For the last week or so, “The Shadow of Your Smile” has been running through my head. It started last Tuesday or Wednesday. I remember at Matt’s valedictory dinner (with mahimahi wrapped in halibut, yum) I asked the pianist to play it, so it was firmly ensconced by then.

The song was written by Johnny Mandel, who also wrote another haunting song, the theme from M*A*S*H. It took me a while to find this, folks! Sinatra comes up first on writer "shadow of your smile", but lists no writer.

Paul Francis Webster wrote the lyrics:

The shadow of your smile when you are gone Will color all my dreams and light the dawn Look into my eyes my love and see All the things you mean to me. Our wistful little star was far too high A teardrop kissed your lips and so did I Now when I remember spring All the joy that love can bring I will be remembering The shadow of your smile.

It was composed for the movie The Sandpiper.

While I’m at it: the lyrics to the theme to M*A*S*H. Mike Altman, the lyricist, is, I believe, the son of Robert “Scumbag” Altman. Good lyrics, but he seems not to have produced anything else afterwards. I hope he didn’t take his lyrics to heart. According to IMDB, he wrote it when he was fourteen.

Speaking of IMDB, Neil Gaiman printed a letter from a certain Cathy mentioning Internet Book List, the book-reader’s hopeful counterpart to the IMDB.

And a Manila site I haven’t explored much: Songtrellis.
11:58:32 PM  #  comment []

Whoops, forgot to tell a story about Friday. Armi, worried about her personal statement, asked me to go over some of it. I yanked it here and there, then suggested we go to the Barnes and Nobles in Clark or Westfield to find something appropriate. While looking through the writing/reference sections, some young men (in stature, not demeanor) came in looking for books on cursing and bad language. With all the possibilities of international, transcultural communication before them—six stands of seven shelves or so each, forty-two shelves worth of books on languages like Tagalog, Latin, Greek, Spanish, Italian, French, Russian—they were oohing and ahhing over the crassest use of language possible. No wonder other countries hate us.

“Where’s the Russian? Aw, they don’t have the Russian.”

Nekulturni bastards.
10:44:30 PM  #  comment []

Maps of the Mind

A hearty thank-you to Caterina for finally putting a name on a book I have been diffidently searching for for ages (um, seven years or so?)! If I have time tomorrow, I’m going to Borders and hunt that down. (Unless, of course, the book is more than twenty years out of print, in which case driving all the way down the Schuylkill would be foolish and futile, not necessarily in that order, and would probably yield only a collection of fantasy stories and a description of the COBE results, if I were to have gone, which, as I have said, would have been be foolish)

Sigh. Though I think Epistemics Illustrated may be a better name for such a book. Soft-core pr0n for the head.

Maps of the Mind
Charles Hampden-Turner
10:36:42 PM  #  comment []