Squander your twenties, save your fives!
Recently, while listening to Frank Sinatra’s “It Was a Very Good Year,” I noticed something strange. As Sinatra listeners will remember, seventeen is a very good year for small-town girls and soft summer nights, while twenty-one is a very good year for city girls who lived up the stairs… but after that, there isn’t another good year until thirty-five (for blue-blooded girls of independent means)! What happened to the rest of the twenties?
Believe me, dear readers, nobody is readier than myself to view artistic content as the byproduct of formal constraints; and it is inarguably a nice rhyme: “Their chauffeurs would drive/ When I was thirty-five.” On the other hand… its niceness is not really such as to merit waiting 14-years. What’s wrong with “We’d sip sparkling wine/ When I was twenty-nine”? Or: “Their butlers would wait/ When I was twenty-eight”?
No, truly I believe that ”It was a very good year” finds its appropriate context only within the contemporary discourse of squandering one’s twenties. (I nominate “Squandering Their Twenties” for Stuff White People Like #116.) How familiar is the story imparted by the autocrat of the Rat Pack: the brief period of sex and excitement at twenty-one, followed by the long empty years of graduate school!
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Thrifty readers! It has been brought to my attention that web access to my LRB piece, which today costs £2.75 to non-subscribers, will next week be available free of charge. Those who have squandered their twenties may enjoy this opportunity to save at least $5.
Readers who enjoy both saving money and listening to Frank Sinatra are encouraged to download some free mp3s by Noam, my friend the award-wanting American musician. One really entertaining thing about Noam (in addition to the singing-songwriting) is that, although he is the most conscientious and considerate person you could ever meet, he is always worried that he is somehow acting like a total jerk! For this reason I particularly recommend his new single “Planet,” in which he blames his imaginary boorishness on… the environment. Well played, sir!
Tags: animals, money, music, poetry, reviews, today's youth, Viktor Shklovsky
November 16th, 2008 at 10:56 pm
Thanks to Peli for alerting me that all the links in this post had been sinisterly and inexplicably redirected to Stuff White People Like!—I think I fixed them now.
November 20th, 2008 at 3:07 pm
Kia ora Elif (Tha’s hi in Maori, I’m being bicultural and letting you know that I am located in New Zealand, last stop in the South Pacific en route to the penguins and killer whales on the ice down the bottom) (or up the top if you think about the globe a bit less Northern hemisphere-centred)
Great review you wrote in the LRB, just what you need when you are someone that studied philosophy at University back in the late 70s and a professor threw the board rubber at me once in a logic lecture. LOGIC, why why why are ravens black or whatever it is. Who gives a shit.
Your review has that delightfully subversive undertow of, why are so many philosophers not able to make the step of thinking, well, what if real people actually did this/ believed this/ how would their lives be better? And personally I am glad that there are still tiny groups of wild haired people who sell old fashioned Marxist journals on the street. Just go to, say El Geneina in Darfur to see why and how anything is possible, much of it unbearably evil, and who knows, hardline Marxiam might be as much the answer as any other damn thing.
I’d better get back to being a wage slave again now before my boss finds out what I’m up to.
Goodonya, that’s what we say round these parts.
November 28th, 2008 at 5:36 am
Yes, enjoyed the review, especially your heroic restraint sustained over several columns about the appalling responses to Althusser as murderer. If our esteemed Marxist critic can get away with murder, then perhaps I, as a junior postgraduate, could evade any legal penalties for a bit of grievous bodily harm or vandalism.
November 28th, 2008 at 3:48 pm
Thanks, Looby!
NB: My Life and Thoughts does not encourage any kind of felonious behavior, notwithstanding perpetrator’s level of postgraduate education.