Tom Lehrer – 1928-2025
Lehrer was the most positive force for my mental expansion in the wasteland of the 1950s. His first album of lancing parodies was a gift from my mother. I have no idea how she came to know of it – it was often that way with her, as with the stories by Theodore Sturgeon and Ray Bradbury, and earlier with the Pogo comic book subscription she got for me in the late 1940s, before the Pogo daily strip started.
Who told her about this stuff or directed her? She was tuned in to something unlikely that was little reflected in her bad cooking or her years as a church secretary.
That first Lehrer collection was initially distributed directly by him, before any label dared pick up his sneers against orthodoxy (this was the time when comic books, fore shit sake, were being banned). But it wasn’t just his anti-establishment outlook (or whatever it would be called today), but the fact that he wrote the funniest songs ever recorded featuring a sense of rhyme that met if not surpassed that of the tin pan alley greats. His eviscerations of “proper” outlook flowed out as neat and bitingly sweet as maple syrup on blueberry pancakes.
How many of you have listened to Lehrer lately? For anyone who’s missed out, grab his Songs and More Songs collection that includes most everything of note – including “I Got if from Agnes,” not released in the early years – oddly, though, not “The Vatican Rag,” which you’ll have to track down separately.
I won’t waste your patience listing the range of song titles or the realms of asininity that he lampooned. They’re all worth it. But I have special love for the “The Irish Ballad,’ wherein a daughter serves up her entire family in various cannibalistic dishes, and every verse ends with an “in” rhyme that stretches language to its limits. And who else would give voice all “The Elements” in the periodic table in no logical or scientific order, but with a grand sweep of mind and memory.
A few years back, Lehrer released everything he’s ever written from copyright, free for any use whatsoever by whomsoever. Thanks, Uncle Tom, from myself and the entire thinking world.
Here’s a neat article of observations by several folks who have interacted with Lehrer:
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2025/jul/29/wit-of-tom-lehrer-by-those-who-knew-him
One last aside: Lewis Carroll and Tom Lehrer were both mathematicians. This says something significant; I wish I knew what.
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Meshing of broken gears
As a child, I didn’t understand how the world worked – any of it. Virtually every aspect of existence was a mystery to me. The only distinction I held: there was me, and there was everything else.
Now, in my “second childhood,” I’m coming to re-experience how much terror lay behind that vacant outlook, and how it never completely left over the years.
But along with that realization has come a wider one that weaves together a tapestry of negativities that could otherwise flap separately.
My life has been stymied by an underlying horror of making mistakes, something I’d not earlier taken into account in the past.
I think that it most likely arises from that sense of not knowing how the world works, leaving me continually afraid that I’ll say the wrong words or do the wrong actions in almost any situation, significant or insignificant, large and small.
That, in turn, has released the intense, voluble anger I express when the slightest thing goes haywire – screaming imprecations against myself, the situation and the world, throwing tools, breaking machinery, hitting myself in the head with my fist (remember that Bob Dylan line?).
Basically, I cannot trust myself, because every action presents a new opportunity for error, and those perceived errors, however simple, coalesce to a form of overriding self-humiliation.
My first conscious memory of this comes from when I was four yers old and our Irish Setter, Shiela, managed to impale herself on the iron fence across the street from our Hastings Ave. house. Brother Vic lifted her down and got her to the vet, who fixed her up. When Vic brought her home, I was standing in the kitchen, to the left, by a window. I looked across at her and said, “She looks fine, just fine.” Instantly, I felt not only wrong but humiliated. I had spoken using the phrasing and cadence of an adult, which I had no right to use!
Today, I still have this lurking dread of wrongness, if not as excruciatingly as in my childhood: a fear of standing out of being noticed when I have no right to say or do whatever I’m saying or doing at the moment. I dread asking questions or seeking advice or making suggestions because I’ll have acted like an dundering fool yet again.
And I wonder, too, if that outlook is part of what pushed me to becoming a writer (insomuch as I am that). Internally, I sense the spoken word as a trap; once said, it can never be unsaid – it exists forever in the world exactly as uttered.
But once I’ve written a word – printed or cursive, long-hand or typed – for sense or clarity I can erase it, obliterate it before it’s seen by anyone else. No record of my humbling error, no need to ask forgiveness.
Oh, don’t mistake it, I do take pride in what I’ve written, whether anyone reads it or not, because each of us has a unique voice, even those who try hardest to sound generic. Whatever I’ve written, no one else could have written it exactly so.
Is that individuality likely to be erased once AI takes hold? I doubt it. AI creates a new assemblage from old creations, but can it then inject inspiration? Isn’t inspiration something more than or other than the complex interactions of what-was?
Taken further, all this may be why, for gaining knowledge, I generally prefer reading to listening. Something in me trusts the written word as having evolved, of having thought growing behind it, whereas the words of a podcast have a single, immutable existence.
OK, that makes no sense in the real world – but then, as I said, the real world makes no sense to me.
lickhaven 