From an old notebook

Alfred Appel Jr., interviewed about his book The Art of Celebration: Twentieth-Century Painting, Literature, Sculpture, Photography, and Jazz (1992):

“I began the lecture with some ringing phrase like, ‘Modern man is isolated and alienated,’ he recalled in an interview at the Museum of Modern Art, where he was about to view the Matisse exhibit. I said, ‘We are all the denizens of T. S. Eliot’s “Waste Land,”’ and I built from there.” But then, he recalled, he stopped, looked out over the students eagerly taking notes and thought, “I don't think I’ve ever seen so many happy, contented faces. Wait a minute, they’re not isolated, they're not alienated. . . . Let me think twice about this ‘Waste Land’ idea. It's what we call an epiphany.”

The current Matisse exhibit, he said, is clear evidence of what people want from art. “The great popularity of this show suggests there is a kind of exit poll being taken at the end of the 20th century, and the vote is in favor of eros over thanatos. Matisse is everyone’s person for celebrating the simple things that all the wars and disasters of the 20th century have not obliterated from the lives of ordinary people.”

From “Eros by a Landslide,” an interview with Jon Elsen, The New York Times Book Review , December 20, 1992.

Also from this notebook
Alfalfa, Ted Berrigan, Jack Kerouac, metaphors
Beauty and the Beast and kid talk
John Ashbery and Kenneth Koch
Plato, Shirley Temple, vulgarity, wisdom, Stan Laurel

Comics synchronicity

[Mark Trail , October 11, 2016.]


[Nancy , October 16, 1951. Click for a larger view.]

Today’s Random Acts of Nancy panel (“Come on, Sluggo”) sent me to Nancy Loves Sluggo: Dailies, 1949–1951 (2014), the third volume in Fantagraphics’s Nancy series. (Collect them all.)

Sixty-five years ago, a girl was leading the way. Come on, Mark.

Related reading
All OCA Mark Trail and Nancy posts (Pinboard)

Michelle Obama speaks

Michelle Obama, campaigning in New Hampshire today:

“This is not normal. This is not politics as usual. This is disgraceful. It is intolerable. And it doesn’t matter what party you belong to.”

Read a transcript or watch and listen.

If our children were still wee pals at home, we’d be watching and listening to this speech with them after dinner tonight.

[I feel honored to have met Michelle Obama in 2004, right here in downstate Illinois. I still hope that someday she’ll run for Senate. Richard Durbin will be weeks short of seventy-six when he is up for reelection in 2020.]

Block that metaphor

On CNN this afternoon:

“They’re trying to find the middle ground where they can straddle this awkward situation.”

Related reading
All OCA metaphor posts (Pinboard)
Further awkward straddling

Doing something well

Joseph Joubert:

I can do something well only slowly and with great effort.

Our moments of light are all moments of happiness. When it is bright in our mind, the weather is good.

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

This post is for Matt Thomas.

Also from Joseph Joubert
Another world : Being and nothingness : Brevity : “Everything is new” : Form and content : Irrelevancies and solid objects : Justified enthusiasm : Lives and writings : New books, old books : ’Nuff said (1) : ’Nuff said (2) : Politeness : Resignation and courage : Ruins v. reconstructions : Self-love and truth : Thinking and writing : Wine

Positively Oslo

I trust my first response as an honest one: when I read this morning that Bob Dylan has won the Nobel Prize in Literature, I let out an involuntary oh my God , an exclamation not of delighted surprise but of bewildered dismay.

Likening Dylan to Homer and Sappho, as the secretary of the Swedish Academy does, is, for me, not especially convincing. What’s wrong with speaking of Dylan in relation to, say, Woody Guthrie? Isn’t Dylan better viewed in the company of American singers and songwriters? Oh — but this is the Nobel Prize in Literature. And Dylan is “poetic.” Like, uh, Homer and Sappho.

Comparisons aside, this award suggests to me that the Swedish Academy’s choice is a bid for popular relevance, something of a stunt, as when the Oxford English Dictionary announces that it’s added moobs and YOLO to its word hoard. The language of the Academy’s brief Dylan biography suggests a preoccupation with celebrity and media culture: “Dylan has the status of an icon.” That’s about the dumbest thing one might say to characterize someone working in the realm of the imagination. But the Academy’s choice at least means that fewer people will be greeting the announcement of the year’s laureate by asking “Who?”

For me the real news in this year’s announcement is that the Swedish Academy has again passed John Ashbery by. He’s now eighty-nine.

[A close second to icon : living legend .]

Pencil time

On Tuesday, The New York Times took a quick look at the Eberhard Faber Company building in Greenpernt. And NPR answered the question “How is pencil lead made?” I wrote in an e-mail:

I was going to say that it appears that the pencil is “having a moment,” but it’s always pencil time.

Related reading
All OCA pencil posts (Pinboard)

Henry and Zippy

[Zippy , October 12, 2016.]

Henry speaks! As he did in a 1935 cartoon appearance. But this time he sounds mean.

Related reading
All OCA Henry and Zippyposts (Pinboard)

Being and nothingness

Joseph Joubert:

It is better to be concerned with being than with nothingness. Dream therefore of what you still have rather than of what you have lost.

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

I’m reminded of what Harold Russell wrote: “It is not what you have lost but what you have left that counts.”

Also from Joseph Joubert
Another world : Brevity : “Everything is new” : Form and content : Irrelevancies and solid objects : Justified enthusiasm : Lives and writings : New books, old books : ’Nuff said (1) : ’Nuff said (2) : Politeness : Resignation and courage : Ruins v. reconstructions : Self-love and truth : Thinking and writing : Wine

[Thank goodness this post wasn’t Sartre’s Being and Nothingness .]

One or more night stands

The New York Times Book Review feature “By the Book” always begins with the same question: “What books are currently on your night stand?” I wish that just once an interviewee would reply, “What night stand? I don’t have a night stand. What’s with ‘night stand’? Why do you assume that that’s where everyone keeps their books?”

Reader, do you have a night stand? And is it made of two words, or one?