Obama!

CNN and MSNBC just called it.

It's been a long, a long time coming, but I know a change is gonna come.

(Thanks, Sam Cooke.)

Serendipitous searching at Big Lots

David Pescovitz posted to Boing Boing yesterday concerning a dissertation by ethnologist Erik Ottoson on "serendipitous searching," which Ottoson defines as "open browsing for anything that awakens the person's interest." "Serendipitous searching" seems to be what explains my attraction to Big Lots — a store that I visit in the hope of finding something surprising and worthwhile. Where else am I going to find pocket packs of Kleenex tissues printed in Thai? Without going to Thailand, that is. (88¢ for six packs, ten tissues each.)

If you like tea and live near a Big Lots, you might seek out two excellent bargains of the moment: Good Strong Tea and Hedley's Tea. I'd never seen either, anywhere. The Big Lots price is $2 for a box or tin of fifty teabags. Good Strong Tea is a product of The East India Company, a Sri Lankan company that appears to be related to the original East India Company in name alone. Good Strong Tea lives up to its name: it's a black tea with a full-bodied, winey flavor. It comes in two varieties, for drinking with or without milk. I've tried without, and I would suspect that with is stronger still, to stand up to the white stuff. Hedley's (from Tea Masters Ceylon, also a Sri Lankan company) is available at Big Lots in a number of varieties. I can vouch for Black Currant, which tastes good hot or iced, and has a less artificial flavor than Twinings Black Currant. Founder and chairman Saman Kasthurirathne guarantees every tin.

[Correction: The address on the box is Sri Lankan, but the East India Company is British, as a friendly e-mail from the company tells me.]

Metaphor of the day

YouTube has the context.

[Calendar page made with iWork '08's Pages.]

All "metaphor" posts (via Pinboard)

Reliving our learning

When I sit down to the piano to compose, I am with the counterpoint assignments I handed in too late to my college theory professor; with the pieces once brought to joyous fruition and with those I abandoned or completed badly; I am with my father, my mother, my sister, my brother tuning his violin, my piano teacher on a Saturday at home in her Chinese dressing gown; with the Mozart concerto I learned at sixteen, with the Berg Piano Sonata, with the Fugue in C Sharp Minor of J.S. Bach. When I am on a train heading into a tunnel, I am engulfed by images of death and darkness, as if pinned beneath a giant calamitous wave. From moment to moment we relive our learning and build upon it.

Allen Shawn, Wish I Could Be There: Notes from a Phobic Life (New York: Penguin, 2007), 140

This passage has me thinking about the frame of mind in which a college student might sit down to work on an essay. Does the student bring to the task a history of accomplishment that fosters confidence in the face of difficulties? Or does he or she relive a history of failure and near-failure that fosters a hopeless fatalism?

What many of my students need to do (and what I try to help them to do) is to unlearn some of the lessons they have been taught and continue to relive: that they're "terrible at grammar," that they "can't write," that they're simply "bad at English." No one sits down to write an essay with the intention not to succeed. But many students acquire along the way the belief that that's the only kind of essay they can write.

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Sports Illustrated and Proust

In April, Odette at Reading Proust in Foxborough linked to a fine post from On-Screen Scientist, detailing one reader's initial inspiration for reading Proust: the words of 1950s quarterback Ronnie Knox, as quoted in the November 3, 1958 issue of Sports Illustrated:

[Quarterback Ronnie Knox of the Toronto Argonauts, an I-like-football-but man: "If I had to make the choice between a month of playing football and a month of reading Marcel Proust, I'd take Proust."]

The Sports Illustrated archive is now online, free to any reader, so I decided to see what part Proust has played in SI history. Between 1958 and 2004, Proust's name appears on thirty-two occasions. Most of these appearances involve metaphorical madeleines. For instance:

Memory works on its own principles. In Remembrance of Things Past, Marcel Proust claims that it was madeleines, small, molded cookies, that had brought his memory, the scenes of childhood and adolescence, flooding back into his mind. The mere taste of a cookie and one of the world's great authors was off for 1,000 pages of reminiscence.

That's O.K. if you're French, but the American in search of his past needs something stronger than cookies. For me it is airplane glue. [J.D. Reed on model-airplane construction, January 5, 1976]

Like Proust's madeleine, the jumbo shrimp provoke a remembrance of the season past. [Robert F. Jones, September 19, 1977]

Its wooden-ness, like Proust's madeleine, opened the floodgates of memory. [Sarah Pileggi on a yo-yo, December 27, 1982]

Steve Rushin weighs in with back-to-back madeleines (no, not really — I'm just attempting to show that I can use a sports metaphor):

The scent of a pastry set Proust off on a recollection of childhood three volumes long, each the size of a breeze block. Likewise, the distinctive odor of the Metrodome — of concrete and Raid and grill disinfectant — had me instantly feeling 16 upon inhaling it again last week. [October 21, 2002]

One whiff of a long-forgotten pastry set Proust off on a three-volume remembrance of things past. For me, insect repellent is Little League baseball, just as sledding is instantly evoked by a speedball of Swiss Miss and Vicks VapoRub. [July 7, 2003]

Sometimes the name Proust is a trope for all things brainy and difficult:

Where sport is concerned, a revolution has occurred. Bearded and barefoot students today find it possible to think about the draft, drugs, Marcel Proust and Fran Tarkenton simultaneously and without any sense of ludicrousness. [John McCormick, May 20, 1968]

Academic accomplishment and social activity are more important at Virginia than football success. For instance, the 1975 football program contains articles dealing with William Faulkner and Marcel Proust, and drinking during games often takes precedence over such things as paying attention to cheerleaders. [Robert W. Creamer, December 8, 1975]

As for pitching, well, like Cleveland general manager John Hart, we'll get around to that later. For now it's a lineup that's deeper than Proust that has the Indians flying. [Tom Verducci, May 24, 1999]

And sometimes Proust signifies fragility:

"I always said he had a delicate side. It comes out completely unexpectedly. It's his Proustian side. Tell me was he very attractive? I try to be broad-minded." [Ernest Hemingway, dialogue from "Miss Mary's Lion," January 3, 1972]

Did Proust jog? Why, the man could hardly get out of bed. [Ron Fimrite, October 8, 1979]

There are some wonderful one-of-kind Proust moments. Here, two comparative literature students liken writers to basketball players:

Proust (Bob Cousy) — Good peripheral vision.

James Joyce (Lew Alcindor) — If you like him, he's the greatest.

Yeats (The old Celtics). [Peter Ellis and Jan Feidel, April 26, 1971]

And a surprising passage in an article about boxers Ingemar Johnasson and Floyd Patterson invokes Proust's cork-lined room. Ponder a world in which the general reader was assumed to know enough to understand the reference:

Pursuing his happiness, if not Ingemar's, Patterson has been sparring in the Napoleon Room, Section 3. This is a free-form auditorium with ghastly brass chandeliers and cork walls. It might better be named the Proust Room. [Gilbert Rogin, March 13, 1961]

Quarterback Ronnie Knox has some fellow Proustians among athletes and sportswriters:

"I can't stand fiction, except for Dostoevsky and Melville, so I stick mainly to books about sociology, philosophy and political thought. I read a lot of Kafka, along with Camus, some Proust, Hegel, Rousseau and Mill." [George Saimes, Buffalo defensive back, on his literary tastes, October 18, 1965]

"He's a bulldog on a story, but a sweetheart of a man," says sports editor Ed Pope of the Miami Herald, who was a reporter for 50-odd years and still recalls his first meeting with Povich, at the 1950 Sugar Bowl. "I was walking down a corridor of the old St. Charles Hotel," Pope says, "and I saw him through an open door. There was my idol, the first and only sportswriter I've ever seen reading Marcel Proust." [Saul Wisnia, on sportswriter Shirley Povich, September 18, 1995]

But Proust of course was no sportsman:

"Be at No. 15 Place Vendôme Monday morning at 9:15 sharp," the wire read. No. 15 Place Vendôme is the address of Paris' Ritz Hotel, where two days earlier my wife and I had met the owner, Charles Ritz, and had promptly earned his disapproval of our fly-casting techniques. I wanted to talk to him not about fishing but about the literary associations of the Ritz—which is so very rich in them—but when I asked Charles for his recollections of Proust, who for years dined there nightly, he said, "I may have seen him. He was another flyswatter." That was Charles' name for anybody who was not a fly-fisherman. I dropped the subject." [William Humphrey, July 16, 1979]

The no. 1 Proustian at Sports Illustrated was Robert Cantwell, a journalist, biographer, and, in the 1930s, a novelist. A memorial tribute by publisher Kelso F. Sutton in the December 18, 1978 SI quotes F. Scott Fitzgerald praising Cantwell as a writer who "'learned a better lesson from Proust than Thornton Wilder did and has a destiny of no mean star.'"

Here is Cantwell writing about Emily Post and invoking Proust's world:

Mrs. Post had a good deal in common with the characters in Proust's novels, a sort of lordly impracticality that was coupled with shrewd common sense. [June 22, 1964]

Emily Post in Sports Illustrated? Yes, the article is about motor sports, and Post wrote By Motor to the Golden Gate.

A more extended Proustian excursion, from a profile of Jacqueline Piatigorsky, chess-tournament sponsor:

A vague, opaque expression seems to settle on her features when she remembers Paris, but from the bits and fragments of her recollections you can recognize something: she lived in the sort of social and intellectual world that Marcel Proust described in the early, glowing volumes of Remembrance of Things Past. Devoted students of Proust have carefully traced the connections between the Rothschilds and the originals of some of the characters in Proust's great novel, and Gaston Calmann-Lévy, Proust's publisher, was a close friend of Jacqueline's parents. Faced in reality with the sort of elegance and sumptuous grandeur that Proust evoked so brilliantly in fiction, she wanted to get the hell out of there. [September 5, 1966]

Cantwell's monument to Proust is the article "Bright Threads in His Tapestry," a piece on the role of sport in Proust's life and work, with some beautiful evocations of the second volume of In Search of Lost Time, the world of Balbec and la petite bande of girls who captivate the novel's narrator. Just one passage:

Easily amused by anything ludicrous, they are turned off by people who are thoughtful, sensitive, shy or constrained, qualities, they say, which "don't appeal." But they make an exception in his case, and soon he is spending most of his time among them, awkwardly trying to keep up with the games they play naturally, philosophizing over matters they take for granted. His first impression of them was altogether wrong. They are the daughters of well-to-do families, followers of a new informal fashion, the products of a new wealth and leisure and the habit of physical culture. In love with all of them, he gradually centers on Albertine, "the bacchante with the bicycle" and "the frenzied muse of the golf-course." She has laughing eyes and colorless cheeks, her polo cap giving her a tough, rakish air. The novel turns imperceptibly into the story of their love affair. "Now I was keenly interested in golf and lawn-tennis," he remembered. "The world seemed more interesting to me…I was a new man." [December 17, 1973]

Any Proust reader will want to read all of Cantwell's piece. Anyone else has likely given up on this post by now.

[This post is for my friend Stefan Hagemann, who knows baseball and Proust very well.]

All Proust posts (via Pinboard)

Illinois roadkill

Our state is in more trouble than I thought. From the Associated Press:

The view along Illinois highways this summer should be beautiful — for the turkey vultures.

The state's transportation department says it won't be picking up as much roadkill left along roads because it spent too much of its budget during the winter. IDOT says it spent more than twice the allotted $40 million on clearing ice and snow removal because of rising fuel costs and harsh weather last winter. Dead animals in driving lanes and any deemed hazardous to motorists will be removed. But much of the rest will be left for scavengers.

Kevin Gillespie of the Jackson County Health Department says the roadkill might be smelly and gruesome, but it shouldn't lead to any health risks.

Guerdon

The winning word from the Scripps National Spelling Bee is guerdon. From Merriam-Webster:

guerdon \ˈgər-dən\ noun
Middle English, from Anglo-French guerdun, of Germanic origin; akin to Old High German widarlōn, reward
14th century
: reward, recompense

When I read the news today, I immediately thought of guerdon as accompanied by thy. But where? Not in William Shakespeare. Not in Ezra Pound. In Hart Crane's poem of the Brooklyn Bridge, The Bridge (1930):

Down Wall, from girder into street noon leaks,
A rip-tooth of the sky's acetylene;
All afternoon the cloud-flown derricks turn…
Thy cables breathe the North Atlantic still.

And obscure as that heaven of the Jews,
Thy guerdon… Accolade thou dost bestow
Of anonymity time cannot raise:
Vibrant reprieve and pardon thou dost show.

[Ellipses in the original.]

Mac year

I realized a few days ago that it's been one year since I began using a MacBook at home, having switched over at work several months earlier when I was up for a new computer. And now that I'm writing this post, I realize that my OS X experience has been in many ways a matter of what's missing. No long wait for the computer to start up and shut down. No registry to tinker with. No defragmenting of the hard drive. No Internet Explorer, an unwelcome browser that cannot be uninstalled. No Microsoft Office (I like iWork, thank you). No hours lost trying to get a wireless card to work. And no Vista, which I resolved long ago not to buy.

My XP computer was a pretty spiffy machine: with unnecessary services turned off and all sorts of registry tweaks, it was reliable and responsive (once it started up). But it cannot compare to my MacBook. If I'm writing in a text-editor and want to check a document's spelling, I just hit Shift-⌘-;. If I want to delete a file, ⌘-Delete. If I want to save an image from a DVD, I open VLC and use the snapshot feature. If I want to do almost anything, from opening applications (on the Mac, they're applications, not programs) to moving files to resizing images, Quicksilver makes tasks amazingly simple. Working on a Mac is sometimes so simple that it can at first be baffling. I remember how long it took me to realize how little is involved in installing most applications: dragging the application's icon to the Applications folder. That's it.

I started out on an Apple //c in 1985, and in retrospect, I regret ever moving away from Apple hardware. I could have been one of those people with a closet full of old Macs by now! Instead I bought into the false mythology that Macs were for people in design and that one had to use a PC to do serious writing. And now, when I talk about how great it is to be working on a Mac, I'm surprised by how many people assume that files created on a Windows machine — any files — cannot be opened on a Mac.

My year has not been entirely Windows-free: the classrooms I teach in are equipped with machines running XP. Every time I turn one on and wait for it to warm up (yes, like an old television), I'm reminded how happy I am working on a Mac. Every time I connect my USB memory stick to a classroom computer and wait for "new hardware" to be "installed" (say what?), I'm reminded how happy I am working on a Mac. Every time I put a disc in the tray and wait for the machine to grind away, I'm reminded how happy I am working on a Mac.

And yesterday morning I realized for the first time that I'm finally, really, out of it, Windows-wise: when I started up the Windows version of VLC to play a DVD, I clicked on the wrong dialog button. In OS X dialog boxes, Play, Save, and so on appear to the right; Cancel, to the left. In Windows, it's the other way around. I clicked Cancel, saw that nothing was happening, realized my mistake, and started over. I'm glad that I clicked Cancel on Windows last year.

Online comics

My local newspaper is dropping its daily Doonesbury and Peanuts. The editor assures us though that we will still be able to read Peanuts on Sundays.

What the editor of course cannot mention is that one can read just about any strip online. The Washington Post, for instance, offers a great selection, including Mark Trail and Zippy the Pinhead. Something for everyone!

[Above, a recent scene from Mark Trail. Note the misplaced speech balloon: it appears that Bill is replying.]

Oveness

Another quality adding-a-URL-to-Google experience:

Despite the lack of the second n, I've decided that oveness should be a word, with the pronunciation duly adjusted:

oveness \ UHV-niss \ noun
: a quality or state pertaining to an oven; specifically, an ashen, dry, hard, metallic quality or state, as of food left too long in an oven

Sample sentence: The baked potatoes had too much oveness to them.

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