Art and frugal living

NPR had a story yesterday about older artists of modest means who manage still to live in New York City. Hank Virgona, 78, usually makes $25,000 to $30,000 a year. The last movie he saw was Fahrenheit 9/11:

"No one has ever heard me say, 'Well, listen, would you like to buy this?' I never do that. I talk about art. I talk about my love for it; I talk about what you can get from it, you know? That a walk down a quiet street, especially towards like dusk, is as good as going to Caracas or Venezuela or anywhere — you know what I mean? It's nourishing. That's what art — that's part of its purpose."

One more passage from Anne Thackeray Ritchie

Early life is like a chapter out of Dickens, I think — one sees people then: their tricks of expression, their vivid sayings, and their quaint humours and oddities do not surprise one; one accepts everything as a matter of course — no matter how unusual it may be. Later in life one grows more fastidious, more ambitious, more paradoxical: one begins to judge, or to make excuses, or to think about one's companions instead of merely staring at them. All these people we now saw for the first time, vivid but mysterious apparitions; we didn't know what they were feeling and thinking about, only we saw them, and very delightful they all were to look at.

Anne Thackeray Ritchie, Chapters from Some Memoirs (Leipzig: Bernhard Tauchnitz, 1895), 227–28

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"[A]thletes, philosophers, sex symbols"

On the need for variety in human ways and means:

So multifarious is existence that infinite varieties of attention are required to build a sustainable life within it. Those who particularly notice what is worrisome or anticipate — even to their detriment — what will be painful may be just those who notice nuances of life others might neglect. A species in which everyone was General Patton would not succeed, any more than would a race in which everyone was Vincent van Gogh. I prefer to think that the planet needs athletes, philosophers, sex symbols, painters, scientists; it needs the warmhearted, the hardhearted, the coldhearted, and the weakhearted. It needs those who can devote their lives to studying how many droplets of water are secreted by the salivary glands of dogs under which circumstances, and it needs those who can capture the passing impression of cherry blossoms in a fourteen-syllable poem or devote twenty-five pages to the dissection of a small boy's feelings as he lies in bed in the dark waiting for his mother to kiss him good night. It needs people who can design air conditioners, and it needs people who can inspire joy.

Allen Shawn, Wish I Could Be There: Notes from a Phobic Life (New York: Penguin, 2007), 249–50

The next-to-last sentence confirms that the seeming echo of Proust earlier in this book is indeed an echo.

Overheard

In Harvard Square, Cambridge, MA:

"Who knows? Maybe this one's not another hippie burnout who'll, like …"

A hope-filled beginning, a sentence that fizzles, incomplete: perhaps the pattern of human existence itself!

All "Overheard" posts (via Pinboard)

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

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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.

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