Frost and Sandburg

From an interview with essayist and editor Joseph Epstein:

Robert Frost once said of Sandburg, they were apparently to give a poetry reading together and someone said, "Where's Carl?" and Frost said, "He's upstairs messing up his hair."

Full enjoyment of Epstein's anecdote requires the understanding that Frost too was something of an actor, playing the role of the homespun, folksy, New England sage. Robert Lowell highlights the difference between the public performer and the private man in his poem "Robert Frost" (which begins by playing on the title of Samuel Taylor Coleridge's poem "Frost at Midnight"):

Robert Frost at midnight, the audience gone
to vapor, the great act laid on the shelf in mothballs,
his voice musical, raw and raw — he writes in the
    flyleaf:
"Robert Lowell from Robert Frost, his friend in the
    art."
"Sometimes I feel too full of myself," I say.
And he, misunderstanding, "When I am low,
I stray away. My son wasn't your kind. The night
we told him Merrill Moore would come to treat him,
he said 'I'll kill him first.' One of my daughters
    thought things,
knew every male she met was out to make her;
the way she dresses, she couldn't make a
    whorehouse."
And I, "Sometimes I'm so happy I can't stand myself."
And he, "When I am too full of joy, I think
how little good my health did anyone near me."

When I was an undergraduate, one of my professors told a story of seeing Frost backstage before a campus reading. Unhappy with the reading arrangements, Frost was kicking a student.

Link » Interview with Joseph Epstein (from identitytheory.com)

George Steiner on reading

In his essay "The end of bookishness?" George Steiner anticipates the near-disappearance of what he calls "classical reading," reading that "takes place in a circle of silence which enables the reader to concentrate on the text." Here is reading's future, as Steiner imagines it:

I would not be surprised if that which lies ahead for classical modes of reading resembles the monasticism from which those modes sprung. I sometimes dream of houses of reading — a Hebrew phrase — in which those passionate to learn how to read well would find the necessary guidance, silence, and complicity of disciplined companionship. . . .

The tale is told of how Erasmus, walking home on a foul night, glimpsed a tiny fragment of print in the mire. He bent down, seized upon it and lifted it to a flickering light with a cry of thankful joy. Here was a miracle. A return of that sense of the miraculous in the face of a demanding text would not be altogether a bad thing.

George Steiner, "The end of bookishness?" Times Literary Supplement (8-14 July 1988), 754

A "sense of the miraculous in the face of a demanding text": what every teacher of literature should aim to inspire in the residents of her or his house of reading.

Related posts
» American reading habits
» Words, mere words

Is Jimmy John's bread vegan?

The company website doesn't say. (Other fast-food companies offer detailed information on ingredients.) An online search yielded no clear answer.

After calling Jimmy John's corporate office and sending two e-mails, I finally got an answer. Jimmy John's bread is not vegan. I offer that information here for anyone else who's wondering.

Proust on time

Still climbing Mount Proust, I will pause to share one sentence:

The time we have to spend each day is elastic: it is stretched by the passions we feel; it is shrunk by those we inspire; and all of it is filled by habit.

Marcel Proust, In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, translated by James Grieve (New York: Penguin, 2002), 187

Link » Proust posts, via Pinboard

Blue crayon

In The Pencil: A History of Design and Circumstance (1990), Henry Petroski points out that Henry David Thoureau left out one crucial item when he made a list of supplies for a twelve-day stay in the Maine woods:

According to his friend Ralph Waldo Emerson, Thoreau seems always to have carried, "in his pocket, his diary and pencil." So why did Thoreau — who had worked with his father to produce the very best lead pencils manufactured in America in the 1840s — neglect to list even one among the essential things to take on an excursion? Perhaps the very object with which he may have been drafting his list was too close to him, too familiar a part of his own everyday outfit, too integral a part of his livelihood, too common a thing for him to think to mention.

When my daughter Rachel made a list of supplies for an imaginary camping trip (at the age of six or seven, I think), she was careful to include the blue crayon with which she wrote her list. This list has been on a wall in my office for many years; I thought it would be fun to scan it and post it here.

[List reproduced with permission of Rachel Leddy]

*

The list now appears in Sasha Cagen's anthology To-Do List: From Buying Milk to Finding a Soul Mate, What Our Lists Reveal About Us (New York: Touchstone, 2007).

In the palace of Rumor

From Ovid, a picture of the palace of Rumor:

There is no quiet, no silence anywhere,
No uproar either, only the subdued
Murmur of little voices, like the murmur
Of sea-waves heard far-off, or the last rumble
Of thunder dying in the cloud. The halls
Are filled with presences that shift and wander,
Rumors in thousands, lies and truth together,
Confused, confusing. Some fill idle ears
With stories, others go far-off to tell
What they have heard, and every story grows,
And each new teller adds to what he hears.

Metamorphoses 12, translated by Rolfe Humphries, 1955

Sounds remarkably like a white-collar workplace.

Florence Wolfson's diary

From tomorrow's New York Times:

In its nearly 2,000 entries, the diary paints a picture of a teenager obsessed both with her appearance and with the meaning of existence.

Jan. 16, 1930: “I bought a pair of patent leather opera pumps with real high heels!” On April 8 that year: “Bought myself a little straw hat $3.45 — It won’t last long.” On April 20 the following year: “Dyed my eyebrows & eyelashes and I’ve absolutely ruined my face.” On March 13, 1934: “A fashion show for amusement and almost overcome with envy — not for the clothes, but the tall, slim loveliness of the models.”

Yet interspersed with observations about frivolous matters are equally heartfelt remarks about the books she loved — Baudelaire and Jane Austen were particular favorites — the paintings she studied, the performances she attended and the city that was her home.

“Slept long hours, read ‘The Divine Comedy’ and for the most part too exhausted to think or even understand,” she wrote on March 12, 1934. Four months later: “Reading ‘Hedda Gabler’ for the tenth time.”

Music, a recurring theme, scored her life with exclamation points. Beethoven symphonies! Bach fugues! “Have stuffed myself with Mozart and Beethoven,”“ she wrote on June 28, 1932. “I feel like a ripe apricot — I’m dizzy with the exotic.”

As a teenager, Florence Wolfson kept a five-year diary from 1929 to 1934. She and her diary were recently reunited.

Link » Speak, Memory (New York Times, registration required)

[Update, May 6, 2008: There's a book: The Red Leather Diary.]

XP, Vista

The curmudgeons of this world know that every new operating system brings with it at least much hype as benefits, and more often than not means spending lots of money in pursuit of the ever-elusive goal of making life at the keyboard perfect. And so they'd rather fight than switch.

From an artlcle on why it might be smart to stick with Windows XP and avoid Windows Vista.

Link » How To Stay Happy With Windows XP
from InformationWeek (via Lifehacker)

From the Levenger catalogue

These richly textured pieces of genuine lizard will endure years of use. Inside are pockets of genuine calfskin.

[From the description of the Lizard Card Wallet, in Levenger's "Mega Summer Sale" catalogue]

Just how many mad scientists are now working for Levenger anyway?

American reading habits

Sad statistics:

Only 32% of the U.S. population has ever been in a bookstore.

42% of U.S. college graduates never read another book.

58% of the U.S. adult population never reads another book after high school.

70% of U.S. adults have not been in a bookstore in the last five years.

80% of U.S. families did not buy or read a book last year.

And on an ironic note:

81% of the U.S. population feels "they have a book inside them."

Link » Facts and figures about publishing
from ParaPublishing.com, via kottke.org