Tintin's playlist

What do Humbert Humbert and Tintin listen to on their iPods?

Duran Duran, naturally. 

Naw, just kidding. Humbert Humbert listens to Barry White (“You’re the First, the Last, my Everything”) and Tintin listens to America’s “Horse with no name", a song I've always found intensely irritating but which in this new light of Boy Reporter soundtrack, I’ve completely re-evaluated. Seriously, I’ll never hear it on my supermarket muzak again without picturing Tintin clinging to the mane of a charging palomino, “I’ve been through the desert on a horse with no name, it felt good to be out of the ra-ain, da, da da, da da da dadadada,..”, the hooves emitting little puffs of dust in time with the song.

I wish I had been the one clever enough to come up with the idea of a “literary mixtapes” series, but that honour belongs to a certain Emily Temple who has been “sneaking a look at the hypothetical iPods of some of literature’s most interesting characters” and posting them on Flavorwire, along with amusing character sketches and assorted commentary.

Some other noteworthy picks besides those already mentioned:

For Alice in Wonderland: “Home” – Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros

For Holden Caulfield: “The only living boy in New York” – Simon and Garfunkel  (“I can gather all the news I need on the weather report”, for the many out there who will be too young to know this song)

For Huck Finn: “Juicy” – Biggie Smalls

Tintin’s playlist is my favourite of all. Willie Nelson “On the road again”, “The Killing Moon” by Echo and the Bunnymen, “ZigZag wanderer” by Captain Beefheart, too perfect!

But I do note one major, major omission.

Who is the most famous Belgian next to Tintin? (Well I’m not sure of this, but anyway right now I can’t think of any more famous.) 

Who like Tintin came from a good bourgeois family and was a bit of a boy scout when young (don't tell me you hadn't noticed this about Tintin), and then went on to embody all the most likable things about Tintin, his defense of the downtrodden, his cheekiness, the touch of irony, the “picture him whistling as he walks away from a trap he’s set” as Emily Temple puts it so well?

Jacques Brel!

Tintin has to have a Jacques Brel song on his iPod. I mean, look at this photo of the extremely young Jacques Brel on the cover of one of his early hits. Imagine him without the cigarette. Okay, maybe it can't be done. But still, you get my drift.

And considering how Tintin remained so improbably, eternally boyish into his seventh or eighth decade, whatever it was, I suggest for him Le chanson des vieux amants,"The song of the old lovers", for these wonderful lines in which it is impossible not to see a reflection of its composer himself:

Et finalement, finalement,
il nous fallut bien du talent
pour être vieux sans être adultes.

And finally, finally, it took a lot of talent on our parts, to be old without being adults.

Here it is, the original version, subtitled in English (what can't you find on youtube?). As you will see, contrary to what the title suggests, Jacques Brel was not singing about weathering the storms of old age, but about weathering the storms of love. He knew plenty of things about the human heart, but old age was something he took a rain check for.



If anyone has another good match between a literary character and a song, I'd love to hear about it.

"Balkan Beetle!"

I came across this a while back and saved it because I knew that a day was going to come when it would be good to have it up my sleeve. And now that the recent investiture of Peter Jackson has Tintin once again in the news ("Arise, Sir Peter, and get that Tintin movie finished already!") I think this might be the moment to play my card.

Well, David’s card actually.

According to the website www3.sympatico, which I like to think is intended to be pronounced "Très simpatico", David Brooks is an arts consultant and Van Gogh specialist who lives in Toronto. He is also the creator of a wonderful Captain Haddock webpage, featuring a long list of his favourite Captain Haddock insults, or curses, as he quaintly calls them.

You will say, perhaps, oh yeah, we’ve seen those. But David’s is better. First, it’s not alphabetized. Alphabetising the insults, which every other list compiler seems to do, absolutely countermands their genius which of course lies in the unexpectedness of the absurdity. It's just not fair to present “Fancy-dress Freebooter!” right after “Fancy-dress Fatima!”.

Not to mention the problem with runs, as when the letter 'n' seems to have all the words for stupidity (do we know why, I wonder):  numbskulls, nitwits (and nitwitted ninepins), nincompoops etc etc. How you pine for a good “Ectoplasmic by-product!” or “Mineral water drinkers!”.

Secondly, David doesn’t try to explain the curses. You’d be surprised how many people are out there providing definitions of Captain Haddock’s terminology. This gives rise to such gems as (my favourite, from a site with the rather didactic name, harbinger of things to come, "language in tintin"):

"Balkan Beetle! --  a type of insect from eastern Europe."

Just after I saw that, a scream rang out. It was my daughter who had picked up her scarf and found a cockroach underneath. My husband grabbed two of the many remote controls which hang out in our living room (they are never there when you want to watch TV but apparently they do have some uses after all) and gave it a left and a right which put it out of action long enough for me grab it in a paper towel and drop it into our insinkerator. Just as I hit the switch -- it was my Fargo moment --  he said “Do you think it really was a cockroach? It looked different, somehow.”

And I thought,  Balkan Beetle!

Raising my glass to Tintin, one of the greatest literary creations of all time.