Musical-comedy pencils

Ella Peterson (Judy Holliday) to Jeffrey Moss (Dean Martin):

"When I went to high school, I'd do anything to keep from doing my homework. Mostly I'd sharpen pencils. You know the yellow kind that says Ticonderoga on it? Well, I'd sharpen it to the Ticonderog, and then to the Ticonder, and then to the Ticond, and then to the Tic, and then to the Ti, and then to the T. And then I'd have to start on another pencil."

Bells Are Ringing (1960), screenplay by Betty Comden and Adolph Green

Bells Are Ringing, now packaged as a dopey-looking DVD, is anything but dopey. Smart songs, witty repartee, arch double-entendres, rotary phones, a telephone exchange name as part of a song lyric (PLaza 0-4433), a betting operation disguised as a classical record label, and a terrific cast (including Frank Gorshin as a Brando-like Method actor). Judy Holliday, in her last film, is brilliant.

Bells Are Ringing (Amazon)

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Andrew Sullivan's advice

Just like yours, my beard has been getting a little gray on the chin and sides recently. And it really does age one. . . .

But all is not lost, your Mullahship.

Andrew Sullivan offers some hair care advice:

Queer Eye for the Jihadist Guy (The Daily Dish)

Film noir pencils

Barton Keyes (Edward G. Robinson) to Walter Neff (Fred MacMurray):

"A desk job. Is that all you can see in it? Just a hard chair to park your pants on from nine to five. Just a pile of papers to shuffle around, and five sharp pencils and a scratch pad to make figures on, with maybe a little doodling on the side. That's not the way I see it, Walter. To me a claims man is a surgeon, and that desk is an operating table, and those pencils are scalpels and bone chisels. And those papers are not just forms and statistics and claims for compensation. They're alive, they're packed with drama, with twisted hopes and crooked dreams. A claims man, Walter, is a doctor and a blood-hound and a cop and a judge and a jury and a father confessor, all in one."

Double Indemnity (1944), screenplay by Billy Wilder and Raymond Chandler

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Everything I always wanted to ask about Grape-Nuts

My son Ben gave me the above advertisement, which he found at a garage sale. (Thanks, Ben!) The plastic sheet that protected the ad is labeled 1920s. I have a bowl of sturdy, appetizing Grape-Nuts almost every morning, so this ad has found a good home.

I'm wondering: this scene carries a sexual implication, doesn't it? The locked eyes seem to bespeak a desire for more than cereal. But does "Only time for Grape-Nuts" mean that there's no time for more than breakfast, or does it mean that time already spent in the bedroom has left no time for a more elaborate breakfast? It's possible of course that this ad might only be a comment on modern times and the death of cooking. The locked eyes though suggest more.

And who are these people anyway? Are they both headed off to work? (Would a woman have dressed in this way around the house?) If the couple are a husband and wife, why is he dressing next to what looks like a single bed? And why is his coat hanging on a chair?

[Readers of a certain age will recognize in this post's title a play on the title of David Reuben's book Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex (But Were Afraid to Ask) (1969).]

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The one after 99,999

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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L (50,000 visits)

Television in the background

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.

Other delights of this episode: guest appearances by Richard Deacon (Fred Rutherford on Leave It To Beaver, Mel Cooley on The Dick Van Dyke Show), David White (Larry Tate from Bewitched), and best of all, Tor Johnson (Inspector Clay from Plan 9 from Outer Space).

Proust: "the self-identity of things"

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

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.]