Thursday Chaff

Posted on March 11, 2021 by admin

It’s been a warm week for March so far, even warm enough last night before bed to crack the window a bit and listen to the strong winds and occasional rain showers. Did that account for the occurrence of one of my semiannual phantasmagoria dreams early this morning? Maybe.

Great Fortune, subtitled “The Epic of Rockefeller Center,” by Daniel Okrent (2003) is a delightful book so far, and I’m only a chapter in. Certainly the most delightful thing I’ve ever read about a major urban mixed-use redevelopment project.

The first chapter sets up the story nicely, telling a short history of the Manhattan land that would be Rockefeller Center up until the time that John D. Rockefeller Jr. got involved in the project in the late 1920s. I didn’t know that the parcel had belonged to Columbia University for many years, and the scheme to redevelop the land (known as the Upper Estate) was ultimately driven by the university’s need to pay for its stately campus in Morningside Heights.

“… this meant that expansion on the grand scale of McKim, Mead & White’s Olympian campus on Morningside Heights had somehow to be financed, and the Upper Estate was the only cash cow in sight,” Okrent writes. “The milking commenced in 1904…”

An important person at the beginning of the story is Otto Kahn, multimillionaire financier and patron of the arts (an American Maecenas, back when educated people would have known that reference), who was president and chairman of the board of directors of the Metropolitan Opera. I didn’t know that he was well enough known that the Marx Brothers parodied him as Roscoe W. Chandler in Animal Crackers.

A digression. Apparently, for $200, one can own an original Otto Kahn letter. Then again, they aren’t rare. Okrent called his correspondence “oceanic.”

Okrent also writes some good standalone lines: “His [architect Ben Morris] neo-Georgian Union League Club on 37th and Park is probably as close as one can get to the architectural equivalent of a stuffed shirt.”

The other day, I was driving along with Ann and playing with the radio dial as we went. On came “Copacabana.” Hadn’t heard that song a good while, but as I mentioned to Ann, it seemed to be on the radio all the time in 1978.

I thought a bit about it, and it seems remarkable that such a downer of a song was so popular. As a ballad, the entire story is, a woman’s boyfriend is killed in front of her, and psychologically she never recovers.

“Yeah,” Ann said. “But the music is so peppy.”

True enough. There’s also a derivative short story in there somewhere. Maybe the incident and the aftermath from the point of view of Rico. Maybe he was the playboy son of a Fulgencio Batista crony. In his highly publicized murder trial in New York in 1949, his lawyers argued self-defense and he was acquitted.

While walking the dog at Fabbrini Park this week, I noticed a memorial plaque on a bench honoring a man named William “Mr. Bill” X (I forget the last name). Nicknamed Mr. Bill, eh? And what were his last words? Oh Noooooooooooooo!

Of course, like Wile E. Coyote, Mr. Bill couldn’t actually die, just suffer endlessly, which seems a lot more hellish. Still, we celebrate the likes of Mr. Bill. I used to have a Mr. Bill t-shirt, and have photographic evidence to prove it, in as much as photographs prove anything anymore. It’s among the t-shirts I’ve lost over the years, which also includes the Kill ‘Em All, Let God Sort It Out shirt that sported a black beret-wearing skull.

Thursday Dust in the Wind

Posted on January 14, 2021 by admin

Much work these days. Lots going on. Will post again on January 19. The more holidays the better, and I’ll bet — considering the inclinations of the incoming administration — Juneteenth will be a federal holiday before long. Or at least the closest Monday.

Ice crystals on our deck. They didn’t last long. Later came snow, which mostly melted.
To follow Sink the Bismarck!, a taut 1960 British war movie, for contrast I recently watched Portrait of a Lady on Fire (Portrait de la jeune fille en feu, 2019), an engaging French love story set just before the Revolution. I haven’t seen many movies as painterly Portrait of a Lady on Fire.

A few weeks ago, before the violent national scrum, we started watching the short series The People vs. OJ Simpson. Top-quality historical fiction. Doesn’t feel historic, just like a good while ago. An increasingly long time ago, more in feeling than strict chronology. When the trial was actually happening, I remember thinking, do I have to hear about that again? Enough time has now passed for the subject to be of some interest.

That said, do I ever feel nostalgic for the ’90s? No. The underappreciated ’70s is more my flavor, and for the exact same uninteresting reason as most people. Nostalgia for one’s youth.

I didn’t know until I read about it a little while ago, but The Great Gatsby is in the public domain now. I could publish 100 words from that book, in order, or maybe reverse order, until I’d gone through the entire book, with the time needed to put the text in my only real cost. I don’t think I’ll do that, but it’s nice to know I could.

The immortal Ella.

A much later version. Recent, in fact, by the highly talented Hot Sardines.

The Hot Sardines’ singing is top notch, but I’m really taken with the animation in the video.

Another recent version by the Speakeasy Three.

Fine harmonies. The video is so stylized that it approaches parody, but doesn’t quite get there. Somehow, that works. Also, am I right in thinking there are celebrity lookalikes in this video? Recent celebrities, not swing-era ones. I don’t care enough about celebrities to find out, but I get that sense.

A site that visit every few months: The Comics Curmudgeon. On Jan 13, he mocks the comic strip Crock, which isn’t hard, but it is hard to be funny while doing it. The writer of the site, Joshua Fruhlinger, pulls it off.

One the characters says to another one, “I can’t wait to meet the blind date you got me. When can I call her?”

“Anytime but the weekends,” the other character says. “That’s the busiest time for blacksmiths.”

Fruhlinger comments: “I was going to go all in on ‘Why is it funny that this woman is a blacksmith,’ but we all know the reason why it’s supposed to be funny: blacksmithery is not a traditional feminine job so can you even imagine going on a date with a woman who would engage in it? What would you even call her? A blacksmithrix? Haw haw! Anyway, that’s stupid, so instead I’m going to focus on something actually puzzling: the assertion that weekends are ‘the busiest time for blacksmiths.’ I guess that’s when most Renn Faires are? Are we dealing with a universe where blacksmiths are a vital part of the everyday economy, making horseshoes and tools and such, or are we in a more modern environment where mass manufactured goods are omnipresent and easy to get, and the only people who go to blacksmiths are weirdos who are obsessed with swords? This is the Crock worldbuilding background that I have a million times more in interest in than I do in Poulet’s love life.”

I’ve started reading American Slavery, American Freedom, subtitled “The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia,” by Edmund S. Morgan (1975). I’m not far along, but enough to know he’s a good writer. The first chapter is unexpectedly about of Sir Francis Drake in Panama in 1572, but I think I can see where he seems to be going with the narrative, which will get to colonial Virginia before long.

Debris Under the Tree

Posted on January 3, 2021 by admin

Another Christmas, come and gone. We opened presents in the morning that day, as usual.

Not as usual, we had a family Zoom in the afternoon. My brothers, and my nephews and their expanding families, Lilly, and Yuriko and Ann and I were all linked. A geographic diversity: Texas, New York, Washington state and Illinois. We had an enjoyable time, even if the connection was wonky occasionally.

Later in the day, our Christmas movie was The Day the Earth Stood Still. The original version, of course. I hadn’t seen it in at least 30 years, but it was as good as I remember. The movie also inspired me to look up its source story, “Farewell to the Master” by Harry Bates, originally published in Astounding in 1940. No doubt a copy of that edition is somewhere in the house in San Antonio, among my father’s sizable collection of SF. I’d never read the story before, so I found in on line. I did know about its unnerving, surprise ending, however. I heard about it from a college friend years ago.

Another New Year’s Day has gone as well, featuring ice precipitation on top of an inch of two or snow that had fallen a few days earlier. Not enough to rise to the level of an ice storm, but enough to keep us within our walls, occasionally listening to the tap-tap-tap of ice hitting the ground or roof, but mostly paying attention to electronic entertainment, or lost in a book or two, for me including American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House (Jon Meacham, 2009) that I put down this summer and which I’m finishing now, about half way through. Big things ahead: Old Hickory is going to destroy the Second Bank of the United States and go up against nullification, and win, along with a second term. He’s already set the Trail of Tears in motion.

Oak Hill Cemetery, Lewistown

Posted on November 2, 2020 by admin

Lewistown, Illinois, isn’t very large. Only 2,100 or so people live there, as opposed to Oak Hill Cemetery in Lewistown, which has a population of more than 5,000. I arrived for a look on the morning of October 17.

I hadn’t expected such a good-looking cemetery. The fall colors helped, but only added to the overall aesthetic of woody terrain, sometimes hilly, peppered with upright stones and funerary art.

As you’d expect, there’s a Civil War memorial.

It’s hard to see in this pic, but this is the entirety of the inscription, written on the stone bench:

IN MEMORY OF OUR PATRIOT DEAD
MDCCCLXI–MDCCCLXV

I didn’t know it until later, but the columns at the memorial were salvaged from the previous Fulton County courthouse, which burned down in the 1890s. When Lincoln came to town in the ’50s to speak, he stood on the courthouse steps between the columns, and so the town wanted to work them into its Civil War memorial.

In as much as Oak Hill Cemetery is known to the world, it isn’t for its beauty or a war memorial. Rather, Edgar Lee Masters took inspiration from it for Spoon River Anthology. Sometimes, I’ve read, very specific inspiration, since he knew many of the townspeople — such as the weak of will, the strong of arm, the clown, the boozer and the fighter, to borrow language from the opening of the book.

“In the groundbreaking work, Masters, a onetime law partner of Clarence Darrow, gives voice to more than two hundred deceased citizens of Spoon River who are laid to rest in Oak Hill Cemetery, known to the locals as The Hill,” wrote Laura Wolff Scanlan in Humanities magazine in 2015.

“Freed by the shackles of life, the un-living who ‘sleep beneath these weeds’ confess their deepest secrets, disappointments, frustrations, joys, and warnings to the living in the form of brutally honest free verse poems.

“In some cases, Masters barely changed their names. Henry Phipps was really banker Henry Phelps. Harry Wilmans was Henry Wilmans…

“Even though most names were fictitious, everyone in town knew exactly who he was talking about. Because of this, the book was immediately banned from schools and libraries in the area, including the Lewistown library.”

When Masters died in 1950, he wasn’t buried in Oak Hill, but rather in Petersburg, Illinois, which is close to Springfield.

The Lewistown library started stocking the book in 1974. After the death of everyone mentioned in it, and most of their immediate families, in other words. In our time, Lewistown claims the work as its own, since what else is the town known for, or could be known for? For the centennial of the book in 2015, the town held Oak Hill Cemetery tours, exhibitions and theatrical performances, according to Humanities.

For avid Spoon River enthusiasts, and there must still be a few, the graves of the real people associated with fictional counterparts are marked with numbers.

There’s a guide available that will tell you who’s who in the cemetery, according to their Edgar Lee Masters number. I am not enough of an enthusiast to look any of them up.

Still, I respect it as a successful work of literature about the residents of a cemetery. Interesting conceit. Sometimes I imagine that if the dead at the cemeteries could talk freely, I might hear some salacious bits. On the other hand, many of them might not have very much interesting to confess.

We had a copy of Spoon River in our library when I was growing up, and I read some of the poems then and a few later. The other day I happened across a radio version from 1957, which is worth a listen. William Conrad is always worth a listen anyway.

Cave-in-Rock State Park

Posted on October 26, 2020 by admin

Snow this morning. It didn’t stick, but it did remind us all of the cold months to come.

At the beginning of 2020, works published in 1924 finally entered public domain in the U.S. The Center for the Study of the Public Domain noted some of the better known works now available to all.

“These works include George Gershwin’s ‘Rhapsody in Blue,’ silent films by Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd, and books such as Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India, and A. A. Milne’s When We Were Very Young.”

Plenty of obscure works are now available as well. One I have in mind is The Outlaws of Cave-in-Rock by Otto A. Rothert, published in 1924. Rothert (1871-1954) was secretary of the Filson Historical Society in Louisville, and apparently took a strong interest in regional history

The Outlaws of Cave-in-Rock can now be found in Google Books. I haven’t read it all, but I have sampled some of it. Such as the first few paragraphs.

“This book is intended to give the authentic story of the famous Cave-in-Rock of the lower Ohio River… and to present verified accounts of the most notorious of those highwaymen and river pirates who in the early days of the middle West and South filled the Mississippi basin with alarm and terror of their crimes and exploits.

“All the criminals herein treated made their headquarters at one time or another in this famous cavern. It became a natural, safe hiding-place for the pirates who preyed on the flatboat traffic before the days of steamboats….

“A century ago and more, its rock-ribbed walls echoed the drunken hilarity of villains and witnessed the death struggles of many a vanished man. Today this former haunt of criminals is as quiet as a tomb. Nothing is left in the Cave to indicate the outrages that were committed there in the olden days.”

The book also tells the tale, in four chapters, of the exceptionally murderous Harpe brothers (or cousins), a bloody story deftly summarized by the late Jim Ridley in the Nashville Scene some years ago. Enough to note here that the Harpes and their women roamed western Tennessee and Kentucky around the beginning of 19th century, murdering and robbing as they went, but especially murdering.

They spent some time among the blackguards at Cave-in-Rock, but were forced to leave after they threw a man bound to a horse to his (and the horse’s) death off the cliff’s edge above the cave for fun. Even river pirates have their standards.

In our time, and in fact since 1929, the cave has been the central feature of Cave-in-Rock State Park. Not quiet as a tomb, quiet as a minor tourist attraction. It isn’t part of Shawnee National Forest, but some of the national forest lands are nearby. Note the sign isn’t a stickler for hyphens.

The park is near the small town of Cave-in-Rock, Illinois, which is walkable distance to the south from the park. We arrived at the park on the afternoon of October 11.

You park in a small lot and climb 50 or so steps uphill, to a crest overlooking the Ohio River, sporting picnic shelters and tall trees. Views from the crest, looking across to Kentucky.

From the crest, you go down more stairs most of the way to the river’s edge. The cave entrance is under a high cliff and a few feet higher than a small beach on the river.
Looking back up at some trees lording over the edge of the cliff.

A few more steps and you’re in front of Cave-in-Rock. It’s an apt name.

Soon you’re inside, looking out.

It doesn’t go too far back, at least not that I know of. Graffiti, mostly painted signatures, is prominent on the roof of the cave.

J. & B.C. Cole were here in 1913, pre-park and probably dangling from a rope over the cliff edge. The more recent Marty and R.S. were here in 2011, and probably had rappelling gear.

Dolce Far Niente and All That

Posted on October 1, 2020 by admin

Here’s an interesting list of words, if accurate, or even if not, and I suspect that’s the case for some of them (but I can’t know). Dolce far niente is a worthwhile concept: pleasant idleness, or the joy of doing nothing.

Such lists now appear periodically on line, and I believe they hark back to a pre-Internet book called They Have a Word For It: A Lighthearted Lexicon of Untranslatable Words & Phrases by Howard Rheingold (1988).

I have a copy of it around somewhere, bought fairly new. I don’t remember any of the words in it, except the concept of a ponte day. “Bridge” day in Italian, meaning a day off between the weekend and a holiday, an especially useful concept in that country since Italy doesn’t have a version of the Uniform Monday Holiday Act, and holidays can fall mid-week.

I also remember the author appearing on the radio show Whad’ya Know? Maybe in 1989. I didn’t listen to it every week in those days, but fairly often. I understand that it ran as a radio show until 2016, and now exists as a podcast.

Just before Christmas 1989, I went to a broadcast of the show when it was in Chicago, at the Blackstone Theatre (these days, the Merle Reskin Theatre). Remarkably, I can listen to it again if I want. So far, I haven’t.

Today I was near the Robert O. Atcher Municipal Center, not far from where we were yesterday. Atcher, besides being mayor of Schaumburg from 1959 to 1975, was a successful country musician.

The trees are just beginning to turn.

Close to the Atcher Center are flowers. We’re in the narrow window when the trees are coloring up, yet some flowers are still blooming.
While on the grounds, I noticed a memorial I’d never noticed before. According to various news reports, it’s been there some years — how did I miss it? A plaque for a Schaumburg resident, René LeBeau, who died awfully young.
I must have heard about the crash of United 232 when it happened, but I had to read about it to remember. Quite a harrowing story. It’s a wonder anyone survived.

Late Summer Thursday Stew

Posted on August 27, 2020 by admin

A package arrived in the mail for Lilly today from UIUC.

“Your high GPA has earned you the privilege of graduating Cum Laude…. This accomplishment, which is referred to as Latin Honors, is also recognized by a special bronze cord,” the enclosed letter said. “Because we were unable to have an on campus commencement ceremony in May, we will be mailing cords to the mailing address you have on file with campus.”

Sure enough, the package also included a bronze cord, looking something like a curtain accessory. Lilly’s already in the Pacific Northwest, so she’ll have to wait for one of us to deliver it in person, since I’m not planning on re-mailing it.

Never got a Latin Honor myself. Missed it by a whisker of GPA, I think. But I don’t really remember, and in nearly 40 years, that fact has never come up at any time for any reason.

I’m surprised some of these TV shows count as public domain. Then again, under the copyright rules before Disney put its imprint on the law, copyright holders had to renew after a certain number of years, and I expect many producers didn’t bother. The other day I watched the first episode of Car 54, Where Are You? It had its amusing moments.

Summer is ebbing away. I’m trying to spend as much time on my deck as possible. A refuge from work and word of the troubled world beyond my little spot.

A few days ago, after work but before dinner, I parked myself on the reclining deck chair on the deck and managed to take a nap. My family marveled at that, considering the heat and noise of the cicadas. But it wasn’t that hot that late in the day, and the sound of cicadas is something to drift off to sleep to, though not as soothing as cricketsong.

I’m about half way through The Unredeemed Captive by John Demos (1994), which Lilly and Ann gave to me last Christmas, on a tip (I believe) from one of Ann’s teachers.

“The setting for this haunting and encyclopedically researched work of history is colonial Massachusetts,” Penguin Random House says. “There, in February 1704, a French and Indian war party descended on the village of Deerfield, abducting a Puritan minister and his children. Although John Williams was eventually released, his daughter horrified the family by staying with her captors and marrying a Mohawk husband.”

It’s a good read about a time and place I’m not especially familiar with, early 18th-century New England. Interesting how in only 50 years or so, that place evolved into the more familiar (to me) mid-century and Revolutionary New England.

Wait, when did Random House and Penguin merge? In 2013, it turns out. I wasn’t paying attention because book publishing isn’t my sort of publishing. I’m used to thinking of Penguin as a solidly British operation, but these days it’s owned by shadowy German billionaires.

Thursday Jumble

Posted on June 11, 2020 by admin

Intermittent rain and thunder on Tuesday and Wednesday, and some vigorous warm winds. Enough to randomize the arrangement of our deck chairs but not, fortunately, to move the cast iron deck table. Mostly, though, recent days have been clear and agreeably summerlike.

They’ve aged remarkably well.

Last weekend, we made it back to Spring Valley to see the Peony Field, now in full bloom.

Also noticed a Little Lending Library at Spring Valley. I think that’s new. It encourages one and all to Be a Good Human Today.Not as full as the one on my street, but it had a few items, including a stack of booklets whose subject is Baha’i prayers. I took one for a look-see. In each are prayers for various occasions and situations, such as Aid and Assistance, Children, The Departed, Healing, Morning, Parents, Tests and Difficulties, and so on.

Later in the week, we got takeout from an Indian restaurant we visited, and liked, a few years ago. Been buying takeout locally ever other week or so since sit-down restaurants closed.

We feasted on sang paneer, malai kofta, paneer bhurji, lamb bhoona — that was mine — along with garlic naanm, roti and jeera rice. All good.

Thursday Slumgullion

Posted on May 28, 2020 by admin

A while ago, I sent a message in a professional capacity to one of Ikea’s subsidiaries. It bounced back, with this message as a reply.

Det gick inte att leverera till följande mottagare eller grupper:
centrespr@ingka.com

Det gick inte att hitta den angivna e-postadressen. Kontrollera mottagarens e-postadress och skicka sedan meddelandet igen. Kontakta e-postadministratören om problemet kvarstår.

Recent movies seen here at home, as if they would be anywhere else, include The Stranger, an Orson Welles noir that I’d never gotten around to seeing; I’ll go along with Variety’s contemporary assessment, quoted in Wiki — it’s a “socko melodrama” — and it made me sorry Welles didn’t get to make that many pictures. Chicago, which was better on the second viewing; the first was when it was fairly new. For a Few Dollars More, which was as good as I remembered it. The pointlessly rejiggered version of Star Wars, which Ann hadn’t seen any version of. The Hundred-Foot Journey, a fair-to-middling foodie movie.

Star Trek watching continues: “The Gamesters of Triskelion,” “The Naked Time,” “Space Seed,” and — because I thought Ann should see some of the lesser lights of the original series, “The Way to Eden,” which is the episode that features space hippies. She continues to get a kick out of the series, especially the costumes, and double especially the space-hippie garb. Made me smile, too.

“The Way to Eden” was bad enough, but not quite as bad as I remember. With a few tweaks, such as making the hippies at least slightly sympathetic, it could have been a much better episode.

Speaking of TV, I had an encounter with the spanking-new HBO Max today. As in, something I wanted to watch on a service I already pay for suddenly disappeared into this latest scheme to tunnel into my wallet. FO, HBO Max. There’s nothing on TV I can’t live without. Nothing.

Last Saturday, which was part sunny and later rainy, I did a lot. A lot of the kind of things you do to keep life running more-or-less on track. I record it here because, if in some future time when the memory of the day has faded, I want to marvel — assuming I survive middle age to marvel — at how productive I was that May day during the pandemic. The rest of the family was likewise busy that day, going all Marie Kondo on the upstairs bedrooms, from which much debris has been removed. Call it spring cleaning.

Besides taking my meals and watching an episode of the remarkably good (if basic) Greatest Events of WWII, I mowed part of our lawn, repaired a windchime, did some of the laundry, cleaned the inside of my car, went to the bank, post office, and drug store (all drive through), walked the dog, helped Ann remove a lot of items from a high shelf in her room, did a first run-through of my taxes, helped Lilly fill out her taxes, vacuumed the living room, swept two rooms, fixed a leaky pipe under the kitchen sink, and washed a lot of dishes. I ended the day reading a bit of Moby-Dick, which I’m slowly working my way through.

Off on a Musical Tangent

Posted on April 21, 2020 by admin

I go off on tangents fairly easily, but then again they’re about the only trips you can take these days. I had a good one yesterday evening, after work and after dinner and after our walk. A discussion some time ago about writing good headlines inspired me to think about a half-remembered list in The Book of Lists, which I pull off the shelf every few years. Specifically, Dr. Demento’s 10 Worst Song Titles of All Time.

I checked. It’s on p. 178. Back when I originally owned the book, in the late 1970s, you’d read such a list, be amused, and that was that. You might hear one of the songs on the list on Dr. Demento, if you listened to the show. I wasn’t a regular listener back then, though I did hear it sporadically — often enough to hear the likes of “Fish Heads,” but never anything on the list that I remember.

So I decided, true to form when on a tangent, to look more closely at some of those bad song titles, at least in Dr. Demento’s opinion (a list he created for The Book of Lists). I toyed with the idea of reposting all of the titles here, but most of the 10 titles are pretty long, and I didn’t feel like all that transcription, so I looked to see if they were posted elsewhere on line. As far as I can tell, there are other versions online, such as this one, that certainly features some bad song titles, but none of them are on ’70s list in The Book of Lists.

Or this list, which claims to be a ’90s version of the original, but has only one title in common with it: “How Could You Believe Me When I Said I Loved You When You Know I’ve Been A Liar All My Life.”

In our time, you can go to YouTube and see most if not all of the bad-title songs, such as “How Could You Believe Me…,” which I have to say hasn’t aged that well.

So I picked a few of the songs from the ’70s list and looked them up. Such as “Would You Rather Be a Colonel With An Eagle On Your Shoulder Or A Private With A Chicken On Your Knee?” That might count as a bad title, but it sure is amusing.

I was happy to find that it was a WWI song, recorded by Arthur Fields but also sung by Eddie Cantor. If I’m not mistaken, the “chicken” in the title had an innocent connotation in referring to flirtatious French girls, but also a less-innocent connotation for those in the know, referring to French prostitutes.

Next: “I’ve Got Those Wake Up 7:30, Wash Your Ears They’re Dirty, Eat Your Eggs and Oatmeal, Rush to School Blues,” a novelty song recorded by Jimmy Boyd in 1953.

Hm. Couldn’t place Boyd until I read he did the first recording of “I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus” the year before. Ah, that singer. Popularized a song that will not die. Boyd had his heyday as a boy singer, but didn’t have much of a career later — or didn’t want one, hard to say. Anyway, here’s the song.

I decided to look up one more from the ’70s list, three out of 10 being enough for now: “A Woman is Only a Woman, But a Cigar is a Good Smoke.” That was a song title? In college (I think) I told someone that Freud had said that. Maybe I believed that myself. Thought it was a quip from Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, though that’s a work I’ve never read nor even lightly grazed.

But no: it’s from Kipling. From a spot of late Victorian comic verse. In 1905, tunesmiths Harry Smith and Victor Herbert wrote a song called “A Good Cigar is a Smoke,” so perhaps Dr. Demento didn’t quite get the title right, though one of the lines in the song is, “For a woman is only a woman, my boy, but a good cigar is a smoke.”

You know, I ought to claim that Smith and Herbert actually just translated the song from German. Sigmund Freud wrote it and included it Jokes, which was published in 1905, same year as the English version of the song. Mere coincidence?

The tangent trip isn’t over yet. Just getting to the best part. After I listened to “A Good Cigar is a Smoke,” the YouTube algorithm suggested “Ashokan Farewell.” Pretty song. I hadn’t heard that in a good while, so I listened to it. Then the usually dense algorithm suggested this.

“Wayfaring Stranger” performed by Hayde Bluegrass Orchestra. A Norwegian band, of all things. Wow.

Been There, Seen That

By Dees Stribling

Category Archives: Books