Florence Wolfson Howitt has died at the age of ninety-six. From the New York Times obituary:
Florence Wolfson, the daughter of well-to-do parents living in an apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, was 14 when she was given a little red diary with gold-edged pages. For the next five years, without skipping a day, she wrote four-line entries that evoked her passions.The diary, found years later in a dumpster, became the stuff of a Times article and a book, Lily Koppel’s The Red Leather Diary, which I wrote about in this post.
“Have stuffed myself with Mozart and Beethoven,” she wrote on June 28, 1932. “I feel like a ripe apricot — I’m dizzy with the exotic.”
John Gardner is a photographer living in Terre Haute, Indiana. I had the pleasure of seeing his work at the Swope Art Museum, where it is part of the exhibition “Reflecting Terre Haute” (closes March 10). Gardner is represented by a slide-show of his Nothing to say, black-and-white photographs of Terre Haute’s empty signs.
Elaine and I have grown to love the Queen City of the Wabash. It is faded, friendly, and unpretentious. It has several small museums— here’s a post on one — and its own Taj Mahal, an excellent Indian restaurant. Here’s a photograph of my favorite not-empty Terre Haute sign.
[See updates below.]
From The Atlantic (via Boing Boing), here’s a list of advertisers still doing business with Rush Limbaugh. The list includes Netflix.
I called Netflix last night to share my thoughts on the company’s Limbaugh connection and spoke with a friendly person who offered to type, word for word, what I had to say. She made it clear that Netflix is interested in what subscribers think about the matter. The Netflix toll-free number, open around the clock:
8:52 a.m.: The Atlantic now says: “Netflix emails to say it doesn’t advertise on Rush. We’re waiting to hear back whether the company just bought ads on the local radio station or what.”
Netflix has not purchased and does not purchase advertising on the Rush Limbaugh show. We do buy network radio advertising and have confirmed that two Netflix spots were picked up in error as part of local news breaks during the Rush Limbaugh show. We have instructed our advertising agency to make sure that this error will not happen again.A related post
The Artist (and typography) Now with a link to a type designer’s take on the film. There’s so much to see when you know what you’re seeing.
A handy mnemonic I am sharing with my students, with whom I’ll be watching King Lear in room 3290. How to remember the room:
Room 3290 sits at the northwest corner of the building. The northwest corner is the corner closest to Grant Avenue. Cary Grant starred in Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest. The title of that film comes from William Shakespeare. Shakespeare wrote King Lear.
Or just write down 3290.
Does anyone have a good mnemonic for seven o’clock?
A related post
Mnemonic
[“I am only mad north by northwest” (Hamlet II.2). It’ll be the Great Performances production of Lear, with Ian McKellen.]
Surely Rush Limbaugh is not so deranged as to believe that the epithet slut applies to Sandra Fluke, the law student who testified before the House Democratic Steering and Policy Committee on contraception coverage in the Affordable Care Act. No: Limbaugh’s purpose is to intimidate by letting women know the price they may expect to pay if they speak publicly about affordable access to contraception.
Limbaugh’s language has a peculiar resonance for me, as I just taught book 22 of Homer’s Odyssey. In that episode of the poem, a dozen women of Odysseus’ household are executed by hanging. Their crime: sleeping with the enemy, Penelope’s suitors, the young men who have taken over the household in Odysseus’ absence. Odysseus’ son Telemachus calls for the women’s execution, not, as Odysseus has directed, by sword (a “clean” death) but by hanging. And in three prominent translations (Robert Fitzgerald, Robert Fagles, Stanley Lombardo), Telemachus explains his decision by calling the women “sluts.” There’s no equivalent to slut in the Greek. In Richmond Lattimore’s highly literal Odyssey, these women “have slept with the suitors.”
A chilling recognition that might arise in a careful reading of the Odyssey : by the end of the poem, these women are forgotten. When Zeus and Athena work out a resolution to the conflict in Odysseus’ kingdom, they decide that all memory of the dead suitors will be removed from the minds of their surviving relatives. But the women of Odysseus’ house are never even remembered before being forgotten: in the ancient economy of persons, their lives and deaths do not count. The poem, we might say, does not care for them.
I’ve stumbled three or four times in writing this post, not sure what point I want to make about this ugly synchronicity of epithets. Homer’s poem is elsewhere deeply attuned to difficulties of women’s lives, and Odysseus and Penelope’s homophrosunê [like-mindedness] offers a startlingly modern way to think about the meaning of marriage. But in Odyssey 22, it is men who have the final word over women’s choices. Current events are all too reminiscent of that scenario.
Related reading and viewing
Sandra Fluke’s testimony (C-SPAN)
Rush Limbaugh’s remarks (Media Matters)
[The translations: Robert Fitzgerald (1961): “you sluts, who lay with suitors.” Robert Fagles (1996): “You sluts — the suitors’ whores!” Stanley Lombardo (2000): “the suitors’ sluts.” Margaret Atwood’s reimagining of Homeric narrative, The Penelopiad (2005), creates a voice for these women.]
Mark Bauerlein on what makes education possible:
For education to happen, people must encounter worthwhile things outside their sphere of influence and brainpower. Knowledge grows, skills improve, tastes refine, and conscience ripens only if the experiences bear a degree of unfamiliarity — a beautiful artwork you are forced to inspect even though it leaves you cold; an ancient city you have to detail even though history puts you to sleep; a microeconomic problem you have to solve even though you fumble with arithmetic. To take them in, to assimilate the objects intelligently, the intellectual tool kit must expand and attitudes must soften. If the first apprehension stalls, you can’t mutter, “I don’t get it — this isn’t for me.” You have to say, “I don’t get it, and maybe that’s my fault.” You have to accept the sting of relinquishing a cherished notion, of admitting a defect in yourself. Poet Rainer Maria Rilke’s simple admonition should be the rule: “You must change your life.”Bauerlein’s insulting title makes me wince. His sub-subtitle — Or, Don’t Trust Anyone Under 30 — makes me cringe. My thoughts about poetry and difficulty are far different from his. But I like what he says in this passage about persistence and humility in the face of the unfamiliar.
From The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future (New York: Tarcher/Penguin, 2008).
