Return of Monday Fragments
Return of Monday Fragments
After (sort of) a week off
The earnestness of Stevie Winwood’s expressions (yes, I know, almost certainly chemically enhanced) in a live clip I found on YouTube. He is Mr. Fantasy.
The studio version doesn’t give you his face, but there is a wonderfully expressive guitar solo.
And I just found these words from SW which merit full endorsement: “Don't buy this 'believe in yourself' rubbish. Why do they keep telling youngsters that? There's no point believing in yourself if you don't know what you're doing. Once you've got a vision of what you want to do, by all means stick to that passionately and doggedly. Believe in your ideas. It's not quite the same thing. Too much self-belief is very shallow and gives you the idea you can do whatever you want…Remember the three Ps: practice, practice, practice. I told myself at age 14, 'In the next year I want to be able to sing like Ray Charles, play harmonica like Little Walter, play guitar like BB King and play keyboards like Oscar Peterson.' Needless to say, I didn't really achieve any of those things. But that's what drove me - self-improvement. There was no other way to do it.”
Just a quick observation: the amount of mind-boggling hatred for Amy Coney Barrett being generated on Twitter by accounts apparently belonging to women is kind of astounding. How is it that the people with “Hate has no home here” signs in their yards are yet capable of the most vicious, slanderous bile when it comes to conservative women?
The other day, I had the 15th century hymn O Filii et Filiae in my head for some reason. I started humming the melody, then singing the lyrics of the hymn while at the dinner table.
My younger daughter asked, as she commonly does when around her father who is constantly singing strange songs to her: “What is that song?”
I put on the link above. Her reaction, wide-eyed: “I love it!”
Perhaps the most reliable way into mystery is through music.
In Todd Gitlin’s last book, a novel about ‘60 activists titled The Opposition (which I’m presently reviewing), a character says toward the end: “One of the problems smart people have is that they don’t know when they’re not being smart.”
I heard a lengthy and insightful discussion on the Hoover Institution’s podcast Uncommon Knowledge on criminal justice reform, what seems to work and what does not in efforts to reduce street crime.
I was thinking at a certain point while listening about my time in France and those who “resquillent” on the metro, that is, slip over or under turnstiles without paying a fare.
The practice was startlingly common then, back in the ‘90s. It infuriated me in principle, as the effect on the system of enough of these people is overcrowded trains, unless the system adjusts by adding more trains, which means they must raise the ticket prices for those who pay since these additional customers are adding nothing to the pot.
As a poor student with quite limited funds who nonetheless faithfully purchased his expensive metro pass every month, I decided to become something of a vigilante to combat the practice.
I would spy a resquilleur eyeing me—you could easily identify the type, and they tried to get abnormally close to you as you entered the turnstile, since the trick was to slide through when another person paid his fare just before the gate could close. I wouldn’t discourage them, sometimes even inviting them with a look, a visual “Yeah, c’mon, I’ll help you out!”
Then, as soon as I’d passed through the turnstile, I’d quickly close the steel door on them, trapping them in between the turnstile and the gate unless they were sufficiently athletically gifted that they could climb out.
I would guess I probably foiled about a dozen of these low-level street criminals during my time in Paris.
As they cursed me and waited there for the metro police or someone with more sympathy for their game to show up, I’d walk off feeling a small amount of moral vindication, as though I’d done some little part for the elimination of free riders.
At the end of summer, this song always comes into my head.
I listened to it over and over after first hearing it at the end of the summer of 1997, when I had to leave France to return home for a short period to sort out funding before coming back to work for another year on my research. Even though I knew I was coming back to Paris, I was heartbroken about leaving. The Jean-Max Rivière lyrics precisely nail the melancholy of a summer by the sea coming to an end.
(Yes, I know, no beach or sea in Paris, but I had spent some fleeting moments that summer seaside at Saint-Malo, and the Seine filled in some of the symbolic space for me.)
When I translated the lyrics to my younger daughter, she said the song made her think of the Mexican beach where we spent a few days this past July and how sad she was to have to leave.
[Ixtapa, Guerrero, Mexico of an evening]
I told her it’s good to have a song to connect to your blue moments. It makes them both more and less sad at the same time. And there’s the hopeful anticipation of the last lines:
“But in the first days of summer
All troubles forgotten
We will return to feast on shellfish
At the sun-drenched beach.”
This is a hard lesson for me to get through my thick head.
For it to produce sustenance, you can’t just pray “Please don’t let tragedy come for me and mine.” You have to pray “Give me the strength to bear my inevitable tragedy.”
Maybe the spiritually advanced even get to the point at which they pray “Please send the tragedies to me rather than to those who are less able to bear them, that those for whom such suffering might prove too much may be spared.”