Joyeux anniversaire, M. Proust

He was born on this day in 1871.

In reading, friendship is suddenly brought back to its original purity. There is no false amiability with books. If we spend the evening with these friends, it is because we genuinely want to. We often take leave of them, at least, only with regret. And once we have left them, none of those thoughts that spoil friendship: ‘What did they think of us?’ ‘Were we not tactless?’ ‘Did they like us?’ or the fear of being forgotten in favour of someone else. All these qualms of friendship expire on the threshold of the pure and peaceable form of it that is reading.

Marcel Proust, “Days of Reading,” in Days of Reading, translated by John Sturrock (London: Penguin, 2008).

Related reading
All OCA Proust posts (Pinboard)

[Days of Reading, from the third series of Penguin’s Great Ideas paperbacks, reprints five short pieces from Against Saint-Beuve and Other Essays (London: Penguin, 1988), now out of print.]

Rhymes with “Boops”

I know that tea is better for you than water. I know that, like chocolate and wine, it enhances cognitive performance. (Science!) I know too that it tastes swell, gives vitality, and makes you go “Boops.” (Advertising!) And I know that tea pairs well with madeleines, especially when Marcel Proust’s birthday is just a day away. (Literature!) But I did not know about the droops.


[“Tea Drives Away the Droops.” Poster by Edward McKnight Kauffer, 1936. Click for a larger view.]

This poster, a product of the International Tea Market Expansion Board, is Cooper Hewitt’s Object of the Day. Geoffrey Ripert describes the poster as “an early and particularly representative example of globalization in advertising, speaking directly to the consumer as an individual, ‘sensual’ being.” A being with droops.

Related reading
All OCA tea posts

TWA, JFK

The photographer Max Tuohey tours the Trans World Flight Center, aka the TWA terminal at John F. Kennedy International Airport. Those stairs! I was there in boyhood, but I didn’t know it until I saw these photographs.

[Via Daring Fireball.]

Fifty blog description lines

The first words of Van Dyke Parks’s song “Orange Crate Art” — “Orange crate art was a place to start” — long appeared on this blog as what Blogger calls a blog description line. (Right below the blog title above.) In May 2010, I began to vary the line, keeping the quotation marks for fun. I never stopped. I’ll quote what I wrote in a post that collected the first two hundred: “These lines now look like bits of found language, detached from contexts, amusing, banal, evocative, opaque. I like that.” And I still do. Here are the fifty that have followed the first two hundred:

“Caffeinated, mildly so”
“One part zot ”
“A name I’ve grown to trust”
“I’m not like that!”
“Thanks, Pete”
“1½ HOUR FREE PARKING”
“Doing what, exactly?”
“As it is, unadorned”
“As its writer intended”
“Ink-thrifty”
“Such a monkey”
“Turned out nice again”
“More powerful than a Coke and a slice”
“It’s very hard to be yourself, but it’s the best
    possible thing”
“A mistaken detail from me”
“Good usage isn’t nearly as fluid as you’re
    suggesting”
“Undivided attention to the most unimportant
    things”
“As if!”
“Not a Vermeer”
“Kinda haphazard”
“That’s me — or is it I?”
“We’re — or is it I’m?”
“Pretty much actual size”
“All that is the case”
“In the traditional manner”
“Pithy, brisk, prosaic”
“Only all palaver”
“Plenty to think about”
“Just plain wrong about some things”
“Echoes and clunkinesses”
“It’s study hour again”
“Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo
    Buffalo buffalo.”
“Bad advice and misinformation”
“A mere smidgen”
“With your permission and all of that”
“Sigh”
“Gullible pup”
“Plain enough”
“Received task, will do later”
“The crank and fuss”
“More readable”
”Naturally roundabout”
“Filled with language”
“Artisan grilled”
“More than slightly in a trance”
“You don’t have to be Frank Sinatra”
“Bits and pieces learned along the way”
“Increasingly unalphabetical”
“Pre-Code”
“Full of meaning”

To be continued.

Melville and Frost

Ishamel ponders whiteness, “the intensifying agent in things most appalling to mankind”:


Herman Melville, Moby-Dick (1851)

In a poem from 1936, Robert Frost, too, ponders “a dumb blankness, full of meaning, in a wide landscape of snows”:



Frost’s poem also suggests Blaise Pascal: “Le silence éternel de ces espaces infinis m’effraie” [The eternal silence of these infinite spaces frightens me]. Frost’s better-known “Design” depicts a scene in white and white and white, a design, if it is a design, “of darkness to appall.”

Appalling whiteness, of the whale and other things, seems like a good note on which to end these Moby-Dick posts.

Also from Moby-Dick
“Nothing exists in itself” : Nantucket ≠ Illinois : Quoggy : “Round the world!” : Gam : On “true method” : “A certain semi-visible steam” : Ishmael, dictionary user : A Sheffield contrivance

“Every generation hyphenates the way it wants to”

From The Simpsons episode “The Bart of War” (May 18, 2003), aired again (again) last night. Bart and Milhouse are in trouble:

Bart: Please, don’t call our parents.

Chief Wiggum: I’m afraid I have to for hijinks like these. Heh. Hijinks. Funny word. Three dotted letters in a row.

Eddie: Is it hyphenated?

Chief Wiggum: It used to be. Back in the bad old days, you know. Of course every generation hyphenates the way it wants to. Then there’s ★NSYNC. Hah. What the hell is that? Jump in any time, Eddie, these are good topics.

I don’t know how Chief Wiggum spells ★NSYNC, but I know how ★NSYNC spells ★NSYNC. (I looked it up.) But I am unwilling to ruin line spacing by superscripting the star. Like so:

^★NSYNC

I also don’t know if Chief Wiggum italicizes words used as words. But I do.

Related reading
All OCA punctuation posts (Pinboard)
The Hammacher Schlemmer crazy making hyphen shortage problem
Living on hyphens
Mr. Hyphen and Mr. Faulkner
One more from Mr. Hyphen

[Mary Norris’s Between You & Me (2015) and Edward N. Teall’s Meet Mr. Hyphen (1937) got me noticing hyphens and talk of hyphens.]

“Rich kids” and English

Linkbait from The Atlantic : “Rich Kids Study English,” complete with a stock photo of an oh-so-white, oh-so languid young woman, shades on, shoes off, reading, sort of, supine on the grass. The more temperate claim that the writer advances: “Kids [kids ?] from lower-income families tend toward ‘useful’ majors, such as computer science, math, and physics. Those whose parents make more money flock to history, English, and performing arts.”

I am skeptical about this claim. It’s not clear how much statistical evidence supports it: all we’re told is “National Center for Education Statistics data.” The graph presenting this evidence seems far from conclusive: “Associate’s Degree only” goes with an average parental household income of $56,636 ± $41,496. English goes with $99,533 ± $59,856. Of all majors listed, the greatest range in parental household income goes with the English major, which would seem to suggest that its students come from all kinds of backgrounds.

Which I believe is the case. I’ve known countless students from decidedly unprivileged backgrounds who have chosen to major in English. (I was one such major too.) This Atlantic piece furthers the pernicious idea that traditional study in the humanities is for a privileged few, while more practical fields offer a proper path for the rest of us. I will quote from a previous post:

If powerful and moneyed interests now seeking to reshape higher education have their way, “college” will soon become a two-tier system, with the real thing for a privileged few  . . . and credits and credentials, haphazardly assembled, vocationally themed, for everyone else.

The idea that the humanities are for “rich kids” is one that any humanist must reject.

It’s still WCW’s wheelbarrow

The New York Times reports on Thaddeus Marshall, “the forgotten man behind William Carlos Williams’s ‘red wheelbarrow.’” Interesting, certainly. But the wheelbarrow of “The Red Wheelbarrow” has been abstracted — removed from its source, dissociated from its surroundings (save for some chickens), lifted into the zone of the imagination, whose work upon things is the focus of Spring and All, the 1923 volume in which the poem (known only as XXII, an exhibit number of sorts) first appeared. To say (as the Internets now say) that Mr. Marshall owned the wheelbarrow in Williams’s poem is to make a category mistake about the relation between life and art.

Williams’s poem, like so much modernist art, is above all a work of juxtaposition: of the made and the natural, the one and the many, the red and the white. As Hugh Kenner observes, the poem forms “an ideogram of the barnyard.” “The Red Wheelbarrow” has small surprises: the broken words “wheel / barrow” and “rain / water,” the mysterious word glazed, which turns the wheelbarrow, if only for a moment, into a work of art, glazed like, oh, say, a Grecian urn. And the poem has a haiku-like economy of form: four two-line stanazas, of four syllables and two, three and two, three and two, four and two. Reading the poem at Princeton University in 1952, Williams invoked the opening line of John Keats’s Endymion : “A thing of beauty is a joy forever.”

It’s good to know where things come from. (It was Hugh Kenner who discovered that “Prufock” was the name of a St. Louis furniture company.) But it’s also possible in English studies to contextualize a work into oblivion — in other words, to miss what’s most important about it . What’s most important about “The Red Wheelbarrow” is its presentation of an everyday, unpoetic reality as the material of poetry. Not a Grecian urn: a wheelbarrow. Not nightingales and skylarks: chickens.

Related reading
All OCA William Carlos Williams posts (Pinboard)

Burt Shavitz (1935–2015)

The Burt behind — or at a distance from — Burt’s Bees has died: “Burt Shavitz, Scruffy Face of Burt’s Bees, Dies at 80” (The New York Times).

Elaine and I happened to watch the documentary film Burt’s Buzz (dir. Jody Shapiro, 2013) on Saturday. Its story was strange and sad: the guy whose face has sold who-knows-how-many tubes of lip balm turns out to have been exiled from the company that bears his name. Yet he still made appearances as a real-life brand emblem, when he would have liked nothing better than to stay on his thirty-seven acres. “A good day is when no one shows up and you don’t have to go anywhere,” he tells the camera. Saddest scene: Burt in Taiwan, using Skype to talk to — and then howl with — his beloved dog.

Magical thinking about poverty and education

My son Ben sent me something from The Atlantic that saddened him, a short piece asserting that “Fixing Urban Schools Without Fixing Poverty Is Possible.” Here’s the most saddening part, from Pamela Cantor, the founder, president, and CEO of the non-profit Turnaround for Children:

The argument that says we can’t fix education until we fix poverty is a false one. We can’t fix poverty or the other adverse events of children’s lives, but we can “fix” the impact of stress on the developing brain. In fact, we have to. We can and must teach schools and teachers how to do this now.

There it is: we can’t fix poverty. But we can “‘fix’” (meaning?) its effects. I daresay that’s magical thinking.

CitizenAudit.org notes that in the year ending June 2014, Turnaround for Children Inc had assets of $16,387,573. The organization’s most recent Form 990 (Return of Organization Exempt from Income Tax) lists $7,437,077 in salaries for seventy-seven employees. The organization’s officers, directors, trustees, key employees, and highest-paid employees (no indication of their number) account for $1,349,525 in compensation.

*

1:57 p.m.: An interesting detail from Wikipedia’s Atlantic article: “The Atlantic Media Company receives substantial financial support from the Gates Foundation through the National Journal ($240,000+) to provide coverage of education-related issues that are of interest to the Gates Foundation and its frequent partner in education policy initiatives, the Lumina Foundation.”