George Orwell calculates the cost of a reading habit in the 1946 essay "Books v. Cigarettes":
[R]eading is one of the cheaper recreations: after listening to the radio probably the cheapest.After reading this essay, I did some rough arithmetic and found that the cost of my Proust habit has been about 25¢ per reading hour. Cheap!
On George Eliot and human freedom:
If science could see freedom, what would it look like? If it wanted to find the will, where would it search? Eliot believed that the mind's ability to alter itself was the source of our freedom. In Middlemarch, Dorothea — a character who, like Eliot herself, never stopped changing — is reassured that the mind "is not cut in marble — it is not something solid and unalterable. It is something living and changing." Dorothea finds hope in this idea, since it means that the soul "may be rescued and healed." Like Jane Austen, a literary forebear, Eliot reserved her highest praise for characters brave enough to embrace the possibilities of change. Just as Elizabeth Bennet escapes her own prejudices, so does Dorothea recover from her early mistakes. As Eliot wrote, "we are a process and an unfolding."[Lehrer has misquoted. Eliot writes in Middlemarch that "character too is a process and an unfolding." Correction added February 7, 2010.]
Jonah Lehrer, Proust Was a Neuroscientist (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2007), 38
The Internets are filled with generous and pseudonymous people, one of whom, Aronnax, has given us GrApple, a set of four beautiful Firefox themes for Mac. I'm partial to GrApple Delicious (blue), which I think is the most beautiful browser theme I've ever seen. Yes, GrApple looks like Apple's Safari, but better. As Aronnax's page notes, GrApple looks "up to 3 times more beautiful than Safari and up to 5.5 times more beautiful than Opera 9." Thanks, Aronnax!
The above image comes from 3rd Ave. El (1954), an Oscar-nominated short film by Carson Davidson. Its elements are delightful: the El, a few riders, a shiny dime, Franz Joseph Haydn's Concerto in D for Harpsichord, and "the city."
The film's credits list six actors, in what appears to be order of appearance (a photographer, a drunk, and father and child, a couple out on the town). These cardplayers though are evidently genuine commuters, caught perhaps on their way to work.
I found 3rd Ave. El as an extra on the DVD release of The Shvitz (1993, dir. Jonathan Berman), a documentary about old-school steambaths. (Shvitz is Yiddish for "sweat.") But you can also watch 3rd Ave. El online, via the Internet Archive.
In eraserdom, black is the new pink.
Latex- and PVC-free, the Black Pearl eraser looks great and plays well with pencils. The package says that this eraser "fits comfortably" in the hand, but I wouldn't know — I hold it with my fingers. I paid $1.47 for two (a his 'n' hers set).
[Update, August 16, 2008: These erasers are difficult to find. Paper Mate says that the Black Pearl is in production and can be ordered from S.P. Richards, 1-800-442-7774.]
Lifehacker, the home of "tips and downloads for getting things done," had a remarkably ill-advised post over the weekend, Get Drunk Faster. Oy. Some spirited (no pun intended) comments followed, one of which challenged readers to "name one …1… literal or fictional uber-responsible type that the opposite sex ultimately digs."
That's easy. In Homer's Iliad, there's the Trojan warrior Hector. His wife Andromache loves him, and Helen (the most beautiful woman in the world) seems attracted to him. In Iliad 6, when Hector and Helen speak, she wonders,
"But since the gods have ordained these evils,Like Hector? Helen then rebukes her keeper Paris by name and invites her "'Dear brother-in-law'" to sit with her. Hector's reply leaves little doubt about the undercurrent of feeling in this scene:
Why couldn't I be the wife of a better man,
One sensitive at least to repeated reproaches?"
"Don't ask me to sit, Helen, even thoughHector then tells Helen that he's off to see his wife and child. His wife and child. Get it? He's a family man, whom we see as a son, brother, husband, and father. Yet his responsibility to the people of Troy trumps even his devotion to family: when, in one of the most moving passages in the poem, Andromache pleads with Hector to consider his own safety in fighting the Greeks, he cannot honor her plea. The city is his responsibility, and he is his responsibility: his name means holder in Homer's Greek.
You love me. You will never persuade me.
My heart is out there with our fighting men."
If you've liked the passages that I've posted from Anne Thackeray Ritchie's Chapters from Some Memoirs, you might like knowing that the book is available as a free .pdf download via Google Book Search. I'm not sure why I didn't think of looking there earlier. No, I am sure: it's because I still think of books as objects found on shelves. Google Book Search has several other books by ATR available as free downloads.
Related posts
"[A]n aspirate more or less"
Anne Thackeray Ritchie on the past
One more passage from Anne Thackeray Ritchie
Perusing telegraph manuals reveals that Morse code is to the semicolon what weedkiller is to the dandelion. Punctuation was charged at the same rate as words, and their high price — trans-Atlantic cables originally cost a still-shocking $5 per word — meant that short, punchy lines with minimal punctuation were necessary among businessmen and journalists.Read the rest:
A Google search brought someone to Orange Crate Art yesterday looking for the names of the pieces played as background music during station breaks on the Classic Arts Showcase. So far as I can tell, this information is unavailable online. Until now! There are two excerpts:
One is from the overture to La gazza ladra (The Thieving Magpie, 1817) by Gioachino Rossini. You can watch and listen to a performance on YouTube. The Classic Arts Showcase excerpt is about seven minutes in.
The other excerpt is from the first movement (Allegro non troppo) of Béla Bartók's Divertimento for Strings, Sz. 113 (1939). There's no YouTube performance, but the iTunes sample of the Chicago Symphony's recording has most of the relevant passage.
The Bartók piece has a curious association for me: whenever I hear it, I think of staying up until two or three in the morning reinstalling Windows, when the only television programming worth having on for company was the Classic Arts Showcase.
[Thanks to Elaine, who knew the Bartók and gave me "Rossini overture" with which to go a-fishing.]
Related post
Classic Arts Showcase
Colson Whitehead. The Intuitionist. New York. Anchor Books. 1999. $13.95 (paper).
The novel's setting is a mid-20th-century Manhattan-like metropolis, with finned cars and transistor radios. But something is off in Colson Whitehead's city: the newsstands are filled with not Life but Lift, a magazine of elevators. The plot focuses on the rivalry between two schools of elevator inspection — Empiricists, who inspect the machine's innards to judge its condition, and Intuitionists, who do their work by imaginatively grasping the machine's condition. The Intuitionist of the novel's title is Miss Lila Mae Watson, a graduate of the Institute for Vertical Transport and the first "colored woman" to work in the city's powerful, prestigious Department of Elevator Inspectors.
Like Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, The Intuitionist is an allegory about color in America. Like Ellison's narrator, Lila Mae is a young African-American struggling upward and set up (it seems) to fail. But there's more than color involved: the conflict between Empiricists and Intuitionists involves different ways of constructing the relation between subject and object (or subject and elevator). Thus the wondrous excerpts from the two-volume Theoretical Elevators by James Fulton, the godfather of Intuitionism, who puzzles over the "vertical imperative" and the "index of being": "where the elevator is when it is not in service."
The Intuitionist is most wonderful when Whitehead fuses these postmodern concerns with the stuff of detective fiction and film noir, notably in the search for the "black box," Fulton's plans for an elevator built on Intuitionist principles. The name suggests not only flight data recorders and objects whose workings cannot be seen but also the "black bird" of Dashiell Hammett's The Maltese Falcon, another object sought by rival factions.
Here's a sample passage. I think that if you like it, reader, you'll like the novel. It's from a conversation about the black box between Lila Mae and a teacher of Intuitionism:
"I don't see how that's possible," Lila Mae murmurs, twisting a button on her suit. "I mean from an engineering standpoint. At its core, Intuitionism is about communicating with the elevator on a nonmaterial basis. 'Separate the elevator from elevatorness,' right? Seems hard to build something of air out of steel."I'm looking forward to reading everything else Colson Whitehead has written.
Mr. Reed withdraws a cigarette from a silver case. "They're not as incompatible as you might think," he says. "That's what Volume One hinted at and Volume Two tried to express in its ellipses — a renegotiation of our relationship to objects. To start at the beginning."
"I don't get you," Lila Mae admits. Reluctantly.
"If we have decided that elevator studies — nuts and bolts Empiricism — imagined elevators from a human, and therefore inherently alien point of view, wouldn't the next logical step, after we've adopted the Intuitionist perspective, be to build an elevator the right way? With what we've learned?"
"Construct an elevator from the elevator's point of view."
"Wouldn't that be the perfect elevator? Wouldn't that be the black box?" Mr. Reed's left eyelid trembles.
