By The Landlord
“Digressions, incontestably, are the sunshine; – they are the life, the soul of reading; – take them out of this book for instance, – you might as well take the book along with them;” – Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman
“Digression is the soul of wit. Take the philosophic asides away from Dante, Milton or Hamlet's father's ghost and what stays is dry bones.” – Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451
“Everything's going along as usual and then all shit breaks loose.” – Joan Didion
“Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans.” – John Lennon
“Which death is preferable to every other? The unexpected.” – Julius Caesar
“To expect the unexpected shows a thoroughly modern intellect.” – Oscar Wilde
“The eye is diverted from the real business, it is caught by the spectacular action that means nothing – nothing at all.” – Agatha Christie, The Mysterious Mr. Quin
“Most sorts of diversion in men, children and other animals, are in imitation of fighting.” – Jonathan Swift
“There is only one kind of shock worse than the totally unexpected: the expected for which one has refused to prepare.” – Mary Renault, The Charioteer
“Remember: they can't prove you're digressing if you don't specify a topic.” – John Alejandro King a.k.a. The Covert Comic
It wasn't supposed to happen this way. Or was it? Plans are made, and then suddenly, or gradually, unmade. The perfectly laid out day, with a series of important meetings, carefully prepared like a crisp, white, perfectly ironed shirt, is suddenly creased and covered in stains. A smooth, meticulously planned journey, with a split-second lapse, suddenly becomes a roadblock gridlock of angry hooting horns or a chaotic railway station of interruption, delay and derailment. A perfect evening of romantic conversation unexpectedly breaks into pointless, angry argument. Life can be a tangential maze, a muddy, foggy haze, a forest of biting, sniping, reversing ferrets, one where one tiny flap of a butterfly wing builds into a lashing hurricane of chaos.
But then sometimes, out of a cloud of calamity and confusion and unexpected change, a ray of sunny enlightenment can emerge. An unexpected encounter, a chance discovery, a piece of luck, a moment of realisation, a change of heart or direction, and then all is well again, or even greatly improved. That is, until the next time.
So it can go both ways, and this week our song theme may include all kinds of downward or upward spirals, but the key is that it's all about moments of divergence, digression, and distraction, of interruption and intervention, leading to the unplanned and the unexpected, whether that be because of oneself, another person, events, or circumstances. In lyrics, might it be suddenly falling down a hole, or falling in love? Suddenly getting the sack, or getting a job? Suddenly failing, or suddenly flying? Suddenly dying, or suddenly living? Any of those scenarios, or just poignant lyrics on such circumstances or feelings might come up, the key is that its a surprise departure from what was supposed to be. And that sense of the unexpected might also be expressed in the music itself.
Right now the world feels more ripe than ever for unexpected events that will require fast thought, action and adaptation, so whatever happens perhaps we can at least be prepared to have playlists for it.
A deep sense of the sheer scale of life's potential for curveball chaos came to me at a young age, not only in experiencing a difficult family life, school and sometimes place in between, but also in pages of books that randomly opened to my child's wide eyes at formative time.
As a young kid I was totally transfixed by the utter complexity in the worlds of of writer and illustrator Richard Scarry. From Busy Town, Busy People, or Cars and Trucks And Things That Go, to What Do People Do All Day?, each was crammed with beautiful hustle-and-bustle scenes of infinitely odd characters crashing into each other, of life moving far too fast or too slow, of sudden encounters, arguments, and interrupted flow. It seemed to me from this point, aged around three or four, that immediately life was never going to be smooth and simple and uniform, but constantly filled with bumps and bangs, peaks and troughs, highs and lows.
Busy Town: from the many packed chaotic pages of Richard Scarry
In a more extreme way I felt exactly the same sense of odd familiarity when at slightly later age I stumbled on the works of Bosch and Bruegel. Whether in scenes of the heavenly or hellish, or just the everyday, the complexity a sheer numbers of miniature stories in those painters' imaginations instantly fitted my world view, they were imprinted on my brain. From a young age, in early school when we were encouraged to draw something, it made sense to me that you wouldn't just depict one figure, but many, not so much of monstrously devilish scenes of Bosch (I wasn't that strange a child), but whether drawing perhaps a person, a cat or a dog, a bear or dinosaur, a car or aeroplane or a robot, there had to be lots of them, all inter-reacting, chatting with, of bashing into each other, all causing surprise in a colourful chaos of the unexpected encounter.
Scarier scenes still: musical goings-on in detail from the busy brush of Hieronymous Bosch
So life is complicated and full of sudden surprises, tangents, digressions and distractions. They might happen on a bigger scale such as events that that interrupt TV shows for a news update, or they might involve dark twisted surprises, such as those concocted in the Roald Dahl’s various Tales of the Unexpected, or in dark comedy films such as Jonathan Demme’s Something Wild (1986), or Martin Scorsese’s After Hours (1985), in which a straight, uptight, sensible, middle-class city type is pulled, usually by a femme fatale, into a series of scary adventures on the wrong side of the tracks in urban underbelly or strange characters, night clubs and criminals.
However, while life’s digressions and unexpected tangents, expressed in song, might be be fantastical, but they might also more often occur on a more habitual context of more recognisable everyday life events. But whatever form they take, they are all diversions from what life was perhaps planned to be, or was expected to be like. But then again, many things feel surprising when they're not at all.
The Bar now has further visitors with something to say about this. In an unexpected visit, Hellboy actor Ron Perlman turns up and reflects on his career. “Almost all of your life is lived by the seat of your pants, one unexpected event crashing into another, with no pattern or reason, and then you finally reach a point, around my age, where you spend more time than ever looking back. Why did this happen? Look where that led? You see the shape of things.”
Adding to this, the American cartoonist, writer and humorist James Thurber says drily: “Yeah. Old age is the most unexpected of all the things that can happen to a man.” Ironically he’s also echoing what others have said before. While life feels like it’s full of surprises, and yet you can also see them coming, but perhaps prefer not to. That’s because as humans we love also to digress. “Yes,” says John Irving with more dry wit. “I have digressed, which is also the kind of writer I would become.”
“Reader, I think proper, before we proceed any further together, to acquaint thee that I intend to digress, through this whole history, as often as I see occasion, of which I am myself a better judge than any pitiful critic whatever, proclaims Henry Fielding, quoting from his The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling.
“A man never lies with more delicious languor under the influence of a passion than when he has persuaded himself that he shall subdue it to-morrow,” adds George Eliot, reading from Adam Bede.
“You don't understand! I coulda had class. I coulda been a contender. I could've been somebody, instead of a bum, which is what I am,” moans Marlon Brando, mimicking his own performance of has-been boxer Terry Malloy, in 1954’s On the Waterfront.
“Pull yourself together, man!” shouts George Bernard Shaw. “If you take too long in deciding what to do with your life, you'll find you've done it!”
“If our condition were truly happy we should not need to divert ourselves from thinking about it, reckons, Blaise Pascal, with a sentence from the book Human Happiness.
“Yet the mind ought sometimes to be diverted that it may return to better thinking,” adds Athenian smart-talker Phaedrus and friend of Socrates, with a clever inversion.
“Yeah. Plan to be spontaneous tomorrow,” adds Steven Wright, languorously.
And finally, in a heroic attempt at avoidance of the unexpected, here’s the cult Twitter poet Brian Bilston, some scribbles from one of several To Do List titles with lovely style of utter avoidance of the inevitable.
• prioritise new tasks to shirk
• resolve myself to do some work
• look at Twitter, spin on chair
• make a brew, loiter; stare
• scroll through the news; stare some more
• reorganise the kitchen draw
• write nine words; cross six out
• stroke the cat, stoke self-doubt
• make tea; stroke cat; scroll news; stare
• Twitter, chair-spin, solitaire
• stroke tea; spin news, scroll cat, wallow
• write To Do list for tomorrow
So then, diversions, distractions and digressions come in all forms from the dramatic to the mundane, but one thing is for sure, they are bound to happen, even if we don’t create or plan them.
And in a special of both planning with an element of surprise, I’m delighted to welcome the next guest playlist guru to the chair, the excellent ajostu! Place your songs about this topic in comments below, before the bell is rung without too many surprises at 11pm UK time on Monday, for playlists published next week.
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