Quixotic Pedagogue

Weekly Reads, Poetry and Art for 06 February 2015

This week, we’ve got takes on Al Qaeda, the vaccine debate, guaranteed incomes, the poetry of Walt Whitman, a painting by Renoir, and more. Enjoy.

Weekly Reads

Sentence of the Week

“Sometimes, though, there is a ghostly rumble among the drums, an asthmatic whisper in the trombones that swings me back into the early twenties when we drank wood alcohol and every day in every way grew better and better, and there was a first abortive shortening of the skirts, and girls all looked alike in sweater dresses, and people you didn’t want to know said ‘Yes, we have no bananas,’ and it seemed only a question of a few years before the older people would step aside and let the world be run by those who saw things as they were — and it all seems rosy and romantic to us who were young then, because we will never feel quite so intensely about our surroundings any more.” –F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Jazz Age

Poem of the Week

Among the Multitude by Walt Whitman
Among the men and women, the multitude,
I perceive one picking me out by secret and divine signs,
Acknowledging none else—not parent, wife, husband, brother, child,
any nearer than I am;
Some are baffled—But that one is not—that one knows me.
Ah, lover and perfect equal!
I meant that you should discover me so, by my faint indirections;
And I, when I meet you, mean to discover you by the like in you.

Art of the Week

This week’s art piece is another housed at the Musee d’Orsay in Paris, Dance at Le moulin de la Galette (1876)  by Pierre-Auguste Renoir.  Nicholas Pioch describes the painting’s description of the lively people of Paris: “Renoir delighted in `the people’s Paris’, of which the Moulin de la Galette near the top of Montmartre was a characteristic place of entertainment, and his picture of the Sunday afternoon dance in its acacia-shaded courtyard is one of his happiest compositions. In still-rural Montmartre, the Moulin, called `de la Galette’ from the pancake which was its speciality, had a local clientèle, especially of working girls and their young men together with a sprinkling of artists who, as Renoir did, enjoyed the spectacle and also found unprofessional models. The dapple of light is an Impressionist feature but Renoir after his bout of plein-air landscape at Argenteuil seems especially to have welcomed the opportunity to make human beings, and especially women, the main components of picture.”

 

Dance at Le moulin de la Galette (1876)

Dance at Le moulin de la Galette (1876)

 

 

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