Barack Obama on race

One more passage from Barack Obama:

To say that we are one people is not to suggest that race no longer matters -- that the fight for equality has been won, or that the problems that minorities face in this country today are largely self-inflicted. We know the statistics: On almost every single socioeconomic indicator, from infant mortality to life expectancy to employment to home ownership, black and Latino Americans in particular continue to lag far behind their white counterparts. In corporate boardrooms across America, minorities are grossly underrepresented; in the United States Senate, there are only three Latinos and two Asian members (both from Hawaii), and as I write today I am the chamber's sole African American. To suggest that our racial attitudes play no part in these disparities is to turn a blind eye to both our history and our experience -- and to relieve ourselves of the responsibility to make things right.

Moreover, while my own upbringing hardly typifies the African American experience -- and although, largely through luck and circumstance, I now occupy a position that insulates me from most of the bumps and bruises that the average black man must endure -- I can recite the usual litany of petty slights that during my forty-five years have been directed my way: security guards tailing me as I shop in department stores, white couples who toss me their car keys as I stand outside a restaurant waiting for the valet, police cars pulling me over for no apparent reason. I know what it's like to have people tell me I can't do something because of my color, and I know the bitter swill of swallowed-back anger. I know as well that Michelle and I must be continually vigilant against some of the debilitating story lines that our daughters may absorb -- from TV and music and friends and the streets -- about who the world thinks they are, and what the world imagines they should be.

To think clearly about race, then, requires us to see the world on a split screen -- to maintain in our sights the kind of America that we want while looking squarely at America as it is, to acknowledge the sins of our past and the challenges of the present without becoming trapped in cynicism or despair.

Barack Obama, The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream (NY: Crown, 2006), 232-33

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Barack Obama on facts
Ideology v. values

Happy Father's Day

[Photo circa 1990]

A related post
Things my children no longer say

Bloomsday

[Ulysses (1922), opening page of the 1961 Modern Library edition]

Today is Bloomsday, the 1904 Thursday on which most of the events of James Joyce's Ulysses take place. (The novel ends in the early morning hours of June 17.)

Ulysses begins:

Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed. A yellow dressinggown, ungirdled, was sustained gently behind him by the mild morning air. He held the bowl aloft and intoned:

—Introibo ad altare Dei.

Halted, he peered down the dark winding stairs and called up coarsely:

—Come up, Kinch. Come up, you fearful jesuit.

The design of the Modern Library Ulysses (1934), with the first letters of the novel's three sections -- S, M, P -- filling whole pages, helped to elicit some wonderful if perhaps tenuous speculations about Joyce's art. S, M, P -- subject, middle, and predicate, the three parts of a syllogism. The letters have also been understood in terms of the novel's principal figures: S for Stephen Dedalus, the focus of Stephen Dedalus' section of the novel; M for Molly Bloom, to whom Leopold Bloom's thoughts always return; P for "Poldy," Molly's Leopold, to whom she said "yes I will Yes."

It may be no more than coincidence that the novel's first and last words reverse one another (s to y, y to s).

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123456

Browser screenshots

Browsershots and IE NetRenderer are two no-cost online services useful to anyone with a webpage. Enter a URL, and you'll get screenshots showing how the page displays in a variety of browsers, in a variety of operating systems.

Looking at Orange Crate Art with these services a couple of days ago let me see that my blog was displaying properly in every browser tested -- except for Internet Explorer (which I never, ever, use). What's more: IE 5.5, 6, and 7 each displayed the page differently. I had to tinker with the padding for a section of the sidebar to get the various IEs to cooperate.

If you have a webpage, I'd recommend trying these services. You may be surprised to see the variety of browsers available. (I like Firefox.) And if there's an unsightly problem, it's nice to know about it (as with spinach between your teeth and things of that nature).

(Which reminds me: Why are the kids today always referring to "things of that nature"? And "and whatnot"?)

Browsershots
IE NetRenderer

Oops

From an opinion piece in a newspaper:



Feel free to make whatever quips and puns occur to you.

William Bronk on reading and time

From an interview with poet William Bronk (1918-1999):

I'm glad I read the things I did when I was younger because I couldn't possibly do it now. I read Proust two or three times. Time is not a uniform quality because as you get older it shrinks. I don't know where the hell it goes to. There used to be long days when you could read long books but they're not there any more.

At Home in the Unknown: An Interview with William Bronk (Artzar)

Proust: involuntary memory, foolish things

Here's a key passage for thinking about Proust's understanding of involuntary memory. Involuntary memory is of course the phenomenon underlying the famous moment of the madeleine -- the unbidden return of the past, triggered by a sensory detail.

On vacation in Balbec, the narrator has just heard a stranger mention "The family of the chief undersecretary at the Postmaster General's." The words overheard remind him of a conversation that Gilberte and M. Swann once had about this family. Habit, the subject with which the narrator begins, fascinates him: it robs what is wondrous (the telephone, for instance) of its wonder; it blinds us to our circumstances; it makes the unendurable endurable. In this passage, the power of forgotten particulars overcomes habit, overcomes time:

Habit weakens all things; but the things that are best at reminding us of a person are those which, because they were insignificant, we have forgotten, and which have therefore lost none of their power. Which is why the greater part of our memory exists outside us, in a dampish breeze, in the musty air of a bedroom or the smell of autumn's first fires, things through which we can retrieve any part of us that the reasoning mind, having no use for it, disdained, the last vestige of the past, the best of it, the part which, after all our tears seem to have dried, can make us weep again. Outside us? Inside us, more like, but stored away from our mind's eye, in that abeyance of memory which may last forever. It is only because we have forgotten that we can now and then return to the person we once were, envisage things as that person did, be hurt again, because we are not ourselves anymore, but someone else, who once loved something that we no longer care about. The broad daylight of habitual memory gradually fades our images of the past, wears them away until nothing is left of them and the past becomes irrecoverable. Or, rather, it would be irrecoverable, were it not that a few words (such as "chief undersecretary at the Postmaster General's") had been carefully put away and forgotten much as a copy of a book is deposited in the Bibliothèque Nationale against the day when it may become unobtainable.

From In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, translated by James Grieve (New York: Penguin, 2002), 222

Last year while reading Proust I had a vivid moment of involuntary memory when a glass of water put me in my maternal grandparents' kitchen. When I came home last night after a post-dinner shopping expedition, the still-present smell of our chipotle, corn, and black bean stew put me in the hallway of my paternal grandparents' apartment building in Union City, New Jersey. The apartment was five flights up, with the aromas of Cuban cooking all the way.

Having found a common element in the works of Proust and Cole Porter, I'm prompted by the above passage to make another link between Proust and popular song. Proust would certainly understand the power of these insignificant, foolish things:

A cigarette that bears a lipstick's traces,
An airline ticket to romantic places,
And still my heart has wings:
These foolish things remind me of you.

"These Foolish Things (Remind Me Of You)"
(Music by Jack Strachey and Harry Link, words by Holt Marvell)

All Proust posts (Pinboard)

The stew recipe is from Vegan with a Vengeance.

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.

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John Ashbery and Fred Astaire on the Mike Douglas Show
Welles' left hand (On a scene from Citizen Kane)