I have been preoccupied with work and reviewing the copy edits on my book, a surprisingly lengthy and arduous process. (I thought I’d satisfied the gods of the Serial Comma, but there appear to be other complex negotiations I neglected relating to contractions and the use of “and” and “but” to begin sentences. Who knew? I am drawing the line at a proposed correction in the punctuation of my quotation from “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” which I think deserves a once and final “stet.”)
But I note with amazement the apparently imminent release of a new album by the New York Dolls. They are probably best known for their glam wear, but it was their proto-punk sound — in particular, the roaring bleating chords of their “Personality Crisis” — that won over my adolescent soul. Three of the original band’s lineup are now dead, including the astounding guitarist Johnny Thunders, but that doesn’t seem to have stopped the surviving two, David Johansen and Sylvain Sylvain, from putting out a worthy reunion album, if Rob Levine’s piece in New York is to be believed.
What I am trying to wrap my brain around is their title, One Day It Will Please Us to Remember Even This. If I am not mistaken, this is a translation of one of the more famous lines from the Aeneid, which I was studying in high school around the time that the Dolls were putting out their second album — one of Aeneas’ rally-the-troops orations, in which he tells his men, chin up, someday you’ll be tickled to remember just how awful what you’re going through right now was.
Are the New York Dolls closet Latin freaks? Is there some actual relationship between these minstrels of our epoch’s imperial city and the epic poet who shaped the imagination of the Roman imperium? If we live long enough, do connections emerge between every single thing we know and love?
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