Dana Gioia's message to graduates

Dana Gioia is a poet and critic, chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, and graduate of Stanford, where he recently gave the commencement address:

What is the defining difference between passive and active citizens? Curiously, it isn't income, geography, or even education. It depends on whether or not they read for pleasure and participate in the arts. These cultural activities seem to awaken a heightened sense of individual awareness and social responsibility.

Why do these issues matter to you? This is the culture you are about to enter. For the last few years you have had the privilege of being at one of the world's greatest universities—not only studying, but being a part of a community that takes arts and ideas seriously. Even if you spent most of your free time watching Grey's Anatomy, playing Guitar Hero, or Facebooking your friends, those important endeavors were balanced by courses and conversations about literature, politics, technology, and ideas.

Distinguished graduates, your support system is about to end. And you now face the choice of whether you want to be a passive consumer or an active citizen. Do you want to watch the world on a screen or live in it so meaningfully that you change it?

Read it all:

Dana Gioia's commencement address (Stanford News, via Arts and Letters Daily)

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Pocket notebook sighting

From Robert Bresson's 1951 film Diary of a Country Priest (Journal d'un curé de campagne). Here the unnamed protagonist, the priest of Ambricourt (played by Claude Laydu), holds a pocket notebook. He is often shown writing with a dip pen in a larger journal.

The film is available, beautifully restored, from the Criterion Collection:

Diary of a Country Priest

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Minimalist word processors

There's a nice post at Web Worker Daily listing ten free alternatives to Microsoft Word. The comments point to a few more.

Having switched over to Macintosh and OS X, I've been delighted by TextEdit (which comes with a Mac), Bean (a free download), and Pages (part of iWork, not free). I've listed these applications in order of increasingly complexity: Pages is the choice if, for instance, you need to create columns. I'm also very happy with Smultron, a free text-editor with tabs. And I'm even happier to be working on a computer without Microsoft Word.

10 Free Minimalist Word Processors for Greater Productivity (Web Worker Daily)

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Proust: "I only ever saw her wearing a hat"

Here's a short story from Proust, illustrating the narrator's contention that "our own contribution to our love — even if judged solely from the point of view of quantity — is greater than that of the person we love." This contention harmonizes with what Proust's narrator elsewhere says of love: that it is a matter of projecting onto another "a state of our own self." Thus love (on these terms) might develop and flourish no matter how limited the acquaintance with its object:

A former drawing teacher of my grandmother's had had a daughter with an obscure mistress. The latter died soon after the death of the child; and this was such a heartbreak to the drawing teacher that he did not long survive her. During the final months of his life, my grandmother and some ladies from Combray, who had never so much as wished to refer in his presence to the woman, with whom he had never officially lived and who had occupied little space in his life, decided to contribute to a fund that would give the little girl a life annuity. It was my grandmother's proposal; but some ladies proved reluctant: Was the child really worth it? Was she actually the daughter of the man who believed he was her father? One can never be sure, with women like her mother. . . . However, it was decided; and the child came to thank them: she was ugly and bore a marked resemblance to the old drawing teacher, thus dispelling all doubts. Her hair being her best feature, one of the ladies said to the father, who had brought the child, "What lovely hair!" My grandmother added, thinking that, the fallen woman being now dead and the drawing teacher almost dead, there could be no harm in alluding to past events of which everyone had feigned ignorance at the time, "It must run in the family. Did her mother have such lovely hair?" To which the father gave a guileless reply: "I don't know — I only ever saw her wearing a hat."

From In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, translated by James Grieve (New York: Penguin, 2002), 438-39

Like so much of Proust, this passage is both comic and poignant, with a range of motives and responses to consider: the guarded reluctance of proper ladies; the effort, on someone's part, to find something nice to say; and framing those more genteel responses, the narrator's grandmother's unhesitating generosity (she embodies all that is best in Combray) and her pragmatic choice (seeing as the drawing teacher is "almost dead") to speak openly of the past. And finally, the poor teacher's response. "I only ever saw her wearing a hat": meaning what? That she kept it on in — a carriage perhaps?

All Proust posts (Pinboard)

Baby naming

Being a parent can be as complicated as you choose to make it:

Lisa and Jon Stone of Lynnwood, Wash., turned to a name consultant because they didn't want their son to be "one of five Ashtons in the class," says Mrs. Stone, 36, a graphic designer. For Mr. Stone, 37, a production director for a nonprofit arts organization, the challenge was to find a "cool" name that would help his son stand out. "An unusual name gets people's attention when you're searching for a job or you're one in a field of many," he says.

At first they considered a family name, Greene, but thought Greene Stone sounded like "some New Age holistic product." Mr. Stone liked Finn Stone and Flynn Stone, but thought both sounded too much like the name of a cartoon family from the Stone Age. After reading through eight baby-name books, the Stones contacted Laura Wattenberg, author of "The Baby Name Wizard," for advice. She suggested they avoid names that ended in "s," given their last name, or names that seemed to create phrases. Her recommendations: Evander as a top choice, with Levi and Vaughn close behind.

When the Stones unveiled the name Evander Jet to family and friends three months ago, Mrs. Stone says they were surprised. "Everybody was like, 'Oh, you named him after the boxer,' when actually it's a really old name."

The Baby-Name Business (Wall Street Journal)

Evander is in Virgil's Aeneid.

Why didn't they go for Roland? (Sorry.)

Overheard

Overheard by my friend Stefan Hagemann:

"On the bright side, we can go see the squirrel museum anytime we want."

The museum, Stefan reports, is in Madison, Wisconsin, housed in a funeral home.

Caution: The link (also from Stefan) takes you to a page with thumbnail photographs of the exhibits, with dead, stuffed squirrels playing basketball, riding motorcycles, and things of that nature:

Squirrel Museum

(Thanks, Stefan!)

All "Overheard" posts (Pinboard)

Lombardo's Homer wins

Stanley Lombardo's unabridged recording of his translation of the Iliad has received the 2007 Benjamin Franklin Award from the Independent Book Publishers Association for best adult nonfiction audiobook.

Nonfiction? Well, the Greeks did think of the Iliad as (to borrow Ezra Pound's definition of the epic) "a poem containing history."

Benjamin Franklin Awards, 2007
Stanley Lombardo recordings (Parmenides Audio)
Stanley Lombardo interview (Jacket)
"Wonderland of voices," review of Lombardo's Iliad and Odyssey recordings (Jacket)

Overheard

"It's not a beauty contest; it's a scholarship program."

All "overheard" posts (Pinboard)

A new Van Dyke Parks interview

From an interview series, Conversations about Creativity:

Cecil Vortex: Is there anything you've found that helps get you into a more creative mode?

Van Dyke Parks: Yes -- smoking is good. Smoking is very helpful. But it's deadly, so today is my second day without smoking. I stopped smoking on Sunday, having smoked for years.

I think that smoking is a very good thing to do -- it's got the association with the Indians; it's a peaceable thing. But like much else that the Indians gave us, we abused the privilege. And so, in my case I must simply stop. I'm too old to smoke. But I do believe that nicotine provides a great creative thrust….

Read the rest:

An Interview with Van Dyke Parks (Cecil Vortex)

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Happy birthday, Brian Wilson

Odd coincidence: someone from Hawthorne, California (on completely unrelated business) visited Orange Crate Art today, which reminded me that it's Brian Wilson's birthday. Brian Wilson is 65 today. Above, four stills of BW performing "Surf's Up," from the 1966 television special Inside Pop, hosted by Leonard Bernstein.

You can find the partial performance from this television show on YouTube, as excerpted from a more recent documentary. The voice at the end belongs to Van Dyke Parks, who wrote the words to Brian Wilson's music.

"Surf's Up" (Brian Wilson)