Henry and happiness

[Henry, July 22, 2014.]

To: Henry

From: Michael

See this post.

Related reading
All OCA Henry posts (Pinboard)

[Henry’s not in a melancholic mood: the puffs of pavement and/or shoe signify nothing more than walking. (I just checked several past strips.) I read Henry online via the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.]

Rob Riemen’s Nobility of Spirit

The essayist and cultural critic Rob Riemen:

Today’s Western society has the same aspirations as the Fascists and Communists. Not without reason do its most important pillars, the mass media and social-capitalist economy, proclaim the virtues of what is new, fast, and progressive — all on the level of consumer goods — and then offer us the freedom to be happy with our gadgets. We must feel eternally young, always see that which is new as superior, accept that limitations do not exist — and we’d better forget about death.

Nobility of Spirit: A Forgotten Ideal, trans. Marjolijn de Jager (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008).

Nobility of Spirit: A Forgotten Ideal is an unusual book, a set of loosely related essays that borrows its title from a 1945 collection of essays by Thomas Mann. Riemen’s touchstones (Mann, above all) are seldom mine; Riemen’s generalizations — “the European cultural traditions,” “the great humanistic ideas” — manage to overlook the long history of European colonial and imperial endeavor. To describe the book in terms of its materials is to suggest a random assortment: an unexpected conversation in a New York restaurant; scenes from the lives of Socrates, Spinoza, Nietzsche, and Mann; an examination of American intellectuals’ reactions to 9/11; a conversation among André Malraux, Albert Camus, and others; and the torture of the Italian anti-Fascist Leone Ginzburg.

What holds the book together is its impassioned advocacy of nobility, not of bloodlines but of spirit, a nobility that Riemen sees as available to anyone who is interested in acquiring it. (Not really: literacy and access to liberal education are the tacit prerequisites.) Riemen associates nobility of spirit with art, intellect, truth, virtue, and the rejection of fundamentalism and nihilism. (See? I have to write in generalizations.) What Riemen seeks is a culture that reverences and preserves all that is good in the human endeavor, that promulgates the dignity of the individual, that eschews the merely entertaining and expedient, that renounces any dream of human perfectibility.

This book’s great value, I think, is its ability to provoke its reader to more careful consideration of our life and times. Now when I see an assistant professor explain away an academic superstar’s plagiarism by arguing that we all use sources without citing them, when I see another celebrated academic dismiss a writer as irrelevant in part because that writer was born before the invention of the telephone, when I see Microsoft equate the purchase of its products with bravery (“I wanna see you be brave”), I think of Rob Riemen’s book.

[That I happened to encounter Nobility of Spirit is testimony to the usefulness of bookstores: I read somewhere that the Manhattan bookstore Crawford Doyle recommends the book to its customers. Strange: I can’t find anything about that online now — though I did buy a signed copy of Nobility of Spirit at the bookstore. What I did find online just now is the surprising news that Crawford Doyle’s owners, Judy Crawford and John Doyle, persuaded New York Review Books to reprint John Williams’s novel Stoner.]

“Elaine Stritch Arrives in Heaven”

A drawing by Bill Madison: “Elaine Stritch Arrives in Heaven.” Just great.

Blogger’s new direction in word verification

[Google, WTF?]

One way to discourage spam comments on a Blogger blog is to enable “word verification.” For a long time, word verification required an aspiring commenter to verify personhood by typing a street address, presumably from a Google Maps snippet. It was number verification, really.

With no explanation and no notice, Blogger recently changed its word-verification practice. A commenter must now type the words PHOTO SPHERE. Photo Sphere is a camera mode for Android phones, or some Android phones. Android? Blogger? Google.

Orange Crate Art has always been an ad-free blog. The closest I’ve come to an ad is the brief self-promotion from a YouTube contributor that prefaced an Elaine Stritch clip in a recent post. I agonized a little about letting that get by, and I decided that the clip was worth it. I take the idea of ad-free seriously.

And because I do, I’ve removed word verification. If the spam becomes too much, I’ll have to reinstate it. But removing it, for now, is my way of showing Google that I’m not a robot.

[You might be surprised by how many spam comments come through with word verification off, even with comment moderation on. Blogger sends almost all such comments to a spam folder. But it’s sad and sometimes creepy to see them. They remind me of how much of the Internets is not the Internets as I know them.]

Happiness and finitude

On happiness and finitude:

Tragic wisdom is the wisdom of happiness and finitude, happiness and impermanence, happiness and despair. This is not as paradoxical as it might sound. You can hope only for what you do not have. Thus, to hope for happiness is to lack it. When you have it, on the other hand, what remains to be hoped for? For it to last? That would mean fearing its cessation, and as soon as you do that, you start feeling it dissolve into anxiety.

André Comte-Sponville, The Little Book of Atheist Spirituality, trans. Nancy Hutson (New York: Penguin, 2008).

This passage suggests to me experiences of which I am increasingly aware and for which I am increasingly grateful: small spots of happiness, moments when all’s well, amid and despite the everything-else of life, the everything-else that is happening and whatever -else is to come. I think any reader who has attained a certain age will understand what I mean. I hope so, because I have no better explanation, only examples: listening to Sinatra in a hospital room, watching a toddler go visiting from table to table in a restaurant.

The tragic wisdom that Comte-Sponville describes is what I find in the words of the vintner Siduri in the Gilgamesh story. She tells Gilgamesh that what he is seeking in the wake of his friend Enkidu’s death — namely, an escape from mortality — is not to be found:

“When the gods created man they allotted to him death, but life they retained in their own keeping. As for you, Gilgamesh, fill your belly with good things; day and night, night and day, dance and be merry, feast and rejoice. Let your clothes be fresh, bathe yourself in water, cherish the little child that holds your hand, and make your wife happy in your embrace; for this too is the lot of man.”

The Epic of Gilgamesh, an English version by N. K. Sandars (New York: Penguin, 1972).

Notice that Siduri’s advice is not to embrace a mindless hedonism, not to eat, drink, and be merry: her advice is to eat, drink, and be merry with full knowledge of one’s impermanence. Pleasure too, not mortality alone, defines the human condition. Happiness and finitude, right there, straight from Mesopotamia.

[Comte-Sponville sees the hope for unending happiness as a problem for both theists and non-theists: “Such is the trap of hope, with or without God — the hope for tomorrow’s happiness prevents you from experiencing today’s.” About the Gilgamesh story: please, no complications about whether Siduri is a brewer or vintner or tavern-keeper, or why these words are not in all versions of the story.]

The Prairie Ensemble (1996–2014)

The chamber orchestra known as The Prairie Ensemble played its final concert last night. For eighteen years, this orchestra flourished in Champaign-Urbana, Illinois. How wrong it feels now to write about The Prairie Ensemble in the past tense.

Kevin Kelly, the orchestra’s music director and conductor for all its eighteen years, always assembled programs with unusual, unexpected repertoire. Just three examples of such repertoire, from many years of concert-going: Aaron Copland’s Appalachian Spring in its original orchestration for thirteen instruments, excerpts from Duke Ellington’s The River, and Heitor Villa-Lobos’s Chôros no. 7. Last night’s program:

Benjamin Britten, Soirées musicales

George Butterworth, The Banks of Green Willow

Carl Nielsen, Concerto for Flute and Orchestra (Mary Leathers Chapman, soloist)

Ludwig van Beethoven, Symphony no. 6 in F Major

And if you, like me, never even heard of George Butterworth, that was the point: the opportunity to hear something unexpected and surprising and beautiful. New music, from 1913.

Last night’s performance was a great one, which makes the orchestra’s end that much sadder. The descriptive notes for the first and last movements of the Beethoven no. 6 — “Awakening of cheerful feelings upon arrival in the countryside,” “Cheerful and thankful feelings after the storm” — made me think of this concert as an occasion for happiness and gratitude. For two hours or so, the world was at peace.

My wife Elaine Fine played viola in The Prairie Ensemble for many years. She has written two posts — one, two — about last night’s concert.

Inside James Brown’s mansion

From the Columbia, South Carolina newspaper The State: Inside James Brown’s mansion, with a short video clip and thirty-seven photographs. James Brown died on Christmas Day 2006. His Christmas tree is still standing.

Related reading
All OCA James Brown posts (Pinboard)

The handwriting is on the wall

[Somewhere in Illinois. Photograph by Michael Leddy.]

Who says cursive is dead?

Related reading
All OCA handwriting posts (Pinboard)

[I like the peace sign. A crazy idea, peace, I know.]

Elaine Stritch (1925–2014)

Elaine Stritch, Tart-Tongued Broadway Actress and Singer, Is Dead at 89 (The New York Times).

[If my memory serves, this performance aired on the WNET series The Great American Dream Machine.]

“Avoid haphazard writing materials”

Walter Benjamin, 1928:

Avoid haphazard writing materials. A pedantic adherence to certain papers, pens, inks is beneficial. No luxury, but an abundance of these utensils is indispensable.

One-Way Street, in “One-Way Street” and Other Writings, trans. Edmund Jephcott and Kingsley Shorter (London: NLB, 1979).

Benjamin here anticipates my dad’s thinking about abundance and office supplies.

Like Benjamin and my dad, I too eschew the haphazard, though I also believe in “any available paper, any available Bic”: any port in a storm.

[The Chicago Manual of Style, 8.171: “A title of a work within a title, however, should remain in italics and be enclosed in quotation marks.”]