Happy Birthday, Duke Ellington!

A hundred and fifteen years young.

Whistle While You Work for the Weekend

I have a questionable habit of relating everything that happens in my life to some song lyric or other. Got it from my mom. Sometimes it's funny to realize that what I'm going around whistling or singing loudly is a narration of exactly what I'm doing. Other times I realize to my horror and embarrassment that I'm broadcasting an opinion that should really be kept to myself. But mostly it's just annoying as heck, for me and everybody else.

However, this weekend I ended up with some pretty great ear worms entertaining me while I took care of a few otherwise tedious chores. Maybe they'll help you if you have some tedium of your own.

First I gathered my laundry together and threw it in the wash. That didn't take much time, but long enough to think about laundromats and sing a few rounds of this.



Next, I had to run some errands around town on my bike. I could've gone forever with this tune stuck in my head.



When I got home, I finally got around to doing my income tax. I wasn't too happy in the end when it cost me $1,800 (keep up the good work, Stephen Harper!), but the phrase "tax deduction" kept this one egging me on for the full two hours it took.



Then it was time to clean the bathroom. I thought the tub and toilet would wear out my positivity for sure, but luckily there was some pink mould in the shower stall that needed taking care of. That of course brought the lovely Nick Drake to mind, who serenaded me well into the evening.



Hope your weekend's as productive and musical!

A Very Short Story

Here's a sneak preview of a story I wrote for my friend KC's monthly coffee newsletter, Concrete News. It'll show up in print in a month or two. I was given a maximum of 100 words for the "Writer's Block" section. I've cheated a little, at 101. If you see a word that can be subtracted, let me know.

Abe and Mrs. Hogg

Abraham Vigoda was nine. His teachers found his name hilarious because of some old actor or whatever. Abe’s family didn't have a TV. It wasn’t funny to him.

Once appointed superintendent of the school board, Abe closed Hemlock Elementary. The ex-teachers hated his guts.

Except one day Sobey’s cashier Mrs. Hogg called him her star pupil. Abe was surprised, then remembered her not laughing at him.

His wife didn’t understand the story's full import. How could she? They watched their kid eat the custard things Abe bought.

After she died, Abe realized Mrs. Hogg must not have had a TV either.

Vinyl Lament

Aaah! Just realized I'm going to miss Record Store Day on Saturday, as I'll be flying to Ontario to visit my family. Of course, I'll be happy to see the fam, but I do always enjoy RSD in Halifax. Seems like there's gonna be some cool stuff going on here too… Oh, well. Maybe someone will have opened a record store in Markham since I lived there in 1987. Probably not.

The Meaning of Life

Had this email exchange with an old friend last week. We hadn't talked in years, so of course there were many catching-up details to be shared, which naturally led to a general discussion about life's ultimate meaning. I swear she started it. In the middle of her last email was this paragraph:

I've realized or decided that life has no meaning. We live and we die. I have no need to make a mark or leave a legacy. We're all ephemeral, transient bags of water animated by electricity. I'm good with that. We're all part of everything, together. Why people have to fuck it up so much during the short time we're here is a sad mystery, assigning meaning where there is none feeds the ego. I assume no physicists believe in god.

That kind of stuff is like a bag of candy to me, so I jumped on the invitation to go to Philosophy Town with it. Possibly it wasn't the kind of sympathetic response she was looking for. But I felt like the process of writing it clarified some of my own "mystical atheist" thoughts on the matter. If you're interested, here's what I said. I've left it unitalicized, because it's quite long and that would be just one level of annoying too many:

As for life having no meaning... I think I know what you mean, but I think I don't exactly agree. Or, rather, there are three distinct things I think you might mean, each of which I do agree with, but maybe not in quite the same way as you:

1. Life has no intrinsic meaning, only meanings we arbitrarily assign it.

Sure. Yes. That seems obviously true to me.

However, I wouldn't then go on to say it therefore has no meaning. Because nothing has "intrinsic meaning," whatever that might be. All meaning is relative to some community that has decided upon it arbitrarily, but that doesn't make it any less valid.

The word "cookie," e.g, has been agreed to refer to a certain kind of baked good. There's nothing about the sound of the word or the way it looks written on a piece of paper that makes it inherently suitable for that purpose, but we can still use it to express hunger or generosity without necessarily feeding anyone's egos.

2. OK, but that's just a different use of the word "meaning" from what I'm saying here, which is something more like "point" or "purpose." Because we are all randomly evolved combinations of physical stuff with no designer, no one can claim knowledge of some ultimate purpose to our existence.

Again, I agree with that statement as far as it goes, but would add that the lack of an inarguable, universally valid reason for human life doesn't imply anything wrong with creating our own reasons for living.

We may be bags of water animated by electricty, but we are not JUST bags of water animated by electricity. We also happen to be the only such bags of water that have developed communicatively rich language. We're the species that makes ideas stand for things and words stand for ideas and things stand for words with next to no effort. It's in our nature to go around creating meaning and stories that make our lives make sense to us. There's no point in saying we shouldn't do that, because it's behind every decision we make, every thought we think, and every opinion we opine.

To put it another way, in order to be "good with" or "not good with" the transient and comically physical nature of human existence, you have to first believe in meaning of some kind. Otherwise, the whole judgment is a non-starter.

3. Thoughts, opinions, judgments — yes, that's exactly what I'm suggesting we get away from. Our obsessive need to see meaning everywhere is precisely what makes us so neurotic, so we need to learn to cut it out when it's not appropriate. Look at this planet, for Pete's sake! We're making a giant mess of it, killing ourselves and everything else along the way, all for the sake of some stupid ideas and preferences we've dreamed up just to make our lives more interesting or sensible. Life isn't supposed to be interesting or make sense! Other species don't do that, and they seem to get along fine. Oh sure, sometimes they eat each other, and I wouldn't exactly argue that they're better artists or moralists or truth-seekers or whatever than we are. But they also don't figure out ways to short-sightedly annihilate each other and their surroundings, just so they can feel a little more comfortable and smug during their individual lifetimes. Come on!

OK, yeah, I'm pretty much with you on this one. And the whole God-as-something-you-need-to-decide-whether-you-believe-in-or-not I also can't get behind. We do need to get over ourselves and stop clinging to the beliefs and stories we identify with so strongly that we're willing to commit violence to ourselves and the beautifully balanced chaos from which we've sprung in order to protect them.

However… I feel like the letting-go and acceptance-of-reality-as-it-is that are called for here are what religion, and even the mystical concept "God," are supposed to be about. Forget about belief or disbelief in certain narratives. Those are not useful concepts. But if one can manage, at least temporarily, to take on the attitude that there are mysterious forces beyond our understanding, behind everything we think we know, including our sense of ourselves, and that those forces furthermore express themselves through each of us and in turn are witnessed by each of us in a pre-causal, atemporal kind of flow that, when we are lucky enough to tune into it, feels like nothing so much as unconditional love, well, that's a very powerful stance to be able to take.

I guess I'm saying that your "We're all part of everything, together" is not incompatible with a physicist experiencing something that she might decide to call "God." We don't need God as a concept that explains how things work — we have science for that. But science doesn't tell us anything about how to enjoy the world as given. If anything, it just makes up more and more stories about that world, till we can't look at anything directly anymore because we're too busy trying to understand and control it. What we need now to balance that perpetual discomfort is a willingness to experience complete mystery behind the complete understanding. It's not a matter of belief, but of openness to possibility.

So, if you're saying life has no meaning and therefore is pointless and therefore it doesn't matter what people do just as long as they keep their stupid stories to themselves, I respectfully disagree. But if, by "Life has no meaning," you mean to celebrate the infinity of possibilities presented to us at every moment when we can manage to let go of our stories, fears, desires, beliefs, and preconceptions and just live, I'm with ya, sister!

Interesting Sentences from Books I'm Reading

"Music… is not simply a distraction or a pastime, but a core element of our identity as a species, an activity that paved the way for more complex behaviors such as language, large-scale cooperative undertakings, and the passing down of important information from one generation to the next."

—Daniel J. Levitin, The World in Six Songs:

How the Musical Brain Created Human Nature

"Unless I can combine poetry with recorded noise, have I any right to be?"

—Morissey, Autobiography

"[T]hough we may tell ourselves that we are royally pushing analogies around from the heights of our conscious thrones, the truth is otherwise: we are really at the mercy of our own seething myriads of unconscious analogies, much as a powerful ruler is really responding to the collective will of their people, because if they were regularly going against their people, they would soon be dethroned."

—Douglas Hofstadter & Emmanuel Sander, Surfaces and Essences:

Analogy as the Fuel and Fire of Thinking

"Science can always explain, qua mathematical eccentricities, that and how a strange thing happens, but can it explain anything about the why?"

—Erik Fosnes Hansen, Tales of Protection (Nadia Christensen, transl.)

"Lionel was there, a great white shape, leaning on the open door with his brow pressed to his raised wrist, panting huskily, and giving off a faint grey steam in his purple singlet (the lift was misbehaving, and the flat was on the thirty-third floor—but then again Lionel could give off steam while dozing in bed on a quiet afternoon)."

—Martin Amis, Lionel Asbo

"And anyway I show up at that party they had for homecoming week in first year and I start making out with the poster of Van Morrison, like I've pinned poor Van against the wall and am sexually assaulting him, and you guys are like Oh my god that's the guy from the freshman mixer who chugged all the purple Jesus right out of the barrel and then vomited into the barrel and then started chugging that, who in Christ's name let him in?"

—Lynn Coady, The Antagonist

"Then they leave the area, a little sick at what they have done, especially the orange, who several times becomes so distraught it stops rolling altogether, and must be picked up and hurled down the path by Jim the penisless man, who, turns out, has a very good arm."

—George Saunders, In Persuasion Nation

His world had vanished long before he entered it.

I went to see the latest Wes Anderson movie a couple of times in the last week. If you haven't seen it, you'll be happy to learn that it's the good kind of Wes Anderson movie — the kind where real adult concerns lie behind the whimsical little episodes in a whimsical little world, provoking some genuine and well-earned emotion. As in The Royal Tenenbaums and The Darjeeling Limited, and as not so much in The Fantastic Mr. Fox and Moonrise Kingdom, the quirky art direction and fast-paced witticisms in The Grand Budapest Hotel serve deeper, darker themes.

The majority of the film's action takes place between the wars in a fictional eastern European country whose historic culture is threatened by a new cynical barbarism, as represented by barely fictional Nazis called the "Zig Zag Division." Monsieur Gustave, the protagonist, is a tragicomic dandy struggling to preserve an already lost world of foppish etiquette and aristocratic kindness, à la Grand Illusion. Though it's fast-paced and zany, the story manages to feel like a Sebaldian meditation on cruelty and decay. Time marches ruthlessly, destructively forward, and if we want to imagine a better world, our best bet is to listen to the tragic stories of our elders.

Nostalgia is a theme that comes up a lot for Wes Anderson. In fact, the more I think about it, the more I realize that most of his movies are about neurotically nostalgic people in meticulously controlled environments. They dislike the world as it is, so they create their own little worlds and maintain them according to the values of bygone days.

The feeling created is somewhere between cozy and claustrophobic, like when children make a closet into a "fort" and bring all their belongings into it. Max Fischer makes the insular life of private school bearable by starting up old-fashioned clubs that modern high school students are no longer interested in. The adult Tenenbaum children dress in their childhood clothes and each have their own room where they surround themselves with the achievements of their youth. Steve Zissou lives on (or rather, in) a Jacques-Cousteau-like exploratory ship where everything is branded in a seventies style. The Whitman brothers try to rekindle their family bonds in a train compartment. Mr. Fox lives in a tunnel under a tree and refuses to grow up. Sam Shakusky is a boy scout camping on an island.

One gets the sense that this is Anderson's own M.O. The films themselves revel in obsessive detail and old-fashioned techniques, presenting themselves as children's stories for adults. In the lighter ones, the director allows his nostalgia free reign, and we get a comforting, sentimental adventure. The characters may lose their control to outside forces temporarily, but it is regained and order restored with no major change in outlook.

On the other hand, when the protagonists' backward-looking need for control is shown not to be a workable characteristic, some real depth is achieved. When, as in The Grand Budapest Hotel, the fastidious world-making of a character is no match for the chaotic forces of nature (either human nature or nature nature), we feel that something real has been lost, and something learned in exchange. The director turns out not to be such a naïf after all, and we leave the theatre a little wiser.

Classic Sesame Street Musical Moments

I've been unsuccessfully scouring YouTube for years now in search of a half-remembered Sesame Street segment where a kooky jazz woman teaches a bunch of kids to sing a really dissonant "Scoobity Dooby Doo" song. I feel like it was Betty Carter, just from the style of her singing, but I could be way off base on that. Anyway, had another try tonight, and came up with all these gems instead. The girl in the Paul Simon video is a particular highlight.