Milk bottles

Today's Peanuts ("today" being December 26, 1960):



In 2007, Linus might also ask "And what are milk bottles?"

Some years ago, when my children were younger, I went into elementary-school classes every so often to read poetry. I remember this small poem prompting many questions:

The imperious dawn comes
to the clink of milk bottles
and round-shouldered sparrows twittering.

Charles Reznikoff (1894-1976), from Rhythms II (1919)

My attention was on "clink" and "round-shouldered" and "twittering" and that mysterious word "imperious." But the kids' thoughts were elsewhere: What did the bottles look like? Where did they come from? How did the people know how much milk to bring? And — did you have to pay for it?

A related post
"It is snowing."

All "dowdy world" posts (via Pinboard)

Holiday Inn as blog metaphor

Jim Hardy (Bing Crosby) describes Holiday Inn:

"A simple little layout where we could do our best at the work we know without any illusions of glory."

Holiday Inn (directed by Mark Sandrich, 1942)

Holiday Inn is a musical that veers from the truly wonderful (Fred Astaire's drunk dance and firecracker dance) to the deeply, unforgivably weird (Bing Crosby in blackface). If you're ever going to see it, now's the time.

The new Blogger

I finally gave in to progress and switched to "the new Blogger" this morning. It'll take a while to get everything back in place (especially as links now need to be added to a page element one at a time). If anyone sees things looking strange in the browser, I'd appreciate it if you'd let me know what you see and what browser you're using. (Thanks!)

As soon as I saw what Orange Crate Art first looked like in the new (or by now, semi-new) Blogger, I wanted to switch back. Line spacing was all awry, with any text after a block quotation squashed into ugliness. It's disappointing that this problem still exists so long — a year? longer? — after the introduction of the new Blogger. I found a solution here: Spacing Changes in Blogger Beta -3. All that's involved is a quick template HTML edit, cutting a line from one section and pasting it in another.

As they say on the Internets, Hope this helps.

Pineapple and truffle salad

Odette at Reading Proust in Foxborough has been troubled, haunted even, by the pineapple and truffle salad mentioned in In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower: "Is it just me or does pineapple salad with truffles sound rather. . . unappetizing?"

I've searched online for pineapple and truffle, ananas and truffe, with no luck. Tonight though something prompted me to try Amazon's "Search Inside!" It was my mind, which said, "Try Amazon's 'Search Inside!'" And there was a recipe, on page 93 of Shirley King's Dining with Marcel Proust: A Practical Guide to French Cuisine of the Belle Epoque (Lincoln, NE: Bison Books, 2006), involving pineapple chunks and truffle strips in a vinaigrette, with chicory or endive as a garnish.

"It is pure ostentation," sniffs King, "to mix truffles with pineapple." She pronounces the resulting dish "pleasant though unusual."

Odette, I'll bring the canned pineapple.

Shirley King's Dining with Proust (Amazon)

All Proust posts (Pinboard)

The Gimble

The Gimble is a nifty tool. It's not the most versatile book holder (it won't work with larger books), but it's small, modestly priced, and cleverly designed and named. I like using it to hold books open while I'm typing out passages.

Why gimble? The OED definition of gimbal helps out:

A contrivance by means of which articles for use at sea (esp. the compass and the chronometer) are suspended so as to keep a horizontal position. It usually consists of a pair of rings moving on pivots in such a way as to have a free motion in two directions at right angles, so as to counteract the motion of the vessel.

This reading tool might be understood as a metaphorical gimbal: it keeps the book open in a horizontal position and allow for easy page-turning in two directions.

Gimble Hands Free Book Holder (Barnes and Noble)
Gimble (That company called "if")

(Thanks, Elaine!)

Review of Bit Literacy

Mark Hurst. Bit Literacy: Productivity in the Age of Information and E-mail Overload. New York. Good Experience Press. 2007. $22.99.

I've just gone from reading Finding Time Again — the final volume of In Search of Lost Time — to reading Mark Hurst's Bit Literacy: Productivity in the Age of Information and E-mail Overload, which is, in another way, about finding time again.

Bits are 1s and 0s, binary digits, the stuff of all digital data. Bit Literacy develops the implications of two incontrovertible statements: "Bits are heavy," overloading us with ever-increasing amounts of stuff, and "Your bits are your responsibility" (i.e., no piece of software can save us). The overall strategy to attain bit literacy: "Let the bits go."

Mark Hurst unpacks this strategy in chapters devoted to managing e-mails, to-dos, files, and online reading. What does a bit-literate person do? He or she empties the in-box of its e-mails daily (but not by replying to everything), tracks to-dos online, creates files that avoid proprietary formats, names and organizes those files in a coherent system of folders and sub-folders, and reads online sources with careful discrimination. (The goal here is not to Rule the Web, but to get in and out as efficiently as possible.)

Bit Literacy is a sharply-defined alternative to David Allen's Getting Things Done. Hurst mentions neither Allen nor GTD by name, but references to folders, "next actions," and a "complex paper-based system" make the point. I can't imagine keeping David Allen's 43 folders either, but I also can't imagine agreeing with Hurst's general claim that paper is an ineffective tool for managing to-dos.¹ Hurst's to-do strategy uses his own Gootodo, an elegant web-based tool. But the great advantage of paper-based tools, or at least some paper-based tools, is their portability and immediate availability. I can enter call numbers in my datebook (Moleskine page-a-day) and have them at hand when I'm in the library. And scheduling future tasks can be simple on paper: I can write "pick up dry cleaning" (to use a to-do example from Bit Literacy) on the appropriate page in my Moleskine when I'm at the dry cleaner, instead of having to hold the thought until I'm at a computer.

About paper, Mark Hurst and I will have to disagree. But in all other respects, I found Bit Literacy persuasive and inspiring (so persuasive and inspiring that I ordered a copy within an hour or so of getting the book from the library). I recommend Bit Literacy to anyone interested in bringing clarity and sanity to life among the bits.

And now I shall contemplate the emptiness of my in-box.

Bit Literacy (Book website)

¹ Why 43 folders? 31 + 12 = 43. One folder for each day of the month, and one for each month of the year.

Proust was the next president

Two nights ago I dreamed that I met Barack Obama and told him that I was reading Proust. "I respect that," he said. How curious then to find a partial sentence in Proust that seems Obama-like in its optimism:

our worst fears, like our greatest hopes, are not outside our powers, and we can come in the end to triumph over the former and to achieve the latter.

Marcel Proust, Finding Time Again, translated by Ian Patterson (London: Penguin, 2003), 344

In 2004, in waking life, I met Barack Obama, before I began reading Proust.

[The hope-filled title of this post alludes to Jonah Lehrer's Proust Was a Neuroscientist.]

All Proust posts (via Pinboard)

The Internet and literacy

A briefly encouraging passage from a deeply depressing piece by Caleb Crain on the future of reading. And if what follows is encouraging news — well, just read:

The Internet, happily, does not so far seem to be antagonistic to literacy. Researchers recently gave Michigan children and teen-agers home computers in exchange for permission to monitor their Internet use. The study found that grades and reading scores rose with the amount of time spent online. Even visits to pornography Web sites improved academic performance. Of course, such synergies may disappear if the Internet continues its YouTube-fuelled evolution away from print and toward television.

Twilight of the Books (New Yorker)

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Freshmen surveyed
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Zadie Smith on reading

Ten best "dowdy world" gifts

In time for holiday shopping, forty or fifty years or so too late:

For her	For him
1. Mink stole	New set of golf clubs
2. Fountain pen	Fountain pen
3. Blender	Electric shaver
4. Monogrammed hankies	Monogrammed hankies
5. Charm for charm bracelet	Tie
6. Monogrammed stockings	Monogrammed socks
6. Stockings	Socks
7. Dusting powder	Old Spice
8. Robe	Robe
9. Box from Emperor of Japan's house	Bowling-ball bag
10. Carton of cigarettes	Carton of cigarettes

Notes
1. The ultimate gifts, no? And why a new set of golf clubs? Because the recipient is of course already a golfer. A mink stole though would of course be a first.

2. The pen must be practical, a workhorse: a Parker 51 or 61, for instance, not a Mont Blanc. See Norman Rockwell's illustration, which I dare not reproduce here: "They gave each other a Parker 61."

6. Just kidding.

7. All I know about dusting powder: Women used it, and I brought it in as a teacher's present in elementary school.

9. Hommage à The Honeymooners. In the episode "'Twas the Night Before Christmas" (broadcast December 24, 1955), Ralph gets Alice "a box to keep hairpins in," made of "2,000 matches glued together," from "the house of the Emperor of Japan." Or so he was led to believe. Alice gets Ralph a bag for his bowling ball.

10. Cigarettes? Sure. Cartons were familiar holiday presents in the dowdy world. We gave our mailman Lucky Strikes; my grandfather got Camels. Lots of people got Chesterfields.



[Chesterfield Christmas ad, 1938, from Tikigirl at Flickr.]

[No minks were harmed in the making of this post. I have never golfed. Orange Crate Art is a smoke-free zone. Your "dowdy world" gift suggestions are welcome in the comments.]

Related reading
All "dowdy world" posts (via Pinboard)

Related viewing, from YouTube
Kent satisfies best at Christmas (Dick Van Dyke and Rose Marie)
This Christmas, make it "Camel time"

Proust on aging

The last part of In Search of Lost Time is, among other things, an extended discourse on aging and on the ways in which we do and do not notice it, in others and in ourselves. Here the narrator is talking with Gilberte, the beautiful girl of his childhood, now a woman whom he will later mistake for her mother:

Gilberte de Saint-Loup said to me: 'Shall we go and dine, just the two of us, at a restaurant?' As I replied: 'So long as you don't think it compromising to dine alone with a young man,' I heard everybody round me laughing, and hastily added: 'or rather, with an old man.' I felt that the phrase which had caused the laughter was one that my mother might have used when speaking of me, my mother for whom I was always a child. Now I noticed that in matters of self-examination, I looked at things from the same point of view as she did. If I had finally taken in, like her, certain changes which had occurred since my early childhood, these were nevertheless now very old changes. I had stopped at the one which once made someone say, almost before it was true: 'He's almost a grown-up young man now.' I still thought this, but these days it was vastly out of date. I was not fully aware how much I had changed. But what, in fact, had those people who had just burst out laughing really noticed? I had not a single grey hair, my moustache was black. I would like to have been able to ask them what it was that revealed the evidence of this terrible thing.

Marcel Proust, Finding Time Again, translated by Ian Patterson (London: Penguin, 2003), 239-40

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Introducing Mlle. Swann (from Swann's Way)

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