Commencement addresses

Re: the previous post: if you graduated from college and showed up for commencement, do you remember anything the commencement speaker said?

Alan Alda spoke at my commencement (Fordham College ’78). I remember one thing from his speech: he asked those graduating to ask themselves, every so often, this question: “What are my values?” Sounds trite, I know, but it works, or at least it’s worked for me.

If you remember something, anything, of what you heard at your commencement, fire away in the comments, please. Let the wisdom, or whatever, accumulate.

[Commencement : what a weird word. Alda is Fordham College ’56.]

“An eccentric, if not a subversive”

A wise observation from Bill Watterson, from a 1990 commencement address:

Creating a life that reflects your values and satisfies your soul is a rare achievement. In a culture that relentlessly promotes avarice and excess as the good life, a person happy doing his own work is usually considered an eccentric, if not a subversive.

[Found via Armand Frasco’s notebookism.]

Michiko Kakutani, messy watch

New York Times book-reviewer Michiko Kakutani is known for her frequent (some might say too frequent) use of the verb limn. Far more frequent is her use of the adjective messy. In February 2011 I wrote a post that tracked Kakutani’s use of messy from 1979 to 2010, from drizzle to steady rain to downpour and back to drizzle. The word appeared just once in 2011 and once more in 2012. The year 2012 also brought a conspicuously inappropriate use of the verb mess up. And now messy is back. From a review of NoViolet Bulawayo’s novel We Need New Names:

Once she is a teenager, she quickly adopts the habits of friends from school, even if she doesn’t exactly care for them — listening to Rihanna, trying on armfuls of clothing at the mall (and leaving them in huge messy piles in the dressing room) and watching pornography online.

Here messy seems to function like a tic: given the context, is there really a difference between piles of clothes and messy piles of clothes? If one leave clothes in huge piles, is neatness ever involved?

[Since 2011 and 2012 brought one messy each, it’s reasonable to speculate that this review might offer the only 2013 sighting.]

Ruskin takes flight

Just eight sentences, just one paragraph. Pick your favorite phrases:

The charts of the world which have been drawn up by modern science have thrown into a narrow space the expression of a vast amount of knowledge, but I have never yet seen any one pictorial enough to enable the spectator to imagine the kind of contrast in physical character which exists between Northern and Southern countries. We know the differences in detail, but we have not that broad glance and grasp which would enable us to to feel them in their fulness. We know that gentians grow on the Alps, and olives on the Apennines; but we do not enough conceive for ourselves that variegated mosaic of the world’s surface which a bird sees in its migration, that difference between the district of the gentian and of the olive which the stork and the swallow see far off, as they lean upon the sirocco wind. Let us, for a moment, try to raise ourselves even above the level of their flight, and imagine the Mediterannean lying beneath us like an irregular lake, and all its ancient promontories sleeping in the sun: here and there an angry spot of thunder, a grey stain of storm, moving upon the burning field; and here and there a fixed wreath of white volcano smoke, surrounded by its circle of ashes; but for the most part a great peacefulness of light, Syria and Greece, Italy and Spain, laid like pieces of a golden pavement into the sea-blue, chased, as we stoop nearer to them, with bossy beaten work of mountain chains, and glowing softly with terraced gardens, and flowers heavy with frankincense, mixed among masses of laurel, and orange, and plumy palm, that abate with their grey-green shadows the burning of the marble rocks, and of the ledges of porphyry sloping under lucent sand. Then let us pass farther towards the north, until we see the orient colours change gradually into a vast belt of rainy green, where the pastures of Switzerland, and poplar valleys of France, and dark forests of the Danube and Carpathians stretch from the mouths of the Loire to those of the Volga, seen through clefts in grey swirls of rain-cloud and flaky veils of the mist of the brooks, spreading low along the pasture lands: and then, farther north still, to see the earth heave into mighty masses of leaden rock and heathy moor, bordering with a broad waste of gloomy purple that belt of field and wood, and splintering into irregular and grisly islands amidst the northern seas, beaten by storm, and chilled by ice-drift, and tormented by furious pulses of contending tide, until the roots of the last forests fail from among the hill ravines, and the hunger of the north wind bites their peaks into barrenness; and, at last, the wall of ice, durable like iron, sets, deathlike, its white teeth against us out of the polar twilight. And, having once traversed in thought this gradation of the zoned iris of the earth in all its material vastness, let us go down nearer to it, and watch the parallel change in the belt of animal life; the multitudes of swift and brilliant creatures that glance in the air and sea, or tread the sands of the southern zone; striped zebras and spotted leopards, glistening serpents, and birds arrayed in purple and scarlet. Let us contrast their delicacy and brilliancy of colour, and swiftness of motion, with the frost-cramped strength, and shaggy covering, and dusky plumage of the northern tribes; contrast the Arabian horse with the Shetland, the tiger and leopard with the wolf and bear, the antelope with the elk, the bird of paradise with the osprey; and then, submissively acknowledging the great laws by which the earth and all that it bears are ruled throughout their being, let us not condemn, but rejoice in the expression by man of his own rest in the statutes of the lands that gave him birth. Let us watch him with reverence as he sets side by side the burning gems, and smooths with soft sculpture the jaspar pillars, that are to reflect a ceaseless sunshine, and rise into a cloudless sky: but not with less reverence let us stand by him, when, with rough strength and hurried stroke, he smites an uncouth animation out of the rocks which he has torn from among the moss of the moorland, and heaves into the darkened air the pile of iron buttress and rugged wall, instinct with work of an imagination as wild and wayward as the northern sea; creatures of ungainly shape and rigid limb, but full of wolfish life; fierce as the winds that beat, and changeful as the clouds that shade them.

John Ruskin, “The Nature of Gothic,” The Stones of Venice, Volume II (1853).

This is your brain on tea

[Life, February 12, 1940.]

The schedule appears in an advertisement promoting not a brand of tea but tea itself, the work no doubt of the Tea Board or Tea Council or Tea House or some such industry group.

Related reading
All tea posts (Pinboard)

Wise advice

A bit of dialogue from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s novel Kavanagh (1849), as seen on a poster in a middle-school hallway:

“Give what you have. To some one, it may be better than you dare to think.”

Bernard Waber (1921–2013)

He wrote and illustrated the Lyle books, favorites in our house: Bernard Waber, Children’s Author, Is Dead at 91 (New York Times).

Oklahoma

[Oklahoma state flag, 1911–1925.]

How to help (ABC News)
How to help (CBS News)
How to help (NBC News)

Henry David Thorough

I just picked up Walden — and couldn’t wait to put it down. Henry David Thorough is thoroughly crabby. He dislikes furniture. He dislikes houses. He dislikes railroads. He dislikes coffee, tea, and wine. He would certainly dislike this brief, breezy commentary on his work. Like I said, crabby.

Reading Walden, I realize that what I most dislike in E. B. White’s writing — the language of man and men — comes straight from Thorough: “If a man,” “When men,” “A man must.” The maleness is less a problem for me than the everybodyness: Yes, we all think and feel as you say we do. You are thoroughly correct.

Repetition Pears

A produce-crate label depicting three boys standing behind produce crates depicting three boys standing behind produce crates depicting three — that’s the Droste effect.


[“Repetition Pears: Produce of U.S.A., grown and packed by R. Wachsmith, Yakima, Washington.” Lithograph by Schmidt Litho. Co., Seattle. 1940–1949. From the Boston Public Library Flickr set Produce Crate Labels.]

“Repetition Pears” sounds like a title for a John Ashbery poem.

I didn’t realize until after writing this post that it nicely follows this one.