Speak, Memory

Some memorizers arbitrarily associate each playing card with a familiar person or object, so that the king of clubs is represented by, say, Tony Danza. The grand masters associate each card with a person, an action, or an object so that every group of three cards can be converted into a sentence. The first card of the triplet is encoded as a person, the second as a verb, and the third as an object. For example, when Cooke sees a three of clubs, a nine of hearts, and a nine of spades, he immediately conjures up an image of Brazilian lingerie model Adriana Lima in a Biggles biplane shooting at his old public-school headmaster in a suit of armor. The more vivid the image, the more likely it is not to be forgotten.

From an article on the U.S. Memory Championship. You can read the entire article by clicking here. (Via Arts & Letters Daily.)

Near South

The Chicago-based magazine Near South just published its fifth issue (Winter 2005), a mixture of poetry and prose, including eight poets and one dramatist responding to "Blue in Green," one of the five pieces on Miles Davis' Kind of Blue. My contribution, a poem called "Early Music," is dedicated to my dad, who had me listening to Kind of Blue when I was a three-year-old kid in 1959.

In this issue I especially like Evie Shockley's blue and green lines:

                 blue spring grew green a cash crop ::
ballads fuel a blown fuse future--

There's no website for Near South, but a copy of the magazine ($5) can be had from

Near South
c/o Garin Cycholl
3617 W. Belle Plaine
Chicago, IL 60618

"Some Enchanted Evening"

Teaching Marianne Moore's "The Mind Is an Enchanting Thing" and Wallace Stevens' "The Idea of Order at Key West" ("Arranging, deepening, enchanting night") made me remember this more modest prose-poem (of mine):

Some Enchanted Evening

                                 for Ron Padgett

light

silence

unfolds

I am making a list of words never to use in a poem. Now I am taking a mental picture of it to send to my folks. The next thing to do is develop. The outcome is clear, with a good background (the family tree). And now for the envelope. Its mental flap unfolds with surprising volume. "Silence!" says the librarian. "More light," whispers Goethe.

"21 for 21"

From today's New York Times:

The homemade video captures the first hour after the stroke of midnight when the birthday boy turned 21 and could legally drink.

His friends thrust shots at him in a booth at the Bison Turf bar and taunt him to drink, shouting obscenities and chanting his name as he tosses back one after the other with beer chasers. After 30 minutes and the 13th shot--a Prairie Fire, or tequila with Tabasco--he vomits into a metal bucket, provided by the bar, the birthday souvenir taken home by so many 21-year-olds before him. Then he resumes his drinking.

"It's the best time of his life," a friend slurs to the camera. "We've all done it. It's a tradition."

The tradition is "power hour," or "21 for 21," as it is known in some other places across the country: 21-year-olds go to a bar at midnight on their birthdays, flash newly legal identification and then try to down 21 shots in the hour or so before the bar closes, or as fast as possible.

It can be a deadly rite of passage.

You can read the rest of this article by clicking here.

[To read New York Times articles, use mediajunkie as your name and password. Or visit bugmenot for a working name and password.]

John Steinbeck on the Blackwing pencil

"I have found a new kind of pencil--the best I have ever had. Of course it costs three times as much but it is black and soft and doesn't break off. I think I will always use these. They are called Blackwings and they really glide over the paper."

John Steinbeck, "The Art of Fiction," Paris Review (1969)

Other Blackwing posts
Blackwing 2: The Return
The new Blackwing pencil
Nelson Riddle on the Blackwing pencil
Stephen Sondheim on pencils, paper

New links

Under "fiction," I've added a link for John Steinbeck, to a Paris Review compilation of his thoughts on writing (a free download).

Under "poetry," the Marianne Moore link now goes to her Paris Review interview (another free download).

Under "writing and tools," I've added links to the Cool Tools site and to a page that explains what became of the Blackwing pencil, Steinbeck's favorite pencil.

More on Teresa Wright

From a piece in the Guardian:

The New York-born Wright's arrival in Hollywood caused a stir, not because of her star power but because of an unprecedented clause Samuel Goldwyn agreed to write into her contract.

It said that she "shall not be required to pose for photographs in a bathing suit unless she is in water. Neither may she be photographed running on the beach with her hair flying in the wind. Nor may she pose in any of the following situations: in shorts; playing with a cocker spaniel; digging in a garden; whipping up a meal; attired in firecrackers and holding skyrockets for the fourth of July; looking insinuatingly at the turkey for Thanksgiving; wearing a bunny cap with long ears for Easter; twinkling on prop snow in a skiing outfit while a fan blows her scarf."

You can read the whole piece, by Ronald Bergan, by clicking here.

Huck's Raft

From Joyce Carol Oates' review of Huck's Raft: A History of American Childhood, by Steven Mintz:

Huck's Raft is an inspired title for a book that deconstructs images, prejudices, "wisdom." On the jacket is what appears to be an illustration of Huckleberry Finn alone and blissfully carefree on his raft on the fabled Mississippi, some time in the mid-nineteenth century; in fact, the photograph is of Charles Lindbergh as a boy rafting on the Mississippi c1912. It is Professor Mintz's argument that American fantasies about childhood are most succinctly (and erroneously) bound up with such idyllic images: the romance of a neverland in which children and young adolescents enjoyed unlimited freedom and were not exploited and abused by their elders. It may have been that Mark Twain shared something of Jean-Jacques Rousseau's idealization of childhood, as he valued nature over the hypocrisy of society, yet the painful evidence of Huckleberry Finn is that its boy-hero is "an abused child, whose father, the town drunk, beat him for going to school and learning to read." In Hannibal, Missouri, in Huck's time, before the Civil War destroyed Southern slavery, life for many Americans was likely to be nasty, brutish and short: even among the middle class, approximately one child in four died in infancy, and one individual in two before his or her twenty-first birthday. The notion of a lengthy childhood, "devoted to education and free from adult responsibilities, is a very recent invention, and one that became a reality for a majority of children only after World War II."

You can read the entire review by clicking here.

Teresa Wright

Sad news this morning:

Teresa Wright, the high-minded ingénue who marshaled intelligence and spunk to avoid being typecast as another 1940's "sweater girl" and became the only actor to be nominated for Academy Awards for her first three films, died on Sunday at Yale-New Haven Hospital. She was 86.

The cause was a heart attack, her daughter, Mary-Kelly Busch, said.

Miss Wright had many parts on Broadway and once performed at a White House dinner for President Franklin D. Roosevelt, but her meteoric landing in Hollywood in 1941 is the stuff of legend.

After seeing her on Broadway, Samuel Goldwyn, the legendary producer, asked her to play the role of Bette Davis's daughter in "The Little Foxes" in 1941. Her performance in the film moved its director, William Wyler, to tell The New York Times that she was the most promising young actress he had ever directed.

She proved his point by being nominated for an Academy Award for best supporting actress for the picture. The next year, she was nominated for best actress for her next role, opposite Gary Cooper as Lou Gehrig's wife in "The Pride of the Yankees," and won the Oscar for best supporting actress as the love interest of Greer Garson's war-bound son in "Mrs. Miniver."

Her work included a starring role in Wyler's "Best Years of Our Lives," winner of the best-picture Oscar in 1946; playing opposite Marlon Brando in his first movie, "The Men," in 1950; and creating the character of Charlie, the innocent but suspicious niece of a serial killer, in Alfred Hitchcock's harrowing "Shadow of a Doubt" in 1943.

You can read the complete New York Times obituary by clicking here. (Use mediajunkie as your name and password.)

Gregory Corso and words

Here's the poet Gregory Corso (1930-2001) on his love of words:

See, I know words--beautiful words from the past that people don't know, and it really saves the words. For instance, "scry" we got before, we understand what "scry" is. A pentacle maker--you know who he is? Karcist. K-A-R-C-I-S-T. O.K., that's one for you. Now, the wind that goes through the trees. You know what that is? It's an onomatopoeic shot. You know what it really is? B-R-O-O-L.

RK: In Old English?

GC: Yeah. Thomas Carlyle, really.

From a 1974 interview with Robert King, in The Beat Vision, ed. Arthur Knight and Kit Knight (Paragon House, 1987).

Karcist isn't in the online OED, but Google turns up several sites that confirm Corso's definition. Brool is in the OED, defined as "A low deep humming sound; a murmur." Among the several sample sentences is one from Thomas Carlyle: "List to the brool of that royal forest-voice."