Van Dyke Parks speaks

From an interview with Van Dyke Parks in Bandoppler Magazine:

Q. Many younger artists discover your work, absorb it, and allow it to influence their own. Are there any new bands that you enjoy?

A. I don't listen to much fabricated by the American middle-class. I avoid well-heeled and boogie perspective. I'm more into world-beat, with its time-tested rhythms and higher social calling.

Q. What are some words of advice that you would give to young artists today who may be facing Mike Loves of their own who do not understand them and their creations?

A. Dance as if no one's looking. Wrestle things out to bring moment to your own sense of discovery, and make the world a better place. This is no time for whiners. That includes Mike Love.

Well said, Van Dyke.

The second exchange alludes to Mike Love's 1966 resistance to the words and music of SMiLE, and perhaps also to Love's 2005 lawsuit concerning the promotion of the 2004 SMiLE album. For context:

» Bad vibrations, four decades on, as Beach Boys resume squabble
(Guardian Unlimited)

And for the Bandoppler Magazine interview:

» Cycles of the Gentleman Comet: Van Dyke Parks

And for all things Van Dyke Parks:

» vandykeparks.com, Jan Jansen's fan-site

Overheard

"I'll stay in my own private garret, eating my granola and avoiding it all."

Beards (signs of the Times)

The New York Times reports today that beards are back, part of a reaction against "men who look scrubbed, shaved, plucked and waxed." "Men both straight and gay," the article says, "want to feel rough and manly."

Rough and manly, that's me (see photo right).

Priceless quotation:

"It's a nice masculine aesthetic," said Robert Tagliapietra, who with his similarly bearded partner, Jeffrey Costello, designs a collection of pretty silk jersey dresses under the Costello Tagliapietra label. "We both like that aesthetic of New England cabins with antlers on the wall, plaid shirts and a beard."

» Paul Bunyan, Modern-Day Sex Symbol (from the New York Times)

Brava, Professor Entman

From the Associated Press:

A group of University of Memphis law students are passing a petition against a professor who banned laptop computers from her classroom because she considers them a distraction in lectures.

On March 6, Professor June Entman warned her first-year law students by e-mail to bring pens and paper to take notes in class.

"My main concern was they were focusing on trying to transcribe every word that was I saying, rather than thinking and analyzing," Entman said Monday. "The computers interfere with making eye contact. You've got this picket fence between you and the students."

» Law professor bans laptops in class, over student protest

» Wireless or wireless-less (a related blog post)

Homer rules

The Online Computer Library Center, "a worldwide library cooperative," has published a list of the top 1000 titles owned by member libraries. The Iliad and Odyssey both make the top ten, placing sixth and fifth. Homer, you rule.

» OCLC Top 1000

Power-sit

Like father, like daughter. My daughter created a word today:

power-sit \ PAU-er-sit \ verb
:to sit in a pair on one side of a table in a restaurant, leaving the other side empty and the table oddly asymmetrical

power-sitting \ PAU-er-si-ting \ noun
:the act of one who power-sits

Sample sentence: We power-sat and totally intimidated the server.

Will power-sitting routinely intimidate servers? More data is needed.

Related posts
Oveness
Skeptiphobia

Skeptiphobia

"Aren't you going to put skeptiphobia on your blog?"

Thanks for reminding me, Elaine.

It came to me in a dream early this morning:

skeptiphobia \ SKEP-tuh-FO-be-uh \ noun
: fear of skeptics or skepticism

Sample sentence: The speaker's skeptiphobia explains the lack of time for questions from the audience.

The Oxford English Dictionary has no entry for this "word." Google, I suppose, will now have at least one.

Related posts
Oveness
Power-sit

Lead Pencil Blues

I'm amused to find two of my abiding interests -- blues and stationery supplies -- brought together in the following lyric of graphitic dysfunction. Blues lyrics are rich in double-entendres -- elevators, jellyrolls, lemons, pincushions, poodles, snakes, switchboards, and wieners, but Johnnie Temple's "Lead Pencil Blues" and Bo Carter's "My Pencil Won't Write No More" are the only blues lyrics I'm aware of that focus on the mighty (or not so mighty) pencil. I've transcribed the lyric of "Lead Pencil Blues" from the recording.

Spoken: Lord have mercy --
I wanna write a letter so bad I don't know what to do

I laid down last night, couldn't eat a bite
The woman I love don't treat me right
Lead in my pencil, baby it's done gone bad
And it's the worst old feelin' baby, that I've
    ever had

I woke up this mornin', my baby says she
    mighty mad
Cause the lead in my pencil, it's done gone
    bad
Lead in my pencil, baby it's done gone bad
And that's the worst old feelin' that I've
    ever had

My baby told me this mornin', she's feelin'
    mighty blue
Lead in my pencil just wouldn't do
And she said "Been ready all night --
Lead in your pencil daddy, just wouldn't write"
Lead in my pencil, baby it just won't write
And it's the worst old feelin' baby, that I've
    ever had

My baby says she goin' to quit me
I'll tell you for this reason why
Lead in my pencil gone bye-bye
Laid down last night, couldn't help but cry
Wanted to write so bad, I was about to die
Lead in my pencil, baby it's done gone bad
And it's the worst old feeling baby, that I've
    ever had

Johnnie Temple, "Lead Pencil Blues" (1935). Available on Back to the Crossroads: The Roots of Robert Johnson (Yazoo).

Canon-formation

On the left, Ted Berrigan's The Morning Line (Santa Barbara: Am Here Books/Immediate Editions, 1982), 26 pages, photocopied and stapled, published in an edition of 250 copies and 15 signed copies. Note the now-rusting staples. The Morning Line is the last book that appeared in the poet's lifetime.

On the right, The Collected Poems of Ted Berrigan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), edited by Alice Notley with Anselm Berrigan and Edmund Berrigan, x + 749 pages.

The volume on the right is now on sale for $29.95, 40% off, direct from the publisher.

» The Collected Poems of Ted Berrigan
(from the University of California Press)

Models for education

Education theorists have given us two broad caricatures of teaching -- "the sage on the stage" and "the guide on the side." If you know anything about current education, you know that the first is bad, the second good. Yes, the reasoning, like caricatures themselves, is reductive.

The first caricature transforms the classroom into a performance venue, the professor strutting and fretting his or her 50 minutes, all eyes and ears attending to a glamorous genius. On this account, any presentation of genuine scholarship and intellectual accomplishment is mere preening: "Who does he think he is? A sage?!" The second caricature imagines a classroom full of highly-motivated, self-directed students, in need of just an occasional correction in steering. This caricature assumes a much greater degree of student interest in "group-work" and the like than is often (or usually?) the case. For many students, "group-work," games, and other "activities" are welcome respites from more difficult work; other students see such stuff as infuriatingly condescending.

These caricatures of "sage" and "guide" have little to do with what can really happen in a college class. They erase the possibility of a professor who talks (or professes, as a professor is supposed to do) and leads a discussion -- orchestrating in real time, imperfectly of course, a multi-voiced improvisation on a theme. To my mind, that's the most wonderful sort of class, one whose shape is unpredictable, sometimes awkward, sometimes delightful, and never to be repeated.