Make way for ducklings

Are such signs common? They are uncommonly cute.

[Spotted near Columbus, Ohio.]

Overheard

A moment in the never-ending battle between imagination and reality:

"I'm so glad we don't really go camping."

(Thanks, Elaine!)

All "Overheard" posts (via Pinboard)

Managing attention

Do you have a never-ending list? Do you manage your time? Do you manage minutes, tasks, and lists? Do you start each day with a list that has more on it at the end of the day than it did at the beginning of the day, in spite of how many items are completed and crossed off?

Or do you manage your attention? Do you manage emotions, intention, and make choices about what will and will not get done? What are your favorite ways to do this?

Linda Stone, who gave us the term "continous partial attention," is asking some questions:

Is It Time to Retire the Never-Ending List? (Huffington Post)

"Is Google making us stupid?"

Nicholas Carr poses that question in the July/August 2008 Atlantic:

Over the past few years I've had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn't going — so far as I can tell — but it's changing. I'm not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I'm reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I'd spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That's rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I'm always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.

I think I know what's going on. For more than a decade now, I've been spending a lot of time online, searching and surfing and sometimes adding to the great databases of the Internet.

As Carr acknowledges, written language and the printing press have also occasioned alarm. I would argue though that it's not Google that makes us stupid but continuous partial attention. It's possible to read online selectively, even deeply. (Mark Hurst's Bit Literacy offers some guidance, and adding an ad-blocking extension to one's browser makes for a much less distracting environment.) And it's possible to use Google as a focused investigative tool. Google is certainly a fine means to the sort of inexpert, everyday knowledge that underwrites what E.D. Hirsch long ago called "cultural literacy." And Google makes possible various kinds of informal research that would otherwise be tedious or unmanageable. In such ways, Google can make us smarter. Information though is not the same as knowledge, and Google co-founder Sergey Brin's dream of "all the world's information directly attached to your brain" suggests a pretty dismal, Gradgrindian model of human potential.

I'm planning to assign Carr's essay as a first piece of reading in the freshman writing class I'm teaching in the fall. Whether to read it online or in print will be, I hope, a subject of discussion.

Related posts
"A lot out there is conspiring to distract you"
George Steiner on reading
Words, mere words
Zadie Smith on reading

61 Atherton Road

I was thinking about the house in Brookline, MA, where Elaine and lived in 1984 and 1985. Typing the address into Google reveals that 61 Atherton Road just went on the market. We rented the first floor — living room with fireplace, dining room, kitchen, bathroom, two bedrooms, screened-in back porch — for $600 a month (heat not included). The asking price in 2008: $879,900.

Anne Thackeray Ritchie on the past

The full passage is sunnier than Allen Shawn's excerpt:

When people write of the past, those among us who have reached a certain age are sometimes apt to forget that it is because so much of it still exists in our lives, that it is so dear to us. And, as I have said before, there is often a great deal more of the past in the future than there was in the past itself at the time. We go back to meet our old selves, more tolerant, forgiving our own mistakes, understanding it all better, appreciating its simple joys and realities. There are compensations for the loss of youth and fresh impressions; and one learns little by little that a thing is not over because it is not happening with noise and shape or outward sign: its roots are in our hearts, and every now and then they send forth a shoot which blossoms and bears fruit still.

Anne Thackeray Ritchie, Chapters from Some Memoirs (Leipzig: Bernhard Tauchnitz, 1895), 227

Related posts
"[A]n aspirate more or less"
Anne Thackeray Ritchie in Google Book Search
One more passage from Anne Thackeray Ritchie

From The Savages

I just saw The Savages (2007, now on DVD), and it's pretty plain to me that Tamara Jenkins, who both wrote and directed the film, well deserved the Academy Award for best original screenplay (she lost to Diablo Cody, who wrote Juno). Like, say, Sideways, The Savages is a film for grown-ups. The story focuses on siblings who must decide what to do about (or for, or with) a parent who's failing. Philip Seymour Hoffman and Laura Linney offer brilliant performances as Jon and Wendy (apt names!), adult children trying to do the right thing, still caught in the bickering and rivalry and emotional distance of a dark childhood. Philip Bosco is their father Lenny, a man whose anger and intolerance remain frightening even as he passes into dementia. A brief scene late in the movie gives an idea of what he was like in earlier years.

Here's one bit of dialogue, when Jon and Wendy find their father tethered to a hospital bed:

Lenny: So do something! You're the doctor!

Jon: I'm gonna go get somebody.

Wendy: He's not that kind of doctor, Dad.

Lenny: I thought he was a doctor.

Wendy: A doctor of philosophy. He's a professor, of theater.

Lenny: Like Broadway?

Wendy: No, Dad, like theater of social unrest.

Daughter, time, wine

You know that time is passing when your daughter is suddenly old enough to give you a bottle of wine as a gift (Crane Lake Petite Sirah). Thanks, Rachel!

Homer's world

Book 18 of Homer's Iliad contains a remarkable description of the surface of Achilles' shield. Made by the god Hephaestus, the lame blacksmith, the shield offers an enigmatic picture of life in its totality: sun and moon, war and peace, city and country, the seasonal endeavors of agriculture and pastoralism and vintage, all encircled by the River Ocean. I like to think of the shield as the god's silent, somber celebration of all the possibilities of life beyond the Iliad: the city at war (i.e., life as it's lived in the Iliad) represents only a small part of the whole.

Above, a remarkable visualization not of Achilles' shield but of the geography of the Homeric world, creator unknown. (Click for a larger view.) If this picture were a real snowglobe, I'd buy it in a second. More via the links:

Homer’s Snowdome (Strange Maps)
Homer's view of the earth (henry-davis.com)
An explanation (henry-davis.com)

(Thanks, TRH!)

Armstrong and Arlen, blues and weather

Singer Ethel Waters famously described songwriter Harold Arlen (1905–1986) as "the Negro-est white man I ever knew." Such songs as "Blues in the Night" (lyrics by Johnny Mercer), "I Gotta Right to Sing the Blues," and "Ill Wind" (lyrics by Ted Koehler) suggest Arlen's strong affinity with African-American musical tradition.

And then there's "Stormy Weather" (also with Koehler), which Waters introduced at the Cotton Club in 1933. I woke up yesterday morning realizing that the song's first three notes — "Don't know why" — are the first three notes of the opening ensemble chorus of the 1928 recording by Louis Armstrong and His Hot Five of King Oliver's "West End Blues." "West End Blues" is in E flat. Here's the start of "Stormy Weather," with the same intervals in G:

Armstrong's version of Oliver's tune adds a two-note pickup (the "Don't know" of the lyric) not found in Oliver's own 1928 recording. The three notes are then repeated (with different time values) in both "West End Blues" and "Stormy Weather" ("Don't know why," "there's no sun"). Was Arlen paying conscious homage to Armstrong? I doubt it. But unconscious homage is the best homage of all.

In 1929, Oliver recorded a remake of "West End Blues" that follows the contours of the Hot Five recording, with Louis Metcalf approximating Armstrong's trumpet. Oliver, Armstrong's mentor, was now emulating his former student.

Will Friedwald's Stardust Melodies: A Biography of Twelve of America's Most Popular Songs (New York: Pantheon, 2002) has a chapter on "Stormy Weather" (the source of the Waters quotation) that makes no mention of a "West End Blues" connection. So it may be that you heard it here first (though Elaine says that she thought of it a long time ago). What made me think of the connection? Stormy weather, perhaps.

(Thanks, Elaine, for the musical notation!)

Related posts
All Louis Armstrong posts (Pinboard)