Bang and Whimper

I am convinced that happiness, if it is at all sustainable or durable, must for most people consist in resigning oneself to the pervasive and inescapable total crapness of the world.

NP: The Decemberists, Here I Dreamt I Was an Architect

I know, I know. Enough with the poetry already. One last poem and I’m done for awhile. Probably. I found this in a review written by Ambrose Bierce, who is one of my all-time favorite American authors, right up there with Poe. It was written by Alfred Austin, who succeeded Tennyson as Poet Laureate (in part because Swinburne was deemed “impossible,” being as Bierce said “Swinburne would very likely have knocked off the Prime Minister’s hat and jumped upon it”). I was startled to find such a bold and beautiful sentiment embodied in such a wonderful sonnet by an otherwise forgettable poet. I have for some time thought that the reasoning Austin presents is the strongest argument for suicide—not that one needs or, indeed, would likely resort to, argument—of the literal as well as more metaphorical varieties. It pleases me greatly to find it so well expressed:

Love’s Wisdom

by Alfred Austin

Now on the summit of Love’s topmost peak
   Kiss we and part; no further can we go;
   And better death than we from high to low
Should dwindle, and decline from strong to weak.
We have found all, there is no more to seek;
   All we have proved, no more is there to know;
And Time can only tutor us to eke
   Out rapture’s warmth with custom’s afterglow.
We cannot keep at such a height as this;
   For even straining souls like ours inhale
But once in life so rarified a bliss.
   What if we lingered till love’s breath should fail!
Heaven of my earth! one more celestial kiss,
   Then down by separate pathways to the vale.

[No worries, folks, I’m nowhere near the peak.]

NP: Gene, Truth, Rest Your Head

I have sailed on stormy seas;
I have felt a flowing breeze
Softly stir on starry nights;
I’ve seen the snow, on sunny heights,
The whirling wind of Winter brings;
The golden leaves on Autumn’s wings;
Spring’s softest rains, and strongest showers;
The quiet passion of Summer’s flowers;
I have witnessed all these scenes:
I know what ‘unrequited’ means.

NP: Blümchen, Eisblumen

Finally, I’ve seen R.E.M. in concert. They have been one of my favorite bands for years and years, since Shari Kornelly and John Young and Greg Thompson first helped me develop some critical faculties concerning music. The show was a week and a half ago (Wednesday night) at the Patriot Center, a horrible venue for concerts, but the show was nevertheless superb. The setlist was perfect. I can actually remember most of it [update—they have the setlist up on the official website, and I had it right except for three songs I had forgotten. It is complete below.—ed] They played:

1. Finest Worksong
2. Begin the Begin
3. Exhuming McCarthy [!!!]
4. Drive
5. Animal
6. Fall On Me
7. Daysleeper
8. Bad Day
9. The One I Love
10. Rockville (Don’t Go Back To) [sung by Mike Mills]
11. Orange Crush [!!!!!]
12. World Leader Pretend
13. I Believe
14. Losing My Religion
15. Find The River
16. She Just Wants to Be
17. Walk Unafraid
18. Man on the Moon

The band abruptly left the stage after an underwhelming choice for last song, and we stood there clapping for a good ten minutes hoping for an encore. Our arms were getting tired and sore, and the clapping was audibly flagging as several people left the show, before the band finally returned to the stage and Michael Stipe announced that he had found a new burst of energy, and that they would play a little longer than they “were supposed to.” They then played the best encore imaginable, ending in my life’s theme song:

1. Life and How to Live It
2. Nightswimming
3. Final Straw
4. Imitation of Life
5. It’s the End of the World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine)

Thanks, guys. It was, all in all, a horrible week, but the show was fantastic.

NP: R.E.M., We Walk

Comme d’habitude, I will be working late this week, and unable to gather the energy or time to write. Comme d’habitude, I turn to poetry to ease the tension. This time, circumstance would have it that I am reading Auden. I offer two to you so that you may read along with me:

Alone

by W.H. Auden

Each lover has a theory of his own
About the difference between the ache
Of being with his love, and being alone:

Why what, when dreaming, is dear flesh and bone
That really stirs the senses, when awake,
Appears a simulacrum of his own.

Narcissus disbelieves in the unknown;
He cannot join his image in the lake
So long as he assumes he is alone.

The child, the waterfall, the fire, the stone,
Are always up to mischief, though, and take
The universe for granted as their own.

The elderly, like Proust, are always prone
To think of love as a subjective fake;
The more they love, the more they feel alone.

Whatever view we hold, it must be shown
Why every lover has a wish to make
Some other kind of otherness his own:
Perhaps, in fact, we never are alone.

Leap Before You Look

by W.H. Auden

The sense of danger must not disappear:
The way is certainly both short and steep,
However gradual it looks from here;
Look if you like, but you will have to leap.

Tough-minded men get mushy in their sleep
And break the by-laws any fool can keep;
It is not the convention but the fear
That has a tendency to disappear.

The worried efforts of the busy heap,
The dirt, the imprecision, and the beer
Produce a few smart wisecracks every year;
Laugh if you can, but you will have to leap.

The clothes that are considered right to wear
Will not be either sensible or cheap,
So long as we consent to live like sheep
And never mention those who disappear.

Much can be said for social savoir-faire,
But to rejoice when no one else is there
Is even harder than it is to weep;
No one is watching, but you have to leap.

A solitude ten thousand fathoms deep
Sustains the bed on which we lie, my dear:
Although I love you, you will have to leap;
Our dream of safety has to disappear.

NP: Slowdive, When the Sun Hits

I’d like to test your moral intuitions. Perhaps you might recall my dearest Caroline, perhaps you might recall the regularity of my Monday visits to her place of employment, perhaps you might be wondering if she remembered me this week with a week away separating me from her memory. Perhaps you might wonder if I saw her at all, or if the other girl was again working my regular section in Caroline’s stead. Wonder no more. The inexorable wheel of Fortuna spins on, and Caroline has been relegated to working a more populous and pleasant section of the restaurant than the loud and smoky bar area that I have made my resting place. I have made it my public and regular habit to sit at a two-chair table on the North-East end of the bar, but she is now working the South-West end. The past few visits I have caught a few fortuitous glimpses of her shining smile as I sat reading at my table, but my server has been Margaret (who, I should say, is also quite lovely, very friendly, and good about not pestering me too much while I read).

Thus, the ethical dilemma: is it morally permissible to request that I be seated in Caroline’s section, rather than taking my regular table in the seat-yourself bar area? In doing so, I would be overtly breaking an easy and established habit, declaring through my actions that it is Caroline that draws me to the Brewery, and not the horrendously un-vegetarian menu. I would be proclaiming my admiration for a barmaid who would be perfectly happy not to have her patrons doting on her. I would be diverting my funds from the deserving pockets of Margaret’s apron to those of Caroline simply because she was the victor in a capricious comparative judgment of beauty. Am I morally reprehensible for having such thoughts? Would I be blameworthy for making the switch?

NP: Hilary Duff, Anywhere But Here

I have safely returned from the beautiful San Juan Island, complete with renewed zest for life and a bad case of the post-vacation blues. It was a wonderful trip, and I enjoyed immensely seeing everyone, and the SCUBA diving was fantastic, and I want to write all about it, but… despite my missing Hurricane Isabel directly, I am still feeling the after-effects of her fury. We never lost power, but we did lose our internet connection, which is still out, as far as I know. Why? Because Comcast is the worst company ever. I understand that they were hit by an unavoidable and severe storm, but since I signed on with them I have experienced nothing but constant service interruptions, horrible customer relations, busy signals because they don’t have enough staff to handle call volumes (even during non-hurricane periods), and an absolutely useless homepage (I won’t even link to it, because I refuse to send them any traffic). If you do happen to visit their page, I challenge you to try to find any useful information about local service interruptions, their efforts after the hurricane, anticipated fix dates, or anything that a customer without service might find interesting or useful. Go ahead and try. The up-shot of this little rant, of course, is that I have to relegate my internet time to lunch at work, or I have to stay late and type from the office, and because of our corporate firewall, I have lost all access to my shell account. Comcast sucks.

I do wish to note, however, that as the children in Lemony Snicket’s Series of Unfortunate Events mature, so do the books. The silliness of the previous books is much diminished (though not absent) in Book the Tenth: The Slippery Slope, but we learn lessons in privacy and decency, as well as something about C. P. Snow, Algernon Charles Swinburne, and Friedrich Nietzsche. If I had to choose three authors who most helped me survive during graduate school, that would be the list. Add to that that Lemony Snicket plays the accordion for the Magnetic Fields, and you may begin to see why I’m such a fan of his work. Or maybe you don’t. Eh.

NP: The Magnetic Fields, Long-Forgotten Fairytale

Goodbye, world. I’m leaving you for greener pastures, bluer skies, and fresher air—in a word, Seattle. I’ll be gone a week (don’t even think of stealing my stuff—my mean and nasty roommate has sharp teeth and claws to chase away any would-be baddies). I’m going SCUBA diving on Monday at Edmonds Underwater Park, so if I don’t return, you might check there. The water is supposed to be a balmy 50° F… I’m so excited.

Lemony Snicket Day approaches. Book the Tenth: The Slippery Slope is out on Tuesday—don’t forget!

…

Yale finally got around to rejecting me today. It hasn’t quite been a year since I applied.

…

Note to self: Beauties board trains in Tenleytown.

NP: In Grid, Tu Es Foutu

Jasmin Wagner (formerly Blümchen) has released a new single! Word was, some time ago, that she had given up on singing to pursue a career in movies (she appeared briefly in the surprisingly not-horrible Driven). It seems, however, that she released a Best Of… 2 CD compilation and DVD containing all her videos back in July to build anticipation for her return to Pop Stardom. Last week, she released Leb deinen Traum [Live Your Dream], which, as Jutze pointed out, sounds like a poor-man’s t.A.T.u. Of course, any resemblance to frequently half-naked Russian teenage lesbians who don’t sound half-bad when covering the Smiths is, in my book, a Good Thing.

NP: Jasmin Wagner, Leb deinen Traum (surprise!)

A long dispute in economic theory involves the role of tastes and the sense in which we might distinguish differences in tastes across time or among different people. The main complaint is that attributing differences in behavior to differences in preferences seems at best tautological, and presents not so much an explanation as an obfuscation. In fact, this objection was formalized in one of the most famous papers in modern economics: De Gustibus Non Est Disputandum [There is No Disputing Tastes] by Nobel Prize Winners George Stigler (1982) and Gary Becker (1992), which appeared in the American Economic Review, vol. 67, in 1977. Stigler and Becker argued that a more nuanced formalization of decision constraints could capture all the richness and variety in behavior that had traditionally been chalked up to differences in preferences. They went so far as to propose that much (if not all) of modern economics could be reformulated on the assumption that all tastes are the same.

I have never been a fan of Becker’s work, so I am particularly pleased to be able to present a definitive case where it is more useful to speak of changing tastes than changing constraints. I am also no fan of Mondays at work, which is where this tale begins…

The first day of the week at work is always difficult—I have email to read, meetings to attend, the cloudy after-effects of hangovers to suffer through, and our systems management always performs a hardware audit when we start our computers for the week that adds about 15 minutes to boot-up time. The past few Mondays (Tuesday after Labor Day was effectively a Monday) have been particularly bad. I have been quite busy at work, and it has been the Mondays when I have learned of my new responsibilities and tasks. Three Mondays back, I had a meeting with one of our SVPs, during which I was charged with finishing a painful piece of research within a very short time frame. I was also informed that I would be taking on some management responsibilities. And that I had a new research project to undertake. And that there would be two other tasks of immediate importance that would fall on my shoulders. And… and… and it was a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day.

Enter Caroline, stage left.

When I finally found my way out of the office, I wandered toward the Rock Bottom Brewery in Bethesda, wanting nothing more than to drown my frustration in a tall, dark glass of foamy oblivion. Normally, I am an ardent admirer of the Stillwater Stout, and I have a weak spot in my soul for a well-crafted Pale Ale, so I generally enjoy imbibing at the Rock Bottom, but enjoyment was not my goal. I wanted something to drink, but I had no desire to enjoy it, so I decided to order something out of the ordinary. I would order the Red.

I was neither happy nor pleasant; I wanted beer and forgetfulness, ale and Lethe, to be left alone and nothing else. Instead, I was greeted at the table by the sweetest smile I have seen in ages. My saucy barmaid made the maintenance of my malaise impossible. She was pretty in all the ways that one could want, she was pleasant and efficient and friendly and bright, and her presence was incredibly warming. Immediately upon ordering the Red I regretted it—nothing but a heady stout could match its intoxicants against hers, and only the Pale would be sweet enough to compete with her. She was wonderful. I passed the hour or so reading Chamfort and averting my eyes when, having wandered from the page timidly in the direction of my lovely, they were invariably met by hers, beaming back her beautiful smile. For the first time since I joined the Mug Club several weeks before, I actually remembered to use my Club card, which records for posterity (and prizes) the quantity of beer that I consume. I had bought one pint; she credited me with six (the maximum allowed in one visit). The receipt said her name was Caroline.

I know it’s odd to read in bars, but I have so little patience for trivial small-talk with strangers, and I have no interest in televised sports, particularly of the American sort, and I know few other people within a thousand miles. This time, however, it seemed to work in my favor. When, after a similarly harrowing Monday (Tuesday, but it was just like a Monday) at work, I returned the next week to the Rock Bottom Brewery, the same saucy barmaid greeted me and offered to get me a Red because she remembered me and remembered what I had ordered the week before. How could I possibly object? I imagine that I was so easy to remember because I was such an anomaly—no one reads in bars, especially when the football’s on. But I found myself reading again, and drinking the Red that I probably wouldn’t have ordered, given my tastes. Somehow, though, the beer was more pleasing to the palate than it had ever been before, and I noticed that the color complemented perfectly my server’s rosy complexion and cherrywood hair.

This past week, when the eternally recurring Monday was once again upon me, I barely managed to make it through the day at work. I was exhausted, and wanted nothing more than to go home and sleep. As I was walking past the Rock Bottom, though, I hesitated. Perhaps she would be working that night? Perhaps her smile would ease the tension and help the sleep come more quickly and more gently? As it turns out, she was working that night, but she was working a different section of the restaurant, so when I took the same table as before, I was greeted by an entirely different waitress, and different, whatever Arby’s says, is not always better. My disappointment, however, was dissipated when she immediately presented me with a Red. Caroline, she said, had seen me come in and had told her that I’m a Red drinker. Caroline, she said, had suggested that I would appreciate the beer. Caroline, of course, was entirely correct. You see, Caroline thinks I’m a Red drinker. So now I am.

NP: The Decemberists, The Soldiering Life