"I feel strongly that the essence of Charlie Brown is premature existential despair and world weariness..."

"... and both this song and the holiday special give you an inaccurate idea of the Charlie Brown ratio of despair to maudlin moments of transcendence. Then again, there’s a sort of evocative melancholy in this song that’s making me regret placing it here, scores of slots below 'Dominick the Donkey.' Eh, it’s probably fine."

Writes Alexandra Petri, explaining her placement of "Christmas Time Is Here" at #80 on "A ranking of 100 — yes, 100 — Christmas songs" (WaPo). 

I found her reasoning very amusing, throughout. Maybe you don't have access to WaPo, but — if you have Spotify — here's the whole list:

"One of the emotions the writer didn’t name explicitly in her article was that of compersion..."

"... defined as the experience of being happy for your partner’s happiness including when they have had sex with a partner other than yourself. This feeling is hard for committed monogamists to understand and certainly many therapists would have difficulty trusting that this emotion is authentic since we have all been brought up in a world where jealousy seems the norm. It’s not that non-monogamous individuals never feel jealousy, they just work on it in a deeply committed way while also feeling compersion. So when a client of mine is expressing joy that his wife is experiencing a new kind of arousal with her boyfriend, most traditional therapists might look for some sort of pathology as to why this husband isn’t exclusively feeling jealous of his wife’s partner."

From "Open, Non-Monogamous, Poly or Designer Relationships/What the NY Times Article Missed and What Therapists Need to Learn" by sex therapist Sari Cooper in Psychology Today.

Compersion, eh? This is a coinage specific to the polyamory movement. I can see it's been in The Urban Dictionary since 2004. It appears exactly once in the NYT archive — 20 years ago in "They Call It Polyluv"*:

Jealousy, predictably, is a polylover's pox, which is why Loving More and its counterpart, the San Francisco-based Sacred Space Institute, sponsor therapeutic workshops. Facilitators like Deborah Anapol, Sacred Space's director, use exercises like ''jealousy compersion challenge'' (in which you practice feeling glad that your mate is with another) and soothing group massage (above). Hill says several four-or-more-somes have met on Loving More's web site; some have even ''married'' -- with as many as six figurines on the wedding cake.

What's the etymology of that coinage? It looks like it might be a portmanteau of "compassion" and "person." It can't be "compassion" and "perversion." I found an entry in "The Book of Human Emotions: From Ambiguphobia to Umpty":

Here's the Wikipedia article on Kerista, in which the great science fiction writer Robert A. Heinlein makes a surprising appearance. In 1966, Heinlein wrote to his agent:

"I recently learned that [Stranger in a Strange Land] was considered the 'New Testament' - and compulsory reading - of a far-out cult called 'Kerista.' (Kee-rist!). I don't know exactly what 'Kerista' is, but its L.A. chapter offered me $100 to speak. (I turned them down.)"

___________________

* I assume the headline is a deliberate allusion to the old Paul Anka song: And they called it puppy love...

Paul Anka takes the highway.

It won't be "My Way."

Who got to him?

Paul Anka steps on Obama's "My Way" and agrees to perform at the inaugural dance for Trump.

Did you remember Paul Anka wrote the lyrics to the song that drives some people crazy? The original lyrics are French, "Comme d'habitude":



In 1968, David Bowie tried writing English lyrics. Bowie's version is "Even a Fool Learns to Love":



Frank Sinatra rejected Bowie's lyrics:

"I was so pissed," said Bowie later. "I thought, 'God, I could have done with that money'. And so I wrote Life on Mars, which was sort of a Sinatra-ish parody, but done in a more rock style."

And the work went to Paul Anka.

Now, just a couple days ago, HuffPo put up "This Farewell Mashup Of Obama Singing ‘My Way’ May Leave You Misty":

And suddenly, the news comes out that Paul Anka is going to sing the song for Donald Trump:

An insider tells the site, "Paul was asked by the members of the Trump inauguration committee and he was only too happy to do it for his longtime friend. While everyone else was running scared from performing at the inauguration, Paul stood fast. He wasn't about to be intimated [sic] by anyone!"

Anka will be singing special re-written he-did-it-Trump's-Way lyrics. We can only guess what changes he'll make to the lyrics. You can't start with "And now, the end is near...." even though that's a perfect line from the Trump hater's viewpoint — along with "Yes, there were times, I'm sure you knew/When I bit off more than I could chew...."

And, whatever you do, wear a shirt — "That’s Just. The Fucking. Way. It Is!"

Toning up the rhetoric, paying attention.

Hey, Sarah Vowell is the new guest columnist at the NYT. I love her hilarious, never-padded writing. I'm immensely enjoying the audio version of her current book "Assassination Vacation." So it's great to see her here.

A taste:

Seeing [Pat] Robertson in that commercial with Bono - and Bono's hair - is a little like listening to Paul Anka's new recording of Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit." At first, it's jarring to hear the guy who wrote "Puppy Love" for Donny Osmond sing Kurt Cobain's lyrics: "a mosquito, my libido." But listen hard and you can hear what Anka hears. He doesn't hear the ranting of weirdos. He hears the poetry, the architecture of a justifiably standard song like "Autumn in New York," like "Fly Me to the Moon."

See how there's something to see in every phrase? I love that!

Anyway, tucked away in this piece that's mostly about aid to Africa, she has this on topic of replacing Sandra Day O'Connor:

On Monday, anticipating an epic dust-up regarding his new nominee for the Supreme Court, President Bush said he hoped that special-interest groups on both sides would "tone down the heated rhetoric." They shouldn't, though.

This is about the lifetime appointment of a person who will be making life and death decisions for millions of people for decades to come, not about some petty time waster like - come on, again? - flag burning. It's so important that we should agree to melt together on the slopes of a Kilauea of issue-ad spew.

Here's the front-page NYT story about the request to tone down the rhetoric on the Supreme Court appointment. I disapprove of exaggerated rhetoric myself, much as I enjoy selecting the juiciest nuggets of it for blogging purposes. But I do think it's right to argue about who belongs on the Court. It's terribly good for us to engage with this, especially to learn to detect when we are being played and to grasp what matters and what really doesn't. Vowell is correct to flag flag-burning as one of the unimportant issues that are used to manipulate ordinary people while the powerful jockey to get the things they really care about.

This is an excellent time for everybody to pay attention. The President would like you to calm down, sit back, and believe that he's carefully studying all the credentials and will decide whom to nominate based on the highest of principles, at which point you're supposed to boo anyone would would obstruct the slick path to confirmation. But you shouldn't do that.

UPDATE: I note that the Times let Vowell make a huge gaffe. Paul Anka did not write "Puppy Love" for Donny Osmond. Paul Anka was himself a teen idol, circa 1959, and "Puppy Love" was one of his many hits. Donny Osmond simply did a cover version, years later.

The American Idol finale.

Well, I found that all quite ugly and boring. I thought it was just mean to show over and over that the judges preferred Fantasia, especially when Simon criticized Diana for the unbelievability of the words of the damned song they forced her to sing! And there is a limit to how much credit Fantasia deserves for the fact that Summertime is a beautiful song. Frankly, I thought there was a lot of weird yelling, a lot of lame judicial pimping, and a lot of insanely inappropriate gospel choir embellishment. And that horrid song, "I Believe"? That's the kind of song that makes me never want to hear music again. I really don't care who wins, and I really don't want to hear the ridiculous assertions people are going to make if Diana wins. But I'll just say, I think, if Diana wins--and she probably will--it will be because they generated sympathy by being mean to her and undermined their credibility by gushing over Fantasia. The worst remark was Simon's saying that Fantasia is the best of all American Idol contestants: there are quite a few Clay Aiken fans who should hit the ceiling over that and even some sensible, rational Kelly and Ruben fans who can take offense. Even the old Frenchie fans can get mad. And they may all express it tonight by voting for Diana. I do think Fantasia is the better of the two, but I don't think she sang very nicely tonight. But there is one thing I'd like to say about the show tonight and that is that I got a big laugh when it seemed as though the show was all over and they announced momentously: here's Paul Anka--as if we cared. And then this leathery orange being emerged and croaked "My Way." The hell?