Elvis pretzels

A digression in Proust's The Prisoner on street-vendors' cries brought to mind a cry I haven't heard — or thought of — for years:

Southern-fried Elvis pretzels,
They are fresh out of the oven.

Or to add the proper emphasis:

SOUTHern fried ELVIS PRETzels,
They are FRESH OUT of the OVen.

The Elvis pretzel man was a familiar figure during my years as an undergrad and grad student at Fordham University in the Bronx, New York. He could be found on a short dead-end section of Belmont Avenue, a street that separated the gated campus from the classroom building Faculty Memorial Hall. The pretzel man stood in the middle of the street, which saw virtually no traffic aside from garbage trucks and an occasional university vehicle. In warm weather the pretzel man wore an apron, the kind that proprietors of newsstands wore. In the cold, a shiny ski jacket ("pewter green," I'd call it, if there is such a color). The pretzel man was rather short and fairly broad, with a huge head of hair (more or less the color of his ski jacket). A laundry basket held the pretzels, which, if memory serves, sold for 50¢. Were they really fresh out of the oven? And if so, where was the oven? I have no idea, but the pretzels were indeed warm. They were also salty and chewy. A complete food, sort of, at least to tide one over between classes. I must have eaten dozens.

This little stretch of Belmont Avenue saw at least one other commercial venture during my time at Fordham: a coffeestand, where one could get something more drinkable than what the machines in FMH dispensed. The coffeestand had a short lifespan: its proprietor was almost certainly selling more than caffeine.

*

April 26, 2012: Found online: a November 9, 1978 Fordham Ram article about Elvis Lamanna, the Elvis pretzel man, complete with grainy photo.



[The Elvis pretzel man bears no relation to the Elvis impersonator Elvis Pretzel.]

More Bronx tales
Naked Bronx
Nick DeMaio and the Eldorado

The day Louis Armstrong made noise

From today's New York Times:

Fifty years ago this week, all eyes were on Little Rock, Ark., where nine black students were trying, for the first time, to desegregate a major Southern high school. With fewer than 150 blacks, the town of Grand Forks, N.D., hardly figured to be a key front in that battle — until, that is, Larry Lubenow talked to Louis Armstrong.

On the night of Sept. 17, 1957, two weeks after the Little Rock Nine were first barred from Central High School, the jazz trumpeter happened to be on tour with his All Stars band in Grand Forks. Larry Lubenow, meanwhile, was a 21-year-old journalism student and jazz fan at the University of North Dakota, moonlighting for $1.75 an hour at The Grand Forks Herald.

Shortly before Mr. Armstrong's concert, Mr. Lubenow's editor sent him to the Dakota Hotel, where Mr. Armstrong was staying, to see if he could land an interview.

Armstrong's frank commentary on color and American culture — "The way they are treating my people in the South, the government can go to hell" — became national news. Read all about it:

The Day Louis Armstrong Made Noise (New York Times)

Related post
Louis Armstrong's advice
Invisible man: Louis Armstrong and the New York Times
Louis Armstrong, collagist
Louis Armstrong's advice

[Note: the Times article is in error when it states that Sammy Davis, Jr. criticized Armstrong "for not speaking out earlier." According to Gary Giddins' Satchmo: The Genius of Louis Armstrong (2001), "Davis said Armstrong did not speak for the Negro people, called him 'a great credit to his race,' and finally conceded that he agreed with his meaning but not 'his choice of words.'"]

Some advice

From a university police department's ten-step list:

STEPS TO TAKE TO STAY SAFE
WHEN WALKING ALONE AT NIGHT

1. Avoid traveling alone at night.

Free fax

FaxZero is a free online fax service, allowing the user to send .doc or .pdf files, up to three pages each, two faxes a day. An ad goes on the cover page. (Can you live with that? I can.)

In some dealings with insurance-related bureaucracy over the past few weeks, I've been asked several times to fax necessary paperwork. (And I've wanted to ask: Is it still the 20th century?) When I explain that I don't have easy access to a fax machine and offer to scan a page and send a .pdf, the answer is No. So I'm happy to now know about FaxZero. FaxZero also offers unfree faxing, with no ads.

FaxZero ("Send a fax for free to anywhere in the U.S. and Canada")

Proust and possession, continued

Twenty-eight pages later, the narrator's dream of possessing the sleeping Albertine comes undone:

We imagine that love has for its object a being which can lie down before us, enclosed in a body. Alas! It is the extension of that body to every point in space and time which that being has occupied or will occupy. If we do not grasp its point of contact with a given place, a given time, then we do not possess it. But we cannot touch all these points. If at least they were indicated to us, we could stretch out to reach them. But we can only feel for them blindly.

Marcel Proust, The Prisoner, translated by Carol Clark (London: Penguin, 2003), 88

Albertine asleep is a body without sight or speech; now the narrator too is blind, unable to see that body in relation to every moment of its past and future. Possession now requires god-like omniscience.

I have a friend who found the roman d'Albertine, the Albertine novel, so disturbing that she wonders whether she'll go back to these later volumes of In Search of Lost Time. Proust's chronicle of obsession makes even Hitchcock's Vertigo seem almost healthy by comparison. (But I still love Vertigo.)

All Proust posts (via Pinboard)

The most disturbing passage in Proust?

I think so, and Elaine has reminded me that I had the same thought when I was reading the novel for the first time last year. The narrator's desire to possess Albertine Simonet can find its fulfillment only in the erasure of all that is individual — all that is human — in her. Barely animate, silent, blind ("There are some faces which take on an unaccustomed beauty and majesty the moment they no longer have a gaze"), Albertine asleep becomes a thing to be looked at:

By closing her eyes, by losing consciousness, Albertine had put off, one by one, the various marks of humanity which had so disappointed me in her, from the day that we first met. She was animated only by the unconscious life of plants, of trees, a life more different from my own, stranger, and yet which I possessed more securely. Her individuality did not break through at every moment, as it did when we talked, through unconfessed thoughts and unguarded looks. She had drawn back into her self all the parts of her that were normally on the outside, she had taken refuge, enclosed and summed up in her body. Watching her, holding her in my hands, I felt that I possessed her completely, in a way I never did when she was awake.

Marcel Proust, The Prisoner, translated by Carol Clark (London: Penguin, 2003), 60

Related post
Proust and Cole Porter (On "possession")

All Proust posts (via Pinboard)

Telephone exchange names on screen

[A Chicago "phonebook," from Nightmare Alley (1947).]

Nightmare Alley (dir. Edmund Goulding) gives us Tyrone Power, Joan Blondell, Mike Mazurki (Moose Malloy from Murder, My Sweet), Tarot card readings, carnival geeks, and the rise and fall of a nightclub mentalist (who performs in a studio recreation of the Chicago Sherman House's Spode Room). There's some great dialogue:

"You've got a heart as big as —"

"Sure, as big as an artichoke. A leaf for everyone."

*

"These great trees in moonlight: they give the whole place a — a cathedral-like atmosphere."

As the Wikipedia article Telephone exchange names notes, Chicago first used a "3L-4N" system (three letters, four numbers). "2L-5D" (two letters, five digits) later became the standard in North America. ROGers Park and STAte were authentic Chicago exchange names, as the Telephone EXchange Name Project confirms. Checking a few of the other 21 exchange names at the TEXNP confirms that they too were Chicago exchanges.

But this page itself is from no phonebook. Or if it, the names (and addresses?) have been altered. Note Mr. Rumstad's first name in the right-hand column.

Related posts
Telephone exchange names
MOre TElephone EXchange NAme NOstalgia
Mike Hammer's answering machine

All "dowdy world" posts (via Pinboard)

Tamas in our time

Ancient texts often resonate with startling relevance. Teaching the Bhagavad-Gita for the first time in many years, I read the following passage with new eyes. The context: Krishna teaches that tamas is one of the three gunas, the movers of all action, "the bonds that bind / The undying dweller / Imprisoned in the body." Tamas binds with "bonds of delusion, / Sluggishness, torpor." When tamas prevails, one is "lost in delusion." Here I think of the folly that has given us a war in Iraq:

The act undertaken
In the hour of delusion
Without count of cost,
Squandering strength and treasure,
Heedless of harm to another,
By him who does not question
His power to perform it:
That act is of tamas.

[Translated by Swami Prabhavananda and Christopher Isherwood.]

Some related posts
Homer then and now
Homer's Rumsfeld
Not dead yet
Petraeus

Linsey-woolsey

Today's word at Anu Garg's A.Word.A.Day brought back a bit of my elementary-school study of New York City history. I remember New Amsterdam. I remember Peter Stuyvesant and his wooden leg. And I remember linsey-woolsey. Everyone must have been wearing it back then:

linsey-woolsey (LIN-zee WOOL-zee) noun

1. A strong, coarse fabric of wool and cotton.

2. An incongruous mix.

[From Middle English linsey (linen, or from Lindsey, a village in Suffolk, UK) + woolsey (a rhyming compound of wool).]

Macs and test-drives

Thinking about a new computer? From an article in today's New York Times:

If you're the owner of a Windows PC who is looking for a replacement computer, the choices are grim. You can step into the world of hurt that is Vista, the latest version of Microsoft Windows that was released in January. Or you can seek out a new machine that still comes loaded with the comparatively ancient Windows XP.

Maybe, you might say, the moment has arrived to take a look at the Mac. You can easily order one online, of course. But if you'd like to take a test-drive before you commit, odds are that you'll have to look far and wide for a store that sells it.

Randall Stross, the author of this article and of The Microsoft Way: The Real Story of How the Company Beats the Competition, seems to be telling us that a lifetime of Windows is inevitable, pointing to Apple's still tiny market share and citing a tech consultant who likens Microsoft's operating system and the hardware that runs it to a giant flywheel: "'It takes a lot of energy to spin it up, but once it gets going, it's virtually unstoppable.'" Alas, the analogy reminds me of the endless wait for Windows (XP) to finish starting up and of the dozens of times I had to hold down the power button to shut off a frozen Windows (98) machine.

I'm not persuaded that the Mac's limited retail presence is that crucial. The Mac interface can be studied at one's leisure at Apple's website. If one really wants to try before buying, Apple resellers can be found on or off campus in many college towns. A library or an obliging friend can also give the cautious consumer a chance to try a Mac. Still, the sometimes disarming simplicity of using a Mac — of, say, installing a program — is more likely discovered in ordinary use than during a test-drive.

The choices aren't grim: many people find Mac OS X ("ten," not "x") a joy to use. Having switched myself — first at work, then at home, no test-drives involved — I'd never go back.

A Window of Opportunity for Macs, Soon to Close (New York Times)