No on 8

Andrew Sullivan, writing in Time in 2004:

When people talk about gay marriage, they miss the point. This isn't about gay marriage. It's about marriage. It's about family. It's about love. It isn't about religion. It's about civil marriage licenses. Churches can and should have the right to say no to marriage for gays in their congregations, just as Catholics say no to divorce, but divorce is still a civil option. These family values are not options for a happy and stable life. They are necessities. Putting gay relationships in some other category — civil unions, domestic partnerships, whatever — may alleviate real human needs, but by their very euphemism, by their very separateness, they actually build a wall between gay people and their families. They put back the barrier many of us have spent a lifetime trying to erase.

If I were a California voter, I'd vote No on 8.

Picking them up and laying them down

Elaine and I went walking from door to door in a midwestern city today on behalf of a certain presidential campaign. The eighty-three-year-old woman who welcomed a yard sign and told us to put it wherever we thought it looked good made our afternoon.

The depth of planning in this campaign is a wonder. I don't like being cryptic, but that's all I can say.

Paintings and Proust

A new book by painter Eric Karpeles: Paintings in Proust: A Visual Companion to In Search of Lost Time (Thames & Hudson, $45). Amazon has it for 34% off. The New York Times has a review.

I'd also like to see (and hear) a CD or two assembling Proust-related music: likely inspirations for Vinteuil's sonata, songs by Reynaldo Hahn, all in period recordings, if possible.

Related reading
All Proust posts

2:14 a.m.

What if he loses?

The stories friends have been telling me of waking up in the middle of the night —

they're true!

Studs Terkel (1912–2008)

His books are browser's delights. In college, I read Working (1974) again and again. When I began teaching, I read from it to my classes. I still remember Dolores Dante and Joe Zmuda.

From the obituary: "'Curiosity never killed this cat' — that's what I'd like as my epitaph.”

Studs Terkel, Chronicler of the American Everyman, Is Dead at 96 (New York Times)

USA Arts

From WNET, NYC's Channel 13, streaming episodes of USA Arts: Willem de Kooning! Martha Graham! Vladimir Nabokov! Charles Olson! And many more.

*

April 8, 2014: Gone, gone. Now there’s only a trailer-like compilation.

A metaphor for painting

Barnett Newman, interviewed by Frank O'Hara for the public television show Art New York (1964):

Newman: I'm not in any way really involved in color as a love act. To me, color is an innate material, and I feel that it's — the proper description would be to call them colors, that anybody can buy and squeeze them out of tubes. And in that sense, it's my job to turn them into color. And I suppose my feeling towards colors is, well, it's more or less like the feeling that a baker has towards his material. I feel that it's like wheat, and my job is to turn the wheat into bread. If I don't have wheat, which might be blue, I use red, which is like rye.

O'Hara [laughing]: What about dough? It's white.

Well, you know, well, if you don't have rye, you use barley. But then of course, you — I suppose you can't make bread with barley, so I make whiskey. [Laughs.]

You can find the interview on the video page at frankohara.org.

Ginsbergs, Ginsburgs

A correction in the New York Times:

An article in some editions on Wednesday about Fordham University's plan to give an ethics prize to Supreme Court Justice Stephen G. Breyer misspelled the surname of another Supreme Court justice who received the award in 2001. She is Ruth Bader Ginsburg, not Ginsberg. The Times has misspelled her name at least two dozen times since 1980; this is the first correction the paper has published.

The Times has often misspelled Allen Ginsberg's last name too.

BOOBOOBOOBOOBOOBOO

Happy Halloween! Thumbtack holes and all.

[Purple marker, by Ben Leddy, from the family archives. Used with permission.]

Teachers, students, humanity

From an essay by Liberal Studies professor Lynn Crosbie on teachers and students:

I realized that students were potentially terrifying, and potentially terrified — that one of the largest obstacles between teachers and students is a failure to recognize each others' humanity.

Reminding me of what I sometimes find myself saying in my classes: "I'm just trying to be a person."

Your first assignment: Read this (GlobeCampus Report)