Smooth song of the day #3 and #4 for 2012

Two songs from the Fleetwoods

Come softly to me



There is a lesson here about being too cute. The song was originally just called "Come Softly Darling". Maybe they thought the grown ups wouldn't notice.

The thing is, it's better with the new, cleaner, title the adults insisted on. This way, when your seventeen or whatever and you figure it out, you think you're the only one.

(By the way, the #1 hits of 1959 had "Venus" immediately followed by "Come Softly to Me" which, in turn, was followed by "The Happy Organ" which is worth a snicker.)

Mr. Blue



There is a lesson that goes with this one too. It's right here:

I'm Mr. Blue
When you say you love me
Then prove it by going out on the sly,
Proving your love isn't true.

That couplet with prove-proving is just so awful. And it would have been so easy to fix! But they didn't.

And aren't you glad I pointed it out to you so you can hear it every time you listen to this song now? You're welcome.

Sorta poltical: "But demographics are on our side"

I know, I know. Just yesterday morning  I was saying that I couldn't get worked up about politics 'cause it's summer.

Well, today's exception is to congratulate Kevin Drum, who writes for Mother Jones, for realizing there is something must be wrong with one of the favourite arguments of the left.

Here is the set up:

A lot of smart people say that demographic trends are steadily moving in favor of Democrats, and they make a good case. The young have turned sharply against Republicans over the past decade, and brand loyalty means their anti-Republican voting behavior is likely to persist over their entire lives.

And here is the punch line:

And yet, real-world events belie these trends. Republicans continue to be just as competitive in national elections as ever. It's easy, of course, to chalk this up to events: 9/11 moved the electorate in a pro-Republican direction, while continuing economic stagnation has more recently moved them in an anti-incumbent—and therefore anti-Democratic—direction. But either the demographic argument is wrong, or else it's been continuing apace, a growing tide held back by chance events. If the latter is true, Democrats should very soon start blowing Republicans out of the water in a very regular and very spectacular kind of way.

That sounds great, but I confess that I don't see much sign of it. What am I missing?

Let me put you out of your misery Mr. Drum, the problem is that the demographic argument is just wrong.

Let me give you an example of a political struggle you don't have a personal stake in as that may make it easier to see. If the demographic argument was right, Quebec would long ago have become an independent country. Youth support for independence in Quebec was even higher than youth support for the Democrats is in the USA for decades beginning in the early 1970s. If that had held, eighty percent of voters up to age sixty should be solidly for independence today. In fact, support for Quebec independence is lower today than it has been any time in recent decades.

If you look at it closely, one of the things that should hit you about the youth vote is how much of it isn't. Isn't a vote I mean. Youth just don't show up to vote much. I could try and convince you that that the issues youth care most about are just abstract issues for them but I don't need to. Anyone who can't even bother to show up to vote just doesn't care that much. The same guy who can't bother making it to the polling station might well wear a button decrying racism, or stand in the street banging a drum for ten hours to end economic inequality, or go to a concert to support efforts to do something about global warming, but all those things are more of a pose, a stance than a decision he has any personal stake in.

And Kevin Drum should know this. Look at his word choice above: "and brand loyalty means...". Brand loyalty? Is that meant to be serious?

Very little hangs on your political opinions when you're young. You don't pay taxes, you don't own property, you don't have a career, you don't have children of your own about to enter the school system.

When I was a child, I used to speak like a child, think like a child, reason like a child ....

Youth grows up and changes. Voting patterns aren't like tattoos, it's relatively easy to change them. Even the voter who votes Democrat all his or her life will do so for vastly different reasons as an adult.

Smooth song of the day #2 for 2012

Who is he and what is he to you?
You know the tambourine? Well, you'll never feel the same about them after this. I'm not going to tell you when it comes it. Just wait for it. When it hits, it will go right through you like a stiletto.



This song is a lot like film noir—it's pure menace all the way through and yet you want more of it so badly. It's sorta like a lover you know will hurt but you your knees go weak every time she or he walks in the door.

The Marriage Plot: Her books

I haven't finished yet but I'm far enough along that there are certain aspects of the book that seem of some significance as I look back. One of these is Madeleine's book collection. It's the very first thing in the book. We know about her books before we know her name.

There is something very right about this. I was at university at the same time (early 1980s) as Madeleine , Leonard and Mitchell and the cultural references are largely correct. One of the things that girls did back then was have their books on a shelf in their room and boys who were lucky enough to get into her room (a privilege that did not necessarily imply sex although it sometimes did) would look at her books and try to reach some conclusions about who and what she really was based on this collection. It's something we all did and I remember people talking about it.

So, as I say, there is something very right about it all. If anything, the problem, it seems to me, is that he doesn't make enough of it. University students are lousy tenants so they pay a premium. As a consequence, they end up jammed into apartments or houses and the only privacy, the only intimacy, they have is in their bedrooms. And even that is very limited. You can hear your roomies having sex and you can hear them having fights and breaking up. Odd as this may seem, to actually sit in a girl's bedroom and be able to study the spines of the books on her shelf was a more exclusive experience than knowing what she sounded like when she came or whether she and her boyfriend discussed issues such as would she swallow, would she wear more exciting underwear and would she please stop obsessing about his ex-girlfriend.

Fred Kaffenberger says he liked the three principals—Madeleine, Leonard and Mitchell—in this novel. That's an important observation because it really comes down to that. Eugenides doesn't have the knack of creating romance about the places or activities he writes about. No one, reading this, would get a yen to go to Brown University. It all comes down to these three characters. You will either find them and their struggles compelling or you will hate the novel.

And Madeleine is the most important of the three. We meet her first and she is, at least to where I am at about seventy percent completed, the center of the book. The only thing the two men have in common is that they are both in love with her.

So let's look at her books in the order they get mentionned:

There were her Edith Wharton novels, arranged not by title but date of publication; there was the complete Modern Library set of Henry James, a gift from her father on her twenty-first birthday; there were the dog-eared paperbacks assigned in her college courses, a lot of Dickens, a smidgen of Trollope, along with good helpings of Austen, George Eliot, and the redoubtable Brontë sisters.

I'll start with the "redoubtable" Brontës. Who is making this judgment? Please excuse me if I remind you that "redoubtable" means "formidable" and that, in a novel anyway, doesn't necessarily mean good. If you were a girl who voraciously reads and they were among your favourites, you might say "redoubtable" as a way of expressing the strength they had and the strength you got from reading them. If you were a boy interested in a girl who voraciously read novels the Brontës might be a formidable barrier because they were big, dense books that boys don't like to read because they dwell on a lot of heavy romantic stuff that doesn't interest boys. And that would matter a lot in a list that had started with Edith Wharton and Henry James, making for a very formidable group. If you were a boy in Madeleine's bedroom you might well think that the only small mercy is that there is no much-loved copy of Jude the Obscure in her collection.

Austen is a typical choice but she gets remarkably little attention in this book. There was a bit of a revolution going on in the eighties in that  the kinds of novels that voracious girl readers loved but that academics tended to diminish were beginning to get a strange new respect in English departments and Austen was the central figure in that revolution. In other words, she has to be there or the book would lose all credibility. But that is the problem for that is the only reason she is there. Much as a novel about a Canadian boy would have to mention hockey, a novel about a girl like Madeleine has to mention Austen. But that is all there is. Austen isn't much discussed and later in the book Madeleine will admit she has not made much of a study of Austen.

I suspect Eugenides hasn't read much Austen. Eliot he has read, his last novel was called Middlesex!

Next we get some poetry but poetry doesn't matter in this story and neither do the paperbacks Madeleine was assigned for classes. What does matter are the final two items listed, and they make for a rather odd pairing:

There were the Colette novels she read on the sly. There was the first edition of Couples, belonging to her mother, which Madeleine had surreptitiously dipped into back in sixth grade and which she was using now using to provide textual support in her English honors thesis on the marriage plot.

Colette and Updike have nothing in common except that they both write a lot about sex and particularly about sex on the sly. And Madeleine reads them on the sly too! I wonder what she is likely to have learned from them? Colette always writes about feelings, about what it feels like to be in love. She does this even when cranking out soft-core porn about girls having "inappropriate" relationships with other girls or boys having affairs with older women. Her books can make you tingle for all that, they made me tingle plenty in my teen years, but they are very different from Updike who tends to describe acts.

Sadly, there is no connection, at least not yet, between these books and Madeleine's sex life. And you'd expect there to be. The impressions a teenager gets from the sexually suggestive books she reads on the sly should have a huge effect on her early sexual experience.

Finally, I should note that the significance of the title has already been explained right here on the first screen of my electronic edition of the novel.

Oh yeah, names. Madeleine's name is a derivative of Magdalen with all that implies. It's also the name of the pastry that triggers the memories in Proust. Are either of those things significant in this novel? I don't know.

Eugenides name is also intetesting, by the way. I'm not anything even remotely resembling a Greek scholar but it must mean "good family" or "good ancestors" or "good descent". Which is kind of appropriate because one major theme of the novel is about the social outsider (Mitchell) in pursuit of the insider (Madeleine). When Mitchell accidentally catches a glimpse of Madeleine's breast, he describes it as her "Episcopalian breast".

Smooth song of summer #1 for 2012

Here is the first entry for the summer of 2012.



This became a hit the year I was thirteen and it was inescapable on the radio. Some people get nostalgic for Top Forty radio now that it is gone but it killed a lot of music. I remember driving through Montreal with my father trying to avoid this tune. I pushed five preset buttons in a row and got this song every time. It didn't matter how good a tune was, you'd hate it by the time Top Forty radio was finished with it.

It wasn't until the year I was nineteen and I heard it played that I realized how wonderful it is. As i've aid before, songs like this get dismissed because they are so easy to enjoy. Not easy to do. One heck of a lot of talent goes into a performance like this. You don't have to listen carefully but you'll notice, if you do, that the lyrics are beautifully crafted, that the arrangement, the harmonies are perfect.

To steal a line from Charles Ryder, it's like drowning in honey, stingless.

Harmony, is there anything it can't do?

Sorta political: It's summertime ...

... and I can't work up enough enthusiasm to blog about politics. Unless something irresistible comes up, no political blogging until September.

The Marriage Plot

I'm reading The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides (about which there will be more to come). I don't usually pay much attention to recent fiction and it is a rare thing when I read any "serious" novel published in the last sixty years. I got hooked after reading this post on a blog I really like by Fred Kaffenberger.

Reading his post my immediate reaction was to respectfully disagree about ... well, just about everything. Respectfully disagree because Kaffenberger is the sort of guy who deserves respect. Reading him for a few years now, I don't think he has made a single unfair or unmeasured comment about anyone; a far better record than my own.

But, as I say, I read his post and particularly this bit,

Perhaps the decline of marriage was already indicated by the marriage plot itself: that odd 19th Century fantasy that happiness and marriage are conterminous: to be happy is to be married, and to be married is to be happy. Such a confusion puts impossible demands on marriage, and short circuits the search for happiness.

and thought, "That's just wrong".

Part of the problem is that there is something very right about what he says and I will get to that at the bottom.

But first this: the notion that happiness and marriage are coterminous isn't a particularly 19th century thing. If anyone is to blame for such things it is the 20th century and Walt Disney would have to be near the top of the list of indicted conspirators.

I can only gesture at the main points here because it would be a long argument (probably a whole book) to do otherwise, but the key element of the great 18th and 19th century novels was that they recognized just how hard a thing marriage was to achieve. Whether you accept the premise or not, the proof that Elizabeth and Darcy would be happy is not that they are now married but that they both showed such virtue on the path to marriage. When we get to the end, we can say, "Now that we have seen what it took them to get there, we can see that they have what it takes to make their marriage work".

One of the really fascinating things about the classic marriage plot is how determinedly it isolates its two principals. This is true even in the sillier fiction. To take one of my favourite examples, in Ann Radcliffe's The Italian, the female lover Ellena, is kidnapped by the evil villain and held in a series of remote locations and then, just when the male lover, Vivaldi, sets her free, he, in turn, is arrested by the Inquisition. Melodramatic? Perhaps but the point is each character is forced to face individual challenges.

And Pride and Prejudice isn't that much different. A series of obstacles (not the least of which is their disdain for one another) keep the characters away from one another and it is what they each do isolation that wins the day. Again, you can question whether the tests are the right ones but the novel doesn't make marriage and happiness coterminous. Elizabeth and Darcy may well be happier than they otherwise might have been had they not connected but the novel leaves us little doubt that both have the virtues to obtains such happiness as is possible in this world even if they had ended up single.

And it is worth remembering that Austen herself never married and yet she remains, even today, the single greatest writer of the marriage plot in novel form. That she believed in a form of happiness she never attained is important.

As I said above, while what Fred Kaffenberger has to say about the 19th century strikes me as unfair when applied to that period but it is absolutely true when applied to our own time. Consider Kathryn Jean Lopez. I can't find the original piece online so I can only refer you to a piece in which she is quoted but take a look at what Lopez had to say about The Bachelor:

But for what it was, it wasn’t too bad. Marriage doesn’t often get an endorsement like it on primetime television, with young people who claim to want “true love” and marriage. And they’re doing more handholding and talking, too, than jumping in and out of bed to find it. . . .

If you were among the 18.2 million Bachelor viewers and then turned on ER or Greta or went to sleep, or otherwise got on with your life, I’m not sure you didn’t walk away with a decent feeling about marriage. “The Bachelor” has a point when he defends the whole concept: “People have met in stranger ways. If the right person for you is in a certain place, even on an incredibly crazy show like this, you’ve got to take the chance.”

That folks is the "conservative" view.  The point here is not that Lopez grudgingly gives (very) limited praise to a trivial and trashy show. No, the problem is that Lopez accepts the silly premise—she thinks the challenge of marriage is finding and meeting the right person. The difference between Lopez's version of marriage and The Bachelor's version is a lot like the difference between the high class call girl and the hooker on the street; although one is cleaner, neater and more concerned with propriety and discretion than the other, they are both whores in the final analysis.

Eliminate all the cheap voyeurism and shoddy exploitation of publicity sluts that goes with The Bachelor and look at what Lopez thinks marriage is about: people who want true love and and are trying to find it. There is the fairytale in which marriage and happiness are coterminous in all its glory.

The problem with this is that you are surrounded by right people. There are millions of wonderful women and men in the world. And they are all around you: you see them at school, at work in your neighbourhood. Finding them is easy and meeting them them is only a little bit harder.

And you'll note that the question that is conspicuously absent here is any wondering on anyone's part about whether they are the right sort of person. The marriage plot as it is promoted today is about whether some silly little narcissist can find person that is right for them. Much as women's magazines perennially promise a swimsuit that is right for every shape, the modern marriage plot assumes that there is a right person out there for every girl. That a woman has to do a lot of hard work to look good in any swimsuit, no matter how "flattering", is brushed away. Marriage also requires a lot of hard work to make yourself into someone marriageable.

In Austen or Shakespeare, the obstacles that stand in the way of true love are more than occasions for drama. They are tests of the virtue of the lovers. They, on the other hand, take it as relatively easy to to fall in love. It says something, and nothing good, about our era that we see the point as finding the person you'll always be able to love.