Utnapishtim's word-processor

[IBM Displaywriter disk, circa 1984, 8" square.]

Talking with my students about the ancient Mesopotamian story of Gilgamesh leads to all sorts of thoughts about impermanence. (The great truth of the story, expressed by the mysterious Utnapishtim, is that "There is no permanence.") I like pointing out to my students that the tablets holding the Gilgamesh story are still readable (or at least largely readable) to anyone who can read cuneiform script. Also readable, a page from a 13th-century Book of Ezekiel that I bring into class (given to me by a friend who was divesting himself of his belongings). But the circa-1984 disks that hold the text of my dissertation (on E.D. Hirsch, Stanley Fish, and J.L. Austin, if you're wondering) have been useless to me for many years — except for display purposes during discussions of impermanence.

I wrote my dissertation with Faber-Castell Uniball pens and legal pads bearing the imprint of the Boston University Law School (the ultra-wide left margin was great for revision; I've never seen such pads since). I made reading copies for my committee with a Panasonic electronic typewriter. And I produced the final text with what was then called a "dedicated word-processor," an on-campus IBM Displaywriter.

Here, from IBM, is a partial description of the machine:

IBM's Office Products Division announced the Displaywriter in June 1980 as an easy-to-use, low-cost desktop text processing system. The Displaywriter System enabled operators to produce high quality documents while keying at rough draft speed. Users could automatically indent text, justify right margins, center and underscore. They could also store a document and recall it for review or revision, and could check the spelling of approximately 50,000 commonly used words. While these features are taken for granted in the post-PC era, they were novel for a time when most documents were created, formatted and revised on manual or electric typewriters. The Displaywriter's "intelligence" came in 160K, 192K or 224K bytes of memory. Single diskette drive diskette units with a capacity for approximately 284,000 characters of information were available. As requirements increased, customers could upgrade to a dual drive diskette unit. . . . A basic system — consisting of a display with a typewriter-like keyboard and a logic unit, a printer and a device to record and read diskettes capable of storing more than 100 pages of average text — cost $7,895 and leased for $275 a month.

The disks (diskette seems coy, considering the size) went into a toaster-like drive (to the right of the CPU, monitor, and keyboard in this IBM photograph). Yes, that's a disk drive, at least 12" wide (and that's the printer to its right).



I knew a guy who was doing word-processing full-time in downtown Boston in 1984. His dream was to buy a Displaywriter of his own and freelance. I hope he was saving slowly enough that he saved himself a lot of money.

IBM Displaywriter (Wikipedia)

Musical diagnosis

Unlikely songs have been running through my mind — and my vocal cords. "Easter Bonnet," "Sweet Caroline." From whence?

Elaine has an explanation. To the tune of "Auld Lang Syne":

I think you've lost your mind, my dear
I think you've lost your mind
I think you've lost your mind, my dear
I think you've lost your mind

M. de Charlus and Ignatius J. Reilly

It occurs to me that Proust's Baron de Charlus — baroque, elusive, haughty, loony — is a likely ancestor of John Kennedy Toole's Ignatius J. Reilly, protagonist of A Confederacy of Dunces. Here is M. de Charlus preparing for a duel (an imaginary duel, as it turns out):

"I think it'll be very beautiful," he said to us with sincerity, intoning each word. "To see Sarah Bernhardt in L'Aiglon, what is that? Excrement. Mounet-Sully in Oedipus? Excrement. It acquires at most a certain pallor of transfiguration when it takes place in the Arena in Nîmes. But what is it compared with that unprecedented thing, of seeing the actual descendant of the Connétable do battle?" At the mere thought of which, M. de Charlus, unable to contain his delight, began to perform contre-de-quartes reminiscent of Molière, leading us to move our beer glasses closer for safety, and to fear that the first clash of blades might wound the adversaries, the doctor, and the seconds. "What a tempting spectacle it would be for a painter! You who know M. Elstir," he said to me, "you should bring him along." I replied that he was not on the coast. M. de Charlus hinted that he might be sent a telegram. "Oh, I say that for his sake," he added, faced by my silence. "It's always interesting for a master — in my opinion, he is one — to capture such an example of ethnic reviviscence. There's perhaps only one a century."

Marcel Proust, Sodom and Gomorrah, translated by John Sturrock (New York: Penguin, 2002), 456

All Proust posts (via Pinboard)

[The Connétable de Guermantes is one of the Baron's ancestors. The contre-de-quarte is "a circular parrying movement of the sword." Molière's Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme features a fencing lesson. These details are drawn from the notes to the Penguin edition of the novel.]

Edward G. Seidenstricker (1921-2007)

The New York Times reports that the translator Edward G. Seidensticker has died:

Translating The Tale of Genji, as Mr. Seidensticker later described it, was a labor of love that took 10 years. At the time, the most complete English translation available was by Arthur Waley, published in the 1920s and '30s. Though respected, Waley's translation was lushly Victorian, and it fell to Mr. Seidensticker to produce something sparer. Here is Waley's version of the tale's opening line:

"At the Court of an Emperor (he lived it matters not when) there was among the many gentlewomen of the Wardrobe and Chamber one, who though she was not of very high rank was favored far beyond all the rest."

Here is Mr. Seidensticker's, short and sweet:

"In a certain reign there was a lady not of the first rank whom the emperor loved more than any of the others."

Sweet? Not really. Clear? Sharp? Yes.

Edward Seidensticker, Translator, Is Dead at 86 (New York Times

Time of Day operator, April 1937

A Time of Day operator and an exchange name: Ah! Telephony!

I clipped this "Flashback 1937" item from the Chicago Tribune some time ago. With Time of Day service vanishing, I thought I should share this bit of the past here. (Click for a larger view.)

Related posts
No Time of Day in LA
Telephone exchange names
MOre EXchange NAme NOstalgia
Mike Hammer's machine
"This is the operator speaking"
All "dowdy world" posts (via Pinboard)

No Time of Day in LA

Practical reality (the dirty scoundrel!) continues to chip away at the dowdy world, as the Los Angeles Times reports:

It's the end of time, at least as far as AT&T is concerned.

The brief note in customers' bills hardly does justice to the momentousness of the decision. "Service withdrawal," it blandly declares. "Effective September 2007, Time of Day information service will be discontinued."

What that means is that people throughout Southern California will no longer be able to call 853-1212 to hear a woman's recorded voice state that "at the tone, Pacific Daylight Time will be . . ." with the recording automatically updating at 10-second intervals.

"Times change," said John Britton, an AT&T spokesman. "In today's world, there are just too many other ways to get this information. You can look at your cellphone or your computer. You no longer have to pick up the telephone."

No, you don't. But I think King Lear put it best: "O reason not the need!"

Reading about the Time of Day service led me to a wonderful page with MP3s of Jane Barbe, "The Telephone Lady," whose voice I still hear when I use my long-distance card (just 3¢ a minute!).

Time of day calling it quits at AT&T (Los Angeles Times, via Boing Boing)
Jane Barbe (Wikipedia)
The Jane Barbe Collection (Telephone World)

All "dowdy world" posts (via Pinboard)

Overheard

"How different our lives would be if we were newscasters."

All "Overheard" posts (via Pinboard)

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?]