Orange Crate Art received its one-hundred-thousandth visit this morning, from someone doing a Google search in Seoul: how to write email professor. It's that time of year: 270 of the last 500 visits to this blog have been to How to e-mail a professor.
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Having the television on as ambient noise can yield unexpected rewards. The following line floated up this afternoon to startle and amuse, from the Bonanza episode "San Francisco Holiday":
"I'm not offering you a drink; I'm offering you a sailor."The context: two ranch-hands have been shanghaied.
An interesting passage to think about in relation to those rooms in which things always look the same — this lamp here, that vase there:
I became more clearly aware of my own transformations by contrasting them with the self-identity of things. Yet we become accustomed to these as we do to people, and when, suddenly, we recall the different meaning that they carried, and then, once they had lost all meaning, the events, very different from those of today, for which they had been the setting, the diversity of the actions performed beneath the same ceiling, between the same glass-fronted bookcases, the change in our hearts and in our lives which that diversity implies seems further enhanced by the immutable permanence of the décor, reinforced by the unity of place.
Marcel Proust, Sodom and Gomorrah, translated by John Sturrock (New York: Penguin, 2002), 510
All Proust posts
[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).
IBM Displaywriter (Wikipedia)
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
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."[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.]
Marcel Proust, Sodom and Gomorrah, translated by John Sturrock (New York: Penguin, 2002), 456
All Proust posts (via Pinboard)
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:Sweet? Not really. Clear? Sharp? Yes.
"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."
Edward Seidensticker, Translator, Is Dead at 86 (New York Times
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)
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.No, you don't. But I think King Lear put it best: "O reason not the need!"
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."
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)
"How different our lives would be if we were newscasters."
All "Overheard" posts (via Pinboard)
