Richard Rorty (1931-2007)

The philosopher Richard Rorty has died.

Richard Rorty, 1931-2007 (Telos Press)
Richard Rorty on the value of literature (Previous blog post)

Educe in Proust

That word again. The writer Bergotte is speaking:

"It may be a sort of second sight on her part. Though I suspect she frequents museums. That would be an interesting thing to educe, wouldn't it?" ("Educe" was one of those words Bergotte was always using; and it had been taken up by certain young men who, though they had never met him, spoke like him as though under the influence of remote hypnotism.)

From In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, translated by James Grieve (New York: Penguin, 2002), 134-35

All Proust posts (Pinboard)

Waitress

[Keri Russell, Adrienne Shelly, Cheryl Hines]

Waitress (2007) is sweet and bitter and charming. It's been labeled "chick flick," but I'd say "people flick."

Director and actor Adrienne Shelly was murdered last year: how sad that this film, which might have been her breakthrough as a director, is now her memorial.

Waitress (Official website)

Ellington in Illinois

Elaine Fine has written about the great experience of playing last night in a concert devoted to symphonic arrangements of longer works by Duke Ellington. As someone who's been listening to Ellington's music since teenagerhood, I was thrilled to be an audience member at this concert, never having imagined I'd have a chance to hear any of these pieces in anything other than their recorded versions. To hear the roaring end of A Tone Parallel to Harlem played by an orchestra -- all I can say is that I was there, and I heard it, and I'll never forget it.

Elaine and I were both fortunate to be audience members for a performance earlier in the week that recreated most of Ellington's first (1943) Carnegie Hall concert. The press release for this recreation made no mention that it would include Black, Brown, and Beige, Ellington's longest and most ambitious composition. Here too, all I can say is that I was there, and I heard it, all of it. Hearing shorter Ellington pieces was equally exciting: Jon Faddis reinventing Rex Stewart's "Boy Meets Horn" -- yes, in the middle of the cornfields! I was happy to be there.

Maurice Peress, a friend and working associate of Duke Ellington and an enthusiastic advocate for his music, conducted both concerts. I gather that Peress doesn't do this kind of thing often. If you're ever nearby when he does: go.

Other Ellington posts
The Duke Box (Ellington in the 40s, an 8-CD set)
Ellington for beginners (Where to start)
Proust and the finger-snapping bit (Ellington advice on how to be cool)

Thomas Hardy, "Drummer Hodge"

Google searches -- e.g., history boys poem -- are pointing to an Orange Crate Art post that mentions the great scene in The History Boys in which Mr. Hector talks about Thomas Hardy's poem "Drummer Hodge." I thought it'd be a good idea to post the poem, which appeared in Hardy's Poems of the Past and Present (1901). The context is the Second Boer War. I offer no interpretation of the poem. (That's right; such stuff cannot be found online.) But given the title of the volume in which "Drummer Hodge" appears, I'll point out that the poem considers Hodge's present, past, and future against a backdrop of eternity.

Drummer Hodge

               I

They throw in Drummer Hodge, to rest
     Uncoffined - just as found:
His landmark is a kopje-crest
     That breaks the veldt around;
And foreign constellations west
     Each night above his mound.

               II

Young Hodge the Drummer never knew --
     Fresh from his Wessex home --
The meaning of the broad Karoo,
     The Bush, the dusty loam,
And why uprose to nightly view
     Strange stars amid the gloam.

               III

Yet portion of that unknown plain
     Will Hodge forever be;
His homely Northern breast and brain
     Grow to some Southern tree,
And strange-eyed constellations reign
     His stars eternally.

[Kopje-crest: a small hill (Afrikaans); veldt: plain (Afrikaans); west: set in the west; Karoo: "high plateau in the Cape of Good Hope, South Africa"; Bush: "British colonial word for tract of land covered with brushwood and shrubby vegetation." Notes from the Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry, ed. Jahan Ramazani, et al. (2003).]

Related post
Movie recommendation: The History Boys

A frequently asked question

From a page of frequently asked questions on the website of the W.H. Auden Society:

Where can I find an interpretation of [name of poem]?

Nothing of this kind seems to be available on the web. This site recommends the books listed on the criticism page, especially those listed as general introductory studies and as comprehensive biographical and critical studies.

I would like to think that somewhere there's a student gullible trusting enough to take this advice. Looking for an explication of a poem? Nothing like that here. Try the library!

Other Auden posts
On handwriting and typing
Six lines from Auden
W.H. Auden centenary

To educe

The word today at A.Word.A.Day is one of my favorites:

educe (i-DOOS, i-DYOOS) verb tr.

1. To draw out; to elicit, as something latent.
2. To deduce.

[From Latin educere (to draw out), from ex- (out of) + ducere (to lead). Ultimately from the Indo-European root deuk- (to lead) that led to other words such as duke, conduct, educate, duct, wanton, and tug.]

When I see the word educe, I think of a passage from Thomas Merton's The Seven Storey Mountain (1948) that I've included on syllabi for some years now. This passage offers a terrific way to think about the possibilities of discussion in a classroom. Merton is writing about Mark Van Doren, one of his professors at Columbia:

Most of the time he asked questions. His questions were very good, and if you tried to answer them intelligently, you found yourself saying excellent things that you did not know you knew, and that you had not, in fact, known before. He had "educed" them from you by his question. His classes were literally "education" -- they brought things out of you, they made your mind produce its own explicit ideas.

Living inside Time

Reading Proust again, I had planned to post sentences from Swann's Way alone, but it's too difficult to resist going on with at least occasional excerpts from the rest of In Search of Lost Time. Here's one. The narrator's father has acknowledged his son's fixed intention to take up writing (not diplomacy) as a way of life. Might that make the narrator happy?

These words of my father's, though they granted me the freedom to be happy or not in life, made me very unhappy that evening. At each one of his unexpected moments of indulgence toward me, I had always wanted to kiss him on his florid cheeks, just above the beard line; and the only thing that ever restrained me was the fear of annoying him. On this occasion, much as an author, to whom his own conceptions seem to have little value because he cannot think of them as separate from himself, may be alarmed at seeing his publishers putting themselves to the trouble of selecting an appropriate paper for them and setting them in a typeface he may think too fine, I began to doubt whether my desire to write was a thing of sufficient importance for my father to lavish such kindness upon it. But it was especially what he said about my likings probably never changing, and what would make me happy in life, that planted two dreadful suspicions in my mind. The first was that, though I met each new day with the thought that I was now on the threshold of life, which still lay before me all unlived and was about to start the very next day, not only had my life in fact begun, but the years to come would not be very different from the years already elapsed. The second, which was really only a variation on the first, was that I did not live outside Time but was subject to its laws, as completely as the fictional characters whose lives, for that very reason, had made me feel so sad when I read of them at Combray, sitting inside my wickerwork shelter. Theoretically, we are aware that the earth is spinning, but in reality we do not notice it: the ground we walk on seems to be stationary and gives no cause for alarm. The same happens with Time. To make its passing perceptible, novelists have to turn the hands of the clock at dizzying speed, to make the reader live through ten, twenty, thirty years in two minutes. At the top of a page, we have been with a lover full of hope; at the foot of the following one, we see him again, already an octogenarian, hobbling his painful daily way round the courtyard of an old-people's home, barely acknowledging greetings, remembering nothing of his past. When my father said, "He's not a child anymore, he's not going to change his mind," etc., he suddenly showed me myself living inside Time; and he filled me with sadness, as though I was not quite the senile inmate of the poorhouse, but one of those heroes dismissed by the writer in the final chapter with a turn of phrase that is cruel in its indifference: "He has taken to absenting himself less and less from the countryside. He has eventually settled down there for good," etc.

From In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, translated by James Grieve (New York: Penguin, 2002), 55-56

What a remarkable passage: parental permission to live the life one wants turns into a life- and death-sentence. This passage invites a reader to recall her or his earliest recognitions of what it means to live in time (or Time).

All Proust posts (Pinboard)

The bald guy

My son showed me an ad from Discover: "Dad, isn't that the bald guy?"



Yes, it's the bald guy:



I don't mean to make light of disease and suffering. I do mean to point out the strangeness of seeing a stock image reappear in another context.

Why do I have a box of Bald Guyz Head Wipes? Because it features one of the best typos I've ever seen. Read all about it:

Laughing in the drugstore

(Thanks, Ben!)

The long e

At a talk given this past April, the linguist William Labov noted in passing that girls' names ending in a long e sound have become much more prevalent in the last hundred years.

At my son's college registration today, the three students leading the group of student-workers: Ashley, Ebonee, and Kristy.