Junk sleep

From BBC News:

Too many teenagers are damaging their health by not getting enough sleep and by falling asleep with electrical gadgets on, researchers say. . . .

The Sleep Council, which conducted the poll of 1,000 teenagers, says gadgets in bedrooms such as computers and TVs are fuelling poor quality "junk sleep". . . .

Almost a quarter of the teens surveyed admitted they fell asleep watching TV, listening to music or with other equipment still running, more than once a week. . . .

Dr Chris Idzikowski of the Edinburgh Sleep Centre said: "This is an incredibly worrying trend. What we are seeing is the emergence of 'Junk Sleep' — that is sleep that is of neither the length nor quality that it should be in order to feed the brain with the rest it needs. Youngsters need to be taught a healthy lifestyle includes healthy sleep as well as healthy food. The message is simple: switch off the gadgets and get more sleep."

Get some sleep, kids. But not in class.

Junk sleep "damaging teen health" (BBC News)

Harvey Pekar on life and death

Harvey Pekar, on Anthony Bourdain's No Reservations last night:

"When you're dead, it robs life of many pleasures."

Bourdain's trip to Cleveland led to two online illustrated narratives:

Meet the Pekars, Part One, Part Two (Anthony Bourdain and Gary Daum)
The Shoot of No Reservations (Harvey Pekar and Gary Daum)

Related post
Harvey Pekar's The Quitter

John Ashbery and mtvU

The New York Times reports that mtvU, an MTV Networks subsidiary broadcasting on college campuses, has chosen John Ashbery as its first poet laureate:

Excerpts of his poems will appear in 18 short promotional spots — like commercials for verse — on the channel and its Web site (mtvu.com, which will also feature the full text of the poems). . . .

Mr. Ashbery, who was the poet laureate of New York State from 2001 to 2003, was immediately receptive. "It seemed like it would be a chance to broaden the audience for poetry," he said.

The poems used in the campaign span his career, and the spots are simple: on a white background, black text floats in to a sound like a crashing wave, appears on the screen for a minute, then floats away. From "Retro" (2005): "It's really quite a thrill/When the moon rises over the hill / and you've gotten over someone / salty and mercurial, the only person you've ever loved." From "Soonest Mended" (2000): "Barely tolerated, living on the margin / In our technological society, we are always having to be rescued" . . . .

Though his roots are in 1950s bohemia, Mr. Ashbery is perhaps not the most obvious choice for the iPod generation. He works on a typewriter and doesn’t listen to popular music, with the exception of a chance encounter with the Peaches & Herb song "Reunited" in a cab in the 1980s; it inspired his poem "The Songs We Know Best." ("Just like a shadow in an empty room / Like a breeze that’s pointed from beyond the tomb / Just like a project of which no one tells — / Or didja really think that I was somebody else?")

But Mr. Friedman is optimistic that verse will find its new audience, and mtvU plans to continue the program with other laureates after Mr. Ashbery's one-year tenure is up.

Read the rest:

An 80-Year-Old Poet for the MTV Generation (New York Times)

And look and listen:

Poet Laureate John Ashbery (mtvU)

[Note to mtvU: Didja have to center each line? What's wrong with a left margin?]

Notebook sighting in Pickpocket

Jules Dassin's Rififi led me to Robert Bresson's Pickpocket (1959), with its dazzling silent stretches of intricate criminal choreography. Pickpocket is my second Bresson film. As in Diary of a Country Priest (1951), a notebook grants access to the protagonist's inner life. A pattern? I must see more Bresson.


[I know that those who have done these things usually keep quiet, and that those who talk haven't done them. And yet I have done them.]

Pickpocket (The Criterion Collection)

Related posts
Pocket notebook sightings in Rififi
Pocket notebook sighting (in Diary of a Country Priest)

Proust: "collective, universal smiles"

Mme Verdurin is displeased:

[T]here was applied to her lips a smile that did not belong to her personally, a smile I had already seen on certain people when they said to Bergotte, with a knowing air, "I've bought your book, it's tremendous," one of those collective, universal smiles that, when they have need of them — just as we make use of the railway and of moving vans — individuals borrow, except for a few ultra-refined ones, such as Swann or M. de Charlus, on whose lips I have never seen that particular smile settle.

Marcel Proust, Sodom and Gomorrah, translated by John Sturrock (New York: Penguin, 2002), 391

All Proust posts (via Pinboard)

Remembrance of orthodontics past

I've been told many times that I have a nice smile, and I have to believe that the tellers are telling the truth as they see it. But I don't have nice teeth. Two upper teeth tilt backwards, badly maloccluded, barely visible, giving my open-mouthed smile a gappy (albeit symmetrically gappy) look. So when a shutter snaps, I tend to zip my lips. I sometimes think about getting these teeth capped, but they've been with me so long that I find it difficult to imagine alterations. Besides, I am told that I have a nice smile.

Hearing the word braces the other day reminded me that I had them as a kid, along with "headgear" and elastics and a retainer, though none of it did much good. (I still remember, sitting in the chair during my final visit, wondering about the return on the investment.) I got curious enough to Google my orthodontist and was surprised to see that as recently as 2003, he was still at it, as the New York State Board of Regents documents. And still, after all those years, working with the same integrity and skill:



These are the only references to Sheldon Estrin that I can find online, aside from a current listing in what appears to be a clearinghouse for cut-rate dental plans. I wish Dr. Estrin's current patients better luck than I had.

[January 2008: I had the two teeth capped, and now I'm smiling. Thanks, Dr. Blagg!]

Related post
Crooked teeth?

Dowdy farms

Spotted on a bag of Vidalia onions:

Dowdy farms: red-checkered tablecloths, pies cooling for "supper," fedora-wearing men on tractors —

Yes, my dowdy farms are straight outta Calverton, as Elaine immediately recognized. Well, I write about what I know, or what I don't.

All "dowdy world" posts (via Pinboard)

Pocket notebook sightings in Rififi

What can I say? I like these cameo appearances.

Rififi (1955) is an extraordinary movie by then-blacklisted Jules Dassin, director of The Naked City (1948) and Night and the City (1950). I'd liken Rififi to John Huston's The Asphalt Jungle (1950), another story of a perfect crime gone awry. The break-in and get-away sequences in Rififi offer 31 minutes without dialogue or music, only the sounds of a criminal masterpiece in progress.

Robbers and cops alike use pocket notebooks in Rififi. Robbers plan their heist ("Florist delivery 5:50"). Cops check for voitures volées (stolen cars). (Could traction be short for traction avant, front-wheel drive? A grey car with front-wheel drive?)

Rififi is available in a beautiful digital transfer from the Criterion Collection:

Rififi (The Criterion Collection)

Related posts
The dowdy world on film
Moleskine sighting
Pocket notebook sighting

Reading in the news

One in four U.S. adults say they read no books at all in the past year, according to an Associated Press-Ipsos poll released Tuesday. . . .

The survey reveals a nation whose book readers, on the whole, can hardly be called ravenous. The typical person claimed to have read four books in the last year — half read more and half read fewer. Excluding those who had not read any, the usual number read was seven.

"I just get sleepy when I read," said Richard Bustos, a habit with which millions of Americans can doubtless identify. Bustos, a 34-year-old project manager for a telecommunications company, said he had not read any books in the last year and would rather spend time in his backyard pool.

Read the rest:

Poll: 1 in 4 U.S. adults read no books last year (International Herald Tribune)

Related post
American reading habits

A pencil parade

Charless in Tallahassee left a link to this photograph in a comment on a pencil-related post.

The BBC explains: "Sue Grant snaps participants entering this year's pencil parade at Moniaive Gala in Dumfriesshire." Wikipedia tells us something about Moniaive, a village in Scotland:

Every year a number of festivals are held within the parish: Moniaive Horse Show, Gala Day, Arts Association exhibition, Beer and Food festival, Comedy nights, Moniaive Folk Festival, Horticultural show, to name but a few. In 2004 The Times described the village as one of the "coolest" in Britain.

I'm unable to find any suggestion of Moniaive's connection to pencils. But when has one needed a special reason to dress up as a pencil?

Your Pictures: 27 July–3 August (BBC News)
Moniaive (Wikipedia)
Moniaive (Village website, now empty)

(Thanks, Charless!)