Orange Crate Art

Thanksgiving night

2009-11-26T08:49:00.004-06:00

Dear Mom & Dad

Arrived safely — no fog or smog on the way back. Arrived at 11:00. Kim has taken the car over now. Knew you would worry so thought I’d just let you know were safe & sound.

Let us know how youre coming back. Here’s the Greyhound schedule if you need it. Be waiting for you.

Love,

Kim and Nina [?]

Found in a book in a secondhand store. The joking reference to smog makes me think this letter might date from the 1960s or ’70s (though the word smog was around long before then). Think of it: a world in which you assured someone that you had arrived safely by writing a letter.

I’m especially thankful today for the roof over my head (new shingles) and the other three people under that roof — Elaine, Rachel, and Ben. We’re together for a few days for the first time in several months. Happy Thanksgiving, family. Happy Thanksgiving, Mom, Dad, Kim, and Nina [?]. And Happy Thanksgiving to all.

WWHD

2009-11-25T11:23:00.000-06:00

A wristband I’d like to see: WWHD. What would Hamlet do?

Nabokov’s unfinished

2009-11-24T11:51:00.009-06:00

Vladimir Nabokov. The Original of Laura (Dying Is Fun). New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2009. $35.

One sample (transcribed exactly):

Black fans and violet ones, fans like orange sunbursts, painted fans with clubtailed Chinese butterflies oh they were a great hit, and one day Wild came and bought five (five spreading out her own fingers like pleats) for “two aunts and three nieces” who did not really exist, but nevermind, it was an unusual extravagance on his part[.] His shyness suprized and amused FLaura.

I awaited the publication of Nabokov’s final unfinished work with great excitement, but reading The Original of Laura fills me with immense and simple sadness — because Nabokov did not get time enough to finish this work, and because no one will ever know what these fragments would have come to.

There is much twinning in the story these fragments suggest: faithless young Flora (FLaura) is in some sense the original of Laura — as in My Laura, a novel by a man with whom she has had an affair, a writer who now “destroys his mistress in the act of portraying her.” But the original of Laura also has her own originals. Flora’s husband Philip Wild (much older, a neurologist, a lecturer at the University of Ganglia, a man “who had everything save an attractive exterior,” seen buying fans above) sees in Flora his young lost love Aurora Lee. Aurora had a twin brother with whom Philip had one brutal sexual encounter. Flora’s mother’s husband Hubert H. Hubert (his name “no doubt assumed”) sees in Flora his dead daughter Daisy. He also sees in Lanskaya, Flora’s ballerina mother, his dead actress wife. Lanskaya is reborn in My Laura as Maya Umanskaya. Note that in the above passage, Nabokov’s FL turns Flora/Laura into a telephone exchange name: given these shifting identities, I can’t imagine that the pun is unintended. Lolita, Poe’s Annabel Lee, and Petrarch’s Laura are of course originals of Flora as well. And Otto Preminger’s 1944 film Laura hovers somewhere in the background. In that story, the relationship between original and copy is oddly reversed, as a painting of Laura Hunt becomes the original of Laura, the image with which detective Mark McPherson first falls in love.

Most curious and poignant in these fragments is the figure of Philip Wild, a man who despises his body — stomach, legs, feet — and who is engaged in a practice of self-hypnosis or trance whose goal is the obliteration of that body, part by part. Thus the novel’s subtitle, Dying Is Fun: “the process of dying by auto-dissolution,” Wild writes, “afforded the greatest ecstasy known to man.” As Flora’s lover destroys his mistress, Wild destroys himself. And here’s more twinning: Wild visualizes his body as a pronoun, an I, the letter prominent in his name. Like his creator, he is working on a book. Like his creator, he writes with a pencil. But unlike his creator, he finishes before dying. What becomes of Wild’s manuscript, taken from his typist by “that other fellow,” who wants to give it “a place of publication more permanent” than a little magazine, is a mystery whose answer we’ll never have. (My suspicion: the other fellow is Nabokov, incorporating Wild’s manuscript in his own.)

The Original of Laura is beautifully designed by Chip Kidd (yes, that’s a real name), with reproductions on heavy stock of the 138 index cards that hold the text, itself transcribed, card by card, with what appears to be absolute accuracy. Penguin (the book’s UK publisher) has online reproductions of several cards.

A related post
Vladimir Nabokov’s index cards

Objectified

2009-11-24T11:33:00.002-06:00

Tonight the PBS series Independent Lens shows Objectified, Gary Hustwit’s 2009 film about objects and design. If Objectified is anything like Helvetica (2007), it’ll be terrific.

If you visit the Independent Lens site for the film, be sure to take the quiz, "Which Object Are You?" I’m a Vespa scooter. You?

Objectified (the film’s site)
Objectified (at Independent Lens)
Helvetica (the film’s site)

A related post
Helvetica

November 31

2009-11-24T11:32:00.002-06:00

I’ve updated an earlier post by adding an explanation from Jim Coudal of Coudal Partners: November gone rogue.

Domestic comedy

2009-11-23T17:19:00.003-06:00

“They’re finally fixing the clock.”

“It’s about time.”

[Silence.]

“You’re not going to say anything about that remark?”

“I’m trying not to acknowledge it.”

Related reading
All “domestic comedy” posts

Mozy double referral bonus

2009-11-22T10:57:00.005-06:00

The online backup service Mozy is offering new users of MozyHome Free (2 GB free backup) an extra 512 MB when registering with a referral code from a current user. The current user gets an extra 512 MB too. (The usual referral bonus is 256 MB.) This Mozy offer expires on January 10, 2010.

I like Mozy, a lot. If you’d like a referral code, reader, please e-mail me. The address is in the sidebar, below the photograph.

[If you’re reading this post in a reader, reader, come by and visit.]

Morris Reisman

2009-11-21T08:39:00.004-06:00

Morris Reisman, inventor of the Silk Away Corn-on-the-Cob Brush and other kitchen items, has died at the age of seventy-six. The Las Vegas Review-Journal has an obituary.

In August 2005, I wrote to Mr. Reisman about a confusion between its and it’s in the text on his corn-brush package. In March 2007, I received a surprising and wonderful reply.

[Thank you, Linda, for your e-mail.]

November gone rogue

2009-11-20T13:19:00.008-06:00

The Field Notes Brand 2009 Calendar doesn’t really add an extra shopping day before Christmas: December 1 falls on the same Tuesday as “November 31.”

This calendar is such a beautiful thing that I don’t mind the mistake. Or is it a joke? I can’t tell.

Field Notes 2010 calendars are coming on November 25.

[Update: I e-mailed Coudal Partners about November 31, and Jim Coudal replied. He suggests that we think of November 31 as a “bonus day”: “We’re aware of it and our policy is that people should just relax and do no work on that day!”]

A related post
Economies of time (Hi and Lois)

[My only connection to Field Notes Brand is that of a happy user.]

Shopping with Robert Frost

2009-11-20T06:27:00.003-06:00

A 15 oz. can of Café du Monde coffee and chicory at our favorite Asian market: $5.25. The same can at a fancy “mart” a mile away: $12.55.

In the words of the poet (well, not really), “Compare, compare!”

Would Robert Frost have liked this coffee? “Earth’s the right place for Café du Monde”: I can hear almost hear him saying it. No, never mind; he’s signed up with Folger’s.

Café du Monde is great for making Vietnamese coffee.

[No poems were harmed in the making of this post.]

How to improve writing (no. 25)

2009-11-19T07:07:00.007-06:00

From a book on design, a sentence about the look of a royal spouse’s “consort throne”:

It was gilded to look as if it were made of gold, the metal that is still the universal signifier of durability and status in almost every culture.

One way to improve this sentence: trust the reader to know what gilded means.

A second: clear up the inconsistency of “universal” and “almost every.”

A third: find a precise alternative to durability. That word might be associated with, say, long-wearing fabrics. But gold doesn’t resist wear; it doesn’t wear.

A fourth: rethink status. Yes, status does mean “high rank,” but I’d rather see the word with a modifier, for the same reason that I’m opposed to “quality” education.

A better sentence:

It was gilded, as gold still signifies high status and abiding value in almost every culture.

I’ve omitted the names of writer and book: neither should be judged by a single sentence. But many sentences in this book are in need of revision: cuts, breaks, rearrangement of parts, and plain old correction (of subject-verb disagreement, for instance). It makes sense that there is no note of thanks to an editor. W.W. Norton & Company, you’re slipping.

The moral of the story: Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested. And many more are to be borrowed from the library. Try before you buy.

[This post is no. 25 in a series, “How to improve writing,” dedicated to improving stray bits of public prose. With apologies to Francis Bacon.]

Related reading
All How to improve writing posts (via Delicious)

Sue Shellenbarger on time-management

2009-11-18T12:56:00.002-06:00

Sue Shellenbarger tried three time-management strategies: FranklinCovey’s Focus, GTD, and the Pomodoro Technique. Her conclusion: borrowing a bit from each might work best. Read all about it, or them:

No Time to Read This? Read This (Wall Street Journal)

I’d never heard of the Pomodoro Technique, but I’m already thinking it would be appropriate to get the nifty timer, Technique or no.

T - U - I - T - I - O - N

2009-11-18T08:50:00.000-06:00

The Strike Committee of the Graduate Employees’ Organization (GEO) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign has voted to suspend its strike. The strike won protection for tuition waivers for graduate employees (a basic element of graduate education). As they say on the Internet, GEO FTW!

I’m proud of those grad students (at least one of whom is a former student of mine) and of my undergrad son Ben, who picketed, drummed, and contributed a chant:

T - U - I - T - I - O - N, waive it and we’ll teach again.

A related post
Grad employees on strike at UIUC

Orange Caroline’s Crayons art

2009-11-17T10:48:00.002-06:00

From Caroline’s Crayons, a lovely story, in words and pictures: Orange.

Reinventing the wheel

2009-11-17T10:42:00.006-06:00

My friend Stefan Hagemann spotted a familiar metaphor put to new use in two articles in Monday’s New York Times. An article about teachers who buy and sell lesson plans online quotes Alice Coburn, a vocational education teacher, who explains her purchases like so: “I hate reinventing the wheel.” And an article about members of the House of Representatives whose House speeches on health care were written, in whole or in part, by corporate lobbyists quotes Stanley V. White, chief of staff for Representative Robert A. Brady (D, Pennsylvania-1): “There’s not much reason to reinvent the wheel on a Congressional Record entry.”

There can of course be great value in reinventing the wheel, in thinking through a matter and coming to conclusions for oneself. The saddest thing to me about Coburn’s statement: its unstated assumptions that such effort is of no value and that whatever a teacher might come up with would be mere repetition, no better than or different from what anyone else has done. As for White’s explanation, its implicit contempt for the Congressional Record is astonishing.

Says Stefan Hagemann, “I guess the next time a student hands me an essay lifted from SparkNotes, I can nod approvingly. No sense reinventing the wheel.”

Grad employees on strike at UIUC

2009-11-16T06:40:00.006-06:00

From the GEO press release:

The strike committee of the Graduate Employees’ Organization (GEO), American Federation of Teachers/Illinois Federation of Teachers Local 6300, AFL-CIO, The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), has authorized a strike against the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois to begin at 8am on Monday morning. After six hours of negotiation on Saturday afternoon, the GEO and administration bargaining teams managed to reach mutually agreeable terms on all aspects of the GEO contract except tuition waiver security. The administration’s refusal to guarantee the continuation of its current tuition waiver practice not only means that the majority of graduate employees could be forced to pay thousands of dollars in additional tuition charges, but also indicates its plans to implement such a change. By making graduate education untenable for all but the most affluent students, the administration is abandoning its responsibility to ensure access to the highest level of public education for all. This is contrary to the University of Illinois’ mission as a public land grant institution. By calling a strike, the Graduate Employees’ Organization is holding the University of Illinois administration accountable to its stated commitment to excellent and accessible higher education.

The arrogance and contempt in the University’s refusal to guarantee tuition waivers might not be immediately evident to a reader outside academia. Briefly: a graduate assistantship typically provides a tuition waiver and a modest (or very modest) salary. To refuse to guarantee tuition waivers is to threaten that graduate employees may have to underwrite their studies with their salaries (and with their savings, and with loans, loans, loans). That refusal thus threatens to remove the very possibility of graduate study, as the GEO says, “for all but the most affluent students.”

The University’s latest effort in brinksmanship and intimidation follows months of stalling in negotiating a contract. (The stall is a favored administrative strategy at other schools too.) The GEO is fighting the good fight in its effort to make the University of Illinois treat its graduate employees with dignity and pay them a living wage. I hope the GEO wins.

[Update, November 17, 2009: GEO FTW!]

Further reading
UIUC GEO

Steven Pinker reviews Malcolm Gladwell

2009-11-15T09:41:00.000-06:00

From a New York Times review:

The common thread in Gladwell’s writing is a kind of populism, which seeks to undermine the ideals of talent, intelligence and analytical prowess in favor of luck, opportunity, experience and intuition. For an apolitical writer like Gladwell, this has the advantage of appealing both to the Horatio Alger right and to the egalitarian left. Unfortunately he wildly overstates his empirical case. . . .

The reasoning in Outliers, which consists of cherry-picked anecdotes, post-hoc sophistry and false dichotomies, had me gnawing on my Kindle.

Another reason books are better than e-readers: easier to gnaw.

A kitchen girl and a restless corpse

2009-11-14T12:55:00.008-06:00

Our son Ben Leddy and his friend Claire Johnson play a medley of the traditional “Kitchen Girl” and their own “Restless Corpse.”

Enjoy.

The Coen brothers and typos

2009-11-13T06:23:00.003-06:00

Peter Stormare played Gaear Grimsrud in the Joel and Ethan Coen’s Fargo (1996). Here he comments on his second line in the film, “Where’s Pancakes House?”:

I said, “It’s gotta be Pancake House.” And then when we were doing the scene, I was saying "Where’s the Pancake House?" And Ethan: “Peter?” “Yeah?” “What were you saying there?” "Where’s the Pancake House?" “No, it says Pancakes House.” “Oh, I thought it was a typo.” “No, no, there’s no typos in our scripts.”

From Minnesota Nice (dir. Jeffrey Schwarz, 2003), a short documentary on the making of Fargo

Verizon’s $1.99 typos

2009-11-12T21:47:00.001-06:00

Press the wrong key on your phone? That’ll be $1.99. David Pogue explains:

Verizon: How Much Do You Charge Now? (New York Times)

I’m really disliking Verizon right now.

[A simple way to fight back, as I discovered in the comments on Pogue’s column: go into your phone’s settings and change the behavior of the cursor keys, or whatever keys ring up at $1.99.]

Van Dyke Parks in Germany

2009-11-12T14:40:00.002-06:00

Van Dyke Parks is playing Germany. Google Translate steps in to explain, sort of:

The U.S., as well as idiosyncratic legendary arranger, producer, songwriter, keyboardist and vocalist takes on his first ever Tour of Germany on 15 November in der Passionskirche in Berlin und zwei Tage darauf im Mousonturm in Frankfurt/Main auf. November in the Passion Church in Berlin and two days later in Mousonturm in Frankfurt on.

Seliger presents Van Dyke Parks ago (MusikWoche, via Google Translate)

“U.S., as well as idiosyncratic” is an excellent characterization of Van Dyke Parks. As is “ago.”

Sonny Rollins and golf

2009-11-12T07:44:00.004-06:00

Tenor saxophonist Sonny Rollins, in an interview with The Guardian:

I do yoga, I eat right, and my enthusiasm and energy are still there. When I don’t have that, I’ll know it’s time to take up golf.

Rollins is seventy-nine.

Related posts
Sonny Rollins in Illinois
Sonny Rollins on paying the rent

Umberto Eco on lists

2009-11-11T09:44:00.002-06:00

Umberto Eco, in an interview with Der Spiegel:

Q: Why do we waste so much time trying to complete things that can’t be realistically completed?

A: We have a limit, a very discouraging, humiliating limit: death. That’s why we like all the things that we assume have no limits and, therefore, no end. It’s a way of escaping thoughts about death. We like lists because we don't want to die.

Two list-related posts
To-Do List
Whose list?

November 11, 1919

2009-11-11T06:57:00.002-06:00

At the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month, two minutes of silence:

[“All London Silent at Armistice Hour.” New York Times, November 12, 1919.]

Jim Kaler on Earth

2009-11-10T22:23:00.003-06:00

“This lovely thing”: Jim Kaler, Professor Emeritus of Astronomy at the University of Illinois, commenting on Earth as seen in the photograph Earthrise, drawing a contrast between the barren moon and our beautiful blue home. This comment came in the course of a talk on “Other Stars, Other Planets.”

The final speculative thought from Professor Kaler’s talk: since new planets, as we now know, are forming all the time, it may be that we are early witnesses to the life of the universe.

Further reading
Jim Kaler’s website