The Magic of Titles

This blog post is pretty much a repackaging of old goods. I've written about the magic of titles before, and I've given lists of my favourite titles before. Recently I decided I'm going to keep an ongoing list of these, just as I keep an ongoing list of lesser-known Irishisms.

I don't know why I seem to care about titles more than anybody. It's a subject I stop myself from talking about in polite company as I realize nobody cares. I talk about boring things instead. Well, this is my blog and I can indulge myself.

It's hard to describe just how much an evocative title means to me. It haunts me. It lingers in my imagination. It awakes the sort "sehensuche" that C.S. Lewis has described so vividly, a desire for something, we know not what, where the desire itself is intensely pleasurable.

The titles I love usually appeal to me for one of several reasons. They express immense wistfulness or yearning; they evoke the magic of time and place in a way that captures my imagination; or they romanticize life (or some part of life) in a particularly vivid way.

I don't like titles that are simply quirky for its own sake, and I've become more fastidious about this.

Anyway, here's the beginning of my list. The titles in bold are the ones I've actually read, watched, or listened to-- at least, to some degree. I've also provided links to obscure or lesser-known works.

BOOKS AND PLAYS

A Year in Provence.

University Ghost Story.

The Winter's Tale.

A Midsummer Night's Dream.

Goodybe to All That.

A Girl in Winter

Tuesdays with Morrie.

The Puppet-Show of Memory.

The Loved Body's Corruption: Archaeoogical Contributions to the Study of Human Mortality.

Boys and Girls Forever: Chidlren's Classics from Cinderella to Harry Potter.

Light Moving in Time: Studies in the Visual Aesthetics of Avant-Garde Film.

Celluloid Skyline: New York and the Movies.

Too Small a World: The Life of Mother Francis Cabrini.

A Page Falls Open: Stories and Poems from Irish Writers.

Goodybe Hessle Road.

The Haunted Screen: Ghosts in Literature and Film.

Echoes Down the Corridor: Irish Theatre-- Past, Present, and Future.

Home Before Night.

Out After Dark.

ALBUMS

Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating in Space.

Love and the Russian Winter.

Dark Side of the Moon

SONGS

There Is a Light That Never Goes Out.

FILMS

Ice Cold in Alex.

Alice Doesn't LIve Here Anymore.

Never Say Never Again.

A Man for All Seasons.

Life with Father.

Seven Years in TIbet.

Dead of Night.

A Night to Remember.

TV SHOWS

It Ain't Half Hot, Mum.

Auf Wiedersehen, Pet.

A Contradiction

This has long seemed like a contradiction to me: society believes in childhood innocence, and yet it also believes in complete sexual explicitness for adults. In fact, any kind of argument for modesty or restraint in fiction, television, music, etc. etc. is attacked as puritanism, prudery, and nay-saying.

Chidlren are somehow meant to travel around in bubbles of innocence which are entirely untouched by the sea of salaciousness around them.

Further, parents are somehow meant to be solely responsible for keeping these bubbles intact-- as though they could watch their children every single moment of every day.

It seems ludicrous to me. Should there really be such radical discontinuity between childhood and adulthood? Can we really have childhood innocence without also aspiring towards chastity and modesty in adults, and in their entertainments?

On the Other Hand...

Yesterday I posted about classic British sitcoms I never found funny.

One of them was Are You Being Served? Conscious I'd never watched more than a few minutes of it, I decided to give it a go. (Nearly all these old sitcoms are on YouTube, to some extent or other.) It was every bit as bad as I imagined. You could see the jokes coming-- not just a mile away, but from the distant horizon.

While I was at it, I thought I'd try another classic British sitcom, one that I hadn't included on the list because I've probably seen about five minutes of it all told. That's Open All Hours. I always just assumed it would be awful.

Initially, my prejudice was confirmed, especially with the drawn-out gags involving the shopkeeper's stutter-- which I don't find "offensive", just tedious. But the more I watched, the more I warmed to it. On the basis of one episode, I've concluded that Open All Hours was pretty good, and I'm going to watch more of it. I should have known, really. Ronnie Barker was rarely in anything bad. In fact, I can't think of an example, unless it's Going Straight, the follow-up to Porridge. And that was mediocre rather than outright bad.

Should One Make Any Evaluative Comment About Oneself?

1) Bragging is obnoxious, although sometimes it can be endearingly child-like and guileless. I've known a few people who were unabashed braggers and honestly, I sometimes found it endearing. But this occurs in a particular personality type-- like Mr. Toad in Wind of the Willows. Mostly it's just obnoxious.

2) Humble-bragging is obnoxious and it's never endearing. "Oh, I have so many friends and they all want a piece of me, I can never keep them happy, what's a soul to do..." You know.

3) Self-criticism looks promising but it's often just an inverted form of bragging, albeit in a different way to humble-bragging. It's in order to show how much he can spare, as Dr. Johnson said. Or else it's to advertise one's frankness, unfliching honesty, humility, etc. etc. Or to fish for praise.

4) Really brutal self-criticism can just embarrass the people around you. What are they supposed to say?

So my question remains. Is it better form just not to praise or criticize yourself at all?

I would make an exception for comical boasting and self-criticism, if they really are comical and not a stealthy form of any of the above.

Everyone is Conservative About What He Knows Best

That's a fairly well-known aphorism which was coined by Robert Conquest. But is it true?

I often find myself thinking about it. The strange thing is, it seems mostly true, but there are many counter-examples. For instance, Picasso and Dali were undeniably extremely accomplished at traditional painting and drawing, and yet they were revolutionaries. Or-- another example-- Charles Dickens knew the law-courts and government bureaucracy up close, and it made him something of a revolutionary. Another example is Hilaire Belloc, who lost all faith in the party system after becoming an MP. Another example is Bobby Fischer, who is often called the greatest chess player of all time but wanted to radically change the rules (I mean the literal rules of chess) in his later days.

I think it might be nine-tenths true, with one-tenth of strong counter examples.

Two New Ones on Me

I've just encountered the word "lagniappe" in my reading. I'd never heard it before. It means, according to Wikipedia, "a small gift given to a customer by a merchant at the time of a purchase (such as a thirteenth doughnut on purchase of a dozen)." I'd never heard that. 

Even more intriguingly, at the end of the Wikipedia article comes this little nugget: "In Ireland, the term "luck penny" (or "luckpenny") denotes a lagniappe."

Never heard that, either!

Classic British Comedies I Never Found Funny

1) Some Mothers Do 'Ave 'Em. (OK, it was sometimes funny. But mostly it was just annoying.)

2) Morecambe and Wise. Give me the Two Ronnies any day. Morecambe and Wise never seemed like British humour to me. They were too zany, they weren't grounded in the real world like great British humour. Granted, I haven't watched much of them.

3) Last of the Summer Wine. Oh, my God. It was SO bad it's almost beyond words. My father used to watch it and defend it as "gentle" comedy. Yes, it was gentle. It was also terrible.

4) Are You Being Served? To be fair, I've never watched an entire episode, but it seemed pretty vacuous to me from the few scenes I did watch.

5) The Vicar of Dibley. Often disgusting, condescending, predictable.

6) Dad's Army. OK, this wasn't terrible-- it had its moments-- but I've never understood why it's so beloved.

That's about enough, unless I think of more.