Richard Feynman and close reading

Richard Feynman speaking:

I have a friend who’s an artist and has sometimes taken a view which I don’t agree with very well. He’ll hold up a flower and say “Look how beautiful it is,” and I’ll agree. And he says, “You see, I as an artist can see how beautiful this is. But you as a scientist take this all apart, and it becomes a dull thing.” And I think that he’s kind of nutty. First of all, the beauty that he sees is available to other people, and to me too, I believe. Although I may not be quite as refined aesthetically as he is, I can appreciate the beauty of a flower. At the same time, I see much more about the flower than he sees. I could imagine the cells in there, the complicated actions inside, which also have a beauty. I mean, it’s not just beauty at this dimension, at one centimeter; there’s also beauty at smaller dimensions, the inner structure, also the processes. The fact that the colors in the flower evolved in order to attract insects to pollinate it is interesting: it means that insects can see the color. It adds a question: does this aesthetic sense also exist in the lower forms? Why is it aesthetic? All kinds of interesting questions which the science knowledge only adds to the excitement, the mystery, and the awe of a flower. It only adds. I don’t understand how it subtracts.

I find in this passage a helpful argument for the value of close reading. Flower: poem. To look at a poem closely is to deepen its excitement, mystery, and capacity to inspire awe.

Here is Feynman speaking. I found my way to this clip via a Jason Kottke post unrelated to poetry. The transcription and punctuation are mine.

Related reading
All OCA poetry posts (Pinboard)
Richard Feynman on honors

Domestic comedy

“I would have asked you, had I said something.”

Related reading
All OCA domestic comedy posts (Pinboard)

[It was very late.]

Any port in a storm

“Five-hour-energy-dot-com. This is NPR.”

More disturbing even than Lifestyle Lift’s sponsorship of the CBS Evening News.

Adjuncts on the PBS NewsHour

“I’ve been on food stamps for, I think, about six months”: from a PBS NewsHour report on adjunct faculty.

The spokesmen for officialdom in this report remind me of tobacco-industry reps: Smoking is an informed adult choice. Nobody forces someone to become an adjunct.

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Henry, vacuuming

[Henry, February 6, 2014.]

This is what a vacuum cleaner looks like.


[Henry, February 6, 2014.]

And this is what a door-to-door salesperson looks like.

You can still buy a vacuum cleaner from a door-to-door salesperson, at least in areas that have such persons. But the machine’s price is very un-Henry. Very.

And this is what a doorbell sounds like. But be careful: there may be a vacuum-cleaner salesperson at the door.

Related reading
All OCA Henry posts (Pinboard)

WCW’s stars

From poem XII in William Carlos Williams’s Spring and All (1923), a cubist rendering of a catch-all box and its contents:

But the stars
are round
cardboard
with a tin edge

and a ring
to fasten them
to a trunk
for the vacation —

These lines seem to puzzle close readers. Marjorie Perloff, writing in The Poetics of Indeterminacy: Rimbaud to Cage (1981):

Finally, and most confusing, are the “stars” made of “round / cardboard / with a tin edge” inside the box or do they decorate its surface? How and why would one fasten “them” as opposed to “it” (the box) “to a trunk / for the vacation”?

It’s not that confusing. The stars are inside the box. A office-supplies-minded reader will recognize them as paper key tags. These objects must have served as luggage tags back in the day.

To say that the image is not confusing does nothing to detract from the work of the imagination (the work of “seeing-as”) in these lines. Recall William Blake, who saw a world in a grain of sand.

Related reading
Other OCA WCW posts (Pinboard)

Glenn Gould on watching television

Glenn Gould, in a 1959 interview:

“I don’t approve of people who watch television, but I am one of them.”

Quoted in Kevin Bazzana’s Wondrous Strange: The Life and Art of Glenn Gould (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 2003).

Bazzana reports that Gould pronounced himself a “vidiot.” One of his favorite broadcasts: The Mary Tyler Moore Show.

Related reading
All OCA Glenn Gould posts (Pinboard)

A Naked City smile

[No smile, start of smile, smile, no smile. From the Naked City episode “The Tragic Success of Alfred Tiloff,” November 8, 1961. Click for larger views.]

As Elaine and I travel through the streets and alleys of Naked City, we like to watch for interesting moments in the background. The small crowds that assemble in many scenes are conspicuously mannerly: they stand back and let the police — that is, the actors and crew — do their work. Every so often a pedestrian in motion will stop and stare.

This young lady’s self-conscious smile at the camera is the most enjoyable background moment we’ve seen. And it’s fleeting — there and gone in a fraction of a second. Get back in character, young lady! This is the Naked City.

In the foreground, Jan Sterling and Jack Klugman as Myrtle and Alfy Tiloff.

Related reading
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Snowplow parents

Would that this news were from The Onion:

“Helicopter parents,” already ubiquitous in undergraduate admissions, are invading the graduate-school process, too, driven by the rising cost of advanced degrees as well as by hard-to-break habits of coddling.

Some of these parents have become so aggressive that they’ve required a new moniker: “snowplow parents,” for their impulse to push obstacles out of their adult children’s way.

“It’s the new norm,” Thomas P. Rock, assistant dean for enrollment services at Columbia University’s Teachers College, says of parents’ involvement in graduate-school admissions. “It’s the Gilmore Girls phenomenon. Moms want to stay best friends with their daughter and all her friends.”

Mr. Rock has fielded calls from more than one set of parents about the status of a student’s application. A few times, when he asked why the student couldn't have called herself, the parent said she was out shopping at the mall.

Parents call Teachers College professors to complain about grades. They descend on weekends set aside for visits by prospective students who have been admitted. One student’s family came dressed in matching plaid Burberry jackets.

“It’s just something we’re not used to,” Mr. Rock said.

The article is behind the paywall: Parents Now Get Themselves Involved in Graduate Admissions, Too (The Chronicle of Higher Education).

[I hadn’t realized how much embarrassment we’ve saved our children.]

Waxtex!

[Life, November 2, 1942. Click for a fresher view.]

The guy seems more interested in the paper than in the sandwich. But heck, it’s Waxtex!

The Menasha Corporation is still going.

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From the Wax Paper Institute, Inc.