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Why did Tom Lehrer swap fame for obscurity?

theguardian.com

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Re: Why did Tom Lehrer swap fame for obscurity?

#21

Post by bambax »

The article is nice and interesting but doesn't answer the question of why did Tom Lehrer stop.

It's possible he thought he didn't have anything more to say. But I doubt that's the whole reason he stopped making songs and performing.

He lived through a time when the US defeated Nazi Germany, and then... hired prominent Nazis to work for them. This is what the Wernher von Braun song is about.

My take is, he thinks humanity as a whole doesn't deserve him — which may very well be the case.

Re: Why did Tom Lehrer swap fame for obscurity?

#22

Post by walterbell »

walterbell wrote: post #10

Around age 70, "A Conversation with Tom Lehrer", https://web.archive.org/web/20210307035012/http://www.paul-l... > This winter I'm just going to do a math course. I'm doing a three-unit, as opposed to five-unit course on infinity, which I've never done before. I'm planning to study like crazy. It's for non-math majors. I'm trying to bring in the fact that infinity is when things get complicated. In calculus, algebra,…

Another Tom Lehrer interview clip (1994, age 65), http://www.crazycollege.org/lehrer.html

  GEO: I was surprised to learn that you enlisted in the Army back in 1955.

  TOM LEHRER: That's one way of putting it, but probably not the appropriate verb. The point is that they were drafting people up to the age of 35. So I dodged the draft for as long as anybody was shooting at anybody. And then when I realized that I would have to go -- there was really no way out of it except getting an essential full time job, which I didn't really want to do -- I waited until everything was calm and then surrendered to the draft board. I wouldn't call it "enlist". "Enlist" means that you have to spend another year. I allowed myself to be drafted. I was 27 at the time and there were a lot of graduate students who were like me who had gotten deferred as graduate students and now had to pay up. So it was a kind of an odd group there, a lot of educated people in my "outfit", I believe is the word. And we had a lot of fun. So I did that for two years in Washington DC and had a great time -- especially since there was no war -- though vice president Nixon was trying to get us into one in Indo-China even then. So there was that little threat. And there was Suez and a few other little things that looked a little tricky. But it didn't look like there was going to be a real war. So it seemed to be safe to go in. And I'm sure that a lot of my cohort felt the same way.

  GEO: And what did you do?

  TOM LEHRER: It was NSA. I think I'm allowed to say that now. I asked around before I surrender to be sure that I would not be in special services or something playing volleyball with the troops in Korea. I wanted to make sure that I got a nice cushy job. We were called "The Chair Borned". And I found out that they were hiring mathematicians. So I arranged to be hired.
 
  GEO: Do you find that your training as a mathematician influenced your song writing. Writing a song seems to me to be like creating a puzzle.

  TOM LEHRER: Not Mathematics itself, but the kind of mind that likes mathematic. Stephen Sondheim has that kind of mind. He was a mathematics major in college, too. Having that kind of a mind, you look for organization, and rhyming, and pattern, and prosody -- all those things that are fun to do in a song, rather than -- which is what a lot of comedy songs are -- just couplets. Working all that out, if not "mathematical", is at least "logical".

  GEO: As a mathematician did you ever make any brilliant discoveries?

  TOM LEHRER: Oh,nonono. I have no desire to extend the frontier of human knowledge; retract them, if anything. I like to teach it and I like to think about it, but that's about it.
https://tomlehrersongs.com/it-makes-a-fellow-proud-to-be-a-s...

Re: Why did Tom Lehrer swap fame for obscurity?

#23

Post by bitwize »

space_oddity wrote: post #15
lupire wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Daniel Radcliffe sang it on Graham Norton, introducing Tom Lehrer to a crowd who didn't know him. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=rSAaiYKF0cs

When I saw that video back then my jaw dropped.Was fascinated by it

Radcliffe's geek cred was a factor in his casting as the title character in Weird:The Al Yankovic Story.

Re: Why did Tom Lehrer swap fame for obscurity?

#25

Post by bitwize »

jrockway wrote: post #17

I still have some Tom Lehrer songs in my playlist. They sound like they're a product of their time but are still relevant today. I am also amused that I learned "new math" in elementary school, but I think it's actually different from the "new math" in his song of that name. I didn't hate it, honestly. "Now the book wants you to do it in base 8." This is actually relevant to my day to day work. (Though in base 8, I h…

New Math was a response to the Soviet lead in the space race. It was thought that introducing more abstract concepts, like different bases and set theory, would help kids grok math more.

It was a fool's game. Just like every other "innovation" in mathematics education since, up to and including Common Core (one of which you probably encountered). At the elementary school level, the only way to increase math proficiency is drilling. Drill the basic math facts and standard algorithms until the kid knows them by heart and can do problems as easily as breathing. Only then will they be ready for the higher level, conceptual stuff.

The Soviets were ahead in math and science because they drilled their kids harder. Any kid who didn't want to drill was a traitor to the working class. (Were I a right-wing conspiracy theorist, I'd say New Math and its successors were Soviet psyops designed to sabotage math education in order to weaken the west. Instead I think it's more likely a psyop by the bourgeoisie to make us more compliant and exploitable slaves through mass innumeracy.)

No surprise, then, that today, when Americans really want their kids to learn math, they use the curriculum from a country where they cane you for minor infractions. They use Singapore Math. Math is hard, and hard things can only be mastered through discipline.

Re: Why did Tom Lehrer swap fame for obscurity?

#26

Post by jrockway »

bitwize wrote: post #25
jrockway wrote: post #17

I still have some Tom Lehrer songs in my playlist. They sound like they're a product of their time but are still relevant today. I am also amused that I learned "new math" in elementary school, but I think it's actually different from the "new math" in his song of that name. I didn't hate it, honestly. "Now the book wants you to do it in base 8." This is actually relevant to my day to day work. (Though in base 8, I h…

New Math was a response to the Soviet lead in the space race. It was thought that introducing more abstract concepts, like different bases and set theory, would help kids grok math more. It was a fool's game. Just like every other "innovation" in mathematics education since, up to and including Common Core (one of which you probably encountered). At the elementary school level, the only way to increase math proficien…

I think I'm too old for common core (39). It was "Chicago Math" or something like that. We did multiplication by making a 2x2 grid with diagonal lines and whatnot? I didn't really understand the simplification that much; my parents taught me the old way well before I encountered this in school.

Re: Why did Tom Lehrer swap fame for obscurity?

#27

Post by walterbell »

gjm11 wrote: post #11
mannyv wrote: post #4

“Life is like a sewer - what you get out of it depends on what you put into it.” Truer words have never been sung.

Those words haven't (so far as I know) been sung either: they're from one of his spoken preambles, not from any of the songs. (The preambles are generally at least as funny as the songs, at least in my estimation.)

From https://tomlehrersongs.com/we-will-all-go-together-when-we-g...

Re: Why did Tom Lehrer swap fame for obscurity?

#28

Post by eichin »

lupire wrote: post #9
OldGuyInTheClub wrote: post #2

I saw "Tomfoolery," a Lehrer revue, in 1980 or 1981 in SF. The actor singing "The Elements" had a periodic table and a pointer. He identified every element in time and at tempo without missing a one. Impressive.

Daniel Radcliffe sang it on Graham Norton, introducing Tom Lehrer to a crowd who didn't know him. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=rSAaiYKF0cs

Wow. (Without the piano line it's clearly a lot harder to get in the pauses to breathe, even the comically large one that's in the original performance.)

Back in the 80's, the MIT freshman chemistry class had A Thing where if you'd stand up in the lecture hall and sing The Elements, you'd get extra credit (I think it was an automatic A on the first quiz? something small.) I'd already placed out, but helped one of my housemates practice, which was fun (he did succeed, on the day.)

Re: Why did Tom Lehrer swap fame for obscurity?

#29

Post by dekhn »

walterbell wrote: post #10

Around age 70, "A Conversation with Tom Lehrer", https://web.archive.org/web/20210307035012/http://www.paul-l... > This winter I'm just going to do a math course. I'm doing a three-unit, as opposed to five-unit course on infinity, which I've never done before. I'm planning to study like crazy. It's for non-math majors. I'm trying to bring in the fact that infinity is when things get complicated. In calculus, algebra,…

I took this class (in '97 IIRC), it was called "Nature of Math". I took it because I loved his songs and wanted to take a few math classes that weren't very hard. (from a comment I made a few years ago on a previous thread: Wonderful course and his delivery was excellent. I almost ended up being the TA the next quarter. It was my introduction to many things, including birthday paradox and analytic solutions for tertiary equations.)

Re: Why did Tom Lehrer swap fame for obscurity?

#30

Post by aebtebeten »

bitwize wrote: post #25
jrockway wrote: post #17

I still have some Tom Lehrer songs in my playlist. They sound like they're a product of their time but are still relevant today. I am also amused that I learned "new math" in elementary school, but I think it's actually different from the "new math" in his song of that name. I didn't hate it, honestly. "Now the book wants you to do it in base 8." This is actually relevant to my day to day work. (Though in base 8, I h…

New Math was a response to the Soviet lead in the space race. It was thought that introducing more abstract concepts, like different bases and set theory, would help kids grok math more. It was a fool's game. Just like every other "innovation" in mathematics education since, up to and including Common Core (one of which you probably encountered). At the elementary school level, the only way to increase math proficien…

To be fair, New Math is a perfect intro to graduate-level* maths; it's just a poor fit for people who (because they don't have calculators? or even slide rules?) would like their children's maths courses to cover arithmetic.

(I had a geometry teacher who had been excited because his daughter wanted him to sign something saying she'd be allowed to take "Sets Education". Imagine, finally sets being introduced at the Jr High level! ... and then he realised he'd misheard: there was an "x" at the end of the first word)

Lagniappe: https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/why-i-couldn39t-be-a-math-...

* or undergraduate discrete maths, of the sort you'd want for any halfway decent CS programme. I'm glad I got a cheap'n'cheerful intro to lattices in 5th grade.

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