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And no one knows where the night is going
Dec. 28th, 2006 11:59 pm
Currently at UW: 0.4. High today: 2.6.
"Highfalutin" is a compound of "high" and a corruption of "fluting". So says Merriam-Webster, anyway. The Online Etymological Dictionary doesn't have it, and, me being an academic non-entity for another six days, I have no OED. Membership has its privileges.
Steve Paiken was replaced tonight by a short film on Leonard Cohen, made in the '60s, when he was just a writer, and the very model of a modern young bohemian. It shows him hanging out in Ben's, which I doubt I'd ever heard of until a few weeks ago, when the television told me it was shutting down. They claim Ben's (maybe even Ben) invented the Montreal smoked meat sandwich.
I turned it on halfway through, and then caught the rest later, in Paiken's repeat slot. The first time, I told L. it was a film about Leonard Cohen before he was a singer--it was a film about Leonard Cohen the fabulous young poet--and she said it sounded like it was a film about Leonard Cohen the stand-up comedian. Then, the second time, a little ways in, the narrator says: "But Leonard Cohen is not primarily a stand-up comic." He sure does stand and get the laughs though. Some for unfamiliar monologues, some for familiar poems. (I went to a few poetry readings as an undergrad. (Do they still have poetry readings, I wonder? I feel like they must've died out with the International Socialists. This little film says that the Canadian papers call Leonard Cohen the top poet of his generation. Which, of course, makes ya wonder (or begs the question, as the Canadian papers would now say), who's the top Canadian poet of this generation? Which, of course, is a ridiculous question.) Funny poems, definitely, were the most popular. I figured out early on, though, that funny poems are a lot easier to write than serious poems. There are only a few ways to be serious, but there's a lot of ways to be funny; you don't even need to mean to be funny, as I found out when I got one of my earliest attempts at love-poetry back after I handed it in in grade 9 English: "great send-up", or something.)
Those familiar poems, I guess I've read them and appreciated their ironic winks, but it had never occurred to me that they're laugh-out-loud stuff--but, you know, people are so ready to laugh. This is probably the thing that depresses me most about the barbarian hordes in the library, and elsewhere: they seem like little bottles of barely-stoppered hysteria, and they keep jostling each other and leaking spurts of it all over the place. They're just bursting with it, just looking for an excuse to burst. Anyway, I was watching this, wondering what Cohen thought of them, with his little half-smile.
I was thinking the other day that I could get through a lot of things a lot more easily if I could cultivate a kind of Norm MacDonald persona; you know, vaguely vacantly smiling and distant, so I could say whatever I felt like and nobody would know I was serious. (But then, more usually, my problem is nobody knows I'm joking.) Leonard Cohen has something like that (and it's funny how it seems like a persona when he's young, and a personality when he's old). But, probably, you can only do it if you're already able to back away inside from your own skin.
Port-'n'-Poker Part 2 tomorrow night. I am so exactly the wrong sort of person to do just the sort of things I am so exactly the sort of person to do.
( I wouldn't really post something like this, would I? )
"Highfalutin" is a compound of "high" and a corruption of "fluting". So says Merriam-Webster, anyway. The Online Etymological Dictionary doesn't have it, and, me being an academic non-entity for another six days, I have no OED. Membership has its privileges.
Steve Paiken was replaced tonight by a short film on Leonard Cohen, made in the '60s, when he was just a writer, and the very model of a modern young bohemian. It shows him hanging out in Ben's, which I doubt I'd ever heard of until a few weeks ago, when the television told me it was shutting down. They claim Ben's (maybe even Ben) invented the Montreal smoked meat sandwich.
I turned it on halfway through, and then caught the rest later, in Paiken's repeat slot. The first time, I told L. it was a film about Leonard Cohen before he was a singer--it was a film about Leonard Cohen the fabulous young poet--and she said it sounded like it was a film about Leonard Cohen the stand-up comedian. Then, the second time, a little ways in, the narrator says: "But Leonard Cohen is not primarily a stand-up comic." He sure does stand and get the laughs though. Some for unfamiliar monologues, some for familiar poems. (I went to a few poetry readings as an undergrad. (Do they still have poetry readings, I wonder? I feel like they must've died out with the International Socialists. This little film says that the Canadian papers call Leonard Cohen the top poet of his generation. Which, of course, makes ya wonder (or begs the question, as the Canadian papers would now say), who's the top Canadian poet of this generation? Which, of course, is a ridiculous question.) Funny poems, definitely, were the most popular. I figured out early on, though, that funny poems are a lot easier to write than serious poems. There are only a few ways to be serious, but there's a lot of ways to be funny; you don't even need to mean to be funny, as I found out when I got one of my earliest attempts at love-poetry back after I handed it in in grade 9 English: "great send-up", or something.)
Those familiar poems, I guess I've read them and appreciated their ironic winks, but it had never occurred to me that they're laugh-out-loud stuff--but, you know, people are so ready to laugh. This is probably the thing that depresses me most about the barbarian hordes in the library, and elsewhere: they seem like little bottles of barely-stoppered hysteria, and they keep jostling each other and leaking spurts of it all over the place. They're just bursting with it, just looking for an excuse to burst. Anyway, I was watching this, wondering what Cohen thought of them, with his little half-smile.
I was thinking the other day that I could get through a lot of things a lot more easily if I could cultivate a kind of Norm MacDonald persona; you know, vaguely vacantly smiling and distant, so I could say whatever I felt like and nobody would know I was serious. (But then, more usually, my problem is nobody knows I'm joking.) Leonard Cohen has something like that (and it's funny how it seems like a persona when he's young, and a personality when he's old). But, probably, you can only do it if you're already able to back away inside from your own skin.
Port-'n'-Poker Part 2 tomorrow night. I am so exactly the wrong sort of person to do just the sort of things I am so exactly the sort of person to do.
( I wouldn't really post something like this, would I? )
