{"id":21581,"date":"2012-03-23T20:20:12","date_gmt":"2012-03-24T00:20:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/?p=21581"},"modified":"2012-03-24T21:28:23","modified_gmt":"2012-03-25T01:28:23","slug":"ear-worms","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/2012\/03\/23\/ear-worms\/","title":{"rendered":"ear worms…"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Ear Worms can be a dreadful affliction – some song that plays over and over in your head that your don’t even know is there until it begins to drive you nuts. I am one of the afflicted and I have to figure out how they got there to be free of them. Recently, the theme song from the old Maverick TV show almost took me out [I saw a blurb about Jody Foster, she was in the movie version, that’s what got it started]. I’m finally free of Whitney Houston’s "I will always love you<\/em>" [source obvious]. Sometimes, it’s a poem – almost always T.S. Eliot, my favorite. This time, it was sing-song versions of "Here we go round the prickly pear<\/em>" or "This is the way the world ends<\/em>." Both from "The Hollow Men." They’ve played intermittently for days.<\/p>\n

As a teenager and college student, I loved that kind of literature. It was, I think, a respit from the business of being one of the guys, or hormone driven, whatever the right words are for living among peers in the years before adulthood. Not that I minded youth, but I think the writers like Faulkner, Hemingway, Woolf, or Eliot reminded me that there was something more to existence than the right-now-ness of adolescence and early adulthood. For me, "The Hollow Men" was my high school Eliot. It fit with the postwar fifties I was living in, which did have something of a background absurd feeling. "The Wasteland" was my college Eliot, the early sixties before all hell broke loose. And "The Four Quartets" followed, to this day an abiding source of reflection. But recently, it has been my old high school Eliot – "The Hollow Men" singing in my head. <\/p>\n

When I was in high school, it was about them<\/em>, those hollow fifties types that the Beatniks were dropping out to get away from, me too. But as I’ve gotten older, I tend more to think that such poems are more important to think about as relating to personal experience. After all, it does start with the word "We<\/em>." And I now think of this poem as the the feelings one goes through when a great disillusionment of one sort or another sets in. I remember a professor once talking about the beginning of section V. [column three] like this<\/font><\/strong><\/u><\/a>:<\/div>\n