Overheard

"Soy sauce, like vibrato, covers a multitude of sins."

Related reading
The Power of Vibrato (Musical Assumptions)
All "Overheard" posts (via Pinboard)

My favorite line from Ratatouille

Even rats and figments of the imagination know despair:

"We are in a cage in a car trunk, awaiting a future in frozen food products."

There are many wonderful things in Ratatouille, including a genuinely touching moment that evokes Proust's idea of involuntary memory.

Ratatouille (Official website)

Telephone exchange names

[Hello, Boing Boing readers!]

Hearing Mike Hammer's telephone number reminds me:

If you'd like to replace the dull first two digits of your telephone number with an authentic and evocative exchange name, Robert Crowe at the Telephone EXchange Name Project has reproduced a 1955 Bell Telephone Company list of approved names. Says the TENP: "If you do not have a historically accurate exchange name to use for your current telephone number, you should choose one from this list." I'm set to go with FIrestone 5-, authentic, evocative, also alliterative.

I still remember MUrray Hill 7-7500 from the commercials for Gimbels Custom Reupholstery that ran on New York's WPIX-TV on weekday mornings. Cartoons and the Little Rascals at 7:00 a.m., and they were trying to get people to think about reupholstering furniture?

Recommended Exchange Names (The Telephone EXchange Name Project)
Gimbels (Wikipedia)

Related posts
MOre TElephone EXchange NAme NOstalgia
All "dowdy world" posts (via Pinboard)

[The original link to the EXchange Name Project is defunct.]

Mike Hammer's answering machine

"This is CRestview 5-4124. Mister Hammer, whom you are calling, is not available at present. If you wish to leave a record of your call, please state your message at the sound of the tone."

Kiss Me Deadly (1955, directed by Robert Aldrich) is terrific: sometimes brutal, often surprising, beautifully filmed. A Christina Rossetti poem, foreign cars, Cloris Leachman, Paul Stewart (Raymond the butler in Citizen Kane), the use of popcorn as a weapon, someone singing "M'appari," allusions (Cerberus, Lot's wife, Medusa, Pandora), a walk through a modern-art gallery, and Mike Hammer's answering machine:



[Ralph Meeker as Mike Hammer]

All "dowdy world" posts (via Pinboard)

Covering v. uncovering

Some dedicated decluttering of my workspace (inspired by Merlin Mann's example) yielded two nice finds today: Harvey Pekar's The Quitter, which I bought last fall and then placed upon a stack of books (which continued to grow), and, sitting in a file tray, a page with some thoughts on the idea of "covering" a century or half-century of literature in a college semester:

When I think about what the word cover is supposed to mean, I think of the joke scenario of tourists rushing from one landmark or museum to another, determined to "see" (or better, "have seen") each one so that they can cross it off their list and get on to something else. But the desire to "cover" or "get things done" is antithetical to genuine appreciation of places or works of the imagination. (And I'm reminded that one of the meanings of cover is "to hide from sight or knowledge.") The real work of seeing might be thought of as a matter of uncovering, which takes time and extended attention. That's the mindset of the museum-goer who looks at just a handful of works and leaves the museum having had an authentic experience of looking at art. And who then keeps looking, again and again.

Another decluttering post
Notary Public

Teunously related post
Harvey Pekar's The Quitter

Blaming Mister Rogers

In today's Wall Street Journal:

Don Chance, a finance professor at Louisiana State University, says it dawned on him last spring. The semester was ending, and as usual, students were making a pilgrimage to his office, asking for the extra points needed to lift their grades to A's.

"They felt so entitled," he recalls, "and it just hit me. We can blame Mr. Rogers."

Fred Rogers, the late TV icon, told several generations of children that they were "special" just for being whoever they were. He meant well, and he was a sterling role model in many ways. But what often got lost in his self-esteem-building patter was the idea that being special comes from working hard and having high expectations for yourself.

Only someone with a cursory knowledge of Mister Rogers' Neighborhood would make this claim. Hard work and high expectations? Consider the many visitors to the neighborhood who talk about and demonstrate their hard-earned abilities: violinist Itzhak Perlman and gymnast Chaney Umphrey, for instance. Or consider the ways in which Mister Rogers himself bumbles and struggles when trying to learn a new skill (often, as I remember, in Negri's Music Shop). Consider too that being "special" is something that comes with a context: "You are my friend. You're special to me." That's a statement not about innate grandeur but about the way someone else sees you.

What I always hear in Mister Rogers' closing words is something quite different from an encouragement to narcissism: "There's just one person in the whole world like you. And people can like you just the way you are." In my ears, those words sound as a reminder of the beauty and mystery of individuality, offering consolation to children whose circumstances — clothes, speech, family situation — put them at a remove from others.

Self-esteem is busting out all over, but I think there are more likely causes to finger. Stay out of my 'hood.

Blame It on Mister Rogers: Why Young Adults Feel So Entitled (Wall Street Journal)

Related post
The inverse power of praise

Proust on habit and selfhood

It's all true: Proust really can change your life. Consider this observation on habit and selfhood:

We constantly strive to give our life its form, but by copying, in spite of ourselves, like a drawing, the features of the person we are, not the person we should like to be.

From The Guermantes Way, translated by Mark Treharne (New York: Penguin, 2002), 181

Other posts on Proust and habit
"This is the operator speaking"
Involuntary memory, foolish things

All Proust posts (via Pinboard)

For the Fourth of July

Bob Swift plays the final variation of Charles Ives' Variations on "America" (1891):

Bob Swift plays Charles Ives (YouTube)

Beverly Sills

May 25, 1929–July 2, 2007

The words of Beverly Sills' farewell song, October 27, 1980, New York:

Time has come for me to leave you.
'Tis the moment for goodbye.
Ah, my sweet, we have to part now.
Please brush your tears from those dear eyes.
We have shared so much together.
'Tis not the end but a new start.
Ah, my dear, I'll always love you.
You'll be forever in my heart.
Ah, my dear, I'll always love you.
You'll be forever in my heart.

Beverly Sills, "Tell Me Why" (YouTube)

Beverly Sills, All-American Diva, Is Dead at 78 (New York Times)

Whose list?

Here is a puzzling piece of paper, 3 9/16" x 4", found in a 1967 paperback, The Olympia Reader, a sampler of works published by the Olympia Press. I no longer know how I acquired this book — most likely at a library sale.

This list is almost certainly a preparation for a short trip — I can't invent another context in which these items fit. Whoever composed the list is an orderly person: five groups, checkmarks for almost all items, long lines through the groups. The red checkmarks might suggest the hand of a teacher.

The drugs and remedies on the list — more items of this sort than of any other — suggest a difficult life. These are the items the listmaker is careful to get down first and, I suspect, cannot imagine leaving home without. The first item, Unicap, might suggest what used to be called a health nut: not many packing lists begin with vitamins. It's the second item that startles: codeine. But there's a red line through it: has it been checked off, or crossed off? Is the listmaker now resolving to do without it?

Most of the medicinal items that follow suggest everyday woes: headaches, colds, stomach ills. Perhaps this traveler wants to be prepared for anything. I cannot make out the third item — xtreno? But look at the middle column: Isoniazid is used in the prevention and treatment of tuberculosis. Marax (evidently no longer available) relieves the symptoms of bronchial asthma.

The toiletries group makes me think that this list belongs to a man: razor, "foam," no makeup. (Cf. Lisa Fremont (Grace Kelly) in Alfred Hitchcock's Rear Window: "Why, a woman going anywhere but the hospital would always take makeup, perfume, and jewelry.") Scissors are a puzzling addition — to trim a mustache? to cut fingernails? Those are tasks one could take care of before a trip. Wherever the listmaker is traveling, there must be toothpaste and deodorant, which seem conspicuously missing from the list. But there won't be shaving cream.

The books — everyone packs a paperback or two, no? — suggest a listmaker familiar with literary culture, as does The Olympia Reader itself, with work by Samuel Beckett, William Burroughs, and Henry Miller. I take Vietnam to be shorthand for Norman Mailer's 1967 novel Why Are We in Vietnam? Chaillot can only be The Madwoman of Chaillot, an English translation of Jean Giraudoux's play La folle de Chaillot. The play was made into a film in 1969, and a paperback translation was published that year. (An aside: the first English translation, from 1947, is by Maurice Valency, who taught one of my professors, Paul Memmo, at Columbia, and, much later, my wife Elaine, at Juilliard.)

The most puzzling part of this list comes last. It's conceivable that a man might wear one pair of pants for three or four days. But where are his t-shirts? Where are his boxers, or briefs? These omissions seem odd with a traveler finicky enough to pack slippers and handkerchiefs (and scissors).

For a long time I thought of this list as a hypochondriacal prelude to a summer weekend trip. But there's no suntan lotion, no tennis racket, no camera. More recently I've wondered if the writer might have been preparing for a stay in a hospital or sanitarium. But the pullover and shirts don't fit that scenario.

On the other side of this piece of paper appear three phone numbers, with letters designating their exchanges: Jef, OR, VI. Each number has a notation to its right, and together these notations suggest a life that has begun to frazzle. They also suggest to me what it feels like to pose questions about this list:

NO

no
reply

wrong
no.

No one's home, or at least no one who can answer my questions.

Related posts
Blue crayon
Found
Invitation to a dance