Being wrong about beauty

Elaine Scarry is commenting on the experience of being wrong about beauty. Her example: realizing that palm trees are, after all, beautiful. She writes:

Those who remember making an error about beauty usually . . . recall the exact second when they first realized they had made an error. The revisionary moment comes as a perceptual slap or slam that itself has emphatic sensory properties.

On Beauty and Being Just (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999).

“The exact second”: that rings true for me. It reminds me of something I posted in 2000 to rec.music.artists.beach-boys (remember newsgroups?), describing how I came to appreciate Brian Wilson and the Beach Boys. Before 1999, the Beach Boys for me were trivial, nothing more than striped shirts, “Surfer Girl,” “Surfin’ Safari,” and a Sunkist commercial. But:

In January 1999 I happened to rent a videotape of I Just Wasn’t Made for These Times. I’d remembered reading in the New York Times that the film was well done and told the story of Brian Wilson’s life (that rang a vague bell). There was much in the film that I didn’t take in, but I was struck by — mesmerized by — the Van Dyke Parks song “Orange Crate Art.” (His name rang a vague bell too.) I rewound that section of the tape many times and started figuring out the tune on the piano (nice chord changes). Then I went to the library, where I always go to explore music I don’t know much about, and discovered that there was a CD called Orange Crate Art available through interlibrary loan. I figured I should get Pet Sounds too. Why not?

Listening to both was an incredible reeducation in music. I don’t typically listen to music with a lot of “production” — in old jazz and blues recordings, production amounted to moving the musicians toward or away from the microphone (the only microphone!). So it took me a while to get used to production, and to then appreciate it. And the songs on Pet Sounds seemed so short — they seemed to barely get started before fading out. But I can mark the first moments in the album that really hit me — the huge drum sound that stops the intro to “Wouldn’t It Be Nice,” the slowing down and picking back up at the end, the intro to “You Still Believe in Me,” and the low note on “me.” So I kept listening.

My account jibes with another observation in Scarry’s book: that the experience of beauty “seems to incite, even to require, the act of replication.” ”Beauty,” Scarry says, “brings copies of itself into being.” Which is just what happened when I listened to “Orange Crate Art” again and again and then began playing the song on the piano. The copies need not be perfect.

I would like to read accounts of other people’s errors about beauty, recognitions that something once thought not beautiful is indeed beautiful, or that something once thought beautiful is not. Is Scarry right that there is usually an “exact second” in which one recognizes the error?

Also from this book
“When justice has been taken away”

“When justice has been taken away”

In periods when a human community is too young to have yet had time to create justice, as well as in periods when justice has been taken away, beautiful things (which do not rely on us to create them but come on their own and have never been absent from a human community) hold steadily visible the manifest good of equality and balance.

Elaine Scarry, On Beauty and Being Just (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999).

Also from this book
Being wrong about beauty

International Women’s Day

[Dia Internacional de la Mujer / International Women’s Day. Poster designed by the Women's Graphics Collective. Chicago, Illinois. 28 3/16" × 20 3/8".)]

“This bold poster was printed by the Chicago Women’s Graphics Collective to celebrate International Women’s Day on March 8, 1975.” It’s Cooper Hewitt’s Object of the Day.

[The identifying information on the Cooper Hewitt page says “ca. 1980.” Whatever the year, it’s International Women’s Day. Some history here.]

Cobble Court on the move

Jeremiah’s Vanishing New York marks the fiftieth anniversary of Cobble Court’s move to the Village. Short story long: Cobble Court is an old Manhattan farmhouse, transplanted from Lenox Hill to Greenwich Village in 1967. At one point before the transplant, the house served as the studio of Margaret Wise Brown. (Goodnight little house.)

You can find many photographs at Scouting New York, from a time when Cobble Court was in danger of being torn down for condominium development. Today, for now, Cobble Court appears to be safe.

A related post
Maeve Brennan, The Long-Winded Lady (With an excerpt from Brennan’s New Yorker piece about the move)

Word of the day: counterpane

Our household has begun to use, in fun, the word counterpane. It’s an older word for bedspread, familiar to us from reading Willa Cather and Herman Melville. The word’s most famous appearance in literature must be in the title of the unforgettable fourth chapter of Moby-Dick: “The Counterpane.”

I began to wonder: counterpane, windowpane. Is a pane then a panel? Is the idea that a bedspread is made of such pieces, sewn together to make a whole? That sounded plausible. But why counter?

The Oxford English Dictionary has the answers to these questions. Counterpane is “an alteration of counterpoint,” with the second element of that word made into pane, which derives from the French pan and the Latin pannus, meaning “cloth.” The pane in windowpane (“a division of a window”) goes back to the same Latin pannus. How strange to see cloth grow transparent and harden.

That clears up pane. But why counter? The OED explains its history, which begins with the

Old French contrepointe . . . , synonym of countepointe, both forms being apparently corruptions of Old French cuilte-pointe, coulte-pointe, coute-pointe, repr[esenting] Latin culcita puncta . . . lit[erally] “quilt stabbed or stitched through, quilted mattress.” The first element is thus the same word as quilt.

So a counterpane is a quilt.

But what about countertop, or as the OED spells it, counter-top? Where does it fit in? It doesn’t. Its counter derives from the Anglo-Norman counteour, countour, which (omitting many steps) goes back to the Latin computātōrium: computāre, meaning “to compute, count,” and a suffix. A counter is first “anything used in counting or keeping account” and later “a banker’s or money-changer’s table; also, the table in a shop on which the money paid by purchasers is counted out, and across which goods are delivered.”

This post, I hope, has delivered the goods, or at least some of them, in over-the-counter fashion.

“Some staples”

In the March 13 New Yorker, Alec Wilkinson writes about the musician Jack White, who likes having fewer choices:

The number three is essential to his purposes. He says it entered his awareness one day when he was an apprentice in the upholstery shop. He saw that the owner had used three staples to secure a piece of fabric and he realized that “three was the minimum number of staples an upholsterer could use and call a piece done.” The White Stripes were built around the theme of three — guitar, drums, and voice. As both a stance and a misdirection, they wore only red, white, and black. White wanted the White Stripes to play the blues, but he didn’t want to be seen as a boy-girl band attempting them.

Some staples, some instruments, some colors. As a regular reader should know, “some,” as in Ernie Bushmiller’s “some rocks,” comes up now and then in these pages.

Work with Care

[Nathan Sherman. Work with Care. WPA Federal Art Project. Pennsylvania, 1936 or 1937. Click for a larger view.]

You can explore the world of WPA posters at the Library of Congress website.

WPA stamps

[Click for a larger view.]

From the USPS: “The U.S. Postal Service celebrates posters of the Work Projects Administration, striking and utilitarian artwork created during the Depression by the Poster Division of the WPA Federal Art Project.” The stamps are due out today.

“The world’s choosing up sides”

From Saboteur (dir. Alfred Hitchcock, 1942). Barry Kane (Robert Cummings), a defense-plant employee, tells the fascist plotter Charles Tobin (Otto Kruger) what’s what:

“Love and hate. The world’s choosing up sides. I know who I’m with. And there are a lot of people on my side, millions of us in every country. And we’re not soft; we’re plenty strong. And we’ll fight standing up on our two feet, and we’ll win. Remember that, Mr. Tobin. We’ll win, no matter what you guys do. We’ll win if it takes from now until the cows come home.”

Related reading
All OCA Hitchcock posts (Pinboard)

UPS My Choice

From United Parcel Service: UPS My Choice is a nifty free service. If you’ve ever come back from a few days away and discovered an unexpected package left at your door, you will appreciate UPS My Choice. It alerts you to upcoming deliveries and allows you to reschedule. Tracks everything too, of course.

[Does everyone else know this stuff already?]