Richard Wollheim on looking at art

Philosopher Richard Wollheim knew — learned — how to pay attention:

I evolved a way of looking at paintings which was massively time-consuming and deeply rewarding. For I came to recognize that it often took the first hour or so in front of a painting for stray associations or motivated misperceptions to settle down, and it was only then, with the same amount of time or more spent looking at it, that the picture could be relied upon to disclose itself as it was.

I noticed that I became an object of suspicion to passers-by, and so did the picture that I was looking at.

From Painting as an Art: The A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts (1987), a series talks given at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., in 1984.

A related post
Joe Brainard on looking at art

Infinite Jest, sadness

Avril Incandenza, “the Moms,” is explaining to her son Mario that “‘There are, apparently, persons who are deeply afraid of their own emotions, particularly the painful ones. Grief, regret, sadness. Sadness especially, perhaps’”:

“I am saying that such persons usually have a very fragile sense of themselves as persons. As existing at all. This interpretation is ‘existential,’ Mario, which means vague and slightly flaky. But I think it may hold true in certain cases. My own father told stories of his own father, whose potato farm had been in St. Pamphile and very much larger than my father’s. My grandfather had had a marvelous harvest one season, and he wanted to invest money. This was in the early 1920s, when there was a great deal of money to be made on upstart companies and new American products. He apparently narrowed the field to two choices — Delaware-brand Punch, or an obscure sweet fizzy coffee substitute that sold out of pharmacy soda fountains and was rumored to contain smidgeons of cocaine, which was the subject of much controversy in those days. My father’s father chose Delaware Punch, which apparently tasted like rancid cranberry juice, and the manufacturer of which folded. And then his next two potato harvests were decimated by blight, resulting in the forced sale of his farm. Coca-Cola is now Coca-Cola. My father said his father showed very little emotion or anger or sadness about this, though. That he somehow couldn’t. My father said his father was frozen, and could feel emotion only when he was drunk. He would apparently get drunk four times a year, weep about his life, throw my father through the living room window, and disappear for several days, roaming the countryside of L’Islet Province, drunk and enraged.”

She’s not been looking at Mario this whole time, though Mario’s been looking at her.

She smiled. “My father, of course, could himself tell this story only when he was drunk. He never threw anyone through any windows. He simply sat in his chair, drinking ale and reading the newspaper, for hours, until he fell out of the chair. And then one day he fell out of the chair and didn’t get up again, and that was how your maternal grandfather passed away.”

David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest (Boston: Little, Brown, 1996).

Snopes has the scoop on Coke and coke. As for Delaware Punch, it’s a (not the) real thing, now owned by Coca-Cola, and still sold in Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas.

Infinite Jest is in truth infinitely sad.

Other Infinite Jest posts
Attention : Description : Loveliness : “Night-noises” : Romance : Telephony : Television

“R. Crumb’s Depression Graph”

Tracking time, place, age, appearance, activites, and mood: “R. Crumb’s Depression Graph.” It reminds me of Charles Joseph Minard’s map of Napoleon’s 1812 Russian campaign.

A related post
R. Crumb’s supplies

Penguin Books postcard

Penguin is celebrating seventy-five years of publishing. My daughter Rachel (whose only relation to Penguin is as a reader) sent us this nifty postcard, one of several marking the occasion. Thanks, Rachel!

A related post
THE MAIN TITLE (Penguin cover-layout by Jan Tschichold)

Newsstand paperweights

“Though they were once as omnipresent as phone booths, the heyday of the cast-iron weights has come and gone”: a New York Times slideshow of newsstand paperweights.

And in Fluence, an illustrated interview with collector Harley Spiller. (Go to the May-June 2010 issue.)

[Toronto Star newsstand paperweight. Photograph by Micki Watanabe Spiller, from the New York Times slideshow.]

Ben Leddy is blogging

My son Ben has begun blogging at Good Reason (“thoughts on philosophy, music, law, and everything else”). An excerpt from his first post:

Perhaps publishers ought to begin selling ‘great books’ with the pages blank. This would remind us that when we reach for an interesting title, we’re not always after great thoughts, but rather, the great challenge of thinking and creating. If you find yourself caught in a cycle of checking out books and returning them a few days later in defeat, ask yourself whether you’re looking to read, or if you’re actually looking to create something new.

“A degree is a degree”

My friend Stefan Hagemann pointed me to a choice bit from a New York Times article about Pakistani politicians accused of claiming fraudulent degrees. Says Nawab Aslam Raisani, chief minister of Baluchistan Province:

“A degree is a degree. Whether fake or genuine, it’s a degree. It makes no difference.”

(Thanks, Stefan!)

Semi-mysterious J.D. Salinger Boxed Set mystery deepens, perhaps

Re: the semi-mysterious J.D. Salinger Boxed Set: I called Little, Brown’s Customer Service number yesterday morning to ask the simplest question: how many volumes? The person on the other end looked up the boxed set and found no answer (and sounded puzzled about that). She took my number and promised to get back to me. No one has returned my call.

So the mystery deepens, perhaps.

Bandbox

The Merriam-Webster Word of the Day is bandbox:

bandbox   \BAND-bahks\   noun

1 : a usually cylindrical box of cardboard or thin wood for holding light articles of attire
*2 : a structure (as a baseball park) having relatively small interior dimensions

Example sentence: “Baseballs flew out of there at a record pace for a while, and everyone had theories about why this stadium was behaving like a bandbox, despite similar dimensions to the old place.” (Filip Bondy, Daily News [New York], November 8, 2009)

Did you know? In the 17th century, the word “band” was sometimes used for ruffs, the large round collars of pleated muslin or linen worn by men and women of the time period, and the bandbox was invented for holding such bands. The flimsy cardboard structure of the box inspired people to start using its name for any flimsy object, especially a small and insubstantial one. But people also contemplated the neat, sharp appearance of ruffs just taken from a bandbox and began using the word in a complimentary way in phrases such as “she looked as if she came out of a bandbox.” Today, “bandbox” can also be used as an adjective meaning “exquisitely neat, clean, or ordered,” as in “bandbox military officers.”

The word bandbox sticks in my head because of Gilbert Sorrentino’s novel Aberration of Starlight (1980). The word appears twice in Marie Recco’s interior monologue, first in Marie’s mother Bridget McGrath’s description of Marie, then in Marie’s description of her ex-husband Tony:

He worshiped the ground she walked on. Went out for chow mein and came back with little red embroidered slippers. Chinese apples. Bouquets of flowers. In January. Why not? her mother said. You always looked like you stepped out of a bandbox. Where did their kind ever see a girl with your looks and breeding?

*

What happened? Red silk slippers. Bouquets and boxes of chocolate. Coming out of the hold of that ship like he just stepped out of a bandbox.

Is it unusual to associate a word with its appearance in a work of literature? Apoplexy has meant Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island to me since sixth grade. Since college, sempiternal has equalled T.S. Eliot’s Little Gidding. Avatar: William Faulkner’s Light in August. Sanguine: Willa Cather’s The Professor’s House. And heifer: John Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” though I had to teach the poem in east-central Illinois to learn the proper pronunciation. (Thanks, Sally.)

What words have these sorts of literary associations for you?

A related post
Gilbert Sorrentino (1929–2006)

Buster Keaton in the rain

[Buster Keaton as Ronald, in College (dir. James W. Horne, 1927).]

There’s an explanation: young Ronald has been sharing that umbrella with his mother (played by Florence Turner, formerly the Vitagraph Girl of early silents).

College has many delights, including a spectacular scene of soda-jerkery. The film’s ending is extraordinarily funny and extraordinarily grim, tracking two lifetimes in just ten seconds. Life’s short.

Eighty-three years later, it’s still raining.