Tom Lehrer's songs, a Robert Pinsky poem (about his love of a certain classic sf magazine, or more likely, the kinds of stories it promised)

Robert Pinsky, in the 28 July New Yorker: "Astounding Stories" (the story most thoroughly referred to in the poem seems likely to be James Blish's "Surface Tension", which was first published in the 1950s insurgent sf magazine Galaxy and was voted into the anthology The Science Fiction Hall of Fame by the members of the SFWA, the SF Writers of America)

Tom Lehrer: the Songs and Lyrics site (might disappear soon, though it's been up with that warning since 2022, and it has been Lehrer's own)

Tom Lehrer: The Copenhagen Concert

TL: That Was the Year That Was  

0:00 National Brotherhood Week 2:39 MLF Lullaby 5:05 George Murphy 7:15 The Folk Song Army 9:28 Smut 12:45 Send the Marines 14:32 Pollution 16:52 So Long, Mom (A Song for World War III) 19:18 Whatever Became of Hubert? 21:32 New Math 26:04 Alma 30:29 Who's Next? 33:31 Wernher Von Braun 35:19 The Vatican Rag

Tom Lehrer: "Poisoning Pigeons In The Park" (live, 1998)  

2000 interview, The Music Show (BBC Radio)

TL: "I Got It from Agnes" (with Italian subtitles!)   

Tom Lehrer DAT Recordings

 

Hanukkah In Santa Monica-0:05 Hanukkah In Santa Monica (short version)- 1:13 The Love Song of the Physical Anthropologist- 2:16 The Love Song of the Physical Anthropologist Take 2- 3:34 The Love Song of the Physical Anthropologist Take 3- 4:53 The Love Song of the Physical Anthropologist Take 4- 5:23 I Got It From Agnes- 6:46 I Got It From Agnes Take 2- 8:42 Trees- (not an original TL song but a Joyce Kilmer poem)- 10:30 That’s Mathematics Take 4- 11:55 Pieces for That’s Mathematics- 13:48 That’s Mathematics- 14:58

TL: "The Subway Song" (on MIT's campus radio station 88.1 FM, then WTBS Cambridge, now WMBR)

 

Lehrer on BBC 4's Desert Island Discs (12 July 1980)--sadly, the entire program, with TL's chosen recordings included (at least in part), seems to have been removed from BBC's site--this below includes the interview segments: 

An Evening Wasted With Tom Lehrer (1959)

Intro start, Song start – Title 00:00, 00:21 – Poisoning Pigeons in the Park 02:39, 03:20 – Bright College Days 05:42, 06:37 – A Christmas Carol 08:40, 09:05 – The Elements 10:52, 12:38 – Oedipus Rex 14:34, 16:44 – In Old Mexico 21:00, 21:34 – Clementine (he talks throughout this one) 25:40, 27:37 – It Makes a Fellow Proud to Be a Soldier 30:31, 31:28 – She's My Girl 33:24, 33:50 – The Masochism Tango 36:55, 38:59 – We Will All Go Together When We Go

Songs by Tom Lehrer (in linked sequence)

The image link includes only "Fight Fiercely, Harvard"; 

hit the text link for the whole album...

SSW: "The Frenzy" by Joyce Carol Oates, THE NEW YORKER, 24 March 2025; "The Crack of Doom" by Bill Pronzini and Barry N. Malzberg, ALFRED HITCHCOCK'S MYSTERY MAGAZINE, October 2016: Short Story Wednesday

"The Frenzy" can be read online here.

"The Crack of Doom" was reprinted in Pronzini's collection Small Felonies 2, which can be had in print form from publishers Stark House for $7 a copy. (George Kelley reviewed the collection here.)

Two accounts of aging men, more sinning than sinned against, albeit one is more obliviously culpable than the other.

The recent Joyce Carol Oates story is the account of a late middle-aged man taking his still, if just barely, teen-aged mistress (he is careful to refer to her in his running interior monologue as very nearly 20yo) on a weekend getaway in Cape May, NJ. The somewhat older Malzberg/Pronzini  story is an account of a man perhaps a few years older, trying to make sense of his predicament as he awaits his orders to commit mayhem in NYC from an amorphous but deadly conspiracy that has him under their collective thumb. Malzberg's ultraviolet sense of humor, as frequently in their collaborations, is only augmented by Pronzini's contribution.

Both men mistake themselves for essentially benevolent, even if potential agent of chaos Elias is less certain of this than is philanderer Cassidy. 

Both have wives and children that they have grown somewhat estranged from, albeit their wives are still present in their lives and can be seen as trying to help both protagonists, however insufficiently from the point of view of both men. Oates's Cassidy first met his young mistress Brianna when she performed in the same high school Palestrina choral concert as Cassidy's daughter, who remains three years younger than his paramour. Brianna for her part is somewhat flighty and lost, floating through life haphazardly (as her affair might suggest), but still full of vigor that Cassidy draws on and enjoys controlling as best (or worst) he might.

Both stories are good examples of what their authors have been capable of. The collaboration cites the Rene Magritte painting that presumably served as partial inspiration; the Oates doesn't overplay the kind of smug self-justification its Cassidy wallows in, even as he feels a distant sense of shame for some, but by no means all, of his behavior. 

I'd been meaning to read the Oates for a week or so, since it was released on-line...I'd misplaced the book I was going to review along with the New Yorker story, but the long-buried AHMM issue had just been disinterred, so it makes an interesting counterpoint in paranoia of a different flavor...as I'd put the issue away almost a decade ago before I had a chance to read it.

For more of today's short stories (and another take on the Oates!), please see Patti Abbott's blog.

On Barry Malzberg (and a bit about his college classmate Joyce Carol Oates)

More recent Bill Pronzini stories

FFB: James Thurber: THE YEARS WITH ROSS

The Years with Ross is a memoir by James Thurber of his experiences, and those of the rest of the The New Yorker crew, with founding editor Harold Ross, a colorful character to say the least and one as full of seeming contradictions as H.L. Mencken, who might be his closest correspondent in American letters in their era...except that, as Thurber noted, Ross could never bring himself to write extensively for publication, after his early career in journalism.

It's also a rare example of a book in print among my entries in this series of reviews, but in discovering it was still in print (since I have the first Book-of-theMonth-Club edition from the 1950s, and first read it some twenty five years ago), I had an opportunity to read Adam Gopnick's self-congratulatory little deposit as foreward to the edition pictured here. In noting, correctly, that Thurber's Ross seems rather a comic figure (a man who consistently affected an aw-shucks Midwestern manner while running a magazine that made a point of insulting Midwesterners on occasion, in favor of presumably un-provincial NYCers at heart if not in address; a man who constantly swore yet blanched at the notion of impropriety of any sort advocated by his ostensibly sophisticated magazine; this is not a man who lacks in comic potential), Gopnick decides that he knows Thurber was merely taking Ross down a peg, and we moderns can clearly see that Thurber was merely resentful of Ross as any writer is of their editor, and today's reader doesn't care about the details of the publishing life in the '30s...what's interesting is the relation between writer and editor, even as so cleverly distorted by grumpy old Thurber-bear. I'm not getting across the full smugness of Gopnick, but it is a pretty remarkable performance, pretty amazingly echoing the sins Gopnick ascribes to Thurber only the younger man commits them less deftly. And, yes, this 21st century reader is indeed interested in the details of publishing in the 1930s, which is why I read books about publishing in the 1930s. Goodness.

But Gopnick isn't completely wrong...Thurber clearly was letting festering irritation out in much of what he wrote about Ross, but unless Thurber made up incidents out of whole cloth, one can see why he might be harboring those resentments, given the capriciousness of much of Ross's decision-making...in the manner of many great yet not consistently correct editors...who were Right even when not correct, by dint of their passion and willingness to shape their medium to fit their vision, as much as the vision of their contributors.

In short, a very useful book, as a look at both Thurber and Ross and how The New Yorker established itself, before becoming the relative bore it became under Shawn and the weathervaning creature it has been since Shawn. And Gopnick's little contribution, and the inclusion of some Thurber memos by the writer's heirs in this edition make it a slight more Interesting experience, it's true.

For more links to "forgotten" book entries this week, please see Patti Abbott's blog, this and every Friday.