"[H]appiness-producing processes"

When we think about the things that alter our lives in a moment, nearly all of them are bad: phone calls in the night, accidents, loss of jobs or loved ones, conversations with doctors bearing awful news. In fact, apart from a last-second touchdown, unexpected inheritance, winning the lottery, or a visitation from God, it is hard to imagine sudden good news. Virtually all the happiness-producing processes in our lives take time: learning new things, changing old behaviors, building satisfying relationships, raising children. This is why patience and determination are among life's primary virtues.

Gordon Livingston, Too Soon Old, Too Late Smart (New York: Da Capo, 2004), 82–84

For another pasage from Gordon Livingston, visit this post on Elaine's blog.

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Frank O'Hara and Mad Men

Watching Mad Men for the first time tonight, I was surprised to see ad man Don Draper reading the paperback edition of Frank O'Hara's Meditations in an Emergency (1957). Don picks up a copy after seeing someone reading the book in a bar.

Meditations was published in a very limited run: 90 hardcover and 900 paperback copies. Brad Gooch's O'Hara biography A City Poet notes that by 1960 the book was out of print. This episode of Mad Men focuses on Valentine's Day, 1962 (the night of A Tour of the White House with Mrs. John F. Kennedy). How does Don Draper get hold of this book so readily? Well, it's television.

At the end of the episode, Don reads aloud the fourth (last) section of "Mayakovsky," the last poem in Meditations:

Now I am quietly waiting for
the catastrophe of my personality
to seem beautiful again,
and interesting, and modern.

The country is grey and
brown and white in trees,
snows and skies of laughter
always diminishing, less funny
not just darker, not just grey.

It may be the coldest day of
the year, what does he think of
that? I mean, what do I? And if I do,
perhaps I am myself again.

Is O'Hara's poem charting this character's future? Tune in next week.

["Mayakovsky" is available in O'Hara's Collected Poems (1971), in two editions of Selected Poems (1974, 2008), and in the reissued Meditations in an Emergency (1996).]

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Morris Freedman on reading

Morris Freedman fesses up:

For several years now I've been reading fewer books, from start to finish, that is. Not that my reading has diminished. If anything, I'm reading more now, more words certainly, every day, every week, daily and Sunday newspapers, weeklies, fortnightlies, monthlies, book reviews, quarterlies, portions of books, encyclopedia articles, professional publications, computer manuals and magazines, student papers. I used to spend much of my time reading books in their entirety, for pleasure, study, and work: fiction, plays, poetry, essays, criticism, biography, scholarship, reportage, reference sources. . . .

I am confident that I cover a wider, more diverse, and even a more nourishing intellectual landscape at this point in my life by grazing widely, occasionally pausing to linger over an appetizing patch, rather than feeding narrowly and deeply all the time.

If Freedman is following current conversation about reading, he might say, "Hey, I covered that in 2002." He did, even if his essay is more about print than pixels:

Why I Don't Read Books Much Anymore (Virginia Quarterly Review)

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Happy Birthday, Dad

My dad turns eighty today. Wholly cats!

I am grateful to my dad for many things — among them, my love of jazz, my love of "supplies" (notebooks, pens, pencils, and such), my habit of whistling, my willingness to work hard while focusing on the work and not the possible reward (my mom has something to do with that last one too). And I owe my dad (and mom) my being here. Thanks, Dad! (Mom too!)

Eightieth-birthday cards, at least the ones I could find, are dreadful. Elaine suggested sending two fortieth-birthday cards. They proclaim forty to be the new thirty, which makes eighty the new sixty.

Posts with art by James Leddy
Abe's shades
Boo!
Happy holidays
Hardy mums
Thanks!

["Wholly Cats" is the title of a 1940 Benny Goodman tune.]

Proust and his schoolmates

At the Bibliothèque nationale de France, a wonderful photograph from the Lycée Condorcet. Can you spot Proust?

Charles Van Doren

The July 28 New Yorker has a long piece by Charles Van Doren, "All the Answers," about the quiz show scandal that unfolded in the late 1950s and life thereafter:

For fourteen weeks in the winter and spring of 1956–57, I came into millions of American homes, stood in a supposedly soundproof booth, and answered difficult questions. I was considered well spoken, well educated, handsome, the very image of a young man that parents would like their son to be. I was also thought to be the ideal teacher, which is to say patient, trustworthy, caring. In addition, I was making a small fortune. And then — well, this is what happened.

Van Doren took his lumps — he was fired from NBC, resigned from Columbia University, and pleaded guilty to perjury — and went on to make a life for himself and his family. In the early 1990s, he turned down a $100,000 fee to serve as a consultant to the film Quiz Show. Along the way, a little gyroscope helped him "survive and somehow find a way back."

No link: this piece is available only in the magazine.

[Update, July 29: As a reader points out, this piece is now online.]

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Lawsuits of the young and entitled

Andrew Giuliani has filed a lawsuit against Duke University and its men's golf coach. From today's New York Times:

Mr. Giuliani, who is 22, is the older of two children that Rudolph W. Giuliani had with his former wife, Donna Hanover.

On Wednesday, he filed a lawsuit in federal court in Durham, N.C., accusing the university of bad faith by "aggressively" recruiting him as a high school student to play for Duke, then dashing his dreams by taking steps during his junior year in college to dislodge him from the team.

In the lawsuit, he acknowledges that he may have misbehaved in February by flipping his putter a few feet, throwing and breaking a club, gunning his engine out of a parking lot and tossing an apple at a teammate's face in a skirmish.

Rather than "quibble" about the details, the student said he had apologized for his own conduct, and said it pales next to the "bizarre" treatment he received from the school once Coach Orrin Daniel Vincent III took over the men’s golf program last summer.

The complaint is worth reading. It refers to Giuliani as "Andrew" and to his fellow golfers as "boys," and it alleges that the coach implemented a "bizarre scheme" drawn from Lord of the Flies to remove young Andrew, "a rising senior," from the team.

Somebody needs to grow up a little.

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"The Disadvantages of an Elite Education"

"The Disadvantages of an Elite Education"

William Deresiewicz, who taught at Yale for ten years, has been thinking about elite education:

An elite education not only ushers you into the upper classes; it trains you for the life you will lead once you get there. I didn't understand this until I began comparing my experience, and even more, my students' experience, with the experience of a friend of mine who went to Cleveland State.

Read it all:

The Disadvantages of an Elite Education (The American Scholar)

(Thanks, Matt, at Submitted for Your Perusal, for pointing me to this essay.)

Teaching at Harvard

John H. Summers taught at Harvard:

I joined the staff of the Committee on Degrees in Social Studies at Harvard University in 2000. As tutor, then as lecturer, I advised senior theses, conceived and conducted freshman and junior seminars and taught the year-long sophomore tutorial, Social Studies 10, six times. The fractured nature of my appointment, renewed annually for six successive years while never amounting to more than 65 per cent of a full-time position in any one year, kept me on the margins of prestige and promotion even as it kept me there long enough to serve three chairmen of social studies, two directors of study and three presidents of Harvard.

Summers' account of teaching "the rich, the powerful and the unalienated," with a grading scale running from A to B, reveals one kind of academic predicament: that of the professor who loathes the institution while desiring its approval. Read it all:

All the rich must have prizes (Times Higher Education)

WALL·E

There's a lot to like in Pixar's WALL·E: echoes of City Lights, E.T., Metropolis, Star Wars, and 2001; several Apple jokes; a doofus CEO (played by Fred Willard) whose advice is to "stay the course" (sound familiar?); the poignant use of an old musical; and a satiric, ominous portrait of a sedentary consumer-culture in which all food comes in cups. I'm very glad that I saw WALL·E, despite my reluctance about seeing "a love story about robots."

What most impressed me in the movie is the expressiveness of WALL·E and EVE. These characters have minimal language and no faces, only heads and eyes (and EVE's eyes have no pupils). Thus feeling resides in tone, gesture, and head and eye movement. In creating these characters, Pixar's animators have worked out a grammar of eloquent emotion.

So go see this love story about robots.