“At the very least, if you’re shy, you’re never bored.”
James Parker, Let Us Now Praise Shyness (Boston Globe)
Saturday, April 17, 2010
In praise of shyness
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Michael Leddy“Orange Crate Art” is a song by Van Dyke Parks and the title of a 1995 album by Van Dyke Parks and Brian Wilson. “Orange Crate Art” is for me one of the great American songs: “Orange crate art was a place to start.”
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Nancy, October 19, 1950.
“Who are we as a country?”
Michael Leddy
Don’t look for premiums or
coupons, as the cost of
the thoughts blended in
ORANGE CRATE ART pro-
hibits the use of them.
Comments are welcome, appended to posts or by e-mail. I moderate comments to keep out spam, so please be patient.
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Words to live by
Life is to be lived, not controlled; and humanity is won by continuing to play in the face of certain defeat.
Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man
*
Νέος ἐφ’ ἡμέρῃ ἥλιος. [The sun is new every day.]
Heraclitus
*
Every day is a new deal.
Harvey Pekar, “Alice Quinn”
*
Nos plus grandes craintes, comme nos plus grandes espérances, ne sont pas au-dessus de nos forces, et nous pouvons finir par dominer les unes et réaliser les autres. [Our worst fears, like our greatest hopes, are not outside our powers, and we can come in the end to triumph over the former and to achieve the latter.]
Marcel Proust, Finding Time Again
*
Surely, in the light of history, it is more intelligent to hope rather than to fear, to try rather than not to try.
Eleanor Roosevelt, You Learn by Living
*
I don’t really deeply feel that anyone needs an airtight reason for quoting from the works of writers he loves, but it’s always nice, I’ll grant you, if he has one.
J.D. Salinger, Seymour: An Introduction
*
I’m not afraid to get it right
I turn around and I give it
one more try
Sufjan Stevens, “Jacksonville”
*
L’attention est la forme la plus rare et la plus pure de la générosité. [Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.]
Simone Weil, in a letter
Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man
*
Νέος ἐφ’ ἡμέρῃ ἥλιος. [The sun is new every day.]
Heraclitus
*
Every day is a new deal.
Harvey Pekar, “Alice Quinn”
*
Nos plus grandes craintes, comme nos plus grandes espérances, ne sont pas au-dessus de nos forces, et nous pouvons finir par dominer les unes et réaliser les autres. [Our worst fears, like our greatest hopes, are not outside our powers, and we can come in the end to triumph over the former and to achieve the latter.]
Marcel Proust, Finding Time Again
*
Surely, in the light of history, it is more intelligent to hope rather than to fear, to try rather than not to try.
Eleanor Roosevelt, You Learn by Living
*
I don’t really deeply feel that anyone needs an airtight reason for quoting from the works of writers he loves, but it’s always nice, I’ll grant you, if he has one.
J.D. Salinger, Seymour: An Introduction
*
I’m not afraid to get it right
I turn around and I give it
one more try
Sufjan Stevens, “Jacksonville”
*
L’attention est la forme la plus rare et la plus pure de la générosité. [Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.]
Simone Weil, in a letter
#1 hit
In memory of
Blog Archive
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2010
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April
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- Weegee the Famous in Indianapolis
- Planet Proust
- Leslie Buck (1922–2010)
- PCs and mice
- Duke Ellington, 1953
- On Duke Ellington’s birthday
- David Hockney and the iPad
- J.D. Salinger photographs
- New York, 1964: record stores
- “Is country music right for you?”
- PowerPoint and the military
- New York, 1964: Schrafft’s
- New York, 1964: Chock full o’Nuts
- War, soldiers, trauma
- Happy Anniversary
- Baby alert
- Government-pen success
- As seen on TV
- Chock full o’Nuts lunch hour
- Angela Lansbury and Basil Rathbone
- An iPad per semester
- The government-issue pen
- Home sweet Homer
- Eddie Feibusch
- Marcel Proust exhibit
- Henry Darger exhibit
- Inverabretes, a creative story
- “The Trustworthiness of Beards”
- In praise of shyness
- Rachel Maddow makes cocktails
- Greenwich Village and coffee house
- Mayflower Coffee Shop(pe)
- Ray LaHood and bicycles
- News grammar
- “Love, Irving Sappho”
- Bill Madison’s Proust Census
- Special theory of relativity
- Easy-listening “Heroes and Villains”
- On the iPad and early adopters
- Clever NYT crossword clue
- Trying the iPad
- Roger Lathbury and Hapworth 16, 1924
- John Gruber on typing and the iPad
- Five sentences about clothes
- Domestic comedy
- The rules of the game
- On this day in 1327
- Brookline Booksmith
- Jay Bennett (1912–2009)
- “Sort of gimmicky”
- “REUSE THIS CARTON!”
- “Why I won’t buy an iPad”
- Watching the Cross Bronx Expressway
- Orange soda art
- “iPads for EVERYONE!”
- Gmail outage
- Google changes its name
-
▼
April
(57)
favorite posts
- Against “deep reading”
- Alkalize with Alka-Seltzer
- At the World Trade Center and St. Paul’s Chapel
- Being wrong about beauty
- Bobbing for apples
- “Bon Appétit!”
- “The Case of the Purloined Prairie”
- ChatGPT’s twenty-line poems
- “The ’Clipse”
- Couric and Palin and Orwell
- Digital naïfs
- Donald Trump’s spelling
- Ebinger’s
- Ellington for beginners
- “Extra credit?”
- Five desks
- Five pens
- Fluke life
- The gold standard, haircuts, and everyone else
- Happy birthday, Mr. Piletti
- Hoagies, pizza, and English studies
- Homeric blindness in “colledge”
- How to Write a Sentence
- Imaginary liner notes
- Invisible man: Louis Armstrong and the New York Times
- Invitation to a dance
- Is there a pencil in The House?
- John Lee Hooker and Canned Heat
- A Kerouac notebook page
- The kitchen shink [sic]
- Klenosky!
- “Make My Jotter Quit!”
- Lady Elaine’s can
- Mysteries of the tollbooth
- National’s et cetera
- Nick DeMaio and the Eldorado
- Obama revisions
- Obama thoughts
- On “On the New Literacy”
- On “Politics and the English Language”
- “On the Road”
- The Oteris and Marty
- The other little book
- Out of the past
- Peppa Pig and the Brontës
- Phones Are For People
- Politics and theory
- “The Poet”
- Proust: involuntary memory, foolish things
- P.S. 131
- Pullum on Strunk and White
- Re: the Beloit Mindset List
- Some have gone and some remain
- “The Spokesmen”
- Sports Illustrated and Proust
- The Springfield Daily Gazette
- That (in)famous line
- Things I learned on my summer vacation
- Van Dyke Parks in Chicago
- W(h)ither grammar
- What I hear in “Walk Away Renee”
Nancy, October 19, 1950.
comments: 1
You'll never be bored because you won't have to be on the listening end of a conversation (or monologue) delivered to you by someone who really only wants to hear him or herself talk.
I agree with the Darwinian concept of shyness. I think that there is a distinction between being shy and being skeptical of hierarchies and agendas in social situations. Self-diagnosed shyness can amount to many missed opportunities for friendship. Sometimes it is worth it to get out of yourself and enter into a conversation. There's a chance that the person on the other end won't be a blowhard who doesn't care anything about you.
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