Refreshment

And now, a word from Charles Eliot Norton (1827-1908):

Whatever your occupation may be and however crowded your hours with affairs, do not fail to secure at least a few minutes every day for refreshment of your inner life with a bit of poetry.

Writing and index cards

Elaine Fine (my wife), who like me has been carrying around a Hipster PDA, showed me this passage yesterday:

I have index cards and pens all over the house--by the bed, in the bathroom, in the kitchen, by the phones, and I have them in the glove compartment of my car. I carry one with me in my back pocket when I take my dog for a walk. In fact, I carry it folded lengthwise, if you need to know, so that, God forbid, I won't look bulky. You may want to consider doing the same. I don't even know you, but I bet you have enough on your mind without having to worry about whether or not you look bulky. So whenever I am leaving the house without my purse--in which there are actual notepads, let alone index cards--I fold an index card lengthwise in half, stick it in my back pocket along with a pen, and head out, knowing that if I have an idea, or see something lovely or strange or for any reason worth remembering, I will be able to jot down a couple of words to remind me of it. Sometimes, if I overhear or think of an exact line of dialogue or a transition, I write it down verbatim. I stick the card back in my pocket. I might be walking along the salt marsh, or out at Phoenix Lake, or in the express line at Safeway, and suddenly I hear something wonderful that makes me want to smile or snap my fingers--as if it has just come back to me--and I take out my index card and scribble it down.

From Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life (Anchor, 1995).

I've been jotting things down on index cards in my own fashion and pulled things from them to write two poems tonight. (I added Richard Goode's recording of Beethoven piano sonatas for inspiration.) Here are some of the odds and ends that made it into my poems (many others didn't):

"avoidance"

luminous faces

waiting for the other sock to drop

a bunch of motels

a shell of a shell

cheap seats

Yes, I jotted down "avoidance" with quotation marks. When I heard the phrase "cheap seats" today, I knew that I wanted to have it as a title.

[Update: Elaine describes her musical uses for index cards.]

Poems

I have three poems in the most recent Malleable Jangle. You can read them by clicking here.

Martin Denny, r.i.p.

From the New York Times:

Martin Denny, the bandleader who mingled easygoing jazz with Polynesian instrumentation and jungle noises to exemplify the "exotica" sound that swept suburban America in the 1950's and 60's, died on Wednesday at his home in Hawaii Kai, near Honolulu. He was 93.

You can read the obituary by clicking here.

E-mail from Stefan Hagemann

My friend Stefan Hagemann writes:

I wanted to comment on your remarks concerning Nellie McKay (and I didn't know, by the way, that her quirkiness extends even to the pronunciation of her surname). I agree that comparing her to Doris Day and Eminem is silly (I think the comment came from a Village Voice writer?), and that made me think of comparisons that occur more naturally by, um, listening to her stuff. I've had fun trying to figure who she listens to, and while I have a number of suspicions, I can think of at least three interesting allusions to other musicians--the Rolling Stones on "Respectable" (which also has a nice little nod to "America" from West Side Story), the Bangles' "Walk Like an Egyptian" on "Toto Dies," and, I'm convinced, the Sex Pistols on "Sari." You may remember that "Sari" ends with the vocals trailing off, with McKay saying "shit" and then, well, there's no nice way to say it, a fart or belching sound. (I just listened again--definitely a fart sound). I contend that it's an allusion to one of the Pistols' angriest kiss-offs, "EMI." It's about being dropped by that label and ends on a similarly flatulent note.

That's astute listening. One of the first things that delighted me on McKay's album was the way her piano intro to "Manhattan Avenue"--a song about her childhood amid junkies and muggers--echoed the opening music from Mister Rogers' Neighborhood.

How to improve writing (no 8. in a series)

This item also from Stefan Hagemann:

Here, perhaps, is number 8, more egregious because it's from the Chicago Tribune. In a story published today (March 4th) about spring training baseball, writer Mark Gonzales focuses on a gutsy performance by White Sox pitcher Mark Buehrle. Evidently, Buehrle (pronounced "burly," in case you're interested) didn't have his best stuff but got by on a combination of craft and guile. This is the sub-headline:

"Starter makes due without his 'A' game."

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NYPL Digital Gallery

From the New York Times:

Say you start your exploration with one of the two images that open the library's Digital Gallery, a detail from a color woodcut from Kitagawa Utamaro's ukiyo-e prints (pictures of the floating world) depicting the lives of ordinary Japanese women and courtesans. There are 35 images from that series, and you can magnify each one enough to see how the women are doing with their lipstick and mirrors. . . .

Want to know what cigarette cards are? Look and you'll learn that in the late 19th and early 20th century, these small picture cards were tucked into cigarette packets as a promotional device, the cigarette equivalent of bubblegum cards. Exactly 21,206 of them are online now. What? That's right. Cigarette cards now represent nearly one-tenth of the whole digital collection.

Maybe, rather than entering the New York Public Library's digital gallery through the ukiyo-e, you go by way of the Web site's other opening image, a 1935 photo of a grouchy-looking man emerging from a basement barbershop on the Bowery. On that path you will find 343 photographs from Berenice Abbott's great work from the 1930's, "Changing New York." You can flip through the pictures and read all about Abbott, her project and how it got to the public library.

That's just the tip of the photographic berg.

The New York Public Library Digital Gallery is a new online resource. It's down right now for improvements, having been overwhelmed by the traffic. I saw it earlier this morning, long enough to feel overwhelmed too, with gratitude.

Meanwhile you can read about it in the Times by clicking here.

ACT, SAT

From the New York Times:

In the three years since the makers of the SAT announced plans to overhaul the test and add a mandatory essay, the frenzied universe of college admission testing has been changing.

The new four-hour SAT makes its debut March 12, but already, the hypercompetitive have begun taking two admission tests, breaking the kind of red-state, blue-state divide that has existed for decades, with the SAT dominant on the East and West coasts, and the Iowa-based ACT the choice throughout the Midwest.

You can read the entire article by clicking here.

[To read Times articles, use mediajunkie as both name and password.]

25 questions

Tell me about yourself. What do you know about our organization? Why do you want to work for us? What can you do for us that someone else can't?

From "The 25 most difficult questions you'll be asked on a job interview." You can find the other 21 and commentary on all 25 by clicking here.

How to improve writing (no. 7 in a series)

From a newspaper article on "active learning":

an example of active learning may be through song or other pneumonic devices

That should be mnemonic, "assisting or intended to assist memory." Mnemosyne, Greek goddess of memory and mother of the muses, would not be pleased by this mistake. I hope she doesn't see it.

The problem for the writer is that pneumonic is indeed a word, meaning "of, relating to, or affecting the lungs; of, relating to, or affected with pneumonia." Thus it doesn't get flagged by a spellchecker.

The moral of the story: when using an unfamiliar word, don't rely on its sound or a spellchecker. Use a dictionary. It's necessary to have not only the right spelling, but the right word.

[Definitions courtesy of Merriam Webster's Collegiate, 10th ed.]

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