Bloomsday 2008

June 16, 1904: Mrs. Leopold (Marion, Molly) Bloom will soon embark on a concert tour. Later today she's meeting Blazes Boylan, the (ahem) "organiser" of the tour, to (ahem) rehearse. Mr. Bloom notices a letter in Boylan's handwriting:

A strip of torn envelope peeped from under the dimpled pillow. In the act of going he stayed to straighten the bedspread.

—Who was the letter from? he asked.

Bold hand. Marion.

—O, Boylan, she said. He's bringing the programme.

—What are you singing?

—La ci darem with J. C. Doyle, she said, and Love's Old Sweet Song.

In the Homeric schema of James Joyce's Ulysses (1922), Leopold Bloom is Odysseus; Molly Bloom, Penelope; Blazes Boylan, a suitor. "Love's Old Sweet Song" (1884, music by J.L. Molloy, words by G. Clifton Bingham) floats through the novel and suggests the crucial question of the Blooms' marriage: is Love's old song to be found only in memory, or might it (like Odysseus) yet return?

Once in the dear dead days beyond recall,
When on the world the mists began to fall,
Out of the dreams that rose in happy throng
Low to our hearts Love sang an old sweet song;
And in the dusk where fell the firelight gleam,
Softly it wove itself into our dream.

Just a song a twilight, when the lights are low,
And the flick'ring shadows softly come and go,
Tho' the heart be weary, sad the day and long,
Still to us at twilight comes Love's old song,
     comes Love's old sweet song.

Even today we hear Love's song of yore,
Deep in our hearts it dwells forevermore.
Footsteps may falter, weary grow the way,
Still we can hear it at the close of day.
So till the end, when life's dim shadows fall,
Love will be found the sweetest song of all.

Just a song a twilight, when the lights are low,
And the flick'ring shadows softly come and go,
Tho' the heart be weary, sad the day and long,
Still to us at twilight comes Love's old song,
     comes Love's old sweet song.

Related post
Bloomsday

A simile on Father's Day

[D]ealing with growing children is like being in a batting cage with ball after ball being thrown at you. You hit the balls you can. Amazingly, the score gets kept for a very long time.

Allen Shawn, Wish I Could Be There: Notes from a Phobic Life (New York: Penguin, 2007), 197

Related posts
"[O]ur past inside us"
Reliving our learning

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!