Fine Arts radiator

[Fine Arts Building, Chicago. Click for a larger view.]

A related post
Fine Arts tile

Fine Arts tile

[Fine Arts Building, Chicago. Click for a larger view.]

I am a tileman’s son. Wherever I go, I look at the tile. If the floor is as old as the building, it’s from 1886.

Related reading
All OCA tile posts (Pinboard)
Fine Arts radiator

Hillary Rodham on the possible and the impossible

Hillary Clinton, then Rodham, graduating senior, in her Wellesley College commencement speech, May 31, 1969:

[W]e feel that for too long our leaders have viewed politics as the art of the possible. And the challenge now is to practice politics as the art of making what appears to be impossible, possible.

That’s why I voted for Bernie Sanders.

This passage is widely quoted, appearing, for instance, in a whitehouse.gov biography. Clinton quoted from the passage in her 1992 Wellesley commencement address.

[The text of the speech on Wellesley’s website appears to have the passage wrong: “we feel that for too long our leaders have used politics as the art of making what appears to be impossible, possible.” Perhaps a line was dropped in transcription? The sentence reads as nonsense, unless “making what appears to be impossible, possible” means something like “making possible what ought to be unthinkable.” Increasing economic disparity, the influence of corporate money in politics: those might be two examples of what ought to be unthinkable. That’s why I voted for Bernie Sanders.]

*

June 21: Audio excerpts made available by Wellesley College confirm the sentences as I’ve quoted them here. (I’ve made one correction: “viewed politics,” not “used politics.”) The mistaken transcription on Wellesley’s website has been corrected.

Bill Murray looks at a painting

Asked to talk about a moment when art has mattered to him, Bill Murray describes an encounter with Jules Adolphe Breton’s The Song of the Lark after a disastrous first experience on stage in Chicago:

“I was so bad I just walked out on the street and headed — and started walking. And I walked for a couple of hours, and I realized I’d walked the wrong direction — not just the wrong direction in terms of where I lived but the wrong direction in terms of a desire to stay alive. And so I — this may be a little bit not completely true, but it’s pretty true — that I walked and then thought, ‘Well, if I’m gonna die where I am, I may as well just go over towards the lake, and maybe I’ll float for a while after I’m dead.’”

He ended up in the Art Institute, walking right through without paying because he was “ready to die and pretty much dead”:

“And there’s a painting there, and I don’t even know who painted it, but I think it’s called The Song of the Lark. And it’s a woman working in a field, and there’s a sunrise behind her. And I’ve always loved this painting, and I saw it that day, and I just thought, ‘Well, look, there’s a girl who doesn’t have a whole lot of prospects, but the sun’s coming up anyway, and she’s got another chance at it.’ So I think that gave me some sort of feeling that I too am a person and get another chance every day the sun comes up.“

See also words from Harvey Pekar (in the OCA sidebar): “Every day is a new deal.”

[Murray was speaking at a press conference marking the UK premiere of The Monuments Men. The Art Institute has a highly condensed version of Murray’s remarks on a placard next to the painting.]

From a Van Gogh letter

Vincent van Gogh to his mother Anna Cornelia, c. June 12, 1890:

I was struck by what you say in your letter about having been to Nuenen. You saw everything again, “with gratitude that once it was yours” — and are now able to leave it to others with an easy mind. As through a glass, darkly — so it has remained; life, the why or wherefore of parting, passing away, the permanence of turmoil — one grasps no more of it than that.

For me, life may well continue in solitude. I have never perceived those to whom I have been most attached other than as through a glass, darkly.

The Letters of Vincent van Gogh , ed. Ronald de Leeuw, trans. Arnold Pomerans (New York: Penguin, 1997).

“I have never perceived those to whom I have been most attached other than as through a glass, darkly”: one can find similar statements in Willa Cather’s fiction. From The Song of the Lark (1915):

He looked down wonderingly at his old friend and patient. After all, one never knew people to the core.

And from The Professor’s House (1925):

The heart of another is a dark forest, always, no matter how close it has been to one’s own.

These passages are a matter of what is sometimes called free indirect discourse: they represent a character’s thinking. But they’re very Cather.

Our household is full of Van Gogh and Cather. We went up to Art Institute of Chicago yesterday to see Van Gogh’s Bedrooms one more time. We stood communing with Jules Adolphe Breton’s The Song of the Lark , just like Thea Kronborg. And then we wandered the ten floors of the Fine Arts Building, which plays a part in Lucy Gayheart (1935).

Also from Van Gogh’s letters
“Admire as much as you can”
“It was a bright autumn day and a beautiful walk”
“Lately, during the dark days before Christmas”
“So you must picture me sitting at my attic window”
“At the moment, I can see a splendid effect”
“The ride into the village was beautiful”
“A colourist the like of which has never yet been seen”

Recently updated

The Band’s Visit With a link to an obituary for Ronit Elkabetz.

A Merriam-Webster advertisement

[Life, November 15, 1937. Click for a larger view.]

I like the idea of a hat-holding man asking a librarian, and a college president, and a newspaper editor, and a bookseller for dictionary advice, even if the illustration makes the hat-holder look like a representative of the local loan shark. “Time? I’ll give you time — in the hospital!”

I invested in a Webster’s Second (a 1954 copy) a year ago. No loan sharks were involved. I’ve cited this beautiful, dowdy dictionary in at least a dozen posts. I like having both the Second and the Third in the same room. Sparks sometimes fly.

Here are three more Merriam-Webster ads, from 1965, 1966, and 1967.

Related reading
All OCA dictionary posts (Pinboard)

Irrelevancies and solid objects

Joseph Joubert:

Fleeting irrelevancies often serve to stamp solid objects in our memory; a sound, a song, an accent, a voice, a smell engrave forever in our mind the memory of certain places, because these small things were what made up our pleasure or boredom there.

The Notebooks of Joseph Joubert: A Selection  , trans. Paul Auster (New York: New York Review Books, 2005).

That sentence seems like a milder version of a passage from T. S. Eliot’s prose:

Why, for all of us, out of all we have heard, seen, felt, in a lifetime, do certain images recur, charged with emotion, rather than others? The song of one bird, the leap of one fish, at a particular place and time, the scent of one flower, an old woman on a German mountain path, six ruffians seen through an open window playing cards at night at a small French railway junction where there was a water-mill: such memories may have symbolic value, but of what we cannot tell, for they come to represent the depth of feeling into which we cannot peer.

“The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism” (1933).

Also from Joseph Joubert
Another world : Form and content : Lives and writings : Politeness : Resignation and courage : Self-love and truth : Thinking and writing

Involuntary Brooklyn

I was cutting the grass this afternoon. Elaine was making meatballs. And suddenly I was eight or nine years old in Brooklyn. I even said it out loud: “Brooklyn.” Elaine must have been running the exhaust fan, wafting olive oil and meat and herbs and garlic into the previously grass-scented air.

I’ve smelled olive oil and meat and herbs and garlic countless times in our house. Smelling them outside is rare. That’s what brought me back to the late afternoons of my childhood, when kids played outside as mothers made dinner, up and down the block.

Lest you think our division of labor replicates that of a mid-century Brooklyn household: I made the sauce. And Elaine filled the gas can. Thank you, Elaine.

More involuntary memories
Proust: involuntary memory, foolish things
In a memory kitchen
Involuntary bicycle

Filling seats in graduate programs

The New York Times reports on Western Kentucky University’s effort to fill seats in graduate programs with less-than-qualified students from abroad. The student-body president: “It is ethically wrong to bring students to the university and let them believe they can be successful when we have nothing in place to make sure they’re successful.” The school’s president: “There are growing pains.” Along with growing pains, there are delusions of grandeur, evident in WKU’s slogan, “A leading American university with international reach.” A reach indeed.