Let's Call the Whole Thing Off -- Billie Holiday (1937)

You say either
And I say either
You say neither
And I say neither
Either, either, neither, neither
Let's call the whole thing off

 

You like potatoes
And I like potahtoes
You like tomatoes
And I like tomahtoes
Potatoes, potahtoes, tomatoes, tomahtoes
Let's call the whole thing off

 

But oh, if we call the whole thing off
Then we must part
And oh, if we ever part
Then that might break my heart

 

So it you like pajahmas and I like pajamas
I'll wear pajahmas and give up pajamas
For we know we need each other
So we'd better call the calling off, off
Let's call the whole thing off

 

So if you go for oysters
And I go for erysters
I'll order oysters and cancel the erysters
For we know we need each other
So we'd better call the calling off, off
Let's call the whole thing off

 

 

 

CPB Classic: Some poems, a song, and a couple of books

From July, 2013


Acquainted with the Night -- Robert Frost


I have been one acquainted with the night.
I have walked out in rain -- and back in rain.
I have outwalked the furthest city light.


Childhood is the Kingdom Where Nobody Dies -- Edna St. Vincent Millay


Nobody that matters, that is.
Distant relatives of course
Die, whom one never has seen or has seen for an hour,
And they gave one candy in a pink-and-green stripéd bag, or a jack-knife,
And went away, and cannot really be said to have lived at all.


The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock -- T.S. Eliot


And would it have been worth it, after all,
After the cups, the marmalade, the tea,
Among the porcelain, among some talk of you and me,
Would it have been worth while,
To have bitten off the matter with a smile,
To have squeezed the universe into a ball
To roll it toward some overwhelming question,
To say: "I am Lazarus, come from the dead,
Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all"—
If one, settling a pillow by her head,
Should say: "That is not what I meant at all.
That is not it, at all."


You're the top -- Louis Armstrong (Cole Porter)


I'm a worthless check, a total wreck, a flop,
But if, baby, I'm the bottom you're the top!


Escape from Freedom -- Erich Fromm


"Fromm's thought merits the critical attention of all concerned with the human condition and its future."


Heart of Darkness -- Joseph Conrad


"Droll thing life is -- that mysterious arrangement of merciless logic for a futile purpose. The most you can hope from it is some knowledge of yourself -- that comes too late -- a crop of unextinguishable regrets."

Halloween costume drama at Yale

Good grief and (sigh). That's all there is to say.

The Atlantic

"According to The Washington Post, “several students in Silliman said they cannot bear to live in the college anymore.” These are young people who live in safe, heated buildings with two Steinway grand pianos, an indoor basketball court, a courtyard with hammocks and picnic tables, a computer lab, a dance studio, a gym, a movie theater, a film-editing lab, billiard tables, an art gallery, and four music practice rooms. But they can’t bear this setting that millions of people would risk their lives to inhabit because one woman wrote an email that hurt their feelings?

Another Silliman resident declared in a campus publication, “I have had to watch my friends defend their right to this institution. This email and the subsequent reaction to it have interrupted their lives. I have friends who are not going to class, who are not doing their homework, who are losing sleep, who are skipping meals, and who are having breakdowns.” One feels for these students. But if an email about Halloween costumes has them skipping class and suffering breakdowns, either they need help from mental-health professionals or they’ve been grievously ill-served by debilitating ideological notions they’ve acquired about what ought to cause them pain."

 

The culture of the spectacle

OK, college students/grads -- Who's the guy in the photo? If you know, congratulations. If your answer is, 'I don't know and I'm ashamed to admit it," that's remediable. But if your answer is, 'I don't know and I don't care,' that's a bigger problem.

Weekly Standard

"That the loss of high culture is an international phenomenon is revealed in Mario Vargas Llosa’s recent collection of essays, Notes on the Death of Culture. Along with the Czech novelist Milan Kundera, Vargas Llosa is the last of the international literary figures still at work, and a man with an impressive oeuvre as a novelist and a strong enough political activist streak to have run for the presidency of his country in 1990. He is a man with complex political views: an advocate of the free market but concerned about the downtrodden of the earth, an agnostic but with a keen appreciation of the spiritual values necessary to democratic society that only religion brings. Now nearly 80, he has published this book of essays around the theme of what he calls “the culture of the spectacle.” 

The culture of spectacle is an entertainment culture in which, as Vargas Llosa has it, “having a good time, escaping boredom, is the universal passion.” The culture of spectacle is dominated by “playful banality .  .  . in which the supreme value now is to amuse oneself and amuse others, over and above any form of knowledge or ideals.” This is a culture in which “Woody Allen is to David Lean or Orson Welles what Andy Warhol is to Gauguin or Van Gogh in painting or Dario Fo is to Chekhov or Ibsen in the theatre.” In this culture, “frivolity, superficiality, ignorance, gossip, and bad taste” dominate. Vargas Llosa argues that the simplicities of the visual—television, movies, smartphones, the Internet, the partiality, in other words, for pixels over print—preclude the thoughtfulness, gravity, and seriousness that once were at the center of culture. The result, he holds, is a world “divided between functional illiterates and ignorant and insensitive specialists.” 

...

On the question of why serious literature is no longer being produced, for example, Vargas Llosa argues that it has been replaced by the kind of light reading that is more congenial to the age. The concentration that reading serious writing requires is no longer there. “For the culture in which we live,” Vargas Llosa writes, “does not favor, but rather discourages, the indefatigable efforts that produce works that require of the readers an intellectual concentration almost as great as that of their writers.” In an extreme statement of this case, James Joyce claimed it took him seven years to write Ulysses and saw nothing wrong if it took his readers seven years to read and understand it. ...

In the culture of spectacle, the great figures are chefs and fashion designers, athletes and actors, television journalists. Intellectuals, whose chief interest was in ideas, have been replaced by so-called public intellectuals. These are men and women of no notable depth whose domains are the op-ed pages and the television news and talk shows. The culture of spectacle has no interest in ideas. Nor does television, its main medium, which makes all ideas banal. 

Mario Vargas Llosa’s culture of spectacle is unanchored and distracted, and not in the least worried about being so."

It's not just that they don't know; they don't care that they don't know

Miss Monroe, acquiring culture

Weekly Standard

"For many years I taught an undergraduate course in prose style to would-be writers. At one point in the course I used to present my students with a list of 15 or so items that included such names and events as the Peloponnesian War, Leon Trotsky, Serge Diaghilev, the 1913 Armory Show, the Spanish Civil War, Nicolas Chamfort, Boris Chaliapin, C. P. Cavafy, the Dreyfus Affair, and a few others. I asked how many knew who or what these items were. A few among them knew one or two of the names and events listed. I said that, at 20 years old, I myself could not have done better than they. I then added that, if one wanted to pass oneself off as a cultured person one had to know such things and a great deal more. My sense is that these students were, as I hoped they would be, as I myself as an undergraduate was, properly cowed by their own ignorance.

I’m not sure that this same exercise would be of much avail today. Now students need merely pick up their smartphones and Google the names on my list. I’m less than sure that culture, and the notion of being a cultured person, has anything like the high standing it once had. Might most people today rather be well informed than cultured? What was once a high human aspiration—the possession of culture—may no longer be so. How did such a change come about?

Truly cultured people were always a minority, at any time and in every place. One used to be able to find a certain number of them in universities. Some schools appeared to have more than others. Columbia in the days of Jacques Barzun, Lionel Trilling, F. W. Dupee, & Co. was notable among them. They were also to be found in the books one read at universities. One could not read, for example, George Eliot without being immensely impressed with her vast learning, deep understanding, and artistic control over complex material, and wondering if, were she alive today, one could engage her in conversation without oneself seeming sadly inadequate. 

No George Eliots around today, and no Barzuns or Trillings either, which is a sad subtraction from the richness of not merely culture but life itself. Nor is it easy to imagine such people soon replaced. Universities, operating under the tyranny of political correctness and the requisites of dumbing down, seem just now keener on building up the self-esteem and protecting the tender sensibilities of their students than in creating young men and women eager to possess culture. 

The acquisition of culture requires repose, sitting quietly in a room with a book, or alone with one’s thoughts even at a crowded concert or art museum. Ours is distinctly not an age of repose. The rhythm of our time is jumpy. The smart phone is its characteristic instrument, with calls and texts coming in more than intermittently, Google there to consult as an aide-memoire, to check for stock prices, ball scores, recent terrorist murders. Information not culture is the great desideratum of our day, distraction our chief theme. 

Cable television, with something for everyone but the thoughtful, awaits at home. What with raising children under the full-court press regime of parenting, making a living, working out at the gym, worrying about one’s diet, taking a breather to watch a baseball game or a movie, there is scarcely time left to read a serious book or anything else that might be construed as acquiring culture."

Education used to be about the attainment of Culture; now, it is about nothing

High Culture / Popular Culture

Weekly Standard

"The old reigning assumption was that one had four years for an undergraduate education, and these years were best spent, at least in the classroom, not on the novels of Kurt Vonnegut or the movies of Wes Anderson, but on certifiably great works—certified by that harshest yet fairest of all critics, Time. One couldn’t of course become educated—except, vocationally, in a trade: engineering, say, or accounting—in four years, but if one was lucky in one’s teachers one could get some rough idea of what education was about and how to go about acquiring more of it once outside of school. 

What education is about, the assumption was, is the attainment of culture. By culture was meant an understanding of life and what is most important in it. This understanding is obtained through experience, observation, insight, and the ability to get outside oneself to view the world from a larger than merely personal perspective. Culture at this depth comprised a compound of a sense of the past, an understanding of what morality was about, and intelligence. The Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa notes that “culture has always signified a combination of factors and disciplines that, according to a broad social consensus, are what define it: a recognition of a shared heritage of ideas, values, works of art, a store of historical, religious, and philosophical knowledge in constant evolution, and the exploration of new artistic and literary forms and of research in all areas of knowledge.” 

The study of the past is the main portal through which culture is acquired; and once through that portal, the art of the past—visual, musical, above all literary—is the chief route to culture. Study of the great art of the past, the imbuing of tradition, was also thought the most certain way to ensure that there will be important art in the present and in the future. 

Matthew Arnold, the great Victorian promulgator of the gospel of culture, held that poetry “is criticism of life,” and criticism itself is “a disinterested endeavor to learn .  .  . the best that is known and thought in the world.” Culture was attained through finding and pondering that best."

More Light! More Light! -- Anthony Hecht (b. 1923)

for Heinrich Blücher and Hannah Arendt

Composed in the Tower before his execution

These moving verses, and being brought at that time   

Painfully to the stake, submitted, declaring thus:

“I implore my God to witness that I have made no crime.”

Nor was he forsaken of courage, but the death was horrible,   

The sack of gunpowder failing to ignite.

His legs were blistered sticks on which the black sap   

Bubbled and burst as he howled for the Kindly Light.

And that was but one, and by no means one of the worst;   

Permitted at least his pitiful dignity;

And such as were by made prayers in the name of Christ,   

That shall judge all men, for his soul’s tranquillity.

We move now to outside a German wood.   

Three men are there commanded to dig a hole   

In which the two Jews are ordered to lie down   

And be buried alive by the third, who is a Pole.

Not light from the shrine at Weimar beyond the hill   

Nor light from heaven appeared. But he did refuse.   

A Lüger settled back deeply in its glove.

He was ordered to change places with the Jews.

Much casual death had drained away their souls.   

The thick dirt mounted toward the quivering chin.   

When only the head was exposed the order came   

To dig him out again and to get back in.

No light, no light in the blue Polish eye.

When he finished a riding boot packed down the earth.   

The Lüger hovered lightly in its glove.

He was shot in the belly and in three hours bled to death.

No prayers or incense rose up in those hours

Which grew to be years, and every day came mute   

Ghosts from the ovens, sifting through crisp air,   

And settled upon his eyes in a black soot.