Vega: Star power and earthly reality

Vega, also known as α Lyrae, is a zero-magnitude star in the constellation Lyra. The fifth brightest star in the night sky and the second brightest in the northern celestial hemisphere, Vega forms, with Deneb and Altair, the Summer Triangle. Suzanne Vega — well, she's just a star, plain and simple.

I wholeheartedly agree with this breathless blog post by Paul Krugman:

Oh my God. How could I have missed the fact that Suzanne Vega is blogging for the Times?

In my next life I want to be a songwriter — precisely because I can’t imagine how it’s done. I’d give up the whole first page of my Google Scholar listing to have written “The Queen and the Soldier.”

For my part, I might substitute Gillian Welch for Suzanne Vega and either Annabelle or Wrecking Ball (alternative post) for The Queen and the Soldier, but I'd be quibbling at the extreme margin. Like Krugman, I'd trade my scholarly oeuvre for one melodically beautiful, lyrically true, and harmoniously complete song.

Very often, especially at AALS conferences and other large academic gatherings, I hear people declare that law teaching is "the best job in the world." I agree that we are very privileged to hold these jobs and that we legal academics, as a group, could definitely stand to be more grateful. But many people who bellow that statement are either delusional freaks or pathological liars, because there so many things in the literary, visual, musical, and theatrical arts (to say nothing of sports) that most of us would rather be doing, if only we had the talent.