I have always found songs that claim such certainty about how one will continue to treat or feel about another person very disturbing. Words like “never” and “always” in songs tend to make me feel that the sentiments are either disingenuous or frighteningly obsessive (stalker-like, really). Whether that disingenuous quality seems a matter of a person fooling himself or intentionally misleading the beloved depends on the context.

Carson McCullers has a remarkable novella called the “The Ballad of the Sad Café” that explores the relationship between the lover and the beloved within the context of a community. I’m afraid I don’t have a copy of her short story on hand to quote from, but here’s an excerpt from Edward Albee’s theatrical interpretation of the same title. This is spoken by the narrator:

“But what sort of thing is love? First of all, it is a joint experience between two persons, but that fact does not mean that it is a similar experience to the two people involved. There are the lover and the beloved, but these two come from different countries. Often the beloved is only the stimulus for all the stored-up love which has lain quiet within the lover for a long time hitherto. And somehow every lover knows this. He feels in his soul that his love is a solitary thing. He comes to know a new, strange loneliness. Now, the beloved can also be of any description: the most outlandish people can be the stimulus for love. Yes, and the lover may see this as clearly as anyone else—but that does not affect the evolution of his love one whit. Therefore, the quality and value of any love is determined solely by the lover himself.

“It is for this reason that most of us would rather love than be loved; and the curt truth is that, in a deep secret way, the state of being loved is intolerable to many; for the lover craves any possible relation with the beloved, even if this experience can cause them both only pain.”

I’m not really sure in what way you’re seeing race enter into this, but I’d recommend reading either the play or the short story as a bit of grist to consider love within a community in a way that this particular quote isn’t getting at just yet—without giving too much away, it would be an understatement to suggest that the love between the two people in this narrative has a significant impact on their entire community.

Happy first.

Man, I’m the butt of this one for reasons I’ll detail a little later.

If nothing else, I can say that it wasn’t April 1 in my time zone yet.

Bump.

Well played, sir! I figured it out just as my finger left the mouse button :(

Hb, you’ve stepped over the line. You owe women and ethnic minorities an apology.

This is better.

Amanda, you have intentionally or unintentionally turned my little prank against me. In fairness, though, I think I had a bad result coming no matter what, at least once I’d decided to engage in self-parody. Not a good idea, it turns out. In this case, either someone can be fooled but then reflect on the plausibility of my set-up, or he can sincerely think that I recommended serious consideration of Rick Astley’s thoughts on love. Both results—kind of embarrassing. April Fools on me.

Thanks to Method for pointing this meme out to me a couple nights ago. It looks like it has hit its peak, (perhaps in the manner of that phrase about shark-jumping), now that Youtube has Rick Rolled its own users.

I’ve come across the Rick Roll’d a couple of times now. I did detect self-parody in your post, but did not catch the date, as I indicated when I posted as Fooled, because it wasn’t April 1 here yet.

Anything can be analyzed in a seemingly serious manner if you study rhetoric long enough. I’ve been irrepressibly giddy lately because I found out that an interdisciplinary course in rhetoric and architecture will count for my last literature requirement (and I’ve finagled things throughout my grad school experience such that I only even took one actual literature course to fulfill those requirements). The fact that the prospect of taking a rhet-ictecture course next year is the highlight of this week made me feel the need for some self-parody of my own when I saw your post!

Also, I love that rick roll’d has a definition on urban dictionary now: http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=rick+roll’d

I dunno, HB. You were the first of several pranksters to get me yesterday, but also the one who amused me the most. I’d looked up Rick Rolling in the Urban Dictionary after Penny Arcade mentioned it last week or therabouts. I had never heard of it, and couldn’t imagine anyone I knew doing it to me, so I promptly forgot about it. Then I read your post, and I thought it was a little over the top and so forth (one might even go so far as to say barmy), but I followed the link in good faith and then realized that I had been Rick Roll’d, and had a good laugh trying to apply your arguments to it.

Amanda:
I don’t know who you are, but I’m so intrigued that you’re going to be taking a class on rhetoric and architecture. Where do you go to school? I’m currently studying architecture at Ohio State, and I wish I could take a class like that.

Aw, thanks, Julia. Barmy—what a kind description. I did try to take the one interesting thing from that video—the token black bartender—and weave it into my ruse.

Missy, I go to school at the University of Idaho. Ours is a relatively small department so there aren’t a lot of classes to choose from for grad students, but I’ve been pretty impressed by how there’s always enough that interests me being offered. This particular course will be team-taught by a professor in the architecture department and a professor in the English department. We don’t have a book list or syllabus yet, but I know the professors plan to have us read Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Michel Foucault, Gaston Bachelard, and Karsten Harries, among others.