Feeding times

After watching a local newscast on Thursday night, I made the mistake of leaving the television on for "warmth" (i.e., for light and noise while working in an otherwise empty house). I virtually never watch prime-time network television, so I found myself at first surprised and then appalled by the barrage of commercials exhorting the viewer to eat out or buy pre-packaged food to eat at home. Convenience and taste were the advantages touted again and again and again — as if driving to a fast-food outlet to eat is in fact convenient, as if a plastic bag of frozen meat and vegetables is in fact superior to what a modestly skilled cook could put together from scratch. I assume that these commercials were running in prime-time to capitalize upon whatever dissatisfactions and frustrations viewers might be feeling about their evening meals. I hit the remote-control after hearing "Better than what Mom makes!"

My prime-time experience is what prompted me to look closely at a four-page insert for Sara Lee brands in today's Parade magazine. Page one: Norman Rockwell's 1943 Freedom from Want, with some ingratiating text added:

Ah, the good ol' days. When there was all the time in the world to create picture-perfect holidays. And when families could enjoy every meal together, not just the big holiday feasts.

Sure isn't how things look today!

No siree, Bob. Today's world is what we see on the next two pages. Sara Lee's website gives a condensed version:


[Click for larger image.]

What I find most telling in this Photoshopped nightmare is the absence of relationships. Contrast Rockwell: people are looking at one another, acknowledging their shared joy in a ritual. In Sara Lee's world, everyone does his or her own thing. Grandma and Grandpa, the only people who can possibly be construed as looking at someone else (at Mom, perhaps, and frazzled Dad), find their smiles unreturned. It seems that they've even had to let themselves in, which (comically and unintentionally) compounds the scene's awfulness. And notice: the kitchen table, minus chairs, functions not as a gathering place but as a surface on which to display food. Sara Lee gives us not a scene of feasting but of feeding. The only hunger here, as the T-shirt at the center of this scene suggests, is in one's stomach.

Did people really have "all the time in the world" to prepare holiday meals back in the "good ol' days"? I think that they made the time, to do things that were important to them. As Michael Pollan, author of The Omnivore's Dilemma, points out, we've figured out how to make the time to spend two or three hours a day on line. I remember that my grandmother used to start the Thanksgiving cooking at six or seven in the morning.

If you're wondering who the self-satisfied young man in the T-shirt is: according to the Parade version of this scene, his name is Jake, and his hockey team is at the door, hungry for hot dogs. Note to hockey team: Go away; we have company. Note to Jake: Take off your headphones, put down your wiener, and go say hello to your grandparents. They're not going to be around forever, and they've come a long way to see you.

Related reading
No time for cooking (Michael Pollan on cooking, via Fire and Knowledge)
Total Meals On Line (Sara Lee)

November 11, 1918

From the New York Times, November 12, 1918:



Read the rest:

Nation Rejoices at War's End; City Is Jubilant (New York Times)

The National Dean's List is dead

A reader has informed me that the National Dean's List, the subject of two oft-visited posts on Orange Crate Art, is dead, defunct, gone. I wrote about the NDL earlier this year after receiving letters of nomination addressed to me (almost 30 years out of college) and a non-existent person at my address. Both names were taken from a magazine-subscription service for college faculty and students.

From the company website:

Educational Communications, Inc. has ceased all operations, including discontinuation of its publications for Who's Who Among American High School Students, Who's Who Among America's Teachers, and The National Dean's List, as well as the Educational Communications Scholarship Foundation.

The Internet Archive shows that Educational Communications, Inc. — or at least its website — was still functioning as of August 2007. Some quick Google searching turns up no details on the company's demise.

I feel sorry for the clerical workers, printers, and bindery workers whose lives will be altered by the demise of Educational Communications, Inc. But I'll still say good riddance to this company. It's mail from outfits such as EC, Inc. that can lead a student to mistake, say, a letter of invitation from Phi Beta Kappa for yet another sham honor. And it's the Internet that allows anyone with an online connection to look around and ask questions. (Type "national dean's list" into Google and see what happens.)

Update, November 12, 2007: The Austin Business Journal published a brief story today. An excerpt:

Austin's Educational Communications Inc. has ceased operations.

According to a Securities and Exchange filing on Nov. 1, the company, a subsidiary of American Achievement Group Holding Corp., is shutting down by the end of the month. Its Web site today confirms that, but company executives could not immediately be reached for comment. . . .

Sales of the parent company's achievement publications decreased to $300,000 for the three months ending May 2007, compared with sales of $1.1 million during the three months ending May 2006.

Related posts
Is this honor society legitimate?
The National Dean's List
The National Dean's List again

Related reading
Phi Beta What? (Wall Street Journal)

#

If you're not subscribed to Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day, you're missing delights such as this word:

octothorpe   \AHK-tuh-thorp\   noun
: the symbol #

Example sentence: Barry noticed the pound sign on the telephone and remarked about how much the octothorpe resembled a tic-tac-toe grid.

Did you know? Stories abound about who first called the # sign an "octothorpe" (which can also be spelled “octothorp”). Most of those tales link the name to various telephone workers in the 1960s, and all claim the "octo-" part refers to the eight points on the symbol, but the "thorpe" remains a mystery. One story links it to a telephone company employee who happened to burp while talking about the symbol with co-workers. Another relates it to the athlete Jim Thorpe, and a third claims it derives from an Old English word for “village.” If the plethora of theories leaves your head spinning, you might want to take the advice of the wag who asked (poetically), "Can we simply just say, / Ere it spoils your day, / It's the thorp between seven and nine?"

When my local Walgreens switched to an automated telephone prescription-refill service, some older users (i.e., older than me, much older) were baffled by the instruction to "Press pound" when finished. Walgreens could've baffled users of all ages with the instruction to "Press the octothorpe."

A Jim Doyle story

I knew James P. Doyle, Jim Doyle, as my professor at Fordham College in the Bronx, New York. This story comes from an arts advocate named Elizabeth Brouha, and it concerns Jim's post-Fordham life, when he lived in Sutton, Vermont, and taught at Lyndon State College. Jim was involved in an arts group that was funding a poet-printer's residencies in local schools, including the school that Jim and Ellen's son Joshua attended. One day Joshua came home, shouting "My poem is in the book. My poem is in the book." The book was a compilation of poems by children in the schools the poet-printer had visited. Ms. Brouha writes that Jim

was so tickled with the whole thing that he wrote a letter to Ellen Levell at the Vermont Council on the Arts about the whole experience. Ellen was going down to Washington, D.C. to plead that more money be given to National Endowment for the Arts so that the state councils could have more money for programs like these. She went before a committee and read them Joshua's poem and his father's letter. It was the greatest thing on the program. It carried the day and the Endowment did get more money.

And that's the story of Joshua's howling success.

From an untitled essay by Elizabeth Brouha in Vermonters: Oral Histories from Down Country to the Northeast Kingdom ed. Ron Strickland (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1998), 21

One of the mysteries of Jim's life is that he never — to the best of my knowledge, and I've checked, carefully — "published," as people in academia say. When Jim was getting ready to leave Fordham, he told me that he thought he was getting close to having something to say in print. But he left no critical writing aside from his dissertation (on the artist and type designer Eric Gill). So I was happy to find Jim's name in a book.


[From the book quoted above. Elizabeth Brouha sits in the center. That's Jim Doyle in the dark striped sweater.]

Other Jim Doyle posts
Department-store Shakespeare
Doyle and French
From the Doyle edition
Jim Doyle (1944–2005)
Teaching, sitting, standing

TElephone EXchange NAmes in classical music

Sylvan Shulman (violin) and Alan Shulman (cello) founded the Stuyvesant String Quartet in 1938. How did the quartet get its name? Mura Kievman, daughter of Louis Kievman (viola) explains:

Dad told me (as I recollect, I may be wrong) that he created the name "Stuyvesant Quartet" when he was in a NYC phone booth and had to come up with a name NOW. The phone exchange was "STuyvesant" in that phone book [booth?], and hence the name. I also recall (perhaps equally incorrectly) that within the group there was some debate as to who actually came up with the name. This version was my father's recollection.

Telephone exchange names, offering inspiration in moments of need, perhaps apocryphally!

The Stuyvesant String Quartet on CD
The Stuyvesant String Quartet with Benny Goodman, clarinet
The New Friends of Rhythm (Jazzing the classics!)

Related posts
Telephone exchange names
More telephone exchange name nostalgia
Telephone exchange names on screen
Telephone exchange names on screen (no. 2)

Update: Alan Shulman's son Jay Shulman pointed me to two more CDs:

Rey de la Torre: Works for Guitar, with the Stuyvesant String Quartet
The Stuyvesant String Quartet: Hindemith, Villa-Lobos, Porter

(Thanks, Elaine! And thanks, Jay!)

"[T]races of ourselves"

Everything, everywhere; there, there:

After a certain age our memories are so interwoven with each other that the object of our thoughts or the book which we are reading has practically no importance. We have left traces of ourselves everywhere, everything is fertile, everything is dangerous, and we can make discoveries every bit as precious in an advertisement for soap as in Pascal's Pensées.

Marcel Proust, The Fugitive, translated by Peter Collier (London: Penguin, 2003), 508

*

I rode home through the city streets. There wasn't a street — there wasn't a building — that wasn't connected to some memory in my mind. There, I was buying a suit with my father. There, I was having an ice cream soda after school.

Wallace Shawn and André Gregory, screenplay for My Dinner with André (1981) (words spoken by Shawn)

Related post
Powders, pencils, mountains, cigars

All Proust posts (Pinboard)

The nostalgia of the very young

A nice gloss on Faulkner's idea of peace as "was." Spoken by a second-grader:

"Oh, I wish I was in kindergarten again."

Why? Naps, and no homework.

Related post
William Faulkner on peace

The sounds of sirens

Three fine examples of the ability to Keep Calm and Carry On, letters to the editor in the November 1940 Musical Times ("Founded in 1844, published on the fifteenth of every month"). The German Blitz had begun on September 7, 1940. "Feste," mentioned in the second letter, was the pen-name of a Musical Times columnist.

(Thanks, Elaine!)

William Faulkner on peace

Reading page after page in Proust's The Fugitive on remembering and forgetting made me recall this passage from William Faulkner, which has lurked in my mind since I first read it in college. It's from a conversation with students at the University of Virginia, March 13, 1957:

[M]aybe peace is only a condition in retrospect, when the subconscious has got rid of the gnats and the tacks and the broken glass of experience and has left only the peaceful pleasant things — that was peace. Maybe peace is not is, but was.

William Faulkner, Faulkner in the University, ed. Frederick L. Gwynn and Joseph L. Blotner (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1995), 67