Harry Potter?

[After thinking a bit.] Yes. This post is all I have to offer re: Potter.

From the BBC series Extras: Andy Millman (Ricky Gervais) is filming an episode of his television series When the Whistle Blows (aka The Wind in the Willows). Andy's agent Darren Lamb (Stephen Merchant) is on the phone, fielding a proposal for his client:

He'd definitely be interested in a film, yeah. Who else is in it? Fellow who played who? Harry Potter? I've never heard of him. What? Little magical kid with glasses? You know Andy's in his forties, do you? That's — they got someone for him? Okay.

When work is done, it's time to pitch the project:

Darren: I'd like to talk some business. How do you fancy three days with Halle Berry?

Andy: Three days with Halle Berry?

Darren: Yeah. Good money; you'd be in and out.

Andy: What are you talking about?

Darren: You know, Halle Berry, little magical kid with glasses.

Andy: Do you mean Harry Potter?

Darren: [After thinking a bit.] Yes.

Related post
Moleskine sighting in Extras

Great names in spam

Jessica, Joshua, Susan, Tom: These are not the names that have made me marvel and cut and paste to a text file before emptying my spam folder. The quality of the spam names sent my way has declined of late into a plausible-first-name-only blandness, even if the sales pitches are as arresting as before. If Jessica and Joshua and company had last names, they'd be Dull and Boring.

But here, in remembrance of things past, are ten great names in spam, culled from my spam-names file:

Exie Deedee
Foggy Derek
Xzavier Folk
Pagan Jerome (Saint's older brother?)
Llamour Leventhal
Fabiola MacCorley
Hines X. Meggy
Lesedi Mongold
Lothario Vanvliet (A Captain Beefheart relation?)
Comfort Wurtz

Related posts
Achilles and stochastic
English professor spam
The folks who live in the mail
Introducing Rickey Antipasto
The poetry of spam
Spam names

Proust beats Malcolm Gladwell

A partial anecdote told by Prince Von captures the thesis of Macolm Gladwell's Blink (2005) — that quick intuitive judgments can have surprising accuracy:

"I'm rather inclined to compare the Kaiser," continued the Prince, whose inability to pronounce the word "archaeologist" (that is, as though it were spelled with a "k") did nothing to stop him from taking every opportunity to use it, "to an old archaeologist" — which the Prince pronounced as "arsheologist" — "we have in Berlin. If you set him in front of a genuine piece of Assyrian antiquity, this old arsheologist weeps. But if it is a modern fake, if it is something that is not really old, he fails to weep. And so, when they want to know whether an arsheological piece is really old, they take it to the old arsheologist. If he weeps, they buy the piece for the museum. If there are no tears, they send it back to the dealer and prosecute him for fraud."

The Guermantes Way, translated by Mark Treharne (New York: Penguin, 2002), 524

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Xenía in D.C.

Last month's news but still worth thinking about:

It started about midnight on June 16 when a group of friends was finishing a dinner of marinated steaks and jumbo shrimp on the back patio of a District of Columbia home. That's when a hooded man slid through an open gate and pointed a handgun at the head of a 14-year-old girl.

"Give me your money, or I'll start shooting," he said, according to D.C. police and witnesses.

Everyone froze, including the girl's parents. Then one guest spoke.

"We were just finishing dinner," Cristina "Cha Cha" Rowan, 43, told the man. "Why don't you have a glass of wine with us?"

The intruder had a sip of their Chateau Malescot St-Exupery and said, "Damn, that's good wine."

The story gets even stranger, with Camembert and hugs.

I'm hoping that any of my Homer-reading students who come across this news item pause to think on the ancient Greek practice of ξενία (xenía), hospitality. The Iliad ends with an extraordinary moment of xenía, when Achilles as host treats Hector's father Priam with respect and compassion. The two share a meal before Priam departs with Hector's returned corpse. The Odyssey is a running display of xenía and its opposite: virtually every scenario in the poem hinges upon the practice or abuse of hospitality. And hospitality isn't limited to better homes and palaces: the swineherd Eumaeus acquits himself as a perfect host by offering Odysseus that best that he has: food, shelter, and a cloak to stay warm (almost literally the shirt off his back).

What's remarkable in this D.C. story is that one person's quick thinking changed — in a moment, for everyone involved — a dismally familiar scenario into something far more humanly complicated. How odd this robber must've felt to be seen not as a terrifying monster but as a guest. And how odd his potential victims must've felt to be recognizing his need for affection (however chemically induced that need may have been).

Attempted robbery ends in group hug (Yahoo News, via Boing Boing)

Harvey Pekar's The Quitter

Dear Harvey Pekar,

I'm writing to tell you how much I liked reading The Quitter. I've read the two American Splendor anthologies, Our Cancer Year, Our Movie Year, and Unsung Hero, and I've always found your observations about everyday life funny, rueful, and moving. I think though that The Quitter moves into more difficult territory. It's a courageous move to write the story of your early life as frankly as you have — your teenaged effort to establish your toughness, and the various failed attempts at work and schooling that followed. The overall story reminds me of Proust's In Search of Lost Time: the mistakes and missteps turn out to be the materials of your vocation as a writer.

Your collaborations with R. Crumb are my favorites, but Dean Haspiel's art is beautiful and complementary, especially in the way it suggests shadowy brooding, in both the past and present.

Will an enlightened publisher someday put out a collection of your writing on jazz, supplemented perhaps by interviews? I'd welcome a Harvey Pekar Reader.

I hope these words find you in domestic, financial, and creative happiness.

All best wishes,

Michael Leddy

The Quitter (Amazon)

About Harvey Pekar (harveypekar.com)
Harvey Pekar (Wikipedia)
American Splendor (Wikipedia)
Archive of Harvey Pekar's reviews (Austin Chronicle)
Archive of Harvey Pekar's reviews (Weekly Wire)

Related post
On Unsung Hero

Notary Public

Another find while decluttering: The Art-Official Notary and Corporation Handbook ("Important information concerning the duties and functions of notaries public, and useful general data"), with a 1959 copyright. I found this item in an office supply store, just a few years ago, and had to buy it. (Cf. Charlie Brown and his tree: "I think it needs me.") In the early 1990s, this store had 45-year-old pencils still for sale.

The last fifteen pages of the handbook show sample seals from various states and counties. These two pages caught my attention:



Amid Smiths and a Doe, one name stands out as genuine. The Social Security Death Index lists no Isidore Charkatz, but it does list an Isadore Charkatz. Mr. Charkatz was born in 1910 and died in 2001. His Social Security card was issued in Maryland, and his residence at the time of his death was Baltimore. I wonder whether his family has a copy of the little book that displays his seal.

Another decluttering post
Covering v. uncovering

The Incredible Head

The Incredible Head is a showerhead that promises "invigorating shower force," even with low pressure. It's also advertised as good for "Navy showers." (More on those in a minute.)

I bought an Incredible Head yesterday ($4.99), and it's a hit with showerers of all ages. It produces tremendous water pressure, so much so that it's necessary to turn the water way down from its usual setting. The Head has a button that shuts the water down a trickle — a good way to save even more water while shampooing. The manufacturer's claim that the Head can reduce water and energy costs by as much as 70% seems pretty plausible.

About Navy showers: turning off the water while showering is, as I guessed, the idea. Strangely enough, Lifehacker has a feature on this very topic today:

Conserve water and save money with the Navy shower (Lifehacker)

Proust and Renoir

Julia left a comment (on this post) mentioning an exhibit of Renoir landscapes at the National Gallery of Canada. Renoir landscapes are Proust territory, in a passage about the ways in which great art changes our perception of reality:

Today people of taste tell us that Renoir is a great eighteenth-century painter. But when they say this they forget Time, and that it took a great deal of time, even in the middle of the nineteenth century, for Renoir to be hailed as a great artist. To gain this sort of recognition, an original painter or an original writer follows the path of the occultist. His painting or his prose acts upon us like a course of treatment that is not always agreeable. When it is over, the practitioner says to us, "Now look." And at this point the world (which was not created once and for all, but as often as an original artist is born) appears utterly different from the one we knew, but perfectly clear. Women pass in the street, different from those we used to see, because they are Renoirs, the same Renoirs we once refused to see as women. The carriages are also Renoirs, and the water, and the sky: we want to go for a walk in a forest like the one that, when we first saw it, was anything but a forest — more like a tapestry, for instance, with innumerable shades of color but lacking precisely the colors appropriate to forests. Such is the new and perishable universe that has just been created. It will last until the next geological catastrophe unleashed by a new painter or writer with an original view of the world.

The Guermantes Way, translated by Mark Treharne (New York: Penguin, 2002), 323-24

All Proust posts (Pinboard)

How to improve writing (no. 14 in a series)

As we lunched in a chic bistro (i.e., Subway), Elaine brought these sentences to my attention. From a package of Subway apple slices:

I see at least three problems:

Subject-verb disagreement: medley, are. But changing the verb won't help, as it makes no sense to say that the medley is picked.

The phrase "packaged into" is cumbersome: the slices are packaged in a bag.

There's a general air of overkill. As far as I can tell, all apples are harvested by hand — difficult, painful work. An apple's "best flavor" could probably be had without the addition of vitamin C as a preservative. A "specially designed bag" is a bag, which you already know about if you've bought this item. An "apple crunch" is the only crunch an apple can have.

A possible improvement, preserving some of the flavor of the original:

A medley of sweet red and tart green apples, picked at the peak of ripeness. The slices are cleaned and packaged to lock in their juicy crunch.

I'd prefer to eliminate the second sentence, but I suspect that it's meant to reassure someone, somewhere, that this product is fit to eat.

This post is no. 14 in a very occasional series, "How to improve writing," dedicated to improving stray bits of published prose.

(Thanks, Elaine!)

All "How to improve writing" posts (via Pinboard)

July 10, 1871

Bon anniversaire, M. Proust.