Words from James Baldwin

Life is tragic simply because the earth turns and the sun inexorably rises and sets, and one day, for each of us, the sun will go down for the last, last time. Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, which is the only fact we have.

James Baldwin, "Down at the Cross: Letter from a Region of My Mind," in The Fire Next Time (1963)

Tea and health

Seen on the side of a box of teabags (Lipton, I think):

Tea is not a substitute for fruits and vegetables.

Birthday

Two years ago:

"If you're going to be this uptight and worried about it, you're not going to be a very happy blogger. Just say 'This is my new blog; I’m trying it out. Thanks to my son and daughter. I hope it works out.'"

Orange Crate Art is two years old today. I will say thanks once again to Rachel and Ben for showing me that I could learn a little HTML. And I will say thanks to Elaine, who listens to posts in the making. I'm grateful, always, to Van Dyke Parks, whose beautiful song gave me "a place to start" and who was gracious and enthusiastic about my use of his title. (If you've never heard "Orange Crate Art," you can find it here and here.)

And thanks, always, to everyone who's read or commented or e-mailed, ever.

Total posts: 570.

Most visited post: How to e-mail a professor.

Most visits in a day: 2,477 (June 23, 2006), most of them going to Cool laptop, a post on using bakeware to cool a laptop.

Most unexpected side effect: Being asked by the Wall Street Journal to comment on the new Proust translation. (See this post for an explanation.)

Longest post: Letters from Aldo, excerpts from a dear friend's letters. I'm happy that this post has more comments than any other: it's a strange and wonderful thing to see people gathered together and remembering someone in this medium.

Link » A place to start, first post, September 15, 2004

Link » You say it's your birthday, blog post, September 15, 2005

Banned books

From Google:

Google Book Search is our effort to expand the universe of books you can discover, and this year we're joining libraries and bookstores across the country to celebrate the 25th anniversary of Banned Books Week – a nationwide initiative to help people learn about and explore banned books. You can start by browsing these 42 classics – books we couldn't be more pleased to highlight.

The three American novels I'm teaching this semester - Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God, and John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath - are all on Google's list of 42 "challenged" books. You can see the list via the link.

Too bad Google censors itself for China.

Link » Explore Banned Books (via Boing Boing)

Overheard

"Hotel rooms usually come with coffee, don't they?"

Link » "Overheard" posts (via Pinboard)

Multitasking: "not paying attention"

From Jared Sandberg's column "Cubicle Culture":

Multitasking, a term cribbed from computers, is an information age creed that, while almost universally sworn by, is more rooted in blind faith than fact. It's the wellspring of office gaffes, as well as the stock answer to how we do more with less when in fact we're usually doing less with more. What now passes for multitasking was once called not paying attention. . . .

"Multitasking doesn't look to be one of the great strengths of human cognition," says James C. Johnston, a research psychologist at NASA's Ames Research Center. "It's almost inevitable that each individual task will be slower and of lower quality."

Link » Why Multitasking Doesn't Work (Wall Street Journal, subscription required)

Related » Multitasking Makes You Stupid

Also related » Clutter

Words from Walt Whitman

The poet Edwin Denby called him "Brooklyn Whitman, commuter Walt." Whitman's words seem appropriate today:

Others will enter the gates of the ferry, and cross
      from shore to shore,
Others will watch the run of the flood-tide,
Others will see the shipping of Manhattan north and
      west, and the heights of Brooklyn to the south
      and east,
Others will see the islands large and small,
Fifty years hence others will see them as they cross,
      the sun half an hour high,
A hundred years hence, or ever so many hundred
      years hence, others will see them,
Will enjoy the sun-set, the pouring in of the flood-
      tide, the falling back to the sea of the ebb-tide.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Just as you feel when you look on the river and sky,
      so I felt,
Just as any of you is one of a living crowd, I was one
      of a crowd,
Just as you are refreshed by the gladness of the river,
      and the bright flow, I was refreshed,
Just as you stand and lean on the rail, yet hurry with
      the swift current, I stood, yet was hurried,
Just as you look on the numberless masts of ships,
      and the thick-stemmed pipes of steamboats, I
      looked.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
These and all else were to me the same as they are
      to you,
I project myself a moment to tell you - also I return.

Walt Whitman, lines from "Sun-Down Poem" (later "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry"), Leaves of Grass, 1856 edition

9/11/01

Above, a scan of Art Speigelman's "9/11/01." As Spiegelman explains, this image "can really be seen only in its printed form." The towers of the World Trade Center, "printed in a fifth, black ink, on a field of black made up of the standard four color printing ink," might be barely visible on your screen.

Link: Re: Cover. How It Came to Be, Art Spiegelman's commentary on his cover

Hair

We live in a world in which men can buy a Philips Norelco Men's Bodygroom to meet their "unique grooming needs." "[T]rim and shave all body zones - not for use above the neck," the ad copy says. Yikes. Here's a defender of hirsuteness:

Plenty of hair gets in my eyes and shadows
My shoulders like a grove. Don't think it ugly
If my whole body is covered thick with bristles:
A tree is ugly without its leaves, a horse
Ugly without a mane, and birds have feathers
And sheep have wool, so beards and hair on the
    chest
Are the sign of a man.

Of course, he goes on to say

                                    In the middle of my forehead
I have one eye, so what? Does not the Sun
See all things here on earth from his high Heaven?
And the great Sun has only one eye.

Yes, it's the Cyclops Polyphemus speaking, in Ovid's Metamorphoses 13 (translated by Rolfe Humphries, 1955).

Proust: Norwegian fjords

This Proust post is for my friend Norman in Norway:

Well, at this point in the social calendar, when anyone invited the Duchesse de Guermantes to dine - with great urgency, in case she was already engaged - she would turn down the invitation with the one excuse that no society person would ever have thought of: she was about to set off on a cruise - "Quite fascinating, my dear!" - of the Norwegian fjords. Society people were thunderstuck by this, and, without any notion of following the Duchesse's example, nevertheless derived from her project the sense of relief you get when you read Kant, and when, after the most rigorous demonstration of determinism, it transpires that above the world of necessity there is the world of freedom.

Marcel Proust, The Guermantes Way, translated by Mark Treharne (New York: Penguin, 2002), 474

Link: Proust posts, via Pinboard