"Herman Melville captured, without endorsing, the nationalist fervor in his novel 'White Jacket': 'We Americans are the peculiar, chosen people...'"

"'... the Israel of our time. God has predestinated, mankind expects, great things from our race; and great things we feel in our souls.' Walt Whitman joined the chorus: 'Have the elder races halted? / Do they droop and end their lesson, wearied over there beyond the seas? / We take up the task eternal.' There’s no confidence like adolescent confidence, for a person or a country."

Writes David Brooks, in "How Trump Will Fail" (NYT).

I can see why this image of a wild, raw, aspiring America appeals to Trump....

Do you see why a tame, cooked, demoralized America appeals to his antagonists? 

Not for delectations sweet/Not the cushion and the slipper, not the peaceful and the studious/Not the riches safe and palling, not for us the tame enjoyment....

"You’re not actually finished until you do read poetry on the weekends for fun."

Someone says in response to someone who said "I vividly remember discovering Dylan’s whole catalogue in college and consequently falling entirely out of touch with everything else music-related for a solid year, I also grew my curls out and you best believe I was wearing scarves and dressing like someone who liked to read poetry on weekends for fun."

All of that was in an r/bobdylan discussion of this new clip of Timothée Chalamet, getting (too far?) into his impersonation of Bob Dylan:

Welcome to the Church of Bob, Timmy. 🙏🏻🎶❤️
pic.twitter.com/g7N7S9DfBk

— Melanie Young 🔧 (@FreewheelinMY) December 18, 2024

What poetry does Bob read?

"The Long Path is a 358-mile hiking trail that begins at the 175th Street subway station in Manhattan and runs to Thacher State Park, just south of the Adirondack Mountains."

" Conceived around 1930 by Vincent Schaefer, a chemist and meteorologist, and named after a line from a Walt Whitman poem, the Long Path initially had no fixed route and was essentially a sequence of waypoints that led toward the Adirondack High Peaks.... It often felt like I was the only human on the trail. Occasionally I encountered others in the mornings or evenings, though all of them lived nearby and were being towed by their dogs. I began to realize that nobody I encountered was aware of the Long Path’s existence, including several people whose homes sat mere feet from the trail. Despite being well marked (its route is indicated with a rectangular aqua blaze), it appears to be hidden in plain sight. Apparently the ubiquitous patches of paint adorning tree trunks, stones and telephone poles are only perceptible to those who navigate by them...."

Writes Casey Kelbaugh, in "Walking From Manhattan to the Catskills on the ‘Long Path’/Intrigued by a trail marker he spotted upstate, a photographer set out to follow a meandering — and little-known — hiking route north from New York City" (NYT)(free access link).

The Walt Whitman poem is "Song of the Open Road," which begins:

Afoot and light-hearted I take to the open road,
Healthy, free, the world before me,
The long brown path before me leading wherever I choose.

"In sharing her preferred title and pronouns, Ms Wood celebrates herself and sings herself – not in a disruptive or coercive way, but in a way that subtly vindicates her identity, her dignity, and her humanity."

Wrote federal district judge Mark Walker, quoted in "Florida can’t ban teacher from asking students to use her preferred pronouns, judge rules/Katie Wood, a transgender algebra teacher, has long gone by ‘Ms Wood’ but the law required students to say 'Teacher Wood'" (Guardian).

The judge was using Walt Whitman's "Song of Myself," which famously begins:

I celebrate myself, and sing myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.

"I grew up in South Korea, where there are two words that can roughly translate as 'laziness': geeureum and gwichaneum."

"Geeureum’s connotations are more or less identical to the English—the word bears the same condescension. But gwichaneum lacks the negative valence. There’s even a kind of jest to it. To feel gwichan... is to not be bothered to do something, not like it, or find it to be too much effort. The key to understanding the term, however, is how it fits into Korean grammar: You can’t say 'Bob is a gwichan person'; you can only say something like 'Doing laundry is a gwichan endeavor for Bob.' The term describes tasks, not people. It places the defect within the act. Errands that are gwichan induce laziness in you.... Gwichan nails what’s wrong with the litany of errands that plague our everyday existence: Many of them don’t merit our devotion.... Gwichanism (a popular neologism in Korea) is not an apologia for anti-productivity or anti-work, and the gwichanist will still fulfill their vital life obligations. You see, gwichanists aren’t unproductive; they’re perhaps meta-productive, interrogating the merit of every undertaking.... [E]mbracing gwichanism allows me to assert the primacy of my preferences, however esoteric...."

Writes Sheon Han in "The Case for Selective Slackerism/How a Korean term helps me reconcile my moments of discipline and sloth" (The Atlantic).

In this view, as I understand it, it's not that you avoid all chores. It's that you differentiate among chores and you view the chores as the source of the laziness. It's interesting to think of the activity itself as producing the feeling and to relieve yourself of a moral burden in feeling lazy.

Is English lacking the words for this distinction between 2 types of laziness? I can see that I have a tag for "laziness" and a separate — and important! — tag for "idleness." There are also many English words in the general area: "apathy," "inertia," "lethargy," "sluggishness," "sloth," "lassitude," "loafing" (I loafe and invite my soul, I lean and loafe at my ease...)....

But perhaps none of these words expresses the difference between the general resistance to work and the resistance only to a particular type of work. And yet, let me suggest "irksome." We speak of the "irksome task." That does seem to blame the task itself and not our own laziness. It makes sense, in English, to say I am not a lazy person, but that is an irksome task.

Was Louisa May Alcott a trans man?

Peyton Thomas — host of "Jo’s Boys: A Little Women Podcast" — looks at the evidence in a NYT op-ed.

Alcott, we're told, "used the names Lou, Lu or Louy." And: 

You've heard of the smoking gun. Now comes the splattering ketchup.

From "Here's every word from the sixth Jan. 6 committee hearing on its investigation" (NPR):

He motioned for me to come in and then pointed towards the front of the room near the fireplace mantel and the TV, where I first noticed there was catsup dripping down the wall and there was a shattered porcelain plate on the floor. The valet had articulated that the President was extremely angry at the Attorney General's AP interview and had thrown his lunch against the wall, which was causing him to have to clean up. So I grabbed a towel and started wiping the catsup off of the wall to help the valet out. And he said something to the effect of, he's really ticked off about this. I would stay clear of him for right now. He's really, really ticked off about this right now..... There were — there were several times throughout my tenure with the Chief of Staff that I was aware of him either throwing dishes or flipping the tablecloth to let all the contents of the table go onto the floor and likely break or go everywhere.

Now that we know about the ketchup — "catsup" — what should we do? How off the norm is it to express anger in the White House by throwing an object? 

I think first of Hillary Clinton throwing a lamp at Bill. Did that happen? I'm seeing "That ‘Hillary Clinton threw a lamp/book/Bible’ story has been circulating for ages" (WaPo):

"This T-shirt has a straightforward message: 'i put ketchup on my ketchup.'"

"Now, that’s the statement of somebody who is seriously in love with ketchup. It kind of teases those Americans who put ketchup on everything, but I find it interesting that one of the companies that distribute these shirts is none other than Heinz. A little self-deprecatory humor going on here, but you can’t help feeling the American spirit in it, the optimistic, cheerful lack of introspection that says, 'Who cares about being sophisticated! I’m gonna do what I want!'"

From "An Accidental Collection/How I amassed more T-shirts than I can store" by Haruki Murakami (The New Yorker).

I appreciate Murakami's appreciation of Americans, and I just used the rhetorical device the T-shirt uses. It's something I talked about before, back in 2019, prompted by a quote from Walt Whitman: "I live here in a ruin of debris—a ruin of ruins." 

I blogged that because I'd recently seen the idea of a cult following with a cult following:

This could be the kind of joke I've seen many times over the years. I remember hearing it long ago when some character on TV (I think it was Gidget's unattractive female friend [Larue]) said she was so excited her "goosebumps have goosebumps." 

That made a big impression on me when I was a teenager — "My goosebumps have goosebumps." Even at the time, I think, I wondered Is this a good template for humor or is it too dumb? 

One answer is Who cares about being sophisticated! I’m gonna do what I want!

Elegant split-screen editing as Nike hopes to inspire togetherness.

Details at AdWeek: "Clever Video Editing Portrays a Message of Unity in Nike’s Latest Powerful Spot/Wieden+Kennedy produced the third ad in 'You Can't Stop Us' campaign."

Like the other two spots in the campaign, “You Can’t Stop Us,” which has the same name as the overall campaign, draws on the sense of community from being socially isolated during a global pandemic. However, unlike the other two spots, the third 1.5-minute video also touches on the feelings stirred by the resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement following the police killings of George Floyd in Minneapolis and Breonna Taylor in Louisville, Ky.

The voiceover narration is done by Megan Rapinoe, the soccer player.

Ah! I'm glad to see that I didn't just imagine that I'd created a tag "oneness."

ADDED: I had to publish this post and click on the tag to see where I got the idea the idea that "oneness" was going to be important. I don't know whether to laugh or cry when I see that the last time I used it was on November 15, 2008 for "The Office of the President-Elect speaks!/Listen up!"



Oh, my Lord, did I think Obama was going to bring us together? No, no, actually not. I had my cruel neutrality:

"The 20th-century German philosopher (and victim of the Nazis) Walter Benjamin warned how fascism engages an 'aestheticization of politics'..."

"... where spectacle and transcendence provide a type of ecstasy for its adherents. Watch clips of fevered crowds, from today or the past, chanting against 'enemies of the people'; they are malignant scenes, but ones that in no small part mimic religious revivals. Critics of democracy often claim that it offers no similar sense of transcendence. The 19th-century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche castigated democracy as a system of 'quarantine mechanisms' for human desires, and as 'such they are … very boring.' If the individual unit of democracy is the citizen, authoritarian societies thrill to the Übermensch, the superman promising that 'I alone can fix it.' Yet I would argue that all of the hallmarks of authoritarianism — the rallies and crowds, the marching and military parades, the shouting demagogue promising his followers that they are superior — are wind and hot air. What fascism offers isn’t elevation but cheap transcendence, a counterfeit of meaning rather than the real thing. [Walt] Whitman understood that democracy wasn’t 'very boring' but rather a political system that could deliver on the promises that authoritarianism only pretended it would. For the poet, democracy wasn’t just a way of passing laws or a manner of organizing a government; democracy was a method of transcendence in its own right."

From "Why We Will Need Walt Whitman in 2020/With our democracy in crisis, the poet and prophet of the American ideal should be our guide" by Ed Simon (in the NYT).

What's so bad about boring? Some things — important things — you want to be boring (for example: the operation of your internal organs). I'd prefer a boring government. I don't like people getting all emotional about politics. Rather than pumping up the pro-democracy propaganda and rhetoric, why don't we give respect to boredom. Let politics be boring so our own individual life engages our interest.

I have a tag "I'm for Boring." I started that tag here (in 2014). Reacting to a WaPo columnist who fretted about low turnout in elections, I said:

Boring!... I mean hooray for boredom in politics.

"It is a sure sign that summer has arrived in China when men start rolling up their shirts, ideally resting them on the natural ledge of their beer belly."

"The theory, based in traditional Chinese medicine, is that exposing one’s midriff helps air out the warm 'chi' energy around the internal organs. So in parks and on street corners, on motorbikes and at open restaurants, men think nothing of pulling up their shirts and letting it all hang out. But now authorities in cities around the country have declared that the broader practice of exposing body parts that should be covered — including chests, bellies and feet — is unseemly...  Many commenters on Weibo, China’s answer to Twitter, supported the various governments’ efforts. The most popular response was the one that recommended promoting this effort nationwide. Another supporter said: 'I can’t stand it. They make public places their own home. It’s as if they are taking the sky as their quilt and the earth their bed.'... 'It’s not a big deal. It’s just our habit. We have to do this when it’s hot,' said a man... sitting in a deck chair outside his building supplies store in a Beijing alley... his blue shirt entirely open. 'We are shirtless because we need to cool down,' he said, while his wife yelled from inside the store: 'It’s not civilized.'...  'It’s a personal style, said one [man]. 'If women reveal their belly it’s beautiful, but when we do it, it’s ugly?'

From "A mainstay of the Chinese summer, the ‘Beijing bikini,’ is under threat" (WaPo). Top-rated comment:

"It’s as if they are taking the sky as their quilt and the earth their bed." — Beautiful language, but the ancient wisdom is captured in this story: "What are you doing meditating in your hut with no pants on?" "The whole world is my hut. This small room is my pants. What I want to know is, what are you doing in my pants?"

I tried to track down that "ancient wisdom." I'm always dubious about references to "ancient Chinese wisdom." It's here, in one book at least... at most? I'm skeptical, but also, it's not an apt joke — that's all it is, a joke, not wisdom, even if it is ancient — because it's one thing to be naked in your home, another thing to inflict it on others in public. But as we say in American free speech analysis: Avert your eyes.

"Ten days after my surgery, I have to go back to work. I’ve been teaching through the months of chemotherapy, but..."

"... despite this, I’ve run out of medical leave. I am driven there by my friends, many of whom have already had to make great sacrifices to help me. Some write checks, some help me drain the surgical tubes stitched to my body, others send mixtapes or cannabis popcorn. My friends carry my books into the classroom, because I can’t use my arms. Delirious from pain, I give a three-hour lecture on Walt Whitman’s poem 'The Sleepers'—'wandering and confused, lost to myself, ill-assorted, contradictory'—with the drainage bags stitched to my tightly compressed chest. My students have no idea what has been done to me or how much I hurt. I have always wanted to write the most beautiful book against beauty. I’d call it 'Cyclophosphamide, doxorubicin, paclitaxel, docetaxel, carboplatin, steroids, anti-inflammatories, antipsychotic anti-nausea meds, anti-anxiety anti-nausea meds, antidepressants, sedatives, saline flushes, acid reducers, eye drops, ear drops, numbing creams, alcohol wipes, blood thinners, antihistamines, antibiotics, antifungals, antibacterials, sleep aids, D3, B12, B6, joints and oils and edibles, hydrocodone, oxycodone, fentanyl, morphine, eyebrow pencils, face creams.' Then the surgeon calls to tell me that, as far as she can tell, the drugs have worked, the cancer is gone. The surgery performed after six months of chemotherapy reveals a 'pathologic complete response,' the outcome I’ve hoped for, the one that gives me the greatest chance that, when I die, it won’t be of this. With that news, I am like a baby being born into the hands of a body made only of the grand debt of love and rage, and if I live another forty-one years to avenge what has happened it still won’t be enough."

From "What Cancer Takes Away/When I got sick, I warned my friends: Don’t try to make me stop thinking about death" by Anne Boyer, a fantastically well-written essay in The New Yorker. Her book "The Undying: Pain, vulnerability, mortality, medicine, art, time, dreams, data, exhaustion, cancer, and care" will be out in September.

I've only copied a small extract, chosen not because it's the most impressively written part of the essay, but because: 1. The subject is teaching — the way the students don't know what is happening inside their teacher and a truly heroic carrying on would go entirely unnoticed (3 hours!), and 2. I love Walt Whitman, and I like how Boyer (a poet) follows the invocation of Whitman with a Whitmanesque list of her own.

Would you like Walt Whitman to read "The Sleepers" to you?

"I live here in a ruin of debris—a ruin of ruins."

Said Walt Whitman, quoted in a NYRB article about "Walt Whitman Speaks: His Final Thoughts on Life, Writing, Spirituality, and the Promise of America." We have that quote and many others because a friend named Horace Traubel "transcrib[ed] in shorthand most of what Whitman said to him during the last years of his life... about five thousand pages...".

... Traubel also sifted through the heap of manuscripts, letters, books, envelopes, magazines, and slips of paper strewn all over Whitman’s second-floor bedroom. “I live here in a ruin of debris—a ruin of ruins,” Whitman sheepishly admitted. If he proposed to burn or tear up a letter, Traubel intervened, and whenever the young man asked for some document, Whitman handed it over without protest....

I'm blogging this because "a ruin of ruins" fits with something I've been thinking about: the rhetorical device seen a few days ago in the phrase "Shen’s cult ­following on social media had a cult following on social media." In the comments to my blog post, I said:

This could be the kind of joke I've seen many times over the years. I remember hearing it long ago when some character on TV (I think it was Gidget's unattractive female friend [Larue]) said she was so excited her "goosebumps have goosebumps."

I was trying to think of other examples of the form. One would be: "My dog's fleas have fleas."

Clearly, "a ruin of ruins" is another example.

Anyway... I'm interested in Walt Whitman too. I liked this from the article:

Traubel was a committed socialist, which Whitman decidedly was not. “How much have you looked into the subject of the economic origin of things we call vices, evils, sins?” Traubel gently needled his friend. Smiling, Whitman replied with good humor, “You know how I shy at problems, duties, consciences: you seem to like to trip me with your pertinent impertinences.”

And there's a big excerpt from the book, "Walt Whitman Speaks: His Final Thoughts on Life, Writing, Spirituality, and the Promise of America" (which you can buy at that link). I'll give  you an excerpt of the excerpt.

This is all on a topic very much in the news these days. Can it change your mind?

Amy Klobuchar hears America singing.

She's getting snow covered and quoting Walt Whitman as she announces her candidacy...



The event is over now, so I've taken down the link to the live feed. I didn't get to hear much of the speech, but the heavy snowfall was a fantastic touch. Loved it. And loved the quoting of Whitman. She recited the first line of the poem that I'll reprint in full:

I hear America singing, the varied carols I hear,
Those of mechanics, each one singing his as it should be blithe and strong,
The carpenter singing his as he measures his plank or beam,
The mason singing his as he makes ready for work, or leaves off work,
The boatman singing what belongs to him in his boat, the deckhand singing on the steamboat deck,
The shoemaker singing as he sits on his bench, the hatter singing as he stands,
The wood-cutter’s song, the ploughboy’s on his way in the morning, or at noon intermission or at sundown,
The delicious singing of the mother, or of the young wife at work, or of the girl sewing or washing,
Each singing what belongs to him or her and to none else,
The day what belongs to the day—at night the party of young fellows, robust, friendly,
Singing with open mouths their strong melodious songs.

Beautiful... but I hear the poem crying out for parody. When I got to "The carpenter singing his as he measures his plank or beam," I wanted to rephrase that to include Jeff Bezos. Is that wrong? I feel that the nighttime party of Whitman's young, robust, friendly fellows would make that poem into a bawdy song lampooning the billionaires and politicians.

ADDED: Here's the full video.



I'll watch it now and update with any useful thoughts that occur to me.

ADDED: She began with a lot of boring thank yous and an emphasis on the location on an island in the Mississippi River. Then there was a lot of talk about the Mississippi, which contained the names of many states, and lead to the observation that the river ties us together.

"As your President, I will look you in the eye, I will tell you what I think, I will focus on getting things done. That's what I've done my whole life. And no matter what, I'll lead from the heart." That seemed worth transcribing, but it doesn't mean much other than as a slight cue to think of her as pragmatic. She proceeds to a lot of policy positions, none of which stood out to me as especially striking. Health insurance. Big Pharma. Common-sense gun legislation. Respect our troops.

She says that if we see obstacles in our path, we should think of the obstacles as the path. That's not the practical way to walk over a real landscape.

She rejects "foreign policy by tweet." And — since we're alluding to Trump — "Stop the fear-mongering and stop the hate."

She botches the translation of "E pluribus unum" and says "Out of one..." before correcting herself to "Out of many, one." That motto seems politically incorrect, no? But she called it "our North Star."

She was reasonably okay. And I loved the snow! I wish she'd ad libbed some wisecracks about it. Imagine what Trump would say if he found himself in an ever-increasing snow storm? I know what Trump said about Amy in the snow:

Amy Klobuchar announced that she is running for President, talking proudly of fighting global warming while standing in a virtual blizzard of snow, ice and freezing temperatures. Bad timing. By the end of her speech she looked like a Snowman(woman)!

"The Nation Magazine Betrays a Poet — and Itself/I was the magazine’s poetry editor for 35 years. Never once did we apologize for publishing a poem."

Writes Grace Shulman (in the NYT).

We followed a path blazed by Henry James, who in 1865 wrote a damning review of Walt Whitman’s “Drum Taps,” calling the great poem “arrant prose.” Mistaken, yes, but it was James’s view at the time. And it was never retracted....

Last month, the magazine published a poem by Anders Carlson-Wee. The poet is white. His poem, “How-To,” draws on black vernacular.

Following a vicious backlash against the poem on social media, the poetry editors, Stephanie Burt and Carmen Giménez Smith, apologized for publishing it in the first place: “We made a serious mistake by choosing to publish the poem ‘How-To.’ We are sorry for the pain we have caused to the many communities affected by this poem,” they wrote in an apology longer than the actual poem. The poet apologized, too, saying, “I am sorry for the pain I caused.”...

As Katha Pollitt, a columnist for The Nation, put it, the magazine’s apology for Mr. Carlson-Wee’s work was “craven” and “looks like a letter from re-education camp.”...

It would not be proper for me to comment on the aesthetic merits of Mr. Carlson-Wee’s piece. That’s the job of the magazine’s current poetry editors. But going forward, I’d recommend they follow Henry James’s example. Just as he never apologized for his negative review of Whitman, they had zero reason to regret their decision.

You can read the poem and The Nation's apology here. Give The Nation some credit: It left the poem up. It just has this heavy-handed "Editor's note" introducing it. I'll reprint the whole thing:

"A hat is a celebration of oneself. It is about presenting one’s most adorned, spit-shined, upright self to God, social media or, in this case, the history books."

Writes Robin Givhan (at WaPo) about the hat Melania wore yesterday at the greeting ceremony for French President Macron. These days, hats are not "about fashion," but "more of an affectation, whether it be the religiosity of Sunday church service or the self-conscious flamboyance of the Kentucky Derby."

The hat was a "magnificent halo of pure white light perched atop first lady Melania Trump’s perfectly groomed head."

Nothing else mattered. There was nothing else.

That hat, broad-brimmed with a high, blocked crown, announced the first lady’s presence as boldly and theatrically as a brigade of trumpeters. It was the bright white hat of a gladiator worn on an overcast day, a kind of glamorous public shield when sunglasses would not do at all. That hat was a force field that kept folks, the wrong folks, from getting too close.

It was a diva crown. A grand gesture of independence. A church hat. The Lord is my shepherd. Deliver us from evil. Amen.

So, I'm seeing 3 things the hat does: 1. Showing off (yay, me, trumpets!!!), 2. Creating a religious aura (looks like a halo, like a lady in church), and 3. Keeping everyone away (force field!).

As to #3, the first thing I think of is the kissing. I saw Macron and Trump kissing. This was the greeting ceremony. Was none of that cheek kissing to be aimed at Melania?

But Givhan emphasizes independence from Trump: "A grand gesture of independence." And she combines #2 and #3 by continuing: "A church hat. The Lord is my shepherd. Deliver us from evil. Amen."

Remember, according to Givhan, the hat says everything: "Nothing else mattered. There was nothing else."

Silent, stoic, statuesque Melania cries out to the Lord. Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death — the White House, with my satanic president-husband — I will fear no evil: for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me.



ADDED: Of course, hats were huge in Trump's campaign. No one ever made as much headway through a hat as Trump. And when Hillary wore a hat, Rihanna wore a picture of it — Hillary + hat — on a T-shirt. And Hillary very famously wore a hat — a big blue hat (presaging a blue dress?) — at the first Bill Clinton inauguration.

ALSO: Is that first line quoted in the post title an intentional reference to Walt Whitman's "Song of Myself"?

I celebrate myself, and sing myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.

I loafe and invite my soul,
I lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer grass.

But Melania could not have felt at ease on the grass at that tree-planting ceremony (where Brigitte Macron grasped Trump's shovel shaft). She along with Madame Macron was wearing stilettos. In order not to sink completely into the sod and get stuck, they were both tasked to walk and stand entirely on their toes.

"A path is little more than a habit that comes with knowledge of a place. It is a sort of ritual of familiarity. As a form, it is a form of contact with a known landscape."

Wrote Wendell Berry, quoted by Etienne in last night's "Winter Road Café," after Bunk said "Hey, this photo..."



"... appears to be a bike path, not a road."

I love the Berry quote, and thanks to Etienne for bringing it to us. It perfectly explains why I, using that photograph and needing a title for the "café," could not bring myself to use the word "path," even though I knew for sure — what you were left guessing* — that it is the thing most people call a "bike path."**

___________________

* Danno observed that if it's not a bike path, it's got "a very wide stripe!"

** Actually, around here, the official term for a thing like that is "bike trail." So you may want to discuss the path/trail distinction or bring out evocative poetic quotes with "trail." There must be many, "trail" being an even more powerful word in the legend of America. The Chisholm Trail, the Appalachian Trail, etc. And yet "trail" refers to dragging something along behind you. The oldest meaning is the trail of a long robe. On the landscape, then, the "trail" is what those who've gone before have left behind. And "trail" has only meant "path" since the early 1800s. "Path" has referred to "A way or track formed by the continued treading of pedestrians or animals" for as long as we can find a language called English — the period the OED calls "early OE" (600-950). That's profound. And — here's where I change my mind and decide that "path" is more powerful than "trail" — the word "pathfinder" has special resonance (from the OED):

1840 J. F. Cooper (title) The pathfinder.
1860 W. Whitman Leaves of Grass (new ed.) 425 The path-finder, penetrating inland, weary and long....
1847 R. W. Emerson Poems 169 Sharpest-sighted god.., Path-finder, road-builder, Mediator, royal giver.
1898 W. James Coll. Ess. & Rev. (1920) 408 Philosophers are after all like poets. They are path-finders. What every one can feel, what every one can know in the bone and marrow of him, they sometimes can find words for and express.

4 great American names, clustered in the great English Dictionary.

There is no word "trailfinder," though there is — we must give "trail" its due — "trail-blazer." But "trail-blazer" only arrives on the scene in the 20th century, and its earilest recorded usage cannot compare to the quadrumvirate of James Fennimore Cooper, Walt Whitman, Ralph Waldo Emerson and William James:

1908 Daily Chron. 19 May 3/2 Mrs. Hubbard's journey..with a small party of ‘trail blazers’ native to the ways of Labrador....
1957 V. Packard Hidden Persuaders xxi. 233 Tide, the merchandisers' journal, admonished America's merchandisers to pay attention to this trail-blazing development as it might be ‘tomorrow's marketing target.’

The "trail-blazing development" was a planned suburban community in Miramar, Florida:

What does it mean to buy a "packaged" home in a "packaged" community? For many (but apparently not all) of the Miramar families it means they simply had to bring their suitcases, nothing more. No fuss with moving vans, or shopping for food, or waiting for your new neighbors to make friendly overtures. The homes are completely furnished, even down to linens, china, silver, and a refrigerator full of food. And you pay for it all, even the refrigerator full of food, on the installment plan.

"[I want] to treat this life, this massive datum which happens to be mine, as a specimen life, representative in its odd uniqueness of all the oddly unique lives in this world."

"A mode of impersonal egoism was my aim: an attempt to touch honestly upon the central veins, with a scientific dispassion and curiosity," wrote John Updike in "Self-Consciousness: Memoirs," which I put in my Kindle in December (for reasons described in this post).

The quote in the post title came up in an interview with Terry Gross that I was just reading:

The behaviors you have to be comfortable with as the host of Fresh Air are behaviors that would be considered antisocial in almost every other context. Do you have to be weird to be the kind of interviewer you are?
You don’t have to be weird. I think what you have to do is really believe, as I do, that the interview serves a function.

What’s the function?
I like to quote John Updike on this. In his memoir, Self-Consciousness, which I really love, he said he wanted to use his life as “a specimen life, representative in its odd uniqueness of all the oddly unique lives in this world.” That’s kind of how I see interviews. When you’re talking to an artist, you can get insight into the sensibility that created his or her art and into the life that shaped that sensibility. I love making those connections. I think we all feel very alone. I don’t mean that we don’t have friends or lovers but that deep at our core we all have loneliness.

I wonder, is this the same usage of "specimen" as in Walt Whitman's "Specimen Days." I've to admit that I'd always compartmentalized that title with the knowledge that Whitman served as a nurse in the Civil War and therefore thought of "specimen" as a urine sample! But that can't be right!

From "Specimen Days":

I suppose I publish... from that eternal tendency to perpetuate and preserve which is behind all Nature, authors included; second, to symbolize two or three specimen interiors, personal and other, out of the myriads of my time, the middle range of the Nineteenth century in the New World; a strange, unloosen'd, wondrous time....

You ask for items, details of my early life—of genealogy and parentage, particularly of the women of my ancestry, and of its far-back Netherlands stock on the maternal side—of the region where I was born and raised, and my mother and father before me, and theirs before them—with a word about Brooklyn and New York cities, the times I lived there as lad and young man. You say you want to get at these details mainly as the go-befores and embryons of "Leaves of Grass." Very good; you shall have at least some specimens of them all.....

Though not about urine samples, this is not the same usage of "specimen" as Updike's. Whitman was saying this book has some samples of what has been in his life, but Updike was saying I am writing based on the idea that my life is an example of all lives.

"The phrase well-rounded derives from phrenology..."

I'm reading that in "Rebel Souls: Walt Whitman and America's First Bohemians," by Justin Martin:

Whitman haunted the Phrenological Cabinet of Fowler & Wells.... On July 16, 1849, Whitman paid three dollars to have his skull read by Lorenzo Fowler. On a scale from 1 to 7, Whitman rated an exemplary 6.5 on such traits as benevolence, self-esteem, and firmness. He received one of his lowest marks for acquisitiveness, the pursuit of money and material gain. The low rating sat fine with Whitman, struck him almost as a veiled compliment. In his report, Lorenzo noted, “Size of head large . . . a certain reckless swing of animal will, too unmindful, probably, of the conviction of others.” He added, “You are yourself at all times.” Overall, Fowler painted a flattering picture of Whitman, casting him as a well-rounded modern man. (The phrase well-rounded derives from phrenology and is based on the notion that an actualized person has a nicely shaped head, without any distortive bumps.) The results greatly pleased Whitman.

Is that really true? I'm seeing in the OED that "well-rounded" to refer to visible objects like trees and horse's hooves is very old, but in reference to a person's character it does go back only to the mid-19th century when phrenology was was the rage. The oldest quote comes from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow — "There was something so complete and well-rounded in his life." Longfellow was loathed by Whitman, enough so that — according to the above-linked book — Whitman once insulted a man by calling him "a young Longfellow." Whitman's crowd understood:

The jibe was brief, pithy, and a direct hit: where Poe was this crowd’s patron saint, Longfellow was its bête noire. As a sentimental poet, Longfellow was anathema to many in the Pfaff’s set. They snidely referred to him as “Longwindedfellow.” 

By the way, here's how Whitman (in 1856) insulted the President of the United States: "The President eats dirt and excrement for his daily meals, likes it, and tries to force it on The States."

Here's an article in The Atlantic — "The Shape of Your Head and the Shape of Your Mind" — that reinforces the claim that the term "well-rounded" comes from phrenology:

The national obsession with head size and shape... infected daily conversation. Many modern phrases trace their roots to phrenology, including “highbrow” and “lowbrow,” “well rounded,” and “shrink” (as in “shrinking” certain undesirable qualities). “Getting your head examined” also has phrenological roots. Though generally considered an insult today, in the past, it was just what most people wanted.....

ADDED: Pfaff's:

"Pfaff’s was the Andy Warhol factory, the Studio 54, the Algonquin Round Table all rolled into one."

"If I can take just one book, to the proverbial desert island? Leaves of Grass, by Walt Whitman. I would spend the rest of my life memorizing it."

"Then I would walk around the island chanting Song of Myself forever. Not a bad way to live out your days on a desert island."

From "25 Famous Women on Their Favorite Books" (in NY Magazine). I've selected the quote from Elizabeth Gilbert.

Also interesting: The book Tina Fey picks is "Leni Riefenstahl: A Memoir."

I was going to say I actually don't know who Elizabeth Gilbert is. Imagining that perhaps she's one of these writers of the short stories that I always skip over when I read The New Yorker, I was going to say I actually don't know who Elizabeth Gilbert is in a kind of modest, self-effacing way. But then I looked her up and saw that she's the author of "Eat, Pray, Love," a book I'm proud that I wouldn't even consider reading. And now I'm proud that I didn't recognize her name, but I'm ashamed that I got sucked in by her quote. Song of Myself, indeed. Bleh. The very thing I liked, I now hate.