration to a close, declaring, “by the power invested in me by Kool and the Gang, I now pronounce you husband and wife.”

Well, what I didn’t tell you last year was that the next morning, as the entire wedding party of thirty-or-forty-or-so people gathered for casual breakfast and coffee and chatter in the crisp California sunshine, Larry and I and a small group of people (including Joey Cheezhee of Joey Cheezhee and the Velveeta Underground, about whom I’d heard so much over the years but had never met) had a soul-searching discussion that will serve, one year later, as the basis for today’s Arbitrary But Fun Friday.

It started like this.  Rob Riddell, one of those fine musicians (and the author of the “about Larry” page of Larry’s website), was going to be married three weeks hence, and he’d gotten such a kick out of the impromptu “Celebration” celebration that he was reportedly thinking of playing the song at his wedding.  Quite apart from the question of whether this constituted an illegitimate form of copying-off, there was the question—and I don’t remember who first brought it up—of whether it was appropriate to play “Celebration” only three weeks after playing “Celebration,” because, after all, as the first verse clearly states,

There’s a party goin’ on right here
A celebration to last throughout the years

And who would want to violate the letter and the spirit of this powerful song?

On the other hand, no one in the United States can be properly married until the band plays “Celebration.” So we were faced with something of a dilemma.

My contribution to the discussion went like this: the question about “Celebration” unfortunately opens out onto the entire genre of packaged-party songs, such as Madonna’s “Holiday” and Chic’s “Good Times.” Because the entire premise of these songs is that our lives are, in fact, full of stress and strife, and we’re just going to take this one day (and night) and have ourselves a goddamn good time if it kills us.  So you obviously can’t play them three weeks apart.  You have to wait until you’ve accumulated enough agony, enough sorrow and trouble, and then you can play one of them again.

Madonna makes this quite clear:

It’s time for the good times
Forget about the bad times, oh yeah
One day to come together
To release the pressure
We need a holiday

“Put your troubles down/ It’s time to celebrate,” she sings, and though there’s an obligatory note of optimism—“Let love shine/ And we will find/ A way to come together/ And make things better,” we know this is so much horseshit, because the song opened by telling us we were allowing ourselves “just one day out of life” (my emphasis).  The note of optimism fools no one.  The song just keeps on mentioning pressure and troubles and bad times.  And that’s because when tomorrow comes, we return to the salt mines, where (if God is merciful) we will soon expire.

“Good Times” puts more of an emphasis on “good” times, as you might imagine, but despite the incessantly repeated (and therefore ultimately unconvincing) claim that “these are the good times,” the song just can’t help alluding to the conditions that make it necessary:

Must put an end
To this stress and strife
I think I want to live the sporting life

(This, folks, is why Raymond Williams was right to say that “we have to break from the common practice of isolating the object and then discovering its components.  On the contrary we have to discover the nature of a practice and then its conditions.”)

And then there is the truly ominous second stanza, which ends with that idyllic picture of “Clams on the half-shell/ And roller skates, roller skates,” but predicates this vision on what can only be called a sense of urgency and despair:

A rumor has it that it’s getting late
Time marches on, just can’t wait
The clock keeps turning, why hesitate
You silly fool, you can’t change your fate

Scholars of packaged-party songs have tried to gloss this stanza by way of its echo of “Time’s winged chariot” (“But at my back I always hear/ Time’s winged chariot hurrying near;/ And yonder all before us lie/ Deserts of vast eternity,” from Andrew Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress”), thereby claiming “Good Times” for the carpe diem tradition.  (The opening line, “a rumor has it,” is pretty clearly a nod to that tradition.) But still, my point remains.  Andrew Marvell certainly couldn’t utter these words to his coy mistress every three weeks, and you can’t play any of these songs that frequently, either.

Few artists have demystified the “party song” tradition so thoroughly as Mary J. Blige, of course, whose delightful “Family Affair” and “Dance for Me” are bracingly insistent on their status as tenuous (though thumpin’) respites from “drama” and “situations” and “BS.” “Dance for Me” admits, “And I know you been stressed/ That’s how we got you messed up,” and “Family Affair” goes so far as to suggest that the first injunction to “leave your situations at the door” was insufficient, and requires a second, more emphatic “I told you leave your situations at the door” (emphasis added, but already implied, I think).

In fact, as our post-wedding discussion progressed, our little group began to wonder if there were any get-up-and-dance songs that weren’t ultimately self-consuming artifacts.  For does not the seemingly straightforward exhortation to get on the good foot imply a bad foot, and that you may be on it as we speak?  And who wants to be reminded of that bad foot in a song about the good foot?  “Ain’t nothing goin’ on but the rent/ A whole lotta bills and my money’s spent/ And that’s on my bad foot.” See?  Told you.

I’ll develop this theme in another post, when I explain why Sam Cooke’s “We’re Havin’ a Party” actually suggests (not in its lyrics but in Cooke’s delivery) that the comforts of this world, even unto the Cokes in the icebox and the popcorn on the table, are paltry and evanescent, and that our true condition consists of misery and grief and mourning.

But for now, here’s our ABF question: is it possible, knowing what we now know, to play or dance to any of these songs unironically?  And precisely how long should we wait before playing or dancing to them again?

Happy anniversary, Larry and Catherine, and thanks again for a lovely party that will last throughout the years.

Side notes: Check out Larry’s new CD, just released the other day or so!  As the website says, “‘Can I Go Now?’ continues in the long tradition of Larry Gallagher albums that began with his other CD three years ago.” I especially recommend “I’m Deep (Will You Sleep with Me),” and I can’t resist mentioning that I couldn’t resist quoting, in Liberal Arts, Larry’s wry take on the guilty-white-liberal phenomenon in “I’m Sorry For What My People Did to Your People,” namely, the stanza that goes,

I’m sorry for what my people did to your people
It was a nasty job
Please note the change of attitude
On the bumper of my Saab.

The first CD is well worth your while, too, ranging from the lovely “Disappointment Slough” to the laugh-til-you-cry “Wimpy White Guys with Guitars.” Just don’t tell Larry I sent you.  Make him guess.

And Jamie turns 15 tomorrow!  We’re taking him to this gig tonight.  And let’s hope he likes his new iPod!  Celebrate good times, come on!

Posted by Michael on 09/15 at 10:50 AM
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