Moleskine sighting

[Ricky Gervais and Ashley Jensen]

A Moleskine sighting: In Extras (Season 1, Episode 4), Andy Millman (Ricky Gervais) takes out a Pocket Reporter.

Yes, the notebook of Hemingway, Picasso, and Millman.

Millman, by the way, is a "background artist," not an extra.

[If you're visiting from Armand Frasco's Moleskinerie, welcome to Orange Crate Art. You might like browsing via one or more of the categories on the sidebar -- stationery, for instance. Enjoy your stay, and as the signs used to say, Please Come Again.]

Jack Prelutsky: "Kids are not stupid"

Poet Jack Prelutsky, on the PBS NewsHour tonight:

"Kids are not stupid; they're just short."

Jack Prelutsky feature (PBS NewsHour, 2.2 MB mp3)
Jack Prelutsky (Official website)

I dream of Citizen Kane

Charles Foster Kane is lying in bed, as at the film's start. Susan Alexander Kane is sitting by the bed.

"Bird," Kane says. "Bird!"

"All ya wanniz a bird?" Mrs. Kane asks.

"Bird," Kane says. He coughs, coughs again, and dies.

And that was my dream, inspired I suppose by the screeching cockatoo that appears much later in the film.

Related posts
I dream of Mingus
John Ashbery and Fred Astaire on the Mike Douglas Show
Welles' left hand (On a scene from Citizen Kane)

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.