Here is where the books are

10 Twelve Thirty by The Mamas and the Papas (1967)

Before Fleetwood Mac made psychosexual intra-band disfunction cool (?), we had The Mamas and the Papas, four great singers and they’re all messed up! There’s hapless Denny Doherty, needy Cass Elliot, manipulative Michelle Phillips, and as for Papa John…if Mackenzie Phillips’s allegations are true, then he’s the worst of them all. Hippies had all kinds of terrible ideas about sex, and M&P may have tried them all; because if there was one thing M&P were, it’s hippies. They lived (the liner notes off their first album assure you) “in a nutty world of semi-existentialism, of cuckoo-clocks and antique lampshades, of beat-up old cars and Indian boots, of longish hair and longer hair, of folk-singers and not-so-folk singers, [etc.]”—and all that psychosexual intra-band disfunction meant they would not live in it long. Although technically the M&P career spanned five albums over six years (1966–71), most critics would say all their decent material comes from only the two years 1966 and ’67.

Those people are crazy, because M&P’s 1968 album, The Papas and the Mamas, is great! (Everything after that is terrible, of course.) It’s just weird is all, but of course it’s weird! It’s 1968! Still, it only has two tracks that are going to get put on a M&P greatest-hits album, and one of them is really a solo Mama Cass release. The other one is “Twelve Thirty,” our #10 selection, and it was actually released as a single in 1967. So I guess that’s points for the two-year thesis.

“Twelve Thirty” is a perfect encapsulation of the good parts of M&P—it’s West-Coast sunshine pop in the most literal sense of being a song about how NYC is grim and depressing (with a broken clock) and California is friendly and kind, a revelation that is happening as the sun comes up. And then there’s stuff about vibrations because hippies. But the whole thing is arranged and sung so lushly and beautifully, like a co-ed Beach Boys tune.

The four individual mamas and papas had fine, by which I mean above-average, post-M&P careers careers, but where they really shone was in their pre-M&P days, as early-’60s folkies. Earlier versions of this list had “Winken, Blinken, and Nod” by The Big Three (feat. Mama Cass), “Oh Mary Don’t You Weep” by The Halifax Three (feat. Papa Denny), and “Bound for Higher Ground” by The New Journeymen (feat. Papa John) pretty high up, but I thought such an arrangement made me look like a sociopath, so I moved them down. If I extend the list to a top 300, they’ll be there.

9 Sisters of Mercy by Leonard Cohen (1968)

Every time someone calls Jim Morrison a poet or Taylor Swift a lyrical genius, part of me dies inside. How many lyrical geniuses has pop music had in the century since W.S. Gilbert died? Bob Dylan is good if we’re grading on a curve (I’ve already complained about the Nobel). I have a couple of others in my back pocket.

But Leonard Cohen is the real deal. Not only is he endlessly quotable (“Even damnation is poisoned with rainbows” | “They’ll never ever reach the moon; at least not the one that we’re after” | “Love is not a victory march” | “There is a crack in everything: that’s how the light gets in”), his lyrics reward rereadings and reexaminations. Buuuut…words are not music, as I’ve said before. What about the music?

Cohen famously joked that people underestimated him, assuming he only knew three chords when really he knew five. But as any bluesman will tell you, three chords is enough. Like some Oulipian making a virtue of constraint, Cohen turned rudimentary guitar and a complete inability to sing into some of the most beautiful songs of the 1960s. Later albums would be more baroque, but adding things didn’t add much. His first album remains the best one.

If I were to judge the tracks on lyrics (like a chump!) I would have picked “One of Us Cannot Be Wrong,” but musically even lovelier (isn’t that the word?) is this piece. It strikes me as both gentle and filthy, as so much of Cohen’s material does.

8 Casey Jones by Mississippi John Hurt (1963)

Is there a better guitarist than Mississippi John Hurt? Probably not, right? I like me some Maybelle Carter and Chuck Berry, but when Hurt plays guitar it sounds like three guitars. I have no idea how he did that!

Like many rural bluesmen, Hurt cut a few sides in the late ’20s, during that fertile moment between when recording equipment became really good and when the Depression trimmed the record industry. Then he disappeared forever. His 78s lived on—some were collected in Harry Smith’s 1952 Anthology of American Folk Music—and by the early ’60s some music nerds, desperate to learn how he played guitar like that, decided to go and find the man, assuming (the records were three-and-a-half decades old by now) he lived. Hurt had left two clues to his location: His stage name suggested he lived in Mississippi, and one disc he made back when was titled “Avalon, My Home Town”—well, all you needed was to locate an Avalon, MS, which in those days was accomplished by poring over the small print in maps. Unfortunately, Mississippi seemed to lack anywhere named Avalon…could be a metaphor…until someone thought of digging up old maps from the 1920s, which did indeed reveal an Avalon, unincorporated region. A quick pilgrimage revealed the existence of an old man named John Hurt living there, but how were our music nerds to know for sure he was the same fellow they were seeking?

The old man brought out his guitar…

Soon John Hurt was traveling around the country, playing for college audiences and putting out albums. It must have been a heady experience; Hurt’s life in rural Mississippi was in may ways closer to the 1920s than the swinging ’60s. Only a couple years before had the rustic cabin he lived in been wired for electricity. Now he was flying in airplanes and guesting on the Carson show. He made a lot of recordings, at least two records’ worth appearing in his lifetime (our chosen song is from the first of these), proving that although his voice had certainly aged in the intervening decades, he was still the performer he had been back in 1928. Hurt enjoyed three years of celebrity and then died, Æ 73.

This is a great story, and Hurt was a great guitarist, but of course I hope I have not given the impression that I value technical proficiency in a musician. We just did Leonard Cohen! What I’m here to tell you is that Mississippi John Hurt was the greatest guitarist of the twentieth century (and therefore probably of all time) and also the greatest bluesman of the twentieth century (and therefore definitely of all time), but these two facts are unrelated.

Hurt’s delivery (in the ’20s or the ’60s) is always calm, genial, and personal. “Casey Jones” is a traditional song, of course, but Hurt often put his own spins on traditional songs, and here I especially like the little detail:

Early one morning came a shower of rain.
Round the curve, I seen a passenger train.
In the cabinet there was Casey Jones.
He’s a noble engineer, but he’s dead and gone.

Earlier versions of the ballad use the rain as a grim foreshadowing of Casey’s fate—slippery tracks and all—but here it’s just part of the day Hurt (or the narrator) saw Casey Jones: a brief brush with celebrity. I remember that day! It rained in the morning.

7 You Better Move On by Arthur Alexander (1961)

Another but not our last former church singer, Arthur Alexander is also another trivia answer: he’s the only songwriter to have songs covered (on studio albums) by The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, and Bob Dylan. Those aren’t my big three, but they’re someone’s.

Alexander is a one-hit wonder only if you stick with the pop charts—”Anna (Go to Him)” was an R&B top ten (his highest chart position anywhere); his best song if a minor hit, though, is this one, the saddest, slowest love song of the 1960s. Part of the song’s beauty is a simple trick: Each verse delays the “hook” (“you better move on”) one line and several beats after the listener expects it, so when it comes it releases so much tension. It’s not a new trick: Josh Ritter’s “Kathleen” and The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám operate on the same principle; but, as with the hedgehog, one solid trick is all you need.

Heck, most (but not all) of the artists in our top ten are above all great artists with many great songs each—fox-style; Alexander is a hedgehog.

6 Da Doo Ron Ron by The Crystals (1963)

I’m sure there were (and are) a lot of perks to being a big international music star, but there must have always been small humiliations as well: The studio shuffles the tracks on your album or censors your protest song or tells you Pete Best can’t be your drummer. But has anyone been humiliated like the Crystals? Phil Spector wanted them to record “He’s a Rebel”; they were out of state; rather than going aboveboard and calling the Contours, Spector got The Blossoms (led by Darlene Love) to cut the song, and then he released it under The Crystals’ byline—without telling The Crystals what he was up to! While this is not the worst thing Phil Spector has ever done, it’s pretty ratttastic. “He’s a Rebel” went to #1; The Crystals would never hit #1 “for real,” and neither The Blossoms nor solo Darlene Love would ever even crack the top ten under their own names.

So that’s humiliating; your biggest hit is fraud that you did not even consent to; humiliation. But “He’s a Rebel” (though excellent) is far from The Crystals greatest single; nor are their earliest hits; because none of these songs have Lala Brooks.

Aretha Franklin or Cass Elliot were more talented, and Nico and Nina Simone were more haunted; and we’ll get to the greatest of them all in a moment; but Lala Brooks, without a doubt, had the most beautiful voice of the 1960s. Just maybe I should say that some of that beauty came from Spector’s evil magic, but what do I know. On songs like (esp.) “And Then He Kissed Me” and “I Wonder” and “All Grown Up” and (esp. esp.) “Da Doo Ron Ron,” fifteen-year-old Lala Brooks sounds like no one else.

As we’ve seen so many times before, the inherently adolescent nature of rock music (or post-rock pop, like this) rewards songs that mix the small, banal facts of teenage life with the overwhelming operatic emotion of teenage life. Few lyrics are as bathotic as “I met him on a Monday and my heart stood still / Somebody told me that his name was Bill.” Oh, they told you that, did they? Is that what they told you? But Phil Spector’s Wall is the antithesis of such a casual remark. Has anything ever been more important than Bill’s alleged name? Or rather: ??!!!?!?!

(To borrow an example from a different Crystals song, when Brooks mentions she “felt so happy [she] almost cried” you may be thinking: “Almost cried? Was it a sad movie? a distant cousin’s wedding?” But don’t worry because the intensity of the music is bawling its eyes out.)

“Da Doo Ron Ron” is a song about nothing, or maybe an average first date; it is a song about being so adolescently inarticulate that da doo ron ron. But it is emotionally perfectly articulate, and what it articulates is “The 1812 Overture.” The combination of Spector’s driving instrumentation and Brooks’s unsurpassed (sorry, Ronnie) voice—look, I like silly pop songs just fine, and there are plenty of silly pop songs on this list, but you don’t get this high up on the charts being just a silly pop song unless you can pop this…majestically? Whatever the word is, that. Da doo ron ron.

5 Runaway by Del Shannon (1961)

Well, here I was swearing off silly pop songs and the next thing I’m trotting out Del Shannon and his #1 pop hit? Should that be allowed?

But there’s nothing silly about “Runaway,” a minor-key lament about heartbreak and loss. It’s explicitly about heartbreak and loss, of course, but the music tells you for real what the words can only gesture at—you know, the way songs should. Unlike, say, “Hats Off to Larry” (Shannon’s follow-up single; #5 on the charts) “Runaway” is barely pop at all. It only sounds like pop because it is all hook. Every moment of this song is hook. There’s absolutely no dead time. The main verse is catchy as heck, and then it goes right to “I’m a walking in the rain”—even catchier—and then we’re in “wa wa wa wa wonder” which leads to “run run run run run runaway!” That’s four hooks in one song with nothing between them!

Del Shannon recorded a string of good songs and a couple of them were even hits; not all of them but the best of them are songs of terror and despair; but of course he could never surpass his greatest triumph, his runaway hit. Even his (lyrically incoherent) 1986 rerecording (for the show Crime Story) is good. Del Shannon shot himself dead in 1990, allegedly after a bad reaction to Prozac.

4 Heroin by The Velvet Underground (1967)

What if you took The Mamas and the Papas and made a band that was their exact opposite? That’s The Velvet Underground: West Coast vs. East Coast, cheer vs. despair, emotion vs. intellect, radio friendly vs. parental advisory, American1 vs. European / rootless cosmopolitan. Mama Cass may be a gay icon, but The Velvets are 100% gayer. They have plenty of intra-band disfunction, but it isn’t psychosexual.

One of those bands that need no introduction unless you’re a “good times, great oldies” DJ, The Velvet Underground somehow managed to remain eternally cool while dressing like this:

They famously worked in (or invented) a host of different musical genres, usually successfully. But for sheet greatness—and I mean great as in great (vast, sweeping, important), not great as in very very good—they never surpassed “Heroin,” a song that starts out (slow but) like nothing you’ve never heard before (esp. in 1967, o.c.) and then builds from there. The ’60s are so replete with drugs as obscured subtext that we have taken to seeking them (“Lucy in the Sky” | “Puff the Magic Dragon”) where they are not, but in “Heroin” the drugs are the overt text and the subtext is: transcendence, regret, nihilism, the whole world.

3 Memories of El Monte by The Penguins (1963)

There’s nothing quite as heady as the nostalgia experienced by people from a time period you might in turn feel nostalgic for. Memories of El Monte was a 1960 record collecting various “oldies,” meaning songs from the 1950s, and “Memories of El Monte” is a 1963 song about that record, or possibly about the memories the record is referencing (El Monte, CA, being the site of a venue).

A cheap postmodern trick like that is hardly going to get a song the #3 slot, so let me assure you that “Memories” is the greatest straightforward R&B love ballad, and ALSO the greatest cheap postmodern trick, as the Penguins (or at least Clive Duncan; the other Penguins had flown the coop by 1963) seamlessly quote some of the songs on Memories, including their own. This is the best song Frank Zappa (!) ever wrote as well as being not the first but the greatest nostalgia collage. Because here the memories are both universal, in that we, the listeners are supposed to share and understand the references, and personal, in that the narrator (who explicitly establishes himself as “I, Clive Duncan of The Penguins”) is really thinking not about music but a girl he danced to the music with. The girl is gone just like those dances are gone just like (in 1963) those old songs have gone—unless you thought ahead and kept your worn-out 45s. Or perhaps the narrator is thinking about the girl so that he can remember the music, the music the way he heard it back then.

2 No Headstone on My Grave by Esther Phillips (1962)

This is it: the greatest voice of the 1960s.

Esther Phillips was a teenage choir girl who picked up a heroin addiction the only way a fifteen-year-old from Texas could have in 1950—she had become a R&B singer. Under the sobriquet Little Esther, she was in fact a great R&B singer, racking up seven top ten and three #1 hits in her first year as a pro. But subsequent years would not go as swimmingly. By the early 1960s she had long since become a has-been, singing intermittently in the kind of venues you only frequent if on the way up or on the way down. She was already down, of course, but someone on his way up happened to see her sing one night. It was Kenny Rogers, and he had enough nepotastic contacts to get Little Esther—rebranded as Esther Phillips (not her real name)—a recording deal. She was back, baby, and her voice had become harder and sadder. She had always possessed a sort of sour tone—I remember reading one critic who said that to enjoy her voice you had to like pickles—but I love pickles, and the elder Phillips leans into it.

And this part of the story is a happy one, if being a junkie who dies at age 48 (bc junk) is happy. Phillips opened for the Beatles; she played SNL; she had a disco hit; she lost a Grammy to Aretha Franklin but Franklin said Phillips should have won and gave her the trophy. She worked steadily, often as a lounge singer, and released many live and studio albums. These recordings usually did not present her at her best, simply because the studio tracks have too many strings and the live tracks have too many horns. Once in a while they tone it down and the result is sublime.

And sometimes they do not tone it down, they just get it right. Here we have “No Headstone on My Grave,” the most heartbreaking cry of the 1960s, backed, for once, by a tasteful piano and a spooky sax. The background vocals are haunting instead of cloying. The song itself is ambiguous—is the narrator dying, “Streets of Laredo”-style, or just hyperbolic?—but it works either way. It’s technically a cover of an (unreleased) Charlie Rich song from her country album, but how anyone would have known that in 1962 I couldn’t say. Its kind of despair is the perfect Venn overlap of country’s and blues’ subject matters.

I never see Phillips’s name bandied about on lists of ’60s greats—was she just too niche R&B? She was hardly obscure at the time. Well, if you don’t know Esther Phillips and are interested in more good stuff, I recommend “Tonight I’ll Be Staying Here with You,” “Brand New Day,” “Aged and Mellow,” “The Deacon Moves In,” “God Bless the Child Who’s Got His Own,” and “Turn the Lamps Down Low.”

1 Heroes and Villains by The Beach Boys (1967)

Obvs. I cannot say The Beach Boys are underrated, although I think I remember a time when they were underrated; certainly their appreciation has always come with an asterisk. There’s no getting around the Full House kitsch and the fact that Mike Love acts out the songs he sings; their early material is dumb (true, but it’s sublimely dumb) and their later material is…a mixed bag; “Kokomo”; “americana”; many of their albums have filler of a kind that makes other bands’ filler look like A-sides. You want to find a track on a major album skipped even more than “Revolution 9”? Here it is.

But The Beach Boys are still the greatest band of the ’60s. If they’d all fallen into a volcano in 1964 they’d be remembered as a type of Jan and Dean with better harmonies, and if they’d all fallen into a volcano in 1965 they’d be remembered as innovators whose lyrics didn’t keep pace with their music, but by 1966 their immortality was secure no matter how many hypothetical volcanos we throw them into because 1966 was Pet Sounds, perhaps the greatest album ever recorded.

Everyone knows what happened next. Brian Wilson decided to make something (Smile) ten times bigger, better, and more complicated than Pet Sounds; no album like that could possibly exist and so it broke his brain. Beach Boys fans have traditionally blamed Wilson’s madness on Mike Love (he acts out the songs!), but Love in his autobiography makes a persuasive case that it was drugs. Of course it was drugs. The Beach Boys still have a half dozen great albums left in them, but none of them are Smile; they’re not even Pet Sounds.

But before Brian went nuts he completed two, and failed to complete many, Smile tracks. One completion is “Good Vibrations,” a great song in its own right, and the other is “Heroes and Villains,” an attempt to boil down all of American history, Hollywood melodrama, and the process of growing up into a three-and-a-half-minute pop song. If it seems elliptical, that’s because it’s excerpted from various much-longer cuts (sort of like that Earl Leaf interview)—but the ambition remains. The ambition is three quarters of the song!

Death, mourning, memory, reevaluation; who are the heroes and who are the villains?; it’s all here—and the narrator has clearly gone on with his life, passing along, perhaps, the song’s lessons to his children. The song’s halting progress and abrupt shifts in tone and tempo are just part of an attempt to convey, you know, everything.

This kind of vast canvas is something I’d make fun of prog rockers for attempting a few short years later, but it was here first and it was here best.

Well, that’s the 1960s for you. If your favorite band didn’t make it, well, you should make your own list. Or maybe I just messed up and forgot to include someone until it was too late. I would like to personally apologize to Jo Stafford, Floyd Cramer, P.P. Arnold, and The Corsairs for accidentally omitting them.

I can’t really do a list like this for any other decade, because my tastes deviate too greatly from…well, when I look at a Rolling Stone-style list of greatest albums from a decade, after the 1960s there’s generally no overlap between them and me. They deviate too greatly from everyone. But if someone demanded I choose a greatest song from the 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, or 2000s, or from the 1950s, 1940s, 1930s, or 1920s—well, I just complied.

Von Eeden/Giordano!

The women of Ravenna kiss
Rarely and deep, they kiss back.
And all they know about life is that
We all have to die.
•Hermann Hesse, “Ravenna (2)” (1902).

In the middle of life, death comes
to take your measurements. The visit
is forgotten and life goes on. But the suit
      is being sewn on the sly.
•Tomas Tranströmer, “Black Postcards” (1985).

The burning ground has seen the back of every man,
for it alone is the end of all men on earth.
No one has ever seen its back.
•Tâyankannanâr, Puranânûru 356 (C1–3).

Death is all there is. Death will have to do.
•Frederick Seidel, “September” (2002).

This encounter will be for you a present to take with you into the land of the dead.
•Hiraga Etenoa, “Song of Younger Sister of Owl God” (1932).

Long letters written and mailed in her own head—
There are no mails in a city of the dead.
•Robert Graves, “I Will Write” (1964).

The moon it was that called her, and she went;
In Shiraz I had lived to live with her,
Not knowing she was on an errand bent—
A traveller,
To sojourn for a night, then strike her tent.
•Richard Le Gallienne, Odes from the Dizan of Hafiz (1903).

And when the earth shall claim your limbs, then shall you truly dance.
•Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet (1923).

Lucretius explains that death is an ineluctable law.
But he cannot say, as Epicurus could not say, why such a law is not absurd.
•Giovanni Reale, The Systems of the Hellenistic Age (1980).

And sett my bright sword at my head,
Mine arrowes at my feete.
And lay my yew bow by my side,
My met-yard wi
•Robin Hoode His Death, Percy Folio (MS c. 1475).

Sources: Hesse: trans. James Wright, Poems (FSG, 1970). Tranströmer: trans. Robin Robertson, The Deleted Word (FSG, 2006); Tâyankannanâr: in George L. Hart, Poets of the Tamil Anthologies (Princeton UP, 1979); Seidel: Area Code 212 (FSG, 2002); Hiraga: in Donald L. Philippi, ed., Songs of Gods, Songs of Humans: The Epic Tradition of the Ainu (Princeton UP, 1979); Graves: Man Does, Woman Is (Doubleday, 1964); Reale: trans. John R. Catan (SUNY Albany P, 1985); Robin Hoode: abrupt end sic; in J. C. Holt, Robin Hood (Thames & Hudson, 1983); some of this material is copyrighted, and I plead only fair use.

Artist unknown; perh. unknowable

My children need comic books!

The object of life is to make sure you die a weird death. To make sure that however it finds you, it will find you under very weird circumstances. To live that kind of life.
•Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow (1973).

My son Augustus, in the street, one day,
Was feeling quite exceptionally merry.
A stranger asked him: “Can you show me, pray,
The quickest way to Brompton Cemetery?”
“The quickest way? You bet I can!” said Gus,
And pushed the fellow underneath a bus.
            Whatever people say about my son,
            He does enjoy his little bit of fun.
•Col. D. Streamer, “Quiet Fun” (1898).

Jimmy Finn was not burned in the calaboose, but died a natural death in a tan vat, of a combination of delirium tremens and spontaneous combustion. When I say a natural death, I mean it was a natural death for Jimmy Finn.
•Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippi (1883).

A numskull encountered a fiend of his and said: “I heard that you had died.”
He replied: “Well, you can see that I am alive.”
And the numskull: “But the person who told me is much more trustworthy than you are.”
•Hierocles & Philagrius, Philogelos (C4?).

Said the Undertaker to the Overtaker,
Thank you for the butcher and the candlestick-maker,
For the polo player and the pretzel-baker,
For the lawyer and the lover and the wife-forsaker,
Thank you for my bulging, verdant acre,
Said the Undertaker to the Overtaker.
Move in, move under, said the Overtaker.
•Ogden Nash, “Tweedledee and Tweedledoom” (1953).

Is there a Valhalla for the human race? Not unless we all become Vikings!
•Gerardus Ramc, “Nucturno” (2000).

Greater than the beef steak is death
•Richard Huelsenbeck, “Death” (1920).

                               Ruskin
would have perished here,
but then, poor man, he
perished anyhow.
•Lorine Niedecker, “Niedecker Weather” (1976).

Diana, Princess Of Wales,
Fine Windsor Palace ass,
Now Dies in safe car—Slap!
A Windsor’s final escape?
•Pip Eastop, “Dianagram” (1997).

Exit laughing: ha ha ha!
•Fields & Chodorov, Wonderful Town (1953).

Sources: Streamer: aka Harry Graham, Ruthless Rhymes for Heartless Homes and More Ruthless Rhymes (Dover, 1961); H&P: in Wm. Hansen, ed., An Anthology of Ancient Greek Popular Literature (IN UP, 1998); Nash: The Private Dining Room (Little, Brown, 1953); Ramc: Octopus Magnus (Lucy Ramc LLC, 2000); Huelsenbeck: trans. Malcolm Green in Blago Bung Blago Bung Bosso Fataka! (Atlas, 1995); Niedecker: Blue Chickory (The Elizabeth Press, 1976); Eastop; some of this material is copyrighted, and I plead only fair use.

Don Heck!

If fleas were to develop a rite, then it would refer to the dog.
•Wittgenstein, Remarks on Frazer’s Golden Bough (1931).

All things have significance for all: if birds had wisdom, they would have constructed an art for knowing the future based on observing humans, as we do by observing them.
•Synesius, On Dreams (404).

I realised that everything is, in reality, gifted with the capacity to communicate, either through the senses or by means of the intellect; more than that, I came to realise that the language of silence is more eloquent than speech, more true to essence than words can ever be. ¶ When someone has spoken, one can concur with the correctness of his observations or else refute his words; whereas the language of emblems is the language of certainty and truth. But then, he who uses the figurative mode speaks only to those who have higher perceptions: while he who expresses himself through conventional means communicates with the ordinary state, common to us all.
•Al-Muqaddasi, Revelation of the Secrets of the Birds and Flowers (ca. 1270).

Every morning the writer should go to the window, look out and remind himself of this fact: aside from his own species, not one thing he sees—not one bird, tree or stone—has in its possession the name he gives it.
•Don Paterson, Best Thought, Worst Thought (2008).

Something unconnected, oblique as if, after the motion
of history, every object we named was not the correct noun.
•Derek Walcott, “The bamboo stands ready” (1997).

Instead of reading the menu, they tried to eat it.
•Shea & Wilson, Illuminatus! (1975).

The Pagans worshipping the Sunne are said to hold their hands to the Gloworme in stead of a coale for heat.
•Nevves from any whence. Or, old trvth vnder a svpposall of Noueltie. Occasioned by diuers Essayes, and priuate passages of Wit, betweene sundrie Gentlemen vpon that subiect (1616).

The butterfly is a success, but man is a mistake.
•Hugo, Les Misérables (1862).

behold the bone cancer sokobauno sokobauno
behold the placenta as it screams in the butterfly nets of the high-school boys
sokobauno sokobauno
•Huelsenbeck, “Plane” (1916).

                                 “Ha!” I said,
“King of the butterflies”…
•Keats, Endymion (1818).

Sources: Wittgenstein: quoted in S.J. Tambiah, Magic, Science, Religion, and the Scope of Rationality (Cambridge UP, 1991); Synesius: in Donald A. Russell and Heinz-Günther Nesselrathn, eds., On Prophecy, Dreams and Human Imagination (Mohr Siebeck, 2014); Muqaddasi: trans. Irene Hoare & Darya Galy. (Octagon, 1980); Walcott: The Bounty (FSG, 1997); Hugo: trans. Lascelles Wraxall (Heritage1938); Huelsenbeck: trans. Malcolm Green in Blago Bung Blago Bung Bosso Fataka! (Atlas, 1995); some of this material is copyrighted, and I plead only fair use.

Sheldon Moldoff!

I draw
The bowstring of Cupid’s bow,
Too powerful for anything but love to pull.
•Frederick Seidel, “Milan” (1998).

The Queen of Love went out to walk
And saw an archer shoot a hawk;
And when she saw the poor hawk die,
The Queen of Love was heard to sigh.
•Songs for the Nursery Collected From the Works of the Most Renowned Poets and Adapted to Favourite National Melodies (c. 1835).

For he was neuere gode werryour,
That cowed not loue a-ryght;
For loue hath made many a conquerour
And many a worthy knighte.
•The Sowdone of Babylone (c. 1400).

Whoever’s not killed for love is carrion.
•Rumi, Divan-Shamsi Tabriz (c. 1247).

Men really have strange emotions and behave in the most bizarre ways. Sometimes a man will leave a very pretty woman to marry an ugly one. Surely a gentleman who frequents the Palace should choose as his love the prettiest girl of good family he can find. Though she may be of such high standing that he cannot hope to make her his wife, he should, if he is really impressed by the girl, languish for her unto death.
•Sei Shonagon, The Pillow Book (1002).

From the parapet wall of this building, three centuries ago, Olive Sherington, the heiress of Lacock, threw herself into the arms of her lover, a gallant gentleman of Worcestershire, John Talbot, a kinsman of the Earl of Shrewsbury. He was felled to the earth by the blow, and for a time lay lifeless, while the lady only wounded or broke her finger. Upon this, Sir Henry Sherington, her father, relented, and shortly after consented to their marriage, giving as a reason “the step which his daughter had taken.”
•Henry Fox Talbot, The Pencil of Nature (1844).

They sin who tell us love can die.
With life all other passions fly,
All others are but vanity.
In Heaven Ambition cannot dwell,
Nor Avarice in the vaults of Hell;
Earthly these passions of the Earth,
They perish where they have their birth;
But Love is indestructible.
Its holy flame for ever burneth,
From Heaven it came, to Heaven returneth
•Robert Southey, The Curse of Kehama (1810).

I use your love as a man burns a candle, burns it away, to light his steps.
•Ursula K. Le Guin, The Farthest Shore (1972).

Like the scum on the well
from which the townsfolk drink,
my paleness goes away
whenever my lover touches me,
And whenever he leaves
it spreads over me again.
•Paranar, Ettuthokai: Kuruntokai 399 (C1–3).

True love casts out all fear. If you’re afraid of me then there’s something wrong with you.
•Charles Manson, as quoted in The Manson File (1988).

Sources: Seidel: Going Fast (FSG, 1998); Sei Shonagon: trans. Ivan Morris (Columbia UP, 1991); Rumi: John Moyne & Coleman Barks, eds., Unseen Rain: Quatrains of Rumi (Shambala, 2006); Paranar: George L. Hart, ed., Poets of the Tamil Anthologies (Princeton UP, 1979); some of this material is copyrighted, and I plead only fair use.

Or "buy me a coffee" (so called)

Ballad of a Summer Love

She’d summer, back in ’94,
	Beside the Knights of Labor’s
Old clubhouse on the facing shore—
	So we were almost neighbors,

And every night I’d swim the lake
	Like Hero’s own Leander.
I’d brave the aquarattlesnake,
	The gar, and salamander

While she’d sit watch upon the pier
	In hopes I would appear. Oh,
She staged such Triumphs for me here—
	And yet she was the Hero:

The hero of the siege of hearts,
	The Chevalier Romantic.
While I dog-paddled round these parts
	She swam the damned Atlantic;

Like Beowulf, a sword in hand,
	Dread monsters from the trenches
She fought at sea. I fought on land
	The eyes of tavern wenches.

She was the first, the very first
	To beg the angel’s pardon,
To slake the serpent’s unknown thirst
	And drive us from the garden.

The angel said, “Strap on some leaves
	To show what you’ve been learning.”
Instead she buckled on her greaves,
	And next thing Troy was burning.

The battle ax and mercy knife
	She never left behind her.
I waved goodbye. The kind of life
	I’d never know—would find her.

Other Poems

Byrne & Wiacek!

I write books! Check 'em out!

20. King of the Road by Roger Miller (1965)

Absolutely the best song to play on your Walkman (or whatever) as you travel by bus. I mean, if you travel by boxcar, more power to you; but it also works on a bus.

This is, on the one hand, just another hobo song, of the kind Woody Guthrie might write, but it is absolutely the most joyous hobo song. This joy is tinged with a sense of irony (this guy ain’t king of nothing!), but it is not tempered by resignation or despair. The hobo in “Hobo’s Lullaby” is barely hanging on. The hobo in “Big Rock Candy Mountain” is practically hallucinating. Miller’s hobo, though, is having a genuinely good time.

It helps, I think, that Miller’s hobo travels through scenes not so alien, not so different from what anyone might have experienced wandering around as an underemployed youth. This hobo, you’ll notice, prioritizes sleeping indoors. I never once swept up in exchange for a hotel room, but it seems like the kind of thing I or my friends might plausibly have done, whereas never in a million years would I have murdered East Texas Red. That’s a different kind of hobo.

But those are just words, and we’re here for music; in which “King of the Road” is the most jovial, sing-along country tune of them all. Fingersnaps!

19. So Young by The Ronettes (1964)

Ronnie Spector suffered for her art more than anyone; she had to marry Phil Spector.

Surely bad for Ronnie, and ultimately bad for Ronnie’s career (as Phil was too jealous to let her perform or record), but now that everyone involved is dead, let us say that we got some great art along the way. Phil Spector was the greatest record producer of the early ’sixties and Ronnie Bennett one of the greatest vocalists—in this way if only in this way it was a match made in heaven.

They recorded a lot of good songs together in a brief two-year span, and perhaps I sound like a simple contrarian for picking as the best this cover of a ’50s doo-wop tune. Right from the beginning, with acappella gospel-informed vocals setting the stage for Ronnie at her most crystalline and pure, this version stands above even the Beach Boys’ later cover (Brian Wilson being of course a huge Ronettes fan). For most of its running, “So Young” is not even very Wall-of-Soundy, just muted instruments and all Ronettes…which means when the instruments do (slowly) come in, they build to something genuinely unexpected. Not even “Be My Baby” can touch this.

Phil went on to anger everyone by producing The Beatles, The Ramones, and Leonard Cohen in unexpected ways (I think two of those three albums are great!) and pointing guns at whoever he could. Then he went to jail for murder. Ronnie got a divorce and a second career. Neither character would be as interesting, in my opinion, after 1964, unless you count murder as interesting.

18. Doggone Right by Smokey Robinson and the Miracles (1968)

Smokey Robinson was Motown’s secret weapon, except I guess he wasn’t a secret. He wrote and sang the very first single released under the Motown imprint, and it’s still my favorite the company ever put out (unfortunately for this list, it’s from 1959). If I say The Miracles were Motown’s most consistent band, I guess you can say they were technically Tamla, but I get these labels all confused and I’d say it still counts. Smokey also wrote a lot of our favorite Motown hits, that last one incorporating the distinctive word “doggone”…which brings us to this track.

Miracles songs are often, in addition to being as emotional or danceable as most ’60s pop, clever. But every once in a while they’re just cool. I’d say “Doggone Right” is the coolest song of the decade, and perhaps the coolest song of all time until Marvin Gaye or Lou Reed dethroned it sometime in the early’ 70s. By strange miracle (sorry) this song is the literal coolest despite having weak and sappy lyrics. You don’t need to sing cool things if you sing them cool. Doggone right.

17. Stay by Maurice Williams and the Zodiacs (1960)

It wouldn’t be a ’60s list without one-hit wonders, and this won’t even be the last 1-h.w. we encounter.

Supposedly written by Williams a decade earlier, as a teenager, “Stay” is perhaps best known as a trivia question, as it possesses the shortest run time of any #1 pop hit (making it the opposite of “American Pie” (or, now, “All Too Well”)), but believe me when I say it is also the seventeenth best song of all the 1960s! The decade came in with a bang!

In fact, sometime around 1960–61, people perfected a certain kind of poppy, doo-woppy R&B, and many of my favorites, including “Save the Last Dance for Me,” “Stand by Me,” “Blue Moon,” the song I’m going to put at #7, etc., occupy a similar zone in my mind. Whatever it is, I lament its passing.

16. Runaround Sue by Dion (1961)

Dion DiMucci was a solid crooner who had a string of often mopey hits with the Belmonts and some good rockers afterwards. Even his late-period sappy current-events single “Abraham, Martin, and John” is, miraculously, good. Dion would probably squeak into a list if not of the top 200 songs of the 1960s, then certainly the top 300…

…but he had these two singles.

I don’t know what fire struck Dion in 1961, but with songwriter Ernie Maresca he had back-to-back hits so far above what he would record previously or later that it almost seems like a different act. I’m not being difficult; I mean, of course, “The Wanderer” (a more interesting take on the “Travelin’ Man” motif) and “Runaround Sue.” It was close, because nothing on “Sue” can touch the majesty with which Dion delivers the line “my two fists of iron, but I’m going nowhere” (a line the label made him change to its current state to remove a reference to beer)—but, that one line aside, “Sue” is the slightly superior song. The slow beginning builds to some genuine rocking. For once, Dion’s habitual heartbreak leaves him not moping but angry!

Once I saw a yo-yo performance accompanied by this song. Could not be improved on.

15. The Village Green Preservation Society by The Kinks (1968)

In 1969, only Ray Davies could sing “God save little shops, china cups and virginity” without a trace of irony. Part of the magic of this song is that it begs to be sneered at and ridiculed, but it will not turn on itself. What you see is what you get here.

The Kinks, of course, are one of those hard-rocking bands who “matured” by the end of the decade. They were, I think, one of the best when they were rocking hard, and they stayed one of the best when they matured.

My proposed additional lyrics:

We are the old book preservation affiliate.
Good save Beowulf, Gilgamesh, and the Iliad.

14. the Abbey Road medley by The Beatles (1969)

I don’t want to sound like Mr. Hot Take, but I think The Beatles are overrated. They could scarcely not be overrated, the way their ratings go, but I think they’re even more overrated than that. Their earlier stuff…I know we’re supposed to celebrate their entire catalog, but when they’re rocking they don’t rock as well as either their precursors (like Chuck Berry or Jerry Lee Lewis) or their contemporaries (like The Kinks or The Animals) and when they’re popping, they’re just not as good as most contemporary pop music. The songs aren’t bad, but in the early ’60s the only way for a song to be actively bad is to be overproduced, and that’s not going to happen here.

Of course they got better fast—but a lot of ’60s bands got better fast. This was a time when people got better fast. By the Rubber Soul / Revolver era they had some good tracks (although I hate “Michelle”—ugh!). Sgt. Pepper’s is fine (except “Day in the Life,” which is off the charts amazing). It’s only with the white album, uneven as it is, that I really get it, that I really think The Beatles are contenders. Only at this moment are they better than, say, Jan and Dean or Manfred Mann.

And then Abbey Road is that much better! Maybe I should believe the hype!

Well that’s my personal Beatles journey; I’m just a born hater; all of this goes to explain why I putzed out and picked most of a side of an album: They’d finally gotten good! And it’s not like picking, say (I was tempted) “all of Pet Sounds”; first of all, I hate “Caroline, No” as much as I hate “Michelle,” and second of all, the medley on Abbey Road is all one piece, in a way. People cover it together. Do you want to hear “She Came in through the Bathroom Window” without the lead-in from “Polythene Pam”? If so, why? Pink Floyd would have tracked this as one long opus and put “I. You Never Give Me Your Money | II. Sun King etc.” in the liner notes; the Beatles didn’t do it, but a suite is a suite and I’m not breaking this one up.

By the way, Let It Be mostly sucks and so does all of their solo work, so that’s a short peak window for the world’s greatest and most popular rock band so-called.

13. Rip Van Winkle by The Devotions (1961)

This track gets called a novelty song sometimes, presumably because it contains the sounds of dwarves bowling, but other than that it is played as straight as the inherently silly genre of doo-wop will permit: It’s a dead serious song about the most dead serious topic there is: literature, specifically one short story from the early nineteenth century.

This was The Devotions’ only hit, and it wasn’t much of a hit: #36 on the Top Forty charts, and that two years after initial release. I think that’s bonkers! How many songs can there be more beautiful than this polyphony about sleeping for decades in the wilderness to escape a nagging wife?

Exactly twelve, sources say.

12. The House that Jack Built by Aretha Franklin (1968)

I’m not really a soul guy, and there’s a lot of Aretha Franklin that leaves me cold. She undeniably has talent, but talent is a party trick. I bite my thumb at talent. If talent mattered, Eric Clapton and Jimi Hendrix would be on this list, and they’re not going to be.

But sometimes Aretha hits the right groove, and this track…I’m going to go ahead and say that “The House that Jack Built” rocks harder than any other song of the ’60s. I don’t usually head bang, but after “…Jack built, y’all” I absolutely head bang. Anyone who tries to compete or rock harder just makes an irritating song, and that’s fatal. I’ve called it. This is maximum rock.

11. Visions of Johanna by Bob Dylan (1966)

A Nobel prize is ridiculous, but I won’t take anything else away from Bob Dylan (except, I guess, a top ten spot). Like The Beatles or The Kinks above, Dylan got better really fast, but he had a head start, so to speak, because he didn’t start doing dumb rock songs (remember: I never mean “dumb” pejoratively) but rather Woody Guthrie pastiches. You can’t actually get any smarter than Woody Guthrie, and you can’t really catch up to Woody Guthrie (no matter how hard you try), but you can go in a different direction, and that’s where he went.

There are other great songs in the electric/full band Dylan canon, o.c., but “Visions of Johanna” is something special. It has the best “conversational opening” (“say, did you ever notice this about the night…”) this side of “Crimson and Clover.” I’m not going to claim I understand the handful of rain or the fish truck or…I mean, how often do I understand Dylan lyrics?… but I also understand every moment of this song, which is a trick Dylan excels at.

Next time we get to the top ten! The best songs of the whole decade! Let me know what you think they’ll be! Get ’em right (no one will) and I’ll send you a book or something. I’m really excited, guys!

On the other hand, affirming that the universe resembles nothing and is only formless amounts to saying that the universe is something like a spider.
•Bataille, Documents #7 (1929).

Indeed, what reason may not go to school to the wisdom of bees, ants, and spiders?
•Browne, Religio Medici (1643).

Nietzsche might well be a little lost in the web of his text, lost much as a spider who finds he is unequal to the web he has spun.
•Derrida, Spurs (1978).

The skill of the trompe l’oeil makes it look as if the daisies are scattered on the page. By a humorous twist the artist pretends that a dragonfly has been deceived and has settled on the flowers as if they were real. It takes us a moment to penetrate this second illusion and perceive that the insects too are painted.
•J.J.G. Alexander, The Master of Mary of Burgundy (1970).

A German entomologist reported that in 1807 the fire department was summoned when a huge swarm of gnats that formed over the steeple of St. Mary’s church in Neubrandenburg was mistaken for a cloud of smoke.
•Gilbert Waldbauer, Insects Through the Seasons (1996).

Amung this sort ove taverins…they keeps bugs in yer bed tu make yu rise in time fur them tu get the sheet fur a tablecloth.
•George Washington Harris, Sut Lovingood. Yarns Spun by a Nat’ral Born Durn’d Fool. Warped and Wove for Public Wear (1867).

It is said, that the foolish curiosity of Elagabalus attempted to discover, from the quantity of spiders’ webs, the number of the inhabitants of Rome.
•Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire vol. III (1781).

Oft like a winged Spider, I am entangled in a new Spun web—but never fear for me, ’tis but the flutter of my wings—and I am off again!
•Coleridge, letter to John Prior Estlin (March 1, 1800).

     Paracelsus:           …This kingdom, limited
Alone by one old populous green wall,
Tenanted by the ever-busy flies,
Grey crickets, and shy lizards, and quick spiders.…
Fancy the crickets, each one in his house,
Looking out and wondering at the world—or best,
The painted snail, with his gay shell of dew,
Travelling to see the glossy balls high up
Hung by the caterpillar, like gold lamps.
     Michal: In truth we have lived carelessly and well!
•Browning, Paracelsus (1835).

But in a vague dream a little worm saw
how the crescent moon split his being in two:
one was nothing,
the other one was everything and God himself.
•Edith Södergran, “There Is No One…” (1925).

Sources: Bataille: Allan Stoekl, ed., Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927–1939 (U MN P, 1985); Harris: quoted in Edmund Wilson, Patriotic Gore: Studies in the Literature of the American Civil War (Norton, 1994); Coleridge: quoted in Willard L. Sperry, Wordsworth’s Anti-Climax (Harvard UP, 1935); Södergran: trans. Stina Katchadourian, Love and Solitude: Selected Poems 1916–1923 (Fjord, 1992); some of this material is copyrighted, and I plead only fair use.

artist unknown (to me)

I had found sensual pleasures vain, transient, and continually attended with tedium and disgust; but that intellectual pleasures appeared to me ever fresh and young, filled up all my hours satisfactorily, gave a new zest to life, and diffused a lasting serenity over my mind.
•Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population (1798).

It is not an unbroken succession of drinking-bouts and of revelry, not sexual love, not the enjoyment of fish and other delicacies of a luxurious table, which produce a pleasant life; it is sober reasoning, searching out the grounds of every choice and avoidance, and banishing those beliefs through which the greatest tumults take possession of the soul.
•Epicurus, “Letter to Menoeceus” (C3 BC).

When I say pleasure, I would not be understood to mean sensuality, which constitutes the supreme happiness of those only who are void of sentiment and imagination.
•Frances Vane, “The Memoirs of a Lady of Quality” (1751).

Also, all things diminish with use except sensuality, which grows greater.
•the Abbé de Brantôme, Memoirs (pub. 1666).

I asked an eminent personage the meaning of this traditionary saying, “The most malignant of thy enemies is the lust which abides within thee.” He replied, “It is because every enemy on whom thou conferrest favours becomes a friend, save lust; whose hostility increases the more thou dost gratify it.”
•Sâdi, The Rose Garden (1258).

This is very like a man glutting himself with dainties to the point of nausea and turning away from them only to return with redoubled zeal after the effect of the nausea is well over. Precisely in the same manner will the world return to violence with renewed zeal after the effect of disgust is worn out.
•Gandhi, Harijan (July 7, 1946).

Freud was so obsessed by the Oedipus complex because he never realized that sex was not the only form of union which can occur between two individuals.
•Robert E. Svodoba, Aghora: The Left Hand of God (1986).

There is danger there—a very real danger to humanity. Consider, Watson, that the material, the sensual, the worldly would all prolong their worthless lives. The spiritual would not avoid the call to something higher. It would be the survival of the least fit. What sort of cesspool may not our poor world become?
•A. C. Doyle, “The Adventure of the Creeping Man” (1923).

“So amusing!” said the worn-out debauchés, who had drained the cup of sensuality to its dregs, and who longed to see lovely women in convulsions, with the hope that they might gain some new emotions from the sight.
•Mackay, Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds (1841).

The superiority of intellectual to sensual pleasures consists rather in their filling up more time, in their having a larger range, and in their being less liable to satiety, than in their being more real and essential.
•Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population (1798).

Sources: Epicurus: quoted in Giovanni Reale, The Systems of the Hellenistic Age (SUNY Albany P, 1985); Vane: in Smollett, The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle (Oxford UP, 1964); Brantôme: trans. Lowell Blair, Tales of Fair and Gallant Ladies (Bantam, 1958); Sâdi: trans. Edward B. Eastwick (Octagon, 1974); Gandhi: Thomas Merton, ed., Gandhi on Non-Violence (New Directions, 1965); Doyle: in The Casebook of Sherlock Holmes (Penguin, 1951); some of this material is copyrighted, and I plead only fair use.

If anyone wants to take a stab at what the top 5 will be, go ahead. Get it right and I’ll send you a book or something (unless you live far away).

Oh yeah! And please check out the books I write! There’s this book of alternate-history scenarios and this crime novel for adults and this filthy paranoid novel for adults and this supernatural thriller for the YAs and these all-ages books on wizards and warriors from legend…so many choices!

Or just by me a coffee, so-called

40 Blue Moon by The Marcels (1961)

Blue Moon is an old song, and there have been plenty of fine mellow versions over the years—The Marcels come into this tradition like one of those jazzed-up or discofied covers of Bach, giving the song a real swing.

The star of the show is, of course, the doo-wop nonsense syllables (bomp-ba-ba-bomp etc.) the song opens with and returns to periodically. This was an era of great doo-wop nonsense, but no one else have ever strung together such a long scatty string so well.

39 If You Really Want Me to, I’ll Go by The Ron-Dels (1965)

The absolute most generic name for a band in 1965, that monicker Ron-Dels comes not from a manifestation of the zeitgeist but from combining the names of band members Ronnie Kelley and Delbert McClinton. Who is Ronnie Kelley? Man, I have no idea, but Delbert McClinton bobbed and wove his way through pop history for decades. Legend has it he taught John Lennon to play harmonica back in ’62 (i.e. before John was cool); he had a top ten pop hit in the 1980s; and that’s him singing in the opening and closing credits of Groundhog Day. He’s doing all right for himself.

But has anything he’s done matched this relatively unsuccessful but beautiful single? I once read someone complaining that the song was just a decade ahead of its time, and its mellow country-pop vibe would have been a hit in the mid-’70s. As it stands, the Ron-Dels are not quite a one-hit wonder, having lacked the requisite hit, but they’re a shoulda been.

38 You Can’t Always Get What You Want by The Rolling Stones (1969)

I’ll admit that I never really came around to The Rolling Stones. They sounded like cool music for cool people, which is a strange thing for a band that peaked before I was born to sound like, but it still gets my hackles up. Remember what that alcoholic guy says to Dylan McKay about his Stones hat? “That hat is about getting high. It is about being cool. It is about par-tay.” We’re here to listen to music, not to par-tay!

But in my twenties I was moonlighting at a small-press magazine and one guy in the office would play The Stones all night, and I was alarmed to learn that they were often good. Sometimes they rocked, and they really rocked! Sometimes they got a nice slow ballad in. And then there’s this weird one.

A book I like about bad music declares, “Rock-and-roll songs with an orchestral choir are bound to be horrible,” and then offers this track as the “sole exception.” And doesn’t it seem like the Rolling Stones are getting away with something here? Rock songs shouldn’t be seven-and-a-half minutes long! Yet this one is. Even the lapidary title/chorus should be annoying, but it come across as just quotable. Surely The Stones’ finest hour.

37 I Wanna Holler by Gary (U.S.) Bonds (1964)

You sometimes see Gary (U.S.) Bonds trotted out as the last American rocker—the idea being that since tragedies and misfortunes took out, one by one, every major ’50s rock ’n’ roller, 1960s American music before the British Invasion belonged to R&B, surf pop, crooners, and girl groups…but Bonds still rocked.

My favorite—and I mean by a long shot—Bonds song, though, was recorded post-Invasion and never even released. I mean, it was released in 1987. That doesn’t count. How messed up was the music industry in 1964 that it couldn’t even get a banger like this out to the public? I don’t want to sound like I’m just dropping edgy hot takes but this song is better than 100% of the Beatles output in 1964! This should have been everyone’s teen anthem!

36 Stand by Me by Ben E. King (1961)

For the movie, see here.

But we’re talking about the song! Overplayed, oversincere, and with a chord progression some people view as trite—ha! who cares! This is one of the most beautiful recordings in history; Ben E. King sang (and wrote!) a lot of good songs, but did he ever have a better moment?

Yes, he did, but that’s a spoiler. See #33.

35 Crimson and Clover by Tommy James and The Shondells (1968)

In 1964 a bunch of high school friends recorded, live in the studio, a song they’d heard once and barely remembered. The side, “Hanky Panky,” got some local play in the Midwest, but then sank into obscurity. The band members graduated high school and went their separate ways. And that was the end of The Shondells.

Or was it??? A year and a half later, a DJ in Pittsburgh somehow came across a copy of “Hanky Panky,” which got traction locally. The record was selling again. For most ex-Shondells this fact was merely pleasant trivia, but Tommy James, lead singer on “HP,” was unemployed at the time and decided to take a chance. He drove to Pittsburgh, dubbed a random local band “The Shondells,” and started playing gigs to support the single. It got a rerelease (credited to Tommy James and The Shondells now) and by 1966 it was #1 on the Billboard charts, perhaps the lowest-fi garage rocker ever to reach that spot.

Tommy James and The [New] Shondells had a string of inoffensive pop hits with the occasional rocker that was, at the very least more polished than “Hanky Panky.” The grinding wheel of time was remorseless in the 1960s music biz, and before too long the band was branching out to psychedelic pop, which, perhaps to everyone’s surprise, they excelled at. I can’t think of another band for which this is true: if you listened blind TJ&tS’s five most famous songs (which I assume to be “Hanky Panky,” “I Think We’re Alone Now,” “Mony Mony,” “Crystal Blue Persuasion,” and the selected hit, “Crimson and Clover”), you’d assume they were from four different bands (the last two mentioned going together). The eclecticism is not unique, just the success of the eclecticism.

But I’ve gotten distracted by all these cute anecdotes and I should have been talking about “Crimson and Clover.” The song has me right from that opening, with the sparse guitar coming in, and then the slow build from folk-rock into a psychedelic silliness that still somehow works—even the vocal tremolo. The track was yet unfinished when a radio station released a bootleg, which put a stop to further tinkering. Perhaps more weird effects would have ruined it.

Hubert Humphrey wrote the liner notes for the album.

34 You Were on My Mind by We Five (1965)

This cover of an Ian and Sylvia song improves on the (already good) original in every way. I mean, I love me some Ian and Sylvia, and I usually think of We Five as being simultaneously too jazzy and too cute, but somehow they managed to put out a song that feels indispensable or inevitable. There are some songs that bypass all my rational faculties on their route to pure joy, and this is one of them.

33 Save the Last Dance for Me by The Drifters (1960)

The Drifters were formed as a showcase for Clyde McPhatter, and after he left for a solo career the band kind of flailed and…drifted (?) until in 1958 The Drifters’ manager fired every single member and replaced them with the members of The Five Crowns. In other words, The Five Crowns, a less successful band, just got renamed The Drifters; this was a good deal for The Five Crowns because The Drifters had months of shows booked. This was a good deal for The Drifters’ manager because The Five Crowns were a great band, especially lead singer Ben E. King. (It was, of course, a bad deal for the fired Drifters.)

“Save the Last Dance for Me”—the title passed for innuendo in 1960—was one of the last tracks King recorded before he pulled a McPhatter; by the time the song was released, he was already gone; The Drifters would never surpass this swan song, and I guess neither would King, although he came closer.

32 Mama Tried by Merle Haggard and the Strangers (1968)

Haggard was a genuine career criminal before he saw Johnny Cash perform a prison show, got on the straight and narrow, became a country star, and was eventually pardoned by Ronald Reagan. Perhaps there’s more pathos than usual in his voice singing, “I turned 21 in prison doing life without parole,” because of the couldabeenness of it all.

Pitchfork called this the perfect country song: “It’s all here: trains, prison, mama, [etc.].” What can I add to that? There are at least two country numbers rated higher on this list, but they’re both country pop, so if you want to call this the best country song of the ’60s, I won’t stop you.

31 Mommy and Daddy (alt. version) by The Monkees (1968)

People used to (maybe we’ve agreed to stop) make fun of The Monkees, but despite what Marge Simpson has claimed, The Monkees sometimes wrote their own songs and sometimes played their own instruments…and it’s not like The Supremes were writing songs or playing instruments either. It’s actually normal for bands to have songwriters and session musicians. When’s the last time you saw Frank Sinatra with a guitar or a typewriter? Sheesh, lay off The Monkees!

And for fans of pure pop, The Monkees have one of the most enviable catalogs this side of Jan and Dean.

But we’re all the way up to #31! We’ve left Jan and Dean back at #57! To get this high up, you’ve got to be making art, son!

And The Monkees consistently tried to make art. Their infamous movie Head (1968) is surely an attempt at constructing some kind of artistic statement, and if most of the film can’t live up to brilliance of the opening credits sequence, where screaming Monkees fans are juxtaposed with screams of terror at authentic atrocity footage…well, how much late ’60s cinema can?

The Monkees were always a little bit better than they let on. Isn’t “Daydream Believer” a serious song wrapped in a bubblegum wrapper (the “Pet Sounds trick”)? The less famous “Shades of Gray” is perhaps too earnest but it is still grappling with the modern condition. And then there’s my favorite, the song under consideration, written—are you listening, Marge?—by Micky Dolenz. Maybe it’s a little too earnest, still, but who wasn’t too earnest in 1968? And the song rocks! “Then ask your mommy and daddy ‘Who really killed JFK?’” Pete Townsend wishes he could write a song about generational conflict as angry and raw as this one!

If it was my blood spilling on the kitchen floor,
If it was my blood, mommy, would you care a little more?

They couldn’t release it of course. The Monkees gave you Head, but they couldn’t give you JFK and blood in the kitchen. I suppose this makes sense—at this time The Monkees were literally collaborating with Bugs Bunny to sell children Kool-Aid, so perhaps blood in the kitchen was not good marketing. The song was released—B-side and album track—in a sanitized, boringer version in 1969. But the original (released 20+ years later) is where it’s at.

30 Pictures of Matchstick Men by The Status Quo (1968)

This is it, the absolute catchiest hook ever composed, full stop. Perhaps not the best hook—our #4, still to be revealed, has the best hooks—but the catchiest.

A one-hit wonder in the US, [The?] Status Quo are incredibly popular in the UK. Like the most popular. They’re like the British Beatles!

I mean…you know what I mean.

29 Eve of Destruction by Barry McGuire (1965)

Ex-Christy Minstrel Barry McGuire would have had his own slice of immortality anyway, appearing as he does next to Roger McGuinn in the chorus of The Mamas and the Papas’ autobiographical “Creeque Alley,” but he also gave us one of the most unlikely #1 hits of the ’60s. 1965 is just too early in the decade for such apocalyptic despair, but here McGuire is, with a gravelly moan that sounds like he’s trying to imitate late-period Leonard Cohen if not Tom Waits (obv. impossible), complaining his way through a panorama of everything wrong with the world. McGuire sneers (every chorus!) at anyone who doubts that the eschaton is immanentizing.

I suppose this could be unendurable…and, sure, part of the fun of the song is that it works as high camp…but it’s also squarely within the (never campy!) folk-gospel tradition. As The King’s Sacred Quartet (or Roy Acuff) once sang, “This world can’t stand long…for it’s too full of hate.” If the righteous fury of the Lord doesn’t sweep everything away then we’ll just end up killing each other. McGuire castigates all of us everywhere, and pretty fairly. Red China: bad. Bloody Sunday in Selma, Alabama: bad. The specter of nuclear war: bad. Hypocritically hating your neighbor while giving lip service to love and tolerance: sure, that’s bad.

This song is like The Monkees’ “Mommy and Daddy” if Micky Dolenz were replaced by some sort of troll monster. But a troll monster’s post-apocalyptic voice is exactly what I want delivering my pre-apocalyptic sermons! “My blood’s so mad, feels like coagulatin’!”

28 Baby by Dinah Washington and Brook Benton (1960)

Jazz legend Dinah Washington and…um…perfectly fine singer Brook Benton were supposed to collaborate on an album (The Two of Us) of duets. Unfortunately, the two of them hated each other and were only able to lay four tracks down before irreconcilable differences prevented them from being in the same studio at the same time. They padded out the album, Ummagumma-style, with alternating solo efforts.

Best of the collaborations they actually managed to complete is “Baby” (subtitled, in parentheses that I usually ignore, “You’ve Got What It Takes”). I first heard this song without knowing the backstory and assumed the studio chatter (“Tell me about it”) was old friends ribbing each other (“You’re in my spot again, honey” / “I like your spot”). Turns out it was two professionals acting their way through a song, teeth gritted in anger; Benton steps on Washington’s line and she is mad (“Now it’s you”). Either way you parse it, the result is fascinating, a mini drama in real life livening up a duet that would be merely beautiful without it.

27 Captain Woodstock’s Courtship by Ian and Sylvia (1964)

Mitch and Mickey—excuse me, I meant to say Ian and Sylvia—followed the conventional path of singing together, marrying, and then divorcing. (Ian had earlier followed the less conventional path of only learning guitar while bedridden with injuries after his first plan, rodeo rider, hit its own conventional snag.) They sang conventional folk songs with the minor innovation that they were Canadian.

“Captain Woodstock’s Courtship” is, like many a 1960s folk song, from the Child collection, in which Woodstock bears the name Wedderburn. The name Woodstock is of course a red herring—this is 1964. Anyway, Ian and Sylvia, like good Canadians, sing a version collected in Nova Scotia, which checks out: Child’s Wedderburn is from Old Scotia.

“Wedderburn/Woodstock” is just another version of the riddling song that so angered Bluto in Animal House. The lyrics as rendered here are (as is the custom) strange and elliptical. Note that it starts with a first-person frame narrative, like a Conrad novel:

As I rode out one May morning down by a shady lane
I met with Captain Woodstock, the keeper of the game.
He said unto his servant, “If it was not for the law,
I’d have that maid in bed with me as she lay next to the wall.”

Well, that clears nothing up! The song immediately after becomes a dialogue, with the maid (Sylvia) proposing riddles and demands, which Woodstock (Ian) answers, a curious form of courtship; but I suppose this is “the law.”

And of course it’s an amazing song! Whatever special magic they were missing and We Five had for “You Were on My Mind” (q.v.), well, Ian and Sylvia had it for this one. The singing is so chipper and clear as a bell, in a way that makes no sense for a song about rapey medieval functionaries, but it’s perfect. The only misstep is the godawful ending, in which Ian and Sylvia join voices and draw out the chorus like the last line of a Broadway showstopper. They might as well yell “Streetcar!” But the rest is aces.

26 Wolverton Mountain by Claude King (1962)

At least 3/4 of the quality of “Wolverton Mountain” lies in the way Claude King pronounces the name “Clifton Clowers,” and the final quarter come from the coda that jumps up in tempo (“I don’t care about Clifton Clowers…”).

But even without those glorious eccentricities, the song would be great. As you doubtless know, it’s the story of a jealous father with the occult power to speak with animals, and his propensity to murder his daughter’s suiters. No bad song can be written with this premise. But King says Clowers and then the song is even better than it should be!

Against all odds, Clifton Clowers was a real person (presumably fictionalized here). He died in 1994 at the age of 102 on Wo[o]lverton Mountain in Arkansas.

25 Rolling Home by Peter, Paul, and Mary (1967)

Peter, Paul, and Mary are another Lev Grossman find—like Ian and Sylvia—or rather, a Lev Grossman fabrication, and it’s easy to treat them as a Monkees for the folk set. But like the Monkees, PP&M were good and kept getting better throughout the ’60s. Their Album 1700 is one of the most consistent records of the decade, and if you only know it for its hit (“Leaving on a Jet Plane”), you’re missing out.

“Rolling Home” is the first track on Album 1700. It can’t be the most Dylanesque track on the album, since they literally cover “Bob Dylan’s Dream” from Freewheelin’, but it is a fast-moving philosophical patter song with harmonica.

Truth, with all its far out schemes,
Lets time decide what it should mean;
It's not the time but just the dreams that die.

Elsewhere PP&M have sung more beautifully (Mary is relegated to the background on this track) or more, you know, accessibly, but this track, lyrically and musically weird as it is, is the one that haunts me the most.

24 I’m Gonna Wait until My Change Come by Sister Rosetta Tharpe (1966)

Sister Rosetta Tharpe was a gospel singer who sang gospel like it was rhythm and blues—before there ever was a rhythm and blues! She played electric guitar before it indicated selling out! Her best tracks (and the height of her considerable popularity) come from the 1940s, but she recorded and toured consistently in the years after. And in 1966 she was touring France…

“I’m Gonna Wait until My Change Come” is a live track from what may be (I waffle) the greatest live album of all time. Tharpe is playing guitar in what appears to be a small venue, and every moment of it is charming. Tharpe’s elementary French (“je vais vous chanter”) is charming, as is her relief at getting the French phrase out. “Merci beaucoup.” Her evident joy—and labor—in the performance is charming. Even the macaronic name Hot Club de France (not an actual location in 1966, just the jazz fanclub sponsoring the tour) is charming.

But who cares about charming? This is Sister Rosetta Tharpe, the greatest gospel singer of her age (although peak gospel predates Tharpe; peak gospel is 1927—my hot take), and she’s here to belt her songs out! It’s just her and guitar, so even though some of Tharpe’s ’50s records can get a little overproduced or verklempt (that organ!), this one is by necessity kept simple, the way it should be.

23 House of the Rising Sun by The Animals (1964)

No one has ever laid claim to a traditional, oft-covered song like Eric Burdon and The Animals did. After this one, all earlier versions of “House of the Rising Sun” sound anemic, which is weird because The Animals technically sanitized the song for 1964 standards and practices by genderflopping it. So instead of a tale about a woman falling into prostitution, it is about…THE EGG McMUFFIN APOCALYPSE!

22 Iko Iko by The Dixie Cups (1964)

The particulars of Mardi Gras parade customs and creole chants are completely alien to me and also anyone outside particular subcultures in New Orleans. The guy who wrote “Jock-a-Mo,” a song about dueling parade participants, seems (if this Wikipedia interview excerpt be believed) to only have a partial understanding. Someone (allegedly) heard “Jock-a-Mo,” sang it to her granddaughter, and that granddaughter was a member of girl group The Dixie Cups. The Dixie Cups sang the (perhaps half-remembered?) lyrics impromptu while banging on soda cans, and it happened to get recorded. With a telephone game like that, no wonder I can’t understand what the song is about!

But songs aren’t for understanding! Songs are for getting a half-perceived semiglimpse of something strange and transcendent that leaks in better here, with the soda can percussion and the overheardness of it all, than in the Dixie Cups’ other (also excellent) sides. Better, too, than all but ~21 other songs of the ’60s, of course.

21 Shake Sugaree by Elizabeth Cotten (1967)

One of the great guitarists of the mid twentieth century, Elizabeth Cotten is perhaps most famous for playing her instrument upside down—left-handed and self-taught, she just wound up with the bass strings at the bottom, a contrivance that ensures she sounds like no one else.

Cotten spent most of her life paying occasional guitar for family only, and has the craziest “getting discovered” story of any musician ever, which I will now recount:

She was a grandmother in her sixties and working the Christmas rush in a department store when she happened to locate (i.e. rescue) a missing child. The grateful mother spontaneously offered Cotten a job as a maid. This is good luck for all involved, but better luck was the fact that the grateful mother was modernist composer Ruth Crawford Seeger. Ruth’s husband was folk-musicologist Charles Seeger. The family kids included Pete Seeger, Peggy Seeger, and Mike Seeger. Approximately zero other households in America were more conducive to discovering that the maid, who one day picked up one of the innumerable guitars left lying around the house and idly started strumming, was a musical genius.

(You’ll notice that if she had learned on a “correct,” restrung guitar, she could hardly have picked up a random one at the Seegers’ and started playing. All the pieves fit like a well-made play.)

Seeger influence (and their home recordings) promoted Cotten’s music. and she had late-in-life celebrity as a folk singer. “Shake Sugaree” is a song Cotten used to play at night for her great-grandchildren—each kid was permitted to compose a verse, and the only thing keeping it from ranking higher is the fact that Cotten had so many grandkids that the song starts to wear out its welcome before the end. Can’t leave out anyone’s verse!

Many of Cotten’s recordings are instrumental, but when she sings she has a hoarse but emotive voice that makes me wish she sang more The vocals here, though, are by Cotten’s great-granddaughter 12yo Brenda Joyce Evans.

Everyone has a theory about what “Shake Sugaree” means, but none of them sound too plausible.

To be continued!

Adkins/Wood!

Ninja are the stage handlers, swathed in black, who set the scene and affect the lives of men (the players), but they are not characters in the play themselves. In this way, they are one with nature, for while onstage, they represent Nature, and Nature is eternal and everbalanced. ¶ So it must be in the life of the Ninja then…to play in the Great Game, yet be untouched by it; to remain honed to fighting edge, prepared, capable; to act in preservation of the balance Nature intends or for the pleasure of acting; to strive always to become a Man of Knowledge and lead by example, being both feared and loved.
•Ashida Kim, Ninja Secrets of Invisibility (1983).

The greatest events—they are not our loudest but our stillest hours. Not around the inventors of new noise, but around the inventors of new values does the world revolve; it revolves inaudibly.
•Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra (1883).

To live well is to live well hidden.
•Ovid, Tristia (ca. 15).

’Sblood! why didn’t nature clap a pair of long ears and a tail upon me, that I might be a real ass, and champ thistles on some common, independent of my fellow-creatures?
•Tobias Smollett, The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle (1751).

His greatest pleasure is
To see no man at all.
•Menander, Dyskolos (316 BC)

Even as a drop forecasts the sea
Two souls forecast calamity;
There are no friends, I thank my God,
In the old wall of my abode.
•E. Powys Mathers, “The Owl” (1925).

If you wish to shun some bitterness
and to beware of sorrows that gnaw the heart,
to no man make yourself too much a comrade:
your joy will be less and less will be your grief.
•Martial, Epigrams XII (103).

Now this I hate, to stand and be deciphered,
Pored on and puzzled through,
Like riddles that are read o’ winter’s nights,
When maids and boys have nought to prate on else.
•Henry Taylor, Isaac Comnenus (1827).

Right now, a dog tied up in the street is barking
With the grief of being left,
A dog bereft,
Right now, a car is parking.

The dog emits
Petals of a barking flower and barking flakes of snow
That float upward from the street below
To where another victim sits:

Who listen to the whole city
And the dog honking like a car alarm,
And doesn’t mean the dog any harm,
And doesn’t feel any pity.
•Frederick Seidel, “City” (2016).

Why meet we on the bridge of Time
to ’change one greeting and to part?
•Hâjî Abdû-el Yazdî, Kasîdah (1880).

Sources: Menander: trans. Phillip Vellacott, Theophrastus: The Characters / Menander: Plays & Fragments (Penguin, 1973); Mathers: Sung to Shahryar: Poems from The Book of the Thousand Nights and One Night (Boni, 1925); Martial: trans. Walter C. A. Ker, Martial vol. II (Loeb) (Harvard UP, 1978) with line breaks added; Seidel: Widening Income Inequality (FSG, 2016); some of this material is copyrighted, and I plead only fair use.

Ditko & Theakston!

If you find these annotations useful, please consider purchasing one of the books I wrote, or buying me a coffee (tea, most likely).

Chapter 50

p. 297
•epigraph: Nag Hammadi is an Egyptian city near which a collection of ancient gnostic texts were discovered in 1945. This epigraph comes from “The Thunder, Perfect Mind.” See also p. 41n for biblical parallels.

•Composition 15, Parallax 17, Euclid X: The changing titles Riccardo gives to his paintings offer if not a history of avant-garde art in the latter half of the twentieth century, at least Eco’s satirical impression of it. These titles are similar to several by Piet Mondrian, which puts Riccardo several decades behind the times.

•squats: Unofficially or illegally occupied buildings. Associated with the left on p. 315.

•Ce n’est qu’un debut: Fr., This is only the beginning. A catchphrase of the (quasi-revolutionary) French protests of May, 1968. The next few titles will be politically engaged, left-coded, and at least quasi-revolutionary.

•Molotov: Both the long-lived and unrepentantly Stalinist Soviet politician—and the eponymous improvised weapon favored by street-fighting types.

•A Hundred Flowers: “Let a hundred flowers bloom,” Chairman Mao said in 1956, signaling that differing viewpoints were now permissible and people could freely criticize the Party. Of course a year later the blooming flowers were culled.

p. 298
•In Praise of Ambiguity: Perh. a reference to Empson’s Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930)?

•A/Travers: A travers is Fr. for “through,” here leaning into a post-structuralist love of dividing words with slashes or parentheses.

•Ça: Fr., that.

•Denegation 15: Cf. Riccardo’s Composition 15, above.

•Megale Apophasis: The Great Declaration, a sacred text of the gnostic Simonians attributed to Simon Magus (Act 8: 9ff). From here on, Riccardo will be hermetic.

•quotations: Note that Riccardo is here postmodern in the specific way Eco lays out in Postscript to The Name of the Rose.

•pompiers: “Art pompier (literally ‘fireman art’) and style pompier are derisive late-19th century French terms for large ‘official’ academic art paintings of the time, especially historical or allegorical ones” (Wikipedia).

•Symbolists: Symbolism (in art as in literature) was mystical, dreamlike, decadent, and anti-realistic. Contemporary with but directly opposite to art pompier.

•Paradise of Doré: see p. 254n

•Beatrix: The Latin form of Beatrice, Dante’s muse.

•Mystica Rosa: Mary (see p. 203), but perh. here also the vast rose of divine love revealed in canto 30 of the Paradiso.

•Dante Gabriels 33: Dante Gabriel Rossetti, a pre-Raphaelite (and proto-Symbolist) painter, is clearly being referred to here (although Dante Alighieri, from above, and Gabriel the angel also obtain). Is the 33 just another of Riccardo’s numbered series (Denegation 15 etc.) or is the number important? Each book of the Divine Comedy has 33 cantos.

•Fedeli d’Amore: See p. 146. Four of the listed paintings refer in some way to Dante.

•Atanor: Another term for an athanor, an alchemical furnace last referenced (as athanor) on p. 14.

•Homunculus 666: 666 is obv. the number of the Beast; for homunculus see p. 347 etc.

•Sophia: see p. 15

•Guernica: Picasso’s 1937 painting depicting the fascist bombing of the eponymous town in Spain. What creature, though?

•Mondrian: See p. 297n. The joke is that whatever Mondrian is, he is not a “realist of the old school.”

•sitar music: As was popular some time before the book takes place, ca. Sgt. Pepper’s (1967).

p. 299
•pavé: A Brazilian desert reminiscent of a tiramisu.

•circular movement: Always cycles.

•bees hunting for a hidden flower: Proust again. See p. 230.

•Simon: I.e. Simon Magus from p. 298n.

p. 300
•put a beard on him: Return of the beard as disguise theme. See p. 79n.

•Ennoia: see p. 41

•Demiurge: see p. 14n

p. 301
•prostitute: Returning to the epigraph.

•Helen of Tyre: Traditional companion of Simon Magus. Longfellow writes

He [sc. Simon Magus] says: “From this evil fame,
From this life of sorrow and shame,
I will lift thee and make thee mine;
Thou hast been Queen Candace,
And Helen of Troy, and shalt be
The Intelligence Divine!”

•“bonfires along the highway for truck drivers”: This is just curious. I don’t understand.

•Guillaume Postel: Sixteenth-century French polymath and kabbalist. Cf. Vivian Postel du Mas (another real person, doubtless unrelated and four-hundred years later but sharing a name) on p. 315.

•a letter carrier: We await silent Tristero’s empire.

•Superman: Another comics reference. And Superman handily picks up the Jewish reference from the previous line…

p. 302
•“I love you”: And yet, as Byron writes (Don Juan VI): “And I love Wisdom [i.e. Sophia] more than she loves me.” See also p. 343, epigraph.

p. 303
•Allumeuse: Fr., a tease or a flirt.

•beyond good and evil: An obvious Nietzsche reference.

•perpetrate all sins: As some heretical sects, such as the Historioni in Borges’s “The Theologians” (1949), were said to attempt.

•“I am the saint and the prostitute”: An even more explicit reference to the epigraph.

p. 304
•cock-a-doodle-doo: Either an evocation of madness or a reference to cuckoldry—both the homophonous pun and the fact that a cuckold (at least in the German tradition) was called, and imagined as, a “rooster rider” (Hahnreiter).

Chapter 51

p. 305
•epigraph: The title translates as: Theatre of Various and Diverse Worldly Minds. Garzoni wrote (although perh. not in the quoted book; I’ve never read it) against and in refutation of Agrippa, the guy who provided the epigraph to the whole of FP (q.v.).

•Deutsches Museum: “The world’s largest museum of science and technology” (Wikipedia).

p. 306

•Marlowe of culture: Once again I proffer the question: Philip or Kit?

•bowels of the earth: Always subterranean.

•cellars: More subterraneanity. Surely a suggestion of “The Cask of Amontillado.”

•crèches: A crèche is on the one hand nativity scenes (suggesting a subterranean display, which might indeed call for (“ox and lamb”) stuffed animals; it is on the other hand a daycare center, which would, perforce, require another kind of stuffed animal. Perhaps giving children taxidermied specimens to play with sounds outre, but we’re already underground.

•“in the light of the sun or the moon”: I have not really been keeping track well, but I do think something could be done with the various kinds of light in FP: solar, lunar, crepuscular.

•“I’m suspicious of everything underground”: Well there you have it.

•sewers of Paris: see pp. 8 & 350

p. 307
•mouth of the underworld: Avernus, Roman entrance to Hades, was famous for emitting such fumes that birds flying overhead fell dead.

•journey to the center of the earth: Obv. subterranean, but even more obv. a Jules Verne reference, so see below.

•Master of the World: Master of the World, like Journey to the Center of the Earth, is the title of a Jules Verne novel.

•Saint-Yves d’Alveydre: see p. 309, right below

p. 309
•epigraph: As will be revealed shortly, Saint-Yves d’Alveydre was a French writer who visited Agarttha (see p. 4) in the hollow earth. “He wrote about this secret location in his Mission de l’Inde en Europe [India’s Mission in Europe] published in 1886. Worried he had revealed too much and apparently under the influence of his oriental contacts, he destroyed all but two copies of this book. One of which was owned by Gérard Encausse alias Papus [see p. 209], who edited and published it in 1910” (Wikipedia).

•Fabre d’Olivet: Antoine Fabre d’Olivet was a (French) revolutionary and also another hermeticist—but I want to pause on him here in light of Mission de l’Inde en Europe, because Fabre d’Olivet was born in Ganges (the French commune, not the Indian river, but still).

•humble clerk: I underlined these words and wrote next to them “Manutius” but I no longer remember what I meant. Can anyone help me here?

•Ministry of the Interior: Get it? Like Agarttha?

p. 310
•mésalliance: I.e. she married beneath her station.

•enharmonic spectrum…diatonic: Agliè has borrowed terms from (esp. ancient Greek) musicology: enharmonic and diatonic are two kinds of scales—the enharmonic scale has smaller intervals between notes than the more familiar diatonic scale. Somewhat oddly, the third kind of scale, chromatic, is the most directly related to the spectrum of visible light—but it goes unremarked upon here. Too exoteric, I guess.

•solar spectrum: But yeah, what I was saying on p. 306 about the different kinds of light…

•cyclic currents: Aways cyclic!

•interpolar and intertropical fluids: On p. 257 I made fun of the word fluids, but I guess it’s all here. Note that you can’t spell interpolar without Interpol.

Chapter 53

p. 312
•epigraph: J. M. Hoene-Wronski is the Józef Wroński from p. 258.

•wispy beard: Beard as disguise.

p. 313
•Eschenbach: Author of Parzival; see p. 141. I don’t remember this detail about going to India, but it’s been a long time since I read the poem.

p. 314
•a short circuit in the brain: De Angelis’s makes connections like Abulafia, and his description cannot help employing a computer metaphor.

p. 315
•“everything is connected”: I.e. tout se tient. See pp. 179, 289, & esp. 618.

•philosopheme: “A philosophcal formulation or principle: proposition” (MW).

•squats: see p. 297

•Action Française: Long lived far-right nationalist French group.

•Vivian Postel du Mas: Note the repeated Postel from p. 301.

•Jeanne Canudo: More commonly known as Valentine de Saint-Point, French Futurist.

•Fabian: The Fabian Society, a peaceful British socialist organization dedicated to amending society gradually, and not through revolution (a Fabian strategy, so-called). H.G. Wells & G.B. Shaw were not only members but kind of just emblematic of the vibe.

•Revue internationale des sociétés secrètes: Obv. this is the International Review of Secret Societies, an early C20 French journal, “rabidly anti-Semitic, biased, hateful and credulous to a degree that is hard to believe” (IAPSOP).

•La Sapinière: A.k.a. Sodalitium Pianum. Pope Pius X’s secret goon squad (1907–1914). Pope (avant la lettre) John XXIII was a member.

•cénacle: Fr., inner circle. More discussion on p. 360n.

p. 316
•”So it seems also to me, O Socrates”: Echoing Plato’s Socratic dialogues, passim.

• “I don’t know what Martinist means”: It really is confusing! See p279n.

•Front Populaire: A big-tent alliance of left-wing French groups, banded together against fascism.

•La Cagoule: Violent French right-wing group. We are scarcely out of conventional exoteric history here.

•Du Mas: I.e. Vivian Postel du Mas from the previous page, but note that the capitalization has changed. (Also Eco often cites the other guy named Dumas (3 Musketeers etc.…)

•Synarchie, panorama de 25 années d’activité occulte: Synarchy, an Overview of 25 Years of occult Activity.

p. 317
•Pétainist: Marshal Philippe Pétain was head of the Vichy French (i.e. collaborationist) government.

•Le 14e complot du 13 mai: The 14th Plot of May 13th.

•“As the man said”: The man, in this situation, is H.L. Mencken.

•“if, on a train, I find a bomb”: see p. 556

p. 318
•Tres: Its origin, in De Angelis’s obiter dicta. Tres is o.c. Spanish for 3, and homophonous with “trace”; a word that leaves but a trace?

Chapter 54

p. 320
•epigraph: For the record, Edgar is acting mad when he says this.

•“a gentleman of the old school”: So to speak.

•Turin: see p. 260n

•“a whole world to be discovered”: Cf. p. 202: “…it had hardly been worth crossing the Atlantic to discover a new world.”

p. 321

•glissons, à la guerre comme à la guerre: Fr., Let’s move on. In war you take it as it goes. Not the last time Garamond will say this (see p. 348).

Chapter 55

p. 323
•epigraph: For Fludd, see pp. 197, etc. For theaters, see pp. 282 etc.

•Adelino Canepa: see pp. 292ff.

•both visible and concealed: An unusual detail to spot at a glance. But o.c. thematic.

p. 324
•Georgic: As in relating to the Virgilian Georgics; rural/agricultural.

•wily Turk: A stock phrase, and perhaps a reference (“the first move”) to the Mechanical Turk, a (fraudulent) C18–19 chess-playing robot.

•Salesian: A Catholic “religious congregation”; perhaps not strictly a fraternal organization (like the Masons) but the next best thing.

p. 325
•the dream: see pp. 60–61

•bombardon: A bass tuba.

•“the partisans…occupied the town”: This statement seems to contradict one later in the same paragraph that “The Fascists mostly stayed holed up in the town.” My assumption (from the broader context) is that the partisans occupied the fields of the plain, and the quoted passage is simply an error.

•Franchi brigade: The Organizzazione Franchi; monarchist, liberal, anti-communist, and o.c. anti-fascist.

p. 326
•“what a memory!”: A strange thing, I think, to say to the narrator. A few documents aside, Casaubon’s memory is all the reader has. And perhaps Casaubon has learned a few of Agliè’s theater of memory tricks (p. 283).

•Black Brigade: Fascist paramilitary organization.

p. 327
•red or black: A Stendhal reference.

•“A corpse was a corpse…”: And now a Gertrude Stein reference.

•Combray: A village, the setting of (part of) Proust’s In Search of Lost Time; the first part of the first volume of which is titled “Combray,” and it ends with the famous madeleine episode.

•John Wayne: Note how the cowboy theme is undercut on the next page. Should probably be viewed as a reference to Jacobean drama, as Wayne’s signature director, John Ford, shares a name with the old (’Tis Pity She’s a Whore) dramatist. Or is that too much?

p. 328
•Hellzapoppin: An absurdist 1941 comedy film (and earlier stage musical, although clearly the film is meant here).

Chapter 56

p. 329
•epigraph: This appears to continue directly from the epigraph to Chapter 9 (p. 59).

•Spiritalia of Heron: Here’s Hero of Alexandria from p. 14 again, the book his Spiritalia seu Pneumatica (the title just means Pneumatics or Pneumatics, the two linked synonyms just representing Latin and (Latinized) Greek). Here’s a sixteenth-century engraving from the book, this one from an Italian translation (Spiritali di Herone Alessandrino).

•Tycho Brahe: Just an old Danish astronomer; just a joke. Tycho’s most famous feature is his missing nose, and here Casaubon “knows not” the correct name of Belbo’s teacher. Cf., though, “what a memory!” from p. 326. Is Casaubon just having us on?

•Domenico Savio: Student of Bosco’s (below); died Æ14 in 1857 and later canonized.

•Don Bosco: John Bosco, C19 priest and teacher; also canonized.

•embouchure: Honestly, embouchure—the positioning of the mouth when playing an instrument—does not usually refer to a callus.

•“not to puff out your cheeks”: Louis Armstrong (from two sentences earlier) is o.c. famous for doing just this (though not as much as Dizzy Gillespie, or perh., as Eco says, cartoon characters).

p. 330
•Ornette Coleman: Free-jazz saxophonist, and—there’s a lot to hate about saxophones, but this seems a strange place to draw the line.

p. 331
•“I believe all sin, love, glory are this…”: Eco’s (and Belbo’s) most beautiful passage.

•“perpetuation of the vile species”: Cf. Borges, “Tlön”: “Mirrors and copulation are abominable, because they both multiply the numbers of men” (and see p. 13n).

•warlike, angelic, apocalyptic, victorious: A litany of biblical (and extra-biblical) trumpet associations, leaning most perh. on Joshua 6:5b (“and when ye hear the sound of the trumpet, all the people shall shout with a great shout; and the wall of the city shall fall down flat”) and the various verses on “the last trump” (e.g. 1 Corinthians 15:52).

•Oscar Levant…Gene Kelly: Oscar Levant was frequently Gene Kelly’s pianist, although not on Broadway. Perh. a reference to the scene in Kelly’s American in Paris in which Levant imagines himself playing “Concerto in F” on Broadway?

•Salgari: Emilio Salgari, turn-of-the-century writer of pulpy adventure stories. See p. 357.

•“Sitting Bull eats General Custer’s heart”: Not actually a historical fact, although one of Sitting Bull’s allies (Rain-in-the-Face) did threaten to eat Custer’s brother’s heart. Apparently he did not get to.

•“they stole comic books”: Infamy!!!!

p. 332
•I quite clearly wrote “rtvadlk” at the top of this page. Any ideas on what I meant?

•“my little listeners”: Even when Belbo is speaking he cannot help but slip into kitsch.

•They Had to See Paris: A 1929 talkie comedy film. I don’t know if they’re putting on a dramatization of it or just showing an old movie?

•“Good Start”: I wish I had a better grip on whether this is a performance or just an intro to a film.

p. 333
•imagining absurd machines: Perh. a suggestion that the invented Plot is, in fact, not original?

• “only to discover, each time, that the machines had already been invented”: Cf. (perh. not for the last time) Eco’s own Open Work: “…everything in the world is already implied by everything else, from the beginning of time, in the same way that it now appears that every discovery has already been made by the Chinese.”

•as the poet says: The poet is Baudelaire, the poem “Hymne à la Beauté / Hymn to Beauty.” English translations tend to make the mayfly a moth, but in the original it’s “l’éphémère” (with a pun on mayfly / ephemera, a pun available in Italian as well. Google translate gives the poem as:

The dazzled mayfly flies toward you, candle,
Crackles, flares up, and says: Let us bless this flame!

Chapter 57

p. 335
•epigraph: This is the third epigraph from The Chemical Wedding (and will not be the last); it is the only one not about a trumpet. A virgin dressed in blue always suggests the Virgin Mary.

•”Like Darién, Diotallevi remarked, verbalizing these discoveries”: Darien would be from whence Balboa “star’d at the Pacific.” Keats, who famously misidentified Balboa as Cortez, calls the observer “silent upon a peak in Darien,” so by “verbalizing” the sight, Diotallevi ruins the moment.

p. 336
•third gear: Presumably not a metaphor; presumably just because they’re going uphill.

•Mercedes: On p. 284, Agliè says that the Oedipus Aegyptiacus “costs less than a Mercedes.” To me, Mercedes will always suggest the Count of Monte Cristo’s ex-girlfriend, but perh. that is not relevant here.

•Eleusinian: Spelled “Eleusian” on p. 275.

•fumes: Always fumes and odors.

•“dream that you are dreaming”: Cf. Poe: “All that we see or seem / Is but a dream within a dream.”

p. 337
•Salomon de Caus: Architect and engineer, he will appear again on pp. 401 & (subterraneanly) 460 (as well as pp. 338 & 350). I can find no evidence that he was himself a Rosicrucian, but certainly people (both inside and outside FP) have later attributed Rosicrucian motives to him. Note that he is sometimes called Caus, reminiscent, perh. of Casaubon.

•the great Rosicrucian century: C17.

•rocaille: “Rocaille was a French style of elaborate design that appeared in furniture and interior decoration during the early reign of Louis XV. A reaction against the heaviness and formality of the Louis XIV style, it featured an abundance of curves, counter-curves, undulations, and elements modeled on nature” (Wikipedia). Note that rocaille comes around a century after de Caus’s death.

•Atalanta Fugiens: Source of the epigraph of Chapter 4, p. 28 (q.v.).

•coral: Coral horns, the good luck charms, appear on pp. 163 & 177. If Maier had written seashells instead of coral, this would have anticipated Lia’s Chapter 63 speech (see pp. 201 & 362ff).

•“we can no longer read it”: Much like (for much of history) “the hieroglyphics of the Egyptians” (mentioned immediately above).

p. 338
•some small structures: These descriptions recall the edifices described in the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (1499), although I haven’t been able to find any actual correspondences.

•Picinelli: Filippo Picinelli, C16 Italian author of Il Mondo simbolico, an encyclopedia of emblems, or as we might say (Eco the semiotician) signs. The book takes images and describes, with attestations, their various symbolic importances. IMs was translated into Latin as Mundus Symbollicus.

•Alciati: Nickname of Andrea Alciato, C16 Italian humanist and author of the Emblemata, a completely different kind of emblem book. Alciati’s is a book of epigrammatic Latin poetry, and was later reprinted with emblematic illustrations accompanying each poem. Alciati dies only three years before the appearance of Il Mondo simbolico.

•sublunar: see p. 3n

•ruling the universe: Just as the earth is ruled from its center (Agarttha) so the universe is ruled from its center (Earth—at least Ptolemaically).

•“naiad…embracing a bull with the scaly tail”: Perh. the image actually depicts Europa and Zeus, his bull-form given a fishy tail in, e.g., this mosaic.

•“some great biblical fish”: Jonah 1:17a: “Now the Lord had prepared a great fish to swallow up Jonah.”

p. 339
•Nequaquam vacui: Usu. rendereed (e.g. on p. 193, q.v.) nequaquam vacuum. Is Agilè confusing the common phrase nequaquam vacuum with the common phrase horror vacui (horror of a vacuum)? Or is this a legitimate use of the genitive case?

•post hoc ergo ante hoc: Here made manifest is a concept we have encountered time and time again. An important concept for Eco—see his Interpretation and Overinterpretation (1990).

•facies hermetica: see p. 267

•“What counts, remember, is to possess a secret”: Agliè’s mantra.

p. 340
•Quod ubique, quod ab omnibus, et quod semper: The so-called Vincentian canon, a threefold test of canonical Catholic belief, formulated C5 by St. Vincent of Lérins. One must believe what has been believed (as the Latin says) “everywhere, by everyone, and always.” Here the canon is being used somewhat contrary to its intended use (of establishing dogma).

•“a girl wrapped in a blue garment spangled with golden stars. In her hand she held a trumpet”: Note the connection to various previous quotations from Andreae on pp. 329 & 335.

•wings…eye: Wings with eyes are a feature of esp. Byzantine angels.

•“more things in heaven and earth”: Garamond is quoting his own imprint, Project Hemes, ellipsis and all; see p. 265.

•CONDOLEO ET CONGRATULATOR: Lat., condolences and congratulations. Another reference to The Chemical Wedding. In a passage somewhat anticipating Kafka’s “Before the Law” (1915), the narrator spies a gate with “two columns on one of which stood a pleasant figure with this inscription, Congratulor. The other having its countenance veiled was sad, and beneath was written, Condoleo.” Jung famously cites this passage in his Mysterium Coniunctionis (1955).

•“through the curtain”: Should I have made a bigger deal of this before? Perceiving things despite the barrier of a curtain suggests a host of allusions, including the rending of the temple curtain (Matthew 27:51 etc.) and the exposure of the Wizard of Oz.

p. 341
•bilocation: Pythagoras (q.v.) is perh. the most famous (and first? practitioner of this technique.

•yogis: Yoga practitioner. The gravity of the term yogi has been somewhat subverted by more modern allusions.

•vegetable essences: Cf. the “ vegetable lethargy” of the soulless homunculi (p. 346).

•telluric form: Although telluric forces run through FP almost from the beginning (pp. 11ff), this is the first time it is linked to teleportation.

•musée Grévin: Parisian wax museum. An Anglophone writer would have used Madame Tussauds.

•tenda de umbanda: see p. 176

•Lenci felt: “Lenci dolls are wool felt dolls that feature heat-pressed wool faces with painted features. They typically have intricately made wool and organdy clothing, adorned with elaborate felt flowers, hats, and/or accoutrements. They are at the top end of the luxury goods market. Today they are considered highly prized collectibles” (Wikipedia).

•Gabrieli: Giovanni Gabrieli, renaissance Italian composer.

•Black Madonna: See p. 145 in general, but perh. esp. La Morenata, the Virgin of Montserrat, a sacred Catalonian statue.

p. 342
•Hamlet: Hamlet, o.c., has been quoted as recently as p. 340.

•Madame Bovary: For the reality of Emma Bovary, recall Flaubert’s quip, “Madame Bovary, c’es moi,” and Woody Allen’s 1977 short story “The Kugelmass Episode” (pdf).

•epiphanies: Lit. appearances or manifestations.

•Golden Calf: Aaron’s heretical idol in the desert (Exodus 32:4).

Chapter 58

p. 343
•epigraph: Trithemius last appeared on p. 133–34. His text describes allegorically Belbo’s relationship with Lorenza.

•“that had first struck me as cheap”: High and low, art and kitsch, are again confused (as, e.g., in FP’s dabbling in genre conventions).

•subaqueous: For once not subterranean!

•“the floor reflected the ceiling”: As above, so below, as Hermes Trismegistus (see p. 14) would say.

•Indian incense: More vapors!

•“two reptiles…a single circle”: For reptiles biting their tails see p. 195. In alchemy, the canonical chemical wedding is the marriage of sulfur (red) and mercury (usu. white but due to its associations with water also possibly blue)—so here that conjunction of opposites is represented visually (as was the custom in alchemical texts). Cf. the dueling dragons in the Prophecies of Merlin (Prophetiæ Merlini) by Geoffrey of Monmouth (ca. 1135), in which the dragons were colored a more conventional red and white—but there the gloss on their meaning, from Merlin, is historical and not alchemical.

p. 344
•Rebis: “The Rebis…is variably identified as either or both the end product of the alchemical magnum opus (or great work) or/and the initial state of matter. It is heavily associated with the principle of hermaphroditism, or the combination of the male and female sexes into one being” (Wikipedia).

•Work of the White: The four phases of alchemy’s Great Work are (in order) black, white, yellow, and red. This one’s a purifying phase.

•White Copper, Immaculate Lamb, etc.: This list appears to come primarily if not entirely from the works of Antoine-Joseph Pernety (e.g. the 1898 translation An Alchemical Treatise on the Great Art).

•nuptial banquet: What follows is an approximation of the fourth day of the Chemical Wedding. The parts that recall the Grail quest—elderly king, banquet, warrior—are all in the CW original.

p. 345
•pendulum: !!!

•“Lorenza was gone”: Thus she disappoints all, as promised on p. 341.

•carbuncle: Borges, in his Book of Imaginary Beings (1957/1967), describes the carbuncle as a legendary beast with a glowing gem in its forehead. Also a term for a gem, of course, but this one illuminates.

•alembics: see p. 279n

p. 346
•fumes: Again!

•a bird: Clearly a type of the phoenix (radiant/ashes).

•golden trumpets: I’m just saying.

•insufflate: To blow something into something else—usu. a medicinal powder into a patient.

•Mysterium Magnum: Lat., great mystery, o.c. “Paracelsus and other alchemists employed the term ‘Mysterium Magnum\’ to denote primordial undifferentiated matter” (Wikipedia).

•a Thing: The ding an sich, the thing in itself—Kant’s term for reality as it really is, as opposed to how it is perceived. What the Great Work is groping for, at least for some.

Chapter 59

p. 347
•epigraph: Despite the many references to his work and thought, this is actually only the second appearance of Paracelsus in FP (after p. 133). The quotation is really too on point.

•measurements: Cf. the kiosk on p. 288, but more appositely Simon Studion on p. 196.

p. 348
•Cartesian imps: AKA Cartesian divers, a science-fair experiment or novelty device that bobs up and down in a bottle of water, apparently of a will but actually due to principles of buoyancy.

•automata: FP’s fear of automata starts way back on p. 11; see also p. 283n (“claim a miracle”).

• à la guerre comme à la guerre: Another stock phrase of Garamond’s; see p. 321.

•agogô: See p. 164 and esp. 212–13

•philter: see p. 231

Chapter 60

p. 349
•epigraph: Artephius “a writer to whom a number of alchemical texts are ascribed. Although the roots of the texts are unclear and the identity of their author obscure, at least some of them are Arabic in origin” (Wikipedia). Note that the presence of a labyrinth is always a Borges reference.

•“like the bell of a trumpet”: Hmmm.

•Ear of Dionysius: A cave with special acoustics through which the tyrant Dionysius of Syracuse would eavesdrop on prisoners kept therein. The famous whispering gallery in Grand Central Station, NYC, is another example of such a place.

•“I’ll tell you something I’ve never told anyone else”: The following lament comes sometimes word for word from Antoine-Joseph Pernety, op. cit., where it is ascribed to the fifteenth-century English alchemist George Ripley.

•soul of Saturn: Another name for the the Prima Materia—i.e., the prime material, the philosopher’s stone, perh. the Rebis.

•aes ustum: Lat., burnt copper (or bronze). An old term for copper oxide.

•saffron of Mars: Iron oxide.

•aqua vitae: Lat., water of life. Alcohol.

•sperm of the stars: Various ancient legends ascribe power (usu. ill) to matter emitted from the stars, but I don’t know what in particular Eco, Balsamo, Pernety, or Ripley is referring to here.

•chelidon: Martin Rulandus’s Lexicon of Alchemy (1619) defines chelidonia as gold and chelidonius as any one of several kinds of precious stones with magical properties, often found inside swallows or tortoises. Take your pick what is used here.

•placentas: !!!

• “even…”: “What counts, remember, is to possess a secret.” R.H. Blyth wrote (Zen and Zen Classics vol. 4 (1966)): “Zen is this row of dots,” but perh. we are just better off not knowing what comes after placentas. Ripley himself trails off before this part of the list (“and an infinity of other things”).

•Balsamo: Giuseppe Balsamo, the real name of Cagliostro (q.v.). Now, the question is: Are we supposed to recognize this as a character, one of the Diabolicals? Another alias for St. Germain? Or is it a one-off joke?

p. 350
•Heidelberg…Caus: see p. 337

•Malraux: Novelist Andre Malraux, as Minister of Cultural Affairs, cleaned off the filthy façades of Parisian buildings.

•sewers: Both the subterranean theme and Salon’s particular bugaboo; see p. 308.

•Cloaca Maxima: Lat., greatest sewer. Rome’s ancient sewer.

•Colbert: Jean-Baptiste Colbert, First Minister of State under Louis XIV. Perh. significantly, since we’ve been talking about architecture, his sewer project began in 1666, the year of the Great Fire of London, which disaster allowed the rebuilding of London along new lines (Wren, etc.).

•Man in the Iron Mask: Both a real prisoner under the reign of Louis XIV (about whom much speculation) and the title of a Dumas novel (in which the masked prisoner is the king’s twin brother).

p. 351
•Ça alors: Fr., Well I’ll be.

•tapis franc: Fr., “a low or unsavoury tavern or cabaret; sot-hole, grog-shop, pothouse” (Wiktionary).

•pègre: Fr., “underworld, mob (part of society that is engaged in crime or vice)” (Wiktionary).

•Légendes: Fr., legends, obv.

p. 352
•rocaille: See p. 337, but isn’t the grammar weird here?

•phonurgic: Relating to the science of acoustics.

•Nibelungs: see p. 72

p.353
•epigraph: Arcanum Hermeticae Philosophiae Opus = Arcane Work of Hermetic Philosophy. Three heads of water, earth, and air, leave only the traditional dragon element of fire. References to the Golden Fleece abound in FP, but usu. concerning the Oder of the Golden Fleece: see pp. 144, 197, 354, 382, 401, etc.

•“those characters in Greek myth”: E.g.g: Actaeon, Tiresias, to some extent Semele (not “the wrath of the gods” but natural consequences there). Cf. Orpheus.

•“tinfoil or some metal leaf, gold and silver”: Again what is low is confused with what is high. Since this is tin and gold, the confusion points not only to Hermes Trismegistus (as above, so below) but to alchemy (transmuting base metals to gold). Note that tinfoil is what paranoids use to make their hats.

•“set in motion by the flames”: As in an eolopile—see p. 14.

•“precious stones—or bits of glass”: High and low again.

p. 354
•Renaissance portrait: This portrait of Prince Eugene of Savoy has the medallion around his neck, not his waist, but was the best I could find.

•stilettos or paper knives: Again the linking of opposites.

•Pink Panther: The cartoon character, of course, who walks to a mellow Henry Mancini jazz score.

p. 355
•San Gennaro: St. Januarius, patron saint of Naples; his blood (stored in an ampoule) miraculously liquifies on holy occasions.

Chapter 62

p. 356
•epigraph: Les druides. Les sociétés initiatiques celtes contemporaines = The Druids: Contemporary Celtic Initiatory Societies.

•Little Red Riding Hood: Presumably that they are on their way to be eaten by a wolf? Note that Casaubon’s prodigious memory (p. 326) has (“I don’t recall it exactly”) failed him here.

•Mikil: This I can find nothing on.

p. 357
•“Certain places have more magic than others”: Elementary tellurism.

•”the three hallouines of Lisieux, Clonmacnoise, and Pino Torinese”: Hallouine of course suggests Halloween, but I can’t get past that. Pino Torinese is right next to Turin (p. 260n), though. (Clonmacnoise is a ruined Irish monastery.)

•dolmen: An ancient megalithic tomb; a flat stone roof balanced atop two or three pillars, creating a kind of chamber.

•“blew a trumpet”: Yes, yes.

•Aïda: The Verdi opera set in ancient Egypt: see p. 260n. This is the triumphal march.

•ramsing: Usu. ramsinga, a sigmoid copper Indian trumpet [!]. Belbo (characteristically) is invoking Salgari’s Mystery of the Black Jungle (1895): “Beneath the earth [!] the mysterious roar was heard for the third time, and from the trunk of the banyan tree rang out the clear, brassy note of the ramsinga.” In Salgari, the Thugs are being summoned.

•Thugs: Here, o.c., murderous Kali-worshippers.

•subterranean currents: A more overt discussion of what is often…underground.

p. 358
•sibyl: see p. 275n

•Dantean nose: Check out Dante’s nose:

•cicatrix: A scar. A word to rhyme with Picatrix, q.v.

p. 359
•“O pegnia (oh, e oh!) et eee uluma!!!”: I cannot translate this, but I want to say that the Italian original has “O pegnia (oh, e oh! intus) et eee uluma!!!”—why did Weaver drop the intus? Also: note those three bangs (!!!); Eco doesn’t use that trick again!

Chapter 63

p. 360
•epigraph: A surprisingly accessible (esp. to English speakers) source.

•Réaumur cylindrical stove: More commonly called a cupola furnace; invented or reinvented in the C18 by French entomologist (!?) René Antoine Ferchault de Réaumur.

•Deutsches Museum: see p. 305

•astrological cénacles: A cénacle in an upstairs room, and in Christian parlance a prayer group. Presumably the astrological minded have similar gatherings? Easier to stargaze from an upstairs room. But see also p. 315n for perh. a simpler explanation.

•Newton: Famously Newton added extra colors (incl. spurious indigo) to the spectrum to ensure there were seven colors matching seven musical notes matching seven planets. And all the other relevant stuff about Newton.

•“I’m like Amparo; I don’t believe in it, yet I surrender to it”: This is stated perh. most explicitly on p. 617.

p. 361
•Celtic and Amerindian: Not the two I would have picked. Perh. the existence of fairy folk / wee folk over and around the realm of humanity?

•file of cross-references…thin as a rail: One would expect Eco to jokingly follow a mention of the file with an immediate reference, but he subverts our expectations by providing two absolute cliches (one verbal, one (the mothering Italian woman encouraging food consumption) situational that are too widespread to be a reference to anything.

•Coney Island, Moscow May Day, Jubilee Year: At least here Eco gives us what we want—analogies in defense of analogies. Coney Island is the iconic fairground, May Day (international workers’ day) is of course a party in Soviet Russia, and Jubilee in ancient Israel was every fiftieth year (Leviticus 25) when debts were forgiven, etc.

p. 362
•serene wisdom: Cunningly, Lia’s speech is a microcosm of FP and the Plan.

p. 363
•hippopotamus: “Another intriguing behavior of hippos is that they roar in the morning at sunrise and in the evening at sunset. The Egyptians possibly interpreted this behavior as a greeting and farewell to the sun. And the sun’s travel was seen as an eternal cycle of rebirth that the deceased hoped to join. Hippopotami were thus associated with life, regeneration, and rebirth” (Met).

•Sphinx: See p. 177. A reference, o.c., to Oedipus’s riddle specifically.

p. 364
•menhir: Prehistoric standing stone; a proto-obelisk. Freudian, o.c. (as is, usu. Oedipus, immediately above, right?).

p. 365
•pregnant: Thus Lia’s model of the universe bears fruit, so to speak.

•“we had entered Gevurah”: In fact, we had entered Gevurah on p. 217.

•Moses Cordovero: C16 kabbalist. “His encyclopedic works became a central stage in the development of Kabbalah” (Wikipedia).

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