now here's an alternative lifestyle I can dream about, the sort of drifting factoid-cum-casual comment that catches my attention and inexplicably holds it for a week in the very back of my mind:

GOSSAMER WINGS

The American Poets Program... has slipped into evening clothes with its new volume of lyrics by Cole Porter. Nearly every Porter song seems to be here, from his 1911 Yale football fight song, "Bull-Dog" ("Bow, wow, wow..."), to "Let's Do It, Let's Fall in Love," "Night and Day," and "Just One of Those Things," as well as a forgotten few like "Which?" ("Which is the right life/ The simple or the night life?"), though the ninety-two selections are but a sliver of the Master's eight-hundred-plus published tunes. Young readers, following the thread of sex and love and liquored insouciance that thrums and swirls through these pages, will wish themselves older, and oldsters, supplying the absent music with each line, will remember how smart and grownup they felt dancing to this stuff while they whispered the lyrics back and forth with a slim, pliant partner.

_ Roger Angell

[This is an excerpt from the column "Critic's Notebook" in The New Yorker, April 24, 2006]


For the record, I don't think a world of liquored insouciance would have been quite my cup of tea, but there's a husky glamour there that I love and hanker.

Also for the record, I wouldn't mind if I suddenly woke up writing like Mr Angell: "... the thread of sex and love and liquored insouciance that thrums and swirls through these pages..."? I think that's more than half the reasons why this thing kept humming in my circuitry until it forced me to share it with someone else.


Oh, well. Back to the future and Historia Económica Universal (Universal Economic History, a mouthful meaning your common or garden Origins of Capitalism course). Test only 12 days away!