Krugman on Rockwell

Paul Krugman, writing in the New York Times on “town hall mobs”:

There’s a famous Norman Rockwell painting titled “Freedom of Speech,” depicting an idealized American town meeting. The painting, part of a series illustrating F.D.R.’s “Four Freedoms,” shows an ordinary citizen expressing an unpopular opinion. His neighbors obviously don’t like what he’s saying, but they’re letting him speak his mind.

I don’t disagree with the analysis that follows Krugman’s opening paragraph. But just a glance at Rockwell’s painting shows that this description is off: there is no hostility, none, in the faces surrounding the speaker. What’s important in Rockwell’s painting is class: the speaker’s clothes and hands mark him as a “working man,” in clear contrast to the suits beside him and in front of him. He even looks a bit like Abraham Lincoln, which might help to explain why everyone’s paying close attention to what he says.

I wonder what Norman Rockwell would say about the chanting, the shouting, the death threats, all that is hateful and ugly in the “debate” (is it one, really?) over health care.

Reading and not reading in Jersey City

The only stolen object of Grandpa’s that I possess is a dictionary, a Webster’s Seventh New Collegiate edition, which he inscribed to my sister the year I was born: “From Grandpa. Hi Ya Paula. Year — 1965.” The call numbers on the spine and the blue stamp on a back page, which reads FREE PUBLIC LIBRARY JERSEY CITY, N.J., have been crossed out in blue indelible marker, his attempt to legitimize the gift. Grandpa obviously had his own interpretation of the phrase free public library.

*

In Jersey City, people were actively illiterate and proudly went around saying things like “I never read a book in my life.” They boasted that they had managed to get so far without reading a single page. I wanted to say, Well, good for you, you idiot. Look where you are. You’re still in Jersey City.

Helene Stapinski, Five-Finger Discount: A Crooked Family History (New York: Random House, 2002), 4, 107–108.

Part memoir, part ancestral scrapbook, part cultural history, Five-Finger Discount assembles stories of theft — petty and grand — and violence over several generations of family life and political life in Jersey City, New Jersey.

Jersey City : Helene Stapinski :: Dublin : James Joyce — a city to escape and hate and love.

Budd Schulberg (1914–2009)

From my favorite scene in On the Waterfront (dir. Elia Kazan, 1954), a conversation between Terry Malloy (Marlon Brando) and Edie Doyle (Eva Marie Saint), my transcription:

Terry: Boy, the way those sisters used to whack me, I don’t know what. They thought they was gonna beat an education into me, but I foxed ’em. [Shrugs.]

Edie: Maybe they just didn’t know how to handle you.

Terry: How would you’ve done it?

Edie: With a little more patience and kindness. That’s what makes people mean and difficult — people don’t care enough about them.

Terry: [Long pause.] Aah, what are you, kiddin’ me?

Edie: No.

Terry: Come on, I better get you home. There’s too many guys around here with only one thing on their mind. [Pause.] Am I gonna to see you again?

Edie: [Pause.] What for?

Terry: [Pause.] I don’t know.

Edie: [Pause.] I really don’t know.

Budd Schulberg, who wrote the screenplay, died yesterday.

Budd Schulberg, Screenwriter, Dies at 95 (New York Times)

“About three lines” again

David Frauenfelder has also posted regarding a choreographer’s assertion that Penelope has “about three lines” in the Odyssey:

Penelope’s three lines — or more (Breakfast with Pandora, “for a diet rich in mythos and logos”)

A related post
“About three lines”? Wrong.

Country, country, or country

Some localites have expressed unhappiness with the variety of musical entertainment offered at summer events. What displeases them is not a lack of variety; rather, they feel that there is too much variety, too many different kinds of music filling the air and ears. One letter to the newspaper suggests that event organizers allow the public to vote on entertainment: “For example three choices of country music.”

Good grief. Even Bob’s Country Bunker (in The Blues Brothers) has both kinds of music, country and western. I have nothing against either. I’m just amused by this localite’s idea of choice.

And I love the word localite, which I picked up from Stephen Calt’s biographies of Skip James and Charlie Patton. I’m happy to get to use it in this post.

Hannah Montana Linux

Q : how did you make such a great OS ;

A : I Thought what would attract young users to Linux and i used that idea and i lot of reading and work ;

Not a joke, though it could be mistaken for one: Hannah Montana Linux. Download and install at your own risk!

Radio Shack renaming

Matthew Shaer comments on Radio Shack’s (ill-advised, I’d say) decision to rename itself The Shack:

“Outhouse,” apparently, was taken. And so was “shanty.”

In other news, Pizza Hut may change its name to The Hut. (No joke.)

“Tests,” “tears”

This morning I made a biennial visit to the eye doctor, where I read the following line, the smallest print on the handheld reading sample:



Reading with my right eye, I aced it. But with my left, it came out like so:



But it makes sense, no? — what with those drops about to be dropped in.

A related post
Signage, misread

“About three lines”? Wrong.

Dance critic Mary Brennan on The Royal Ballet of Flanders’ The Return of Ulysses:

Its choreographer, Christian Spuck, comments wryly that in Homer, which is the inspiration for his clever, witty modern ballet, the faithful Penelope only rates about three lines in the entire Odyssey.

“About three lines”? Wrong. Wrong. Wrong.

Penelope appears in ten of the poem’s twenty-four episodes (and is quoted by the soul of a dead suitor in one more). Like her husband, she is a figure of tremendous resourcefulness and metis [craftiness, cunning, trickery]. She has, after all, resisted for many years the patriarchal imperative that she remarry, puting off her suitors by weaving and unweaving a burial shroud for Odysseus’s father Laertes. Penelope’s colloquy with Odysseus in book 19 is for many readers the poem’s greatest moment, a dazzling and poignant episode-long display of these partners’ homophrosunê [likemindedess]. And in the ancient world, Penelope almost had the last word: some commentators thought 23.287 the fitting end of the poem. It’s Penelope who speaks to Odysseus that line and the one preceding it:

“If the gods are going to grant you a happy old age,
There is hope your troubles will someday be over.”

[Translation by Stanley Lombardo (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2000).]

None of these matters have been lost on contemporary classicists, who have devoted considerable attention to Penelope’s role in Homer’s poem. Only someone sans real familiarity with the Odyssey could make the claim that “Penelope only rates about three lines” — or think such a claim wry. Homer’s poem is a far more complicated matter than smug 21st-century assumptions about antiquity and gender might allow.

And speaking of the 21st century, here is a sample of the production’s official description:

Poseidon wears flippers, goggles and a giant tutu while the goddess Athena becomes a tour guide equipped with a megaphone. And as the music of [Henry] Purcell blends effortlessly into Doris Day, tightly choreographed corps-de-ballet becomes revue-style dancing.

Odysseus, help!

Related reading
All Homer posts (via Pinboard)

Tolls and M&M’s

“Soon I had acquired a whole constituency of regular customers”: Fred Kimmerly recounts what happened when, as a toll collector on Connecticut’s Merritt Parkway, he began giving out M&M’s.