Songbooks

When I was young we had a couple of old songbooks that went back to pre-World War II times, when my parents were young!  They had stuff like "Bury Me Not on the Lone Prairie" and "I Don't Want to Play in Your Yard." (One of them I think we still have.) There were also titles like "She May Have Seen Better Days" and the barber-shop quartet "She Was Happy Till She Met You." (My mother remembered millions of those songs!)

Several of us played the piano in my family.  We also had books like Everyone's Favorite Gilbert and Sullivan and one with all the songs from Mary Poppins, which I memorized.

In recent years I took some solo singing lessons from Giuseppe--classical and opera stuff.  I'd go to his house in Scarborough, where he's lived since coming to Canada in the 1950s.  He has a fancy garden with speakers that play opera music, and an indoor fountain!  So I bought some new songbooks with songs in Italian and French and German.

German's a surprisingly difficult language, considering how close it is to English.  I did the Schubert song "Wohin?" (German for "Where to?"), about a "Bachlein," which is German for brooklet.  The original Bach (brook) has a female gender, but the "-lein" suffix means that Bachlein is neuter in some ways, but stays female in others.  So you get a line that literally means, "It's singing of water fairies beneath her depths"!

Cookies

I guess my favourite brand of cookies is those Peek Freans Assorted Creme, especially the round ones without the jelly in the middle.  Another one I used to like was those French vanilla cookies with raisins. (I think they showed impressionist art on the package!) But they seem to have disappeared.

I'm in this Crowdreads Meetup, and every time Maria she brings cookies!  She does a different recipe every time.  She's popular with the rest of the group, of course.

I remember the Cookie Monster on Sesame Street.  Some grownups said that characters like the Cookie Monster and Oscar the Grouch were bad role models for kids, which I suppose is what makes them popular.  In more recent years they've had him eating fresh fruit instead!  Oh, dear.

The Christie company used to have a big cookie factory in Etobicoke near the Lakeshore area.  We drove past it once, and what a fragrant smell it had!  In school I had a math class with a student teacher called Mr. Christie, so of course some of us repeated the ad line, "Mr. Christie, you make good cookies." (Kids are mean.)

My first and true romance

On Twitter the other day someone asked, "Who was your first celebrity crush?" I answered Francesca Annis and showed a photo of her in a British TV series about Lillie Langtree.  I didn't see that series when it first came out in 1979 (we didn't get PBS then), but I saw a photo of her in it and she was very beautiful!  The series itself I saw a decade later. (It has wonderful theme music by Joseph Horovitz.)

When my sister was young she had a big crush on Leonard Nimoy, but not from his Spock role on Star Trek--it was from his role as Paris, master of disguise, on Mission:  Impossible!  And my other sister had a crush on Robert Vaughan as Napoleon Solo in The Man From UNCLE!

I've never yet gone in for serious romance.  I guess my greatest love is for the socialist movement.  It pained me when the Labour Party lost the British elections of 1992. (If it had happened just six months later, after the August market crash, they'd clearly have won!) And it pained me when Tony Blair took over the party and effected a "Third Way" sellout on crucial issues like privatization, in the name of "electability." Sure, they won the next election, but they would have even if they'd been led by Stalin! (Beware the "post hoc ergo propter hoc" fallacy.) But their new leader Jeremy Corbyn has given me hope again.  One thing I like about him is that he doesn't drink, something he has in common with me.

Owls

I don't know much about owls.  I read somewhere that if you dream about an owl it means you're in danger!

I recall that David Letterman's show once chowed a clip of barn owls eating mice, accompanied by "Tomorrow," the song from the musical Annie.

In junior high school we read a book by Farley Mowat about a boy and his pet owls. (The title was Owls in the Family.) I think they were called Wol and Weeps.

There was an owl in the Winnie-the-Pooh stories.  When I was young we had a miniature of that owl that came from a box of Shreddies or some cereal, that had a hole in the bottom so you could put it on the end of a pencil or pen.  I think it lost one of its wings.

I remember a rhyme from my youth:

There was a wise owl lived in an oak.

The more he saw, the less he spoke.

The less he spoke, the more he heard.

Why can't we be like that wise bird?

Frost

One thing I remember from my youth in New Brunswick was how in the early fall there'd be an overnight front and in the morning I'd wake up and see a grey sheet over the lawn.  But after a while it would thaw and the lawn would be green again.  That's one thing I miss from New Brunswick.

One of my favourite poets is Robert Frost.  He'd been a New England farmer and his poems often start with a realistic detail of country life, then develop it into a deep metaphysical theme.

Nature’s first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf’s a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.

"Nothing Gold Can Stay" involves "Paradise lost," a great theme in American culture.  I think that what I liked about that frost on the lawn was precisely that it was gone so soon!

The way a crow

Shook down on me

The dust of snow

From a hemlock tree

Has given my heart

A change of mood

And saved some part

Of a day I had rued.

What I like about "Dust of Snow" is that it starts with a silly moment and draws back to reveal that it's about someone having a bad day.  Like a movie shot that starts with a closeup than draws out to reveal a whole panorama!

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,

And sorry I could not travel both

And be one traveler, long I stood

And looked down one as far as I could

To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,

And having perhaps the better claim,

Because it was grassy and wanted wear;

Though as for that the passing there

Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay

In leaves no step had trodden black.

Oh, I kept the first for another day!

Yet knowing how way leads on to way,

I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh

Somewhere ages and ages hence:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—

I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference.

When I was young, I thought that "The Road Not Taken" was about the importance of doing things differently instead of conforming.  Now that I'm older, I realize that it's about the regret we inevitably feel when we look back at our choices and speculate on what a different choice would have meant.

Decision-making

You know that Proust questionnaire on the back page of Vanity Fair where they ask celebrities a set list of questions?  One of the questions they ask is, "What do you consider the lowest level of misery?" I think my answer would be, "Indecision."

I remember that Mad magazine did a quiz, "How neurotic are you?" For one question, they showed an illustration with a driver on a two-lane road seeing two big trucks bearing down on him in either lane, and the question was, "Do you have trouble making quick decisions?" The answers were Yes, No, and Maybe!

How is the word "indecisive" pronounced?  Is the third syllable pronounced like "is" or like "ise"? I can't decide!

I'd write more about this subject, but I'm not sure what to say. (Oh well, saying nothing in one type of decision...)

Celebrities

Celebrities don't interest me much. (I haven't really met any.) You can have reality TV.  The Kardashians aren't just famous for being famous, they've made a fortune from being rich!  Life's unfair, isn't it?  If only you could make a fortune from being poor...

Ever see the PBS documentary series The Civil War?  It made the historian Shelby Foote famous, but he didn't switch to an unlisted phone number like most celebrities use.  So every time they reran the show, he'd get lots of calls from people he didn't know!

It's odd to think how when you're famous you get into the dreams of people you don't know, so you can't dream about them!

I think it's better to be famous after you're dead.  It'll be too late for people to dig up most of the dirt about you!

Guilty pleasures

I'm ashamed to admit it, but I kind of like I Dream of Jeannie.  That's the 1960s sitcom about astronaut Larry Hagman opening this old lamp and finding himself master of Barbara Eden, a genie who goes by the name Jeannie.  It wasn't very PC, of course. Sometimes I imagine what I'd do if I had a genie...

Another guilty pleasure of mine is The Phantom, a comic strip about a masked vigilante who lives in the jungle in Skull Cave among a tribe of pygmies.  He comes from a long line of Phantoms, starting with an ancestor 500 years ago who swore an oath on the skull of his father's killer to devote his life, and his descendants', to fighting pirates and criminals.  The job's been handed down so smoothly that most people thinks they've been one continuous immortal hero, and they call him The Ghost Who Walks!

Back in my early twenties, I used to like Arnold Schwarzenegger movies like Conan the Barbarian.  One particular guilty pleasure is The Running Man, where he gets put on a violent TV game show, hosted by real-life game show host Richard Dawson.  When Arnie says "I'll be back!" Dawson says "Only in reruns."

Another guilty pleasure movie of mine is the 1963 slapstick comedy It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World.  Someone called it vulgar, cynical and cruel, and it is, but it succeeds through sheer relentlessness. (And I like any movie with Terry-Thomas!)

My guilty pleasure western is the 1963 Cinerama epic How the West Was Won.  It's cheesy, vulgar triumphalism, yet I've watched it again and again!

In more recent years, there's the 1997 Jerry Bruckheimer comedy-thriller Con Air.  It's the sort of movie that starts with a fight scene at night in the pouring rain with a revolving oil well machine in the background because, well, it looks cool!  In one scene Nicolas Cage has to kill this guy so he starts a fight by saying, "Put--the bunny--back in the box!"