Diane Schirf has two more posts about “relics”: mail chutes and phone booths. Previously: letters and mailboxes.
Thursday, December 1, 2011
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Michael Leddy“Orange Crate Art” is a song by Van Dyke Parks and the title of a 1995 album by Van Dyke Parks and Brian Wilson. “Orange Crate Art” is for me one of the great American songs: “Orange crate art was a place to start.”
Don’t look for premiums or
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Nancy, October 19, 1950.
“Who are we as a country?”
Michael Leddy
Don’t look for premiums or
coupons, as the cost of
the thoughts blended in
ORANGE CRATE ART pro-
hibits the use of them.
Comments are welcome, appended to posts or by e-mail. I moderate comments to keep out spam, so please be patient.
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Words to live by
Life is to be lived, not controlled; and humanity is won by continuing to play in the face of certain defeat.
Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man
*
Νέος ἐφ’ ἡμέρῃ ἥλιος. [The sun is new every day.]
Heraclitus
*
Every day is a new deal.
Harvey Pekar, “Alice Quinn”
*
Nos plus grandes craintes, comme nos plus grandes espérances, ne sont pas au-dessus de nos forces, et nous pouvons finir par dominer les unes et réaliser les autres. [Our worst fears, like our greatest hopes, are not outside our powers, and we can come in the end to triumph over the former and to achieve the latter.]
Marcel Proust, Finding Time Again
*
Surely, in the light of history, it is more intelligent to hope rather than to fear, to try rather than not to try.
Eleanor Roosevelt, You Learn by Living
*
I don’t really deeply feel that anyone needs an airtight reason for quoting from the works of writers he loves, but it’s always nice, I’ll grant you, if he has one.
J.D. Salinger, Seymour: An Introduction
*
I’m not afraid to get it right
I turn around and I give it
one more try
Sufjan Stevens, “Jacksonville”
*
L’attention est la forme la plus rare et la plus pure de la générosité. [Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.]
Simone Weil, in a letter
Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man
*
Νέος ἐφ’ ἡμέρῃ ἥλιος. [The sun is new every day.]
Heraclitus
*
Every day is a new deal.
Harvey Pekar, “Alice Quinn”
*
Nos plus grandes craintes, comme nos plus grandes espérances, ne sont pas au-dessus de nos forces, et nous pouvons finir par dominer les unes et réaliser les autres. [Our worst fears, like our greatest hopes, are not outside our powers, and we can come in the end to triumph over the former and to achieve the latter.]
Marcel Proust, Finding Time Again
*
Surely, in the light of history, it is more intelligent to hope rather than to fear, to try rather than not to try.
Eleanor Roosevelt, You Learn by Living
*
I don’t really deeply feel that anyone needs an airtight reason for quoting from the works of writers he loves, but it’s always nice, I’ll grant you, if he has one.
J.D. Salinger, Seymour: An Introduction
*
I’m not afraid to get it right
I turn around and I give it
one more try
Sufjan Stevens, “Jacksonville”
*
L’attention est la forme la plus rare et la plus pure de la générosité. [Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.]
Simone Weil, in a letter
#1 hit
In memory of
Blog Archive
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2011
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December
(65)
- New Year’s Eve 1911
- Hi and Lois watch
- Philip Gove on student writing
- Television antennas and other relics
- Overheard
- Meat-flavored potato chips
- Improved to-do lists
- Dead give-away
- Recreational and recreative reading
- Awesome People Reading
- Marshall McLuhan’s reading strategy
- Duke Ellington and a Blackwing
- Marco Arment on blogging
- Literature and word-processing
- “Don’t be a brute”
- Ebert documentary picks
- “Auggie Wren’s Christmas Story”
- Eggnog economics
- Steve Jobs on PowerPoint
- Juneberry78s
- Lost mitten
- “change modify revise alter rewrite amend chop to ...
- Featured merchandise
- Eameses on PBS tonight
- Cello exceptions?
- Proust in Miami
- Make Way for Tomorrow
- On interests and teaching
- Domestic comedy
- namebench
- They don’t write ’em like this anymore
- Brian Wilsons
- Stubbs’s Corollary
- Strunk and White rap
- Raymond Carver and Ovid
- Longuyland
- Mac Quick Look
- The Descendants
- The Glasses, illustrated
- Charles Mingus’s eggnog recipe
- Foot Clinic sign
- Christopher Logue (1926–2011)
- Lynda Barry on Carrie
- As exams approach
- The Audio-Visual Society
- Eameses in the air
- Lorem ipsum
- Blagojevich sentencing poll
- Review: The Wage Slave’s Glossary
- On the dash
- Another random number
- Uncle Mark Gift Guide & Almanac
- Salinger due-date slip at auction
- Telephone exchange names on screen: Naked City
- Panhandling and handshakes
- The Los Angeles Times on Mitt Romney and job creation
- Random number
- FeedBurner, broken again
- Santa Monica clock
- Henry buys liverwurst
- John Ashbery in Time
- Chrome v. Firefox
- “Plotnik's mantra of follow-up”
- Mail chutes and phone booths
- “Plotnik’s mantra of follow-up”
-
▼
December
(65)
favorite posts
- Against “deep reading”
- Alkalize with Alka-Seltzer
- At the World Trade Center and St. Paul’s Chapel
- Being wrong about beauty
- Bobbing for apples
- “Bon Appétit!”
- “The Case of the Purloined Prairie”
- ChatGPT’s twenty-line poems
- “The ’Clipse”
- Couric and Palin and Orwell
- Digital naïfs
- Donald Trump’s spelling
- Ebinger’s
- Ellington for beginners
- “Extra credit?”
- Five desks
- Five pens
- Fluke life
- The gold standard, haircuts, and everyone else
- Happy birthday, Mr. Piletti
- Hoagies, pizza, and English studies
- Homeric blindness in “colledge”
- How to Write a Sentence
- Imaginary liner notes
- Invisible man: Louis Armstrong and the New York Times
- Invitation to a dance
- Is there a pencil in The House?
- John Lee Hooker and Canned Heat
- A Kerouac notebook page
- The kitchen shink [sic]
- Klenosky!
- “Make My Jotter Quit!”
- Lady Elaine’s can
- Mysteries of the tollbooth
- National’s et cetera
- Nick DeMaio and the Eldorado
- Obama revisions
- Obama thoughts
- On “On the New Literacy”
- On “Politics and the English Language”
- “On the Road”
- The Oteris and Marty
- The other little book
- Out of the past
- Peppa Pig and the Brontës
- Phones Are For People
- Politics and theory
- “The Poet”
- Proust: involuntary memory, foolish things
- P.S. 131
- Pullum on Strunk and White
- Re: the Beloit Mindset List
- Some have gone and some remain
- “The Spokesmen”
- Sports Illustrated and Proust
- The Springfield Daily Gazette
- That (in)famous line
- Things I learned on my summer vacation
- Van Dyke Parks in Chicago
- W(h)ither grammar
- What I hear in “Walk Away Renee”
Nancy, October 19, 1950.
comments: 8
Thanks for the link to this blog. Schirf has written several interesting, haunting entries. Mail chutes were so fascinating to me as a kid: I use to beg my dad to let me drop his mail down the chute in the building where he had his office. I'm sure I dropped other things, like a paper football, or a toy soldier, just to see what would happen. (I probably clogged the system! I wonder how those clogs were repaired? Could the glass covers of the chutes be removed at various floors?) And the old phone booths that had little stools in them were so cozy, but at the same time potentially claustrophobia-inducing: I used to keep the tip of my shoe between the folding door and the booth's frame, just in case...
Last spring we vacationed in Seattle, and stayed at a Marriott hotel in Pioneer Square, in the renovated Alaska Building, an old office building whose first floor was once a bank. The lobby is beautifully restored, including the brass mail chute. I loved explaining to my 11-year-old daughter exactly what it was - letters are already enough of an anachronism to someone her age, let alone mail chutes!
I remember using a mail chute back in grad school and wondering whether what I mailed would make it to the bottom of the chute (five stories below), much less to the addressee.
Three relics that I run into in Chicago apartments and apartment buildings: coal chutes, high on the wall fixtures for old gaslights, and low on the baseboard outlets for central vacuuming. I remember as a small boy jumping a mile high when standing in a basement and the coal came crashing down. Even I have trouble trusting my memory about central vacuuming, seems impractical. As these things fade from our experience, I imagine most people see these things and don't even wonder what they are.
A lot of people look but never see. I'm probably one of them. My apartment has quarter doors sealed on the outside that I've always wondered about.
Thanks for the mention. I"m sorry I've never gotten around to reciprocating. :(
My 1927 house (now heated by a gas-heated boiler) still has its coal chute door, a relic I just love. The only way I'll ever get rid of it is if it rusts and falls off. And I once had an apartment in Chicago that had a door off the back landing that was once used for delivery of ice blocks - loved that too.
Coincidentally, Chris Burdick just posted this on facebook:
I thought I was the last non-cell phone person, but a woman just used the pay phone near where I'm sitting. The woman dialed a number, the phone gave off a loud fax machine shriek, and the woman backed away in terror.
Thanks for sharing all these details of the gone world here, everyone. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a coal chute or an outlet for central vacuuming. I do remember though the shaft for the dumbwaiter in my grandparents’ apartment building, which my grandmother sometimes used for conversations with her neighbor. I also remember a large hump in my grandparents’ kitchen wall, close to the floor, a door of some sort that had been painted over, always a mystery to me.
Diane, don’t worry about linking — there’s no need to link back.
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