Involuntary bicycle

"I rode my bike": I said that in class yesterday morning, when some thunder spoke up to contradict the day's forecast. And I felt for a moment thirteen years old, as if I had been riding my Schwinn Sting-Ray — high-rise handlebars, banana seat, Slik rear tire (no tread), and a basketball under one arm.

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Creative timekeeping

In the news:

Hillary Clinton today brought up the assassination of Sen. Robert Kennedy while defending her decision to stay in the race against Barack Obama.

"My husband did not wrap up the nomination in 1992 until he won the California primary somewhere in the middle of June, right? We all remember Bobby Kennedy was assassinated in June in California. I don't understand it," she said, dismissing calls to drop out.

It depends on what the meaning of the word "June" is.

In 1968, the New Hampshire primary took place on March 12. RFK was assassinated less than three months later, on June 5. (He died on June 6.)

In 1992, the Iowa caucuses took place on February 10. Bill Clinton won the California primary less than four months later, on June 3. Writing in the New York Times on June 14, 1992, Tom Wicker noted that "By the time the California primary rolled around two weeks ago, Clinton had the nomination all but in the bag" [my emphasis].

This year's Iowa caucuses took place on January 3, so the 2008 equivalents of June 1968 and June 1992 would be late March and early May. The Clinton campaign's use of "June" as a fixed reference point by which to judge the appropriate length of a campaign is transparently dishonest. And to invoke a political assassination while explaining why one is continuing a campaign: my mind reels.

I now realize that any attempt to think about the Clinton campaign in relation to kleos may be misguided. Kleos functions in a culture of shame, where the abiding concern is what others will think of you. The Clinton campaign at this point is beyond shameless.

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Hillary Clinton and kleos

Hillary Clinton and kleos

I'm teaching the Iliad and the Odyssey in a four-week summer session for undergraduates: two hours of teaching in the morning, five days a week, and preparing for the next class at night. So I have Homer on the brain, and I find myself thinking about the Democratic presidential race in terms of κλέος. Kleos, "what is heard," or, less literally, "fame," "glory," is one of the great moving forces in Homer's Iliad. When, for instance, the Trojan warrior Hector challenges any Achaean to fight him, he promises if victorious to return his opponent's corpse for funeral rites,

"So someone in generations yet to come
Will say as he sails by on the darkening sea,
'That is the tomb of a man long dead,
Killed in his prime by glorious Hector.'
Someone will say that, and my fame [kleos] will not die."

[Iliad 7, translated by Stanley Lombardo.]

To seek kleos is to seek a cultural afterlife in memory and speech.

Kleos in Homer is always a good thing, but as the Greek-English Lexicon points out, kleos can also refer to any reputation, good or bad. So what kleos might Hillary Clinton's actions in the Democratic race attain for her? What will the future say? That she gave her all in an effort to push back the barriers against women's full participation in political life? That when she saw the math against her, she worked to support her party's inevitable nominee and further the cause of racial reconciliation? Or that she damaged her party's chances by taking every chance to characterize her opponent's success as illegitimate? The future is listening, now.

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Louis Armstrong, collagist

Well, you know, my hobbie (one of them anyway) is using a lot of scotch tape.

Louis Armstrong, in a 1953 letter

The Spring 2008 Paris Review has a feature on Armstrong's collages, which cover the fronts and backs of reel-to-reel tape boxes.

The label in the center of the above collage most likely refers to the 1960 Duke Ellington-Billy Strayhorn adaptation of The Nutcracker Suite and the 1956 Ellington-Rosemary Clooney LP Blue Rose.

[The contributor info in the PR notes that Steven Brower's Satchmo: The Wonderful World of Louis Armstrong, on Armstrong's visual art, will published by Harry N. Abrams in spring 2009.]

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A new album from Brian Wilson

In the news:

Brian Wilson will release his first album in more than three years in September, a project that marks his return to Capitol Records, the label where he gained fame with the Beach Boys during the 1960s.

That Lucky Old Sun will come out in the United States on September 2, and a day earlier internationally, Wilson and Capitol announced on Monday during a news conference at the label's historic tower in Hollywood.

"It's a great honor to be here and a very sentimental time in my life," said Wilson, 65, looking relatively healthy in a striped polo shirt, faded jeans and slip-on tennis shoes. "I haven't recorded here in 46 years, almost half a century that I haven't recorded here. Ha!"

That Lucky Old Sun is a collaboration with Scott Bennett (of Wilson's band) and Van Dyke Parks.

Five radios

1
I remember my first transistor radio, a Zenith with a leather case and an earphone that looked like a hearing aid. I think that I received this radio as a present for First Communion (halfhearted Catholic childhood). My most vivid memory of this radio involves summer and a "beach chair" (lawn chair) on which I sat in front of my grandparents' house, one leg elevated, listening to WABC and WMCA (the Beatles, the Four Seasons' "Rag Doll"). I had bruised my leg very badly trying to jump up the steep steps of my stoop, two steps at a time.

2
I remember my parents' FM radio, which sat on their bedroom dresser. This radio took several minutes to warm up, and I liked seeing the red-orange warmth as the tubes came to life. In early adolescence, I listened to hours of blues from the twenties and thirties on this radio, via Columbia University's WKCR. Yes, those were my Saturday and Sunday afternoons.

[ ]
I don't remember a second transistor radio, but I must have had one, because I do remember listening to Jean Shepherd on WOR when I was in high school. I listened in bed with an earphone and never fell asleep.

3
I remember the kitchen radio, AM-FM, always tuned to WOR in the morning ("Rambling with Gambling") or to news station WINS ("You give us 22 minutes; we'll give you the world").

4, 5
I remember the AM radios in the family station wagon (a Ford Torino) and my first car (a Honda Civic 1200). As a college commuter in those cars, I listened to Gambling in the morning (with helicopter reports on traffic) and Bob and Ray in the afternoon. Being stuck in traffic on the approach to the George Washington Bridge was a lot more bearable with Bob and Ray, Mary and Harry Backstayge, and Wally Ballou ("-ly Ballou here").

[Reading about WKCR in the New Yorker prompted me to write this post. My model is Joe Brainard's I Remember, a book with a simple and brilliant premise.]

[Update, May 29, 2008: I just found a photograph of the Zenith on Flickr: Zenith Royal 12.]

Yahoo! Mail memorial tagline

Goodbye, taglines. I will have to be a better friend, newshound, and know-it-all without you.

"Your world is doomed!"

From a New Yorker profile of WKCR-FM's Phil Schaap:

The precocious obsessive is a familiar high-school type, particularly among boys, but the object of Schaap's obsession was a peculiar one among his classmates. "The lonely days were adolescence," he admitted. "My peer group thought I was out of my mind. But, even then, kids knew basic things about jazz. Teddy Goldstein knew 'Take the A Train.' But he kept telling me, 'Don't you know what the Beatles are doing? Your world is doomed!'"

Creative counting

From CNN:

Clinton has recently been claiming a lead over Obama in the popular vote, a debatable claim, especially because the Democratic National Committee doesn't count the votes of Florida and Michigan, which Clinton does. . . . Clinton's campaign also excludes the caucus states in their popular vote count.

Too bad the Clinton approach wasn't available when I was an undergrad. I could've used it to improve my GPA:

1. Exclude any history course from the spring semester of freshman year.

2. Exclude all courses in biology, mathematics, and physics.

3. 4.0!

Looking at Lincoln

Visiting the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum yesterday, I wasn't wowed by the lifelike figures standing about (John Wilkes Booth outside the White House!). I wasn't wowed by the sound effects (e.g., snoring in the Lincoln cabin) or the Ivesian blur of choral music, orchestral music, and (live) guitar and dulcimer. The Scholarship meets Showmanship™ philosophy of the so-called "Experience Museum" leaves me cold. The experience I want in a museum is that of being able to look at things without distraction. Dowdy me.

What I best liked in the museum: Looking at the back inside cover of one of Lincoln's law books, filled with pencil jottings. Looking at a sequence of photographs that show how Lincoln aged through the Civil War. And in a temporary exhibit about presidential campaigns, looking at a television camera used in a 1960 Kennedy-Nixon debate. It was a CBS camera, surprisingly small, with a broken plastic 2 on its front. I wonder if it might be the camera on the right in this photograph (no. 1 is on the left).