Yowza

I don’t know if I like, or hate, the title of the new James Bond film, “Quantum of Solace.” Sometimes I’ll see it going by on a bus and I’ll think, oh, that’s nice, that sounds like poetry, like maybe T.S. Eliot (i.e., “April is the cruellest month, a quantum of solace out in the dead land…”). And then other times it reads like something I would write when I was about 14 and started composing nonsensical poetry that I thought was very grand, frequently consulting a thesaurus (“A quantum of solace, she demanded, and perhaps a modicum of morality…). So which is it? It’s an odd name for a Bond film, the titles of which were better in the beginning of the series: Dr. No, Goldfinger, From Russia With Love. Stylish, noirish, fitting the main character. Throughout the 80s and 90s they devolved into obvious, Rambo-like promises of violence: Tomorrow Never Dies, Die Another Day, Licence to Kill. “Quantum of Solace…” What exactly does it mean? I never took physics, so I can’t begin to say (how much is a quantum? If you drank that much, would you keel over?), but it’s somehow a timely and useful phrase, as in: “The economy’s going down the tubes, the government's using our hard-earned taxpayer dollars to bail out the banks, but we feel a quantum of solace in knowing that Barack Obama will soon be president.” “George Bush started two illegal wars, fouled up the country and the world, but there's a quantum of solace in knowing he’s going away soon and we won’t have to see his face.”