The Importance of Singing Happy Songs
The Importance of Singing Happy Songs
And some other things
[“When you’re in shit up to your neck, the only thing you can do is sing”]
Even on relatively bad days, I am very, very far from being “dans la merde jusqu’au cou.” I am blessed in more ways than I can easily summarize. But I find the sentiment of Beckett’s phrase irresistible (even though I suspect he didn’t sing much), and I want to sing a little bit anyway.
I spend a lot of energy in my life criticizing and polemically engaging with ideas. It’s an unavoidable part of the territory, given what I have dedicated myself to professionally. It is also quite consonant with my personality, or at least some major part of it.
I don’t have the slightest problem being contrary in discussions. (Maybe you’ve noticed?) Montaigne believed that “agreement is an altogether tiresome constituent of conversation,” and my way of being in the world is fairly consonant with that view.
Many people though are made uncomfortable by even the thought of strenuously challenging the assertions of other people in public places. As a social scientist, I have some pretty solid understanding of why that’s the case, and why it’s a good thing that many of us are like this, and that all of us excepting the pathological recognize the need to play well with others—i.e., don’t disagree too strenuously—at least some of the time.
Nonetheless, I have always been the kind of person who is not shy about saying “Nope, what you just said is hopelessly wrong, and here’s why, in more bloodless detail than you probably care to have” when someone else says things I find unconvincing.
However positive this attribute can be in some settings, it has a tendency to run amok if unchecked, potentially producing negative effects for everyone involved.
I am not sufficiently attentive to checking it. For long periods, it runs untamed, and gets me into trouble. It also irks some people I am trying to help and persuade instead of helping and persuading them.
(NB: My argumentative grumpiness cannot “harm” anybody in the way the Woke talk today about “harm” so long as I am only speaking or writing, unless a listener or reader is really, really committed to feeling “harmed,” in which case they will have done all the work of “harming” themselves, or at least of convincing themselves they are harmed and then acting that out. Irking, I repeat, is the worst I can do. Already significant enough, as I look at it today.)
Now and again, though, I remember that this part of me requires a leash and I sing a happy song instead of doing the bare knuckles agonism that is my second nature.
Today is one of those days.
I am singing as I type these words.
I sing (aloud, instead of just inside my head) much more now than I ever have before. That is itself perhaps a telling statement about how much worse I was previously at transcending the critical spirit! After all, serious critics, they will all eagerly tell you, cannot be running around frivolously singing, for crying out loud.
I also avoided singing in my youth because I considered (and still consider) my singing voice a not very good one, and I disliked the idea of butchering music I loved. But for reasons unknown I feel differently now.
Just sing, already. That’s what I tell myself.
Oh, I admit I still cringe at the idea of people who objectively cannot sing well getting in front of others and demanding that they pretend to enjoy something that is humanly unenjoyable (e.g., all those television programs on this theme that I have never watched and never will), but that’s a reaction to the narcissism, not the singing per se, really.
Everybody should sing more, at least in the privacy of their own homes, where only your family, who have to put up with you anyway, can potentially be offended by your melodic inability.
I sing mostly shamelessly now, and generally in key, even if I frequently need to go falsetto. Nonetheless, I am told by some close to me that it is sometimes still annoying.
That is not my intention. I just sometimes cannot help, right in the middle of cooking something or putting on my shoes and coat or just walking down the stairs, breaking into “Old Man” or “Sir Duke” or “Shotgun Willie” or “La Chanson de Prevert” or “SOS” or “Erbarme dich, mein Gott” or “Funk 49” or “Tonight You Belong to Me” or “Salve Regina” or “Si No Te Hubieras Ido” or whatever it happens to be on a given day at a given moment.
I genuinely feel as though I can’t help it. As Billy Gibbons, channeling John Lee Hooker, once said, “It’s in him and it’s got to come out!” It is not to annoy you, family member or other unfortunate bystander, that I do it. If I were trying to do that, I’d get into a car and put the windows down and then drive very slowly by a crowded area with very loud and very bad music thumping out of my car speakers and look menacingly around while I was doing it.
Whoops, there goes the agonist again…
I think I will make a New Year’s resolution to sing still more. Can’t hurt.
Louis Pasteur: “Un peu de science eloigne de Dieu, mais beaucoup y ramene/A little science distances you from God, but a lot of it brings you back to Him.”
Paul Offit gives an informative update on bivalent boosters: Most recent evidence indicates, as he predicted earlier, they are pretty much a bust in terms of the most extravagant claims being made for them. Some authorities would have you believe you basically need the booster for protection against serious illness—this is not true, if you got the original vaccine designed for the ancestral COVID virus—and that you are also well-protected against mild illness if you get the new booster—also not true.
All the evidence to this point indicates the booster does not much boost your protection against serious or mild illness over and above the original vaccination you hopefully already got. Mainstream media can still generally be counted on to spin furiously in their “everybody absolutely needs to get every single shot available or else we’re all doomed!” ideological persuasion, but Offit gives you a much more measured and objective view on this.
To date, only a little more than 10% of those eligible have gotten the new booster.
I wonder what the percentages are among the Bucknell faculty. I got to overhear an entertaining exchange among a few of them a few weeks back that was painfully uninformed by any relevant medical information. One hopes at least that such meagerly knowledgeable people in positions of authority are not illegitimately pontificating as experts to their students on this.
Offit’s account here is pretty devastating. All the money spent on designing boosters for variants that have disappeared by the time the booster is ready cannot be gotten back. That money could certainly have been spent on other medical problems with a much larger return in public health. Decisions of pretty grave financial and public health irresponsibility are being pursued here.
If this becomes the standard CDC/FDA policy going forward (invent new boosters tailored to whatever the new variants are every year, when it’s a near certainty that this will do little to actually decrease disease burden in the population), it’ll only waste more money with no real medical benefit and it’ll further decrease public trust in the authorities making these decisions. Bad all around.
I listened to a Radio France thingy on Jean-Luc Godard’s superb piece of ‘60s Nouvelle Vague cinema, Le Mépris/Contempt.
This was one of the films that, in my student days, first made me vigorously understand that cinema was, potentially at least, an art form and not just an hour and a half’s mindless diversion of car chases and things exploding. (Yes, Bardot’s lovely presence in it certainly boosted my youthful attention, but there is much more here than just her enchanting pulchritude).
I don’t even mind Godard (who later would have a pretty vapidly politically radical period lasting from the end of the ‘60s through the 1970s, as did many another artistic figure in Paris) poking at empty-headed American materialism in the Jack Palance character. I mean, this guy exists all over the place in this culture. I’ve met him. I’ve known a few real-life versions who were even more cartoonish than the Palance character. A full-fledged political view of this would need more careful analysis, but it’s a character in a film, not a sociological treatise.
The anatomy of a disintegrating love story (Piccoli and Bardot), the commentary on tragedy as a genre and the self-reflexive discussion of film-making are all absorbing. Visually, the film is a treasure. And the score is as heart-breakingly gorgeous as the young Bardot.
An excerpt from my journal, July 30, 1997:
Saw Godard's Le mépris for second time tonight. The shot wherein they are viewing scenes of the film within a film, The Odyssey, and images of Greek sculpture, accompanied by Delerue’s orchestral score, nearly made me cry at the memories evoked from the first time I saw this film [I’m guessing there must have been something particularly emotionally significant, beyond just the film itself, about that first viewing—I wish I remembered now what it was. Note to youthful self: more details, please, on memories obliquely referred to in the journal for the benefit of your ancient future self looking back with much-aged neurons over this material…].
The statement about Hollywood cinema and American crudeness more generally. Palance, the modern figure, always jets, or drives, or motorboats there, and we imagine in full vigor, speed, vitality, will, but also spiritual emptiness, while Paul and later Fritz Lang walk, meandering along side streets and mountain paths, discussing all the while, lacking the speed and the power of the moderns but retaining something more human, more...philosophical.
The use of many languages (French, English, German, Italian) and often failing to translate them all into French for the viewer, which virtually ensures that the viewer will miss part of the story, which is, in fact, always true.
The role of The Odyssey and the debate over the interpretation, whether to try to place it in its proper time or to "modernize" it—which is the right artistic move?
The stunning tracking shots of the Italian sea and coast at Palance's retreat.
Will see more Godard this week at the festival that is going on at Reflet Medicis [below, it’s on a little side street that is a minute’s walk from the Place de la Sorbonne, on which sits a cafe—also below—that was one of my frequent haunts in my student thesis researcher days]. It is a marvel to still be in this city.
The film’s trailer, which is a little chef d’oeuvre in its own right:
One of the few relatively lengthy scenes I found on YouTube. Piccoli zig-zaggedly ascending the stairs is just a delight:
George Delerue’s score:
Gustave Flaubert: “Qui etes-vous donc, O Societe, pour me forcer a quoi que ce soit?/Who are you, O Society, to force me to do anything at all?”
The sociologist manqué gives his endorsement.
Just discovered this guy’s YouTube channel. Like it. A lot.
Two planes collide over the rainforest in Brazil.
One plummets like a stone and 155 people are dead instantly.
The other miraculously manages to land and seven passengers walk out, stunned to be alive.
One of them writes a story about this.
The words convey nothing of the experience. They describe a banality, in a language that cannot escape cliché and boredom.
This moment that should be the defining moment in the life of anyone who survives it becomes strangely powerless when it is written and spoken.
How is it that words always prove so wholly incapable of illuminating what is most profoundly meaningful in the experience?
Hi all,
I’ve been at this project now for nearly a year. Hardly seems possible, but I just checked the calendar and I believe that is the right math.
So, this is a note to you: Thank you.
I’m tremendously flattered by your interest in what I have to say about life, art, politics, death and I’m grateful that you read my ramblings. Every writer desires to be read (Lovecraft’s letter accompanying his submission to an editor notwithstanding) and thus owes a debt that cannot really be repaid to readers, however much the writer sometimes pretends not to recognize this (it’s part of the persona, you see…).
So that’s something I want to be sure to say and say again: THANK YOU.
Now, the other reason for this little note.
I finally got around to doing the technical stuff necessary to provide a paid subscription option.
Why should you consider a paid subscription for an account at which, at present, everything is available for free?
Because inevitably, and despite my deepest feelings about writing, I think at least a bit about possible material returns when I am allocating time to writing projects. I do not have infinite time to dedicate to writing, and it emerges necessarily that sometimes the possibility of writing things for pay trumps writing things here. This is so even though I much prefer writing here precisely because it allows me more freedom to engage with the topics I find most interesting.
If I can generate more paid subscriptions, I can spend more time doing this writing, the writing I most care about, and the writing that I hope you find valuable.
If I generate enough, I may even finally find enough time and energy to get around to dipping my toes into Podcast World, which is professionally speaking probably the last thing I should do, given my tendency to say things that get me into trouble, but YOLO, as I’ve heard the young people say.
I look forward to writing more for you. Should you decide to “go paid,” you need only click the button below and it should lead you in the right direction.
Cheers, and very special thanks to those who have already switched to a paid subscription!
ATR