The Lincoln Bedroom

It's time to turn the page:

Asked at a town hall-style meeting in Fargo, N.D., about any decorating plans for the Lincoln Bedroom, Obama described a visit to the White House after he became a U.S. senator.

"You have all these mementos of Abraham Lincoln, but you have this flat-screen TV in there," Obama told the crowd at the outdoor event.

"I thought to myself, 'Now, who stays in the Lincoln Bedroom and watches [ESPN's] 'Sports Center'? You've got your clicker. . . . That didn't seem to me to be appropriate. So I might take out the TV, I don't know.

"You should read when you're in the Lincoln Bedroom! Reread the Gettysburg Address. Don't watch TV."

Orange flag art

Jasper Johns (b. 1930), Flag on Orange Field (1957)

Sluggo’s “No”

Sluggo has no problem shirking, but for the rest of us, Ramona Creel's 20 Ways to Say No might be helpful. I am not taking on any new responsibilities. And so on. No. This Ernie Bushmiller illustration has been called "the greatest Nancy panel ever drawn."

The Wrecking Crew

The Wrecking Crew (2008, dir. Denny Tedesco) is a documentary film about the Los Angeles studio musicians heard on recordings by the Beach Boys, the Byrds, Nat King Cole, the Mamas & the Papas, the Righteous Brothers, the Ronettes, Frank Sinatra, and many others. The director is the son of guitarist and Crew member Tommy Tedesco.

The film has been shown at festivals and has a screening tonight in Los Angeles. No distribution yet.

"Books v. Cigarettes"

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!

"[A] process and an unfolding"

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."

Jonah Lehrer, Proust Was a Neuroscientist (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2007), 38

[Lehrer has misquoted. Eliot writes in Middlemarch that "character too is a process and an unfolding." Correction added February 7, 2010.]

Aronnax's Firefox themes for Mac

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!

El cardplayers

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.

Black Pearl eraser

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.]

"Uber-responsible" types

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,
Why couldn't I be the wife of a better man,
One sensitive at least to repeated reproaches?"

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:

"Don't ask me to sit, Helen, even though
You love me. You will never persuade me.
My heart is out there with our fighting men."

Hector 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.

Aeneas, the hero of Virgil's Aeneid, one of the few survivors of the fall of Troy, is another "uber-responsible" figure with strong sexual appeal. Aeneas is devoted above all to what Virgil calls pietas, his duty — to the gods, his family, his people. Aeneas' departure from Troy gives us an emblem of that devotion: as Aeneas leads the band of survivors, he carries his father Anchises on his back. Aeneas is responsible too for his own son Ascanius: thus Troy's past and its people's future are both his responsibility. Dido, queen of Carthage, is smitten as Aeneas tells the story of Troy's destruction. She is, literally, love-sick, "a wound / Or inward fire eating her away," and she kills herself when Aeneas abandons her (not long after consummating the relationship) to find a home for his people.

Rick Blaine (Humphrey Bogart) at the end of Casablanca (1942) is a distant inheritor of Aeneas' sense of pietas: "But I've got a job to do too. Where I'm going, you can't follow. What I've got to do, you can't be any part of." Rick walks off into "a beautiful friendship" (not sexual of course) with Captain Louis Renault (Claude Rains), who has said that "well, if I were a woman and I weren't around, I should be in love with Rick." Thus the "uber-responsible type" might appeal not only to the opposite sex but to "all the sexes," as Ira Gershwin put it. Everybody comes to Rick's.¹

[Iliad translation by Stanley Lombardo (1997). Aeneid translation by Robert Fitzgerald (1983). Casablanca screenplay by Julius J. Epstein, Philip G. Epstein, and Howard Koch.]

¹ Everybody Comes to Rick's: the title of the Murray Burnett–Joan Alison play that was the basis for Casablanca; also a line in the film, spoken by Louis to Major Strasser (Conrad Veidt).

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On the Iliad and Aeneid