In The New York Times, Brian Dillon recommends reading old magazines as “cheap time machines.” He assures the reader that no rabbit holes await. But as a browser of the Google Books archive of Life, I have to disagree.
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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
coupons, as the cost of
the thoughts blended in
ORANGE CRATE ART pro-
hibits the use of them.
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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
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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
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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
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Nancy, October 19, 1950.
comments: 7
I especially enjoy old lifestyle magazines as a slice of life for what would’ve come my way fifty years prior. The ads are my favorite part; they flesh out all the forgotten parts of daily living. I buy them old magazines and books using inflation to judge the pricing. If they beat the inflationary price, why not!
-AC
That article prompted me to do some idle Life browsing. I came back with two great (?) ads that I'll post soon.
I remember when feminism was closer to its peak, back in the mid-1980's, and someone brought an early-1960's Life magazine to our campus club and we howled at the chauvinism of the ads.
On a previous year I looked at, and blogged about, a 2006 edition of The Atlantic with a story on migrants, called" illegal migrants" back in those days. The perspective was saner than today, with an Arizona border guard saying, "This is as good as it gets" meaning there would always be illegals. He noted that American would sneak into British Columbia if the wages there were $75 per hour. Yup, inflation.
But think what the magazines of the 1980s would look like to our eyes. (Did feminism peak in the mid-1980s?)
I have to say that I’m hardly an outlier in finding the word “illegals” ugly. An excerpt from a New York Times piece about the word:
The more common phrase, “illegal immigrant,” also implies suspicion, but strip the noun from it and the entire identity of a person who crosses the border without permission, or outstays his or her visa, is reduced to that of a criminal: What rights could he or she be entitled to? “Illegals” becomes the noun, the insult and the dismissal. Designating immigrants as “illegals” also makes it easier not to see the frequent lawbreaking of employers who provide meager pay and unsafe working conditions. And “illegals” implies a permanent caste, as if there is no possibility of becoming anything else — even if millions of immigrants in the course of American history have shown otherwise.
I live in Canada, where The Atlantic is sold at the supermarket.
I have never in my life seen illegals as a noun in print... So I didn't know you guys ever used it... I guess it's like how our ancestors never used the F-word in print, so that you would assume, reading their fiction, that they never knew the word.
In Europe, judging from the BBC free news website, the common new term is migrants, without the word illegal. I'm sure the US media now do the same.
I remember our army company commander, just before we went down south to Fort Lewis, in Washington, having to warn us that even though we watch the same television the US is very different, and so certain messes on base were off limits to Canadians.
My knowledge of the US is print based, which can be silly of me. For example, all the scholastic YA books in the used bookstore have US children going to summer camp. And they take going to college for granted. But in Canada, except for community college, an average (reading YA books) I.Q. would only get you high school.
For my recreation major a weekend summer camp was compulsory in early September, before the snow, (we got to know each other fast!) because most of us had never been.
It’s often used as a contemptuous term in the States, in speech and in print.
“Migrants” feels strange to me too, suggesting nomads moving from place to place. “Undocumented immigrants” sounds euphemistic to me. Garner’s Modern English Usage has a lengthy entry about “Illegal immigrant” and related terms. It has “illegal immigrant’ outpacing ”undocumented immigrant,” “illegal alien,” and “undocumented alien,” 13:10:9:1.
Scrolling up, I see where I could have been clearer. Good catch. I suspect feminism peaked in the 1970's' because in the early 1980's, when my college teacher was fishing for "a word like racism," no one could answer. (OK, I could, but I was silent on purpose) The word he wanted was sexism. At the time I am pretty sure that consciousness raising circles had ended. I remember looking around my class and thinking that long hair was merely cosmetic, not political, and a peace sign belt buckle was merely for fashion.
By about the mid-80's short hair was back; gay men had started the shorter-hair fashion.
About a decade or two ago (I forget) I heard two teenage girls at a store counter not knowing what Ms meant, and when I told a university graduate friend about them she replied, "I think it means you're divorced."
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