Boredom and attention

Wally: So I mean, is that our problem? Is that what you're saying? Are we just like bored, spoiled children who've been lying in the bathtub all day, playing with their plastic duck, and now they're thinking, What can I do?

Wallace Shawn and André Gregory, screenplay for My Dinner with André (New York: Grove, 1981), 91

*

Many of the things we find interesting are not so by nature, but because we took the trouble of paying attention to them. Until one starts to collect them, insects and minerals are not very appealing. Nor are most people until we find out about their lives and thoughts. Running marathons or climbing mountains, the game of bridge or Racine's dramas are rather boring except to those who have invested enough attention to realize their intricate complexity. As one focuses on any segment of reality, a potentially infinite range of opportunities for action — physical, mental, or emotional — is revealed for our skills to engage with. There is never a good excuse for being bored.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Finding Flow: The Psychology of Engagement with Everyday Life (New York: Basic Books, 1997), 128

[The back cover of Finding Flow notes that the name Csikszentmihalyi is pronounced "chick-SENT-me-high."]

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Calling Bandi

News from the UK:

A foul smell permeating London and parts of England over the past two days is due to farmers on the European continent spreading manure in their fields, forecasters and British farmers said Saturday.

Experts say the inescapable farmland smell permeating London will stick around for a couple of days.

Forecasters said a stiff breeze from the east is carrying the smell across the North Sea from Belgium, the Netherlands and even Germany. They said the smell is likely to hang around through the weekend as the easterly wind continues.

"The word for fertilizer": is that an innocent slogan, or a joke that Bandini's customers would have caught? (Think of another word for "fertilizer.") Either way, this smell calls for a persuasive product spokescharacter to explain it away. It's time for Bandi.

[Image from a 1959 matchbook cover, found in Warren Dotz and Masud Husain's Meet Mr. Product (San Francisco: Chronicle, 2003).]

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The Entman Award

And the Entman (imaginary award of my devising) goes to Saul Levmore, Dean of the University of Chicago Law School, who has announced a block on Internet access in classrooms. From his e-mail to students:

Visitors to classes, as well as many of our students, report that the rate of distracting Internet usage during class is astounding. Remarkably, usage appears to be contagious, if not epidemic. Several observers have reported that one student will visit a gossip site or shop for shoes, and within twenty minutes an entire row is shoe shopping. Half the time a student is called on, the question needs to be repeated.

In law school! (I am low on exclamation points.)

I commend Dean Levmore for his sane and courageous position on Internet access in classrooms, and I hope that college and university administrators elsewhere follow his example.

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Earthquake

I woke early this morning to a strange sound — as if a behemoth truck were driving across the roof of my house. The rumbling (heard, not felt) lasted a few seconds, and I went back to sleep.

It turns out to have been an earthquake. There are no signs of damage. I've heard no sirens. No significant attention on the television news. A local morning show just mentioned (mentioned!) the earthquake during its weather forecast.

Update, 10:16 a.m.: We just had an aftershock, a few seconds with bookcases shaking.

5.4 earthquake rocks Illinois (Associated Press)

Parents and stars

Relative Esoterica's wonderful post about Mildred Bailey got me thinking and writing about a wonderful James Schuyler poem, which in turn made me resolve to ask my wonderful parents about their various brushes with the stars during their years working in New York City. Here are the goods:

My mom once saw Rex Harrison and Lilli Palmer together. My mom also rode in Rockefeller Center elevators that carried Christine Jorgensen and Nancy Walker.

As I noted in my Schuyler post, my dad once said hello to Groucho Marx. And he once met Doro Merande, who asked "What are you building there?" My dad also said hello to Walter Abel, Hans Conried, and Abe Vigoda on the sidewalks of New York.

And he once saw Roy Eldridge and Maxine Sullivan leaving a building on Broadway. "Hi, Maxine," said my dad. "Well, how did you know?" asked Maxine Sullivan. (Because my dad was and is a jazz fan; that's how.) Roy Eldridge kept to himself, looking off somewhere behind sunglasses.

Best of all: sitting with fellow construction workers outside a jobsite, my dad was granted a fleeting vision of Katharine Hepburn, driving by in a convertible. "Hello, fellas," she said.

I've met and talked with many great people in the worlds of music (mostly jazz) and writing, but stars? Not many. I once saw James Coco in a Greenwich Village grocery store, and Gene Shalit in a midtown theater lobby. I watched Nancy Walker rehearse a commercial for Bounty paper towels at a discount department store (the Rosie's Diner of those commercials was close by). And I once talked with André Gregory (as in My Dinner with André) in the lobby of the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Elaine encouraged me to introduce myself (I'd seen My Dinner with André seven times). André Gregory had seen the movie six times.

Reader, feel free to share your constellations in the comments. If you have recollections of parental brushes with the stars that would take us further back in time, those are most welcome too.

(Hi, Mom and Dad! Happy birthday, Mom!)

Apostrophes and vandalism

From Greater Manchester, England:

Despite her anger that someone had dec­ided to slash her tyres and deface her car, Rachel Ward couldn't help but smile when the vandal missed the apostrophe in "can't."

"I thought they had a cheek asking if I can't read when they clearly can't spell," said the 27-year-old. The vandalism was bad enough but then they add insult to injury by forgetting the apostrophe."

Car defaced, with bad punctuation (Metro)

ABC's Fight Night

ABC's management of tonight's Democratic debate reminds me why I watch so little television. This debate was a travesty: billed as "Clinton vs Obama" and (at least online) "Fight Night," it was an exercise in badgering and baiting on the part of moderators Charles Gibson and George Stephanopolous. With all the urgent issues facing the country, Gibson and Stephanopolous spent close to one hour (of two) on shallow distractions and absurdities — flag lapel pins, quantitative analysis of other people's patriotism, the Weather Underground, and the question of whether each candidate would promise to choose the other as a running mate. Afghanistan? Education? Energy? Food prices? Housing? Mortgages? Torture? The unitary executive? Veterans' well-being? Not a single question. Audience members seemed to be jeering Gibson at debate's end. Good on them.

And having George Stephanopolous — from Bill Clinton's White House! — co-moderate a debate that involves the boss's wife: my mind boggles. Pass the Crown Royal.

Overheard

Two hours before I begin teaching Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God, I hear a young male voice in the hallway beyond my office, something about skipping a class: "You won't miss anything. It's a woman talking."

To which the appropriate reply is that of Janie herself, to her husband Joe Starks, a man who's always wanted to be a "big voice" and a "big ruler of things":

"Sometimes God gits familiar wid us womenfolks too and talks His inside business. He told me how surprised He was 'bout y'all turning out so smart after Him makin' yuh different; and how surprised y'all is goin' tuh be if you ever find out you don't know half as much 'bout us as you think you do."

All "Overheard" posts (via Pinboard)

The tenderometer

The dowdy-surreal machinery of Ruth Griswold's The Experimental Study of Foods (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1962) continues to delight me. Here is a description of what might be called the penetrometer and shortometer's kooky younger brother, the one who does Jerry Lewis imitations and squirts milk out his nose:

An instrument called a recording strain-gauge denture tenderometer being developed at Massachusetts Institute of Technology may prove satisfactory for a wider range of foods that some of the other instruments. This apparatus is fitted with human dentures mechanically arranged to simulate the frequency and motions of chewing. These motions are more complex than the simple operations of shearing, pressing, or puncturing performed by some of the other instruments. The strain-gauge tenderometer has been used for apples, potatoes, peas, pears, peaches, and bread.

Griswold alas provides no photograph of the strain-gauge denture tenderometer, and 1950s journal articles mentioning this item relegate it to endnotes. Below, a pocket-sized strain-gauge denture tenderometer (out of its leak-proof carrying case). Those other instruments, they're just boring.

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Orange crate art

[Packing oranges at a co-op orange packing plant, Redlands, Calif. Santa Fe R.R. trip. March 1943. Photograph by Jack Delano (1914–1997).]

This photograph is one of the 3265 photographs that the Library of Congress has made available via Flickr. Wikipedia has an article on photographer Jack Delano.

And now it's back to work at the Continental Paper Grading Co.

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