Penguin's Great Ideas

From a review of Penguin's Great Ideas, third series:

These books are too beautiful. If I'm going to read a book, I want to be able to tote it around in a jacket pocket, to leave it in the bathroom to get warped by steam, or in the kitchen to get stained with ketchup.

Heinz, I hope.

Penguin's Great Ideas volumes are beautiful books indeed. You can see the covers from all three series (first, second, third) at designer David Pearson's website. No info available as to when these books will be available in the U.S. (I've asked.)

[Update, August 25, 2008: Penguin has no plans to publish the books in the United States. How to get them? More information in this post: Penguin's not so great idea.]

Proust in the New York Times crossword puzzle

[Welcome, syndicated-Times puzzlers!]

In today's puzzle, 36-Down, seven letters:

"Love is reciprocal       ": Marcel Proust

The answer is TORTURE (all caps, the crossword convention). The passage:

To be loved, one need not be sincere, nor even good at lying. By love, I mean here a kind of mutual torture.

The Prisoner, translated by Carol Clark (London: Penguin, 2003), 96

Yet another passage that won't soon appear on a Proust gift tag or note card.

My favorite clue in today's puzzle is 23-Across, "Field with bases" (four letters). Highlight the empty space between the colon and period if you want to see the answer: MATH.

Related reading
All Proust posts (Pinboard)

Review: Inara George and Van Dyke Parks

Inara George with Van Dyke Parks, An Invitation (Everloving, 2008)

Overture : Right as Wrong : Accidental : Bomb : Duet : Dirty White : Idaho : Rough Design : Tell Me That You Love Me : Don't Let It Get You : Oh My Love : Family Tree : Night Happens

Songs by Inara George ("Family Tree" written with Mike Andrews)
Arrangements by Van Dyke Parks

Playing time 38:46

An Invitation is a collaboration across generations and a recording to treasure. Inara George and Van Dyke Parks go back a long way — to 1974, when Inara (daughter of Little Feat's Lowell George) was born.

An Invitation is much like a theater-piece, complete with overture and a closing "Good night, good night to all of you." The songs are beautiful and spare; George sings them in a strong, cool, unstagey voice that makes the meaning of every word register. Her poignant and witty lyrics offer varied glimpses of someone in love, desirous, self-abasing, jubilant, ruefully self-aware, still hopeful:

Want to be a kite
And fly above your house
And then drop down into your room ("Right as Wrong")

I'm like a pet salamander
Just cut a few holes for some air
Carry me everywhere ("Tell Me That You Love Me")

I could be
Your century
I want to settle down
I could be
Your baby tree
I want to settle down ("Family Tree")

You're coming out
You bought the ticket
This is the greatest ("Don't Let It Get You")

I can break my heart
Before we start
Before we even start ("Duet")

A state of mind
To intertwine
Now love is blind
A rough design
But still sturdy ("Rough Design")

Parks' arrangements for small orchestra are elegant and endlessly supportive. There's a marked Gershwin influence (including a moment of An American in Paris) and some Argentine and French touches, especially when Parks plays accordion.

The throes of love? Accordion? I fear that this account might make An Invitation seem anything but inviting. But inviting it is. I've listened to this CD five times in two days, and will be listening again and again. It's contemporary music of the highest order. You are invited to try before you buy, at the Everloving website.

Other Van Dyke Parks posts
A new VDP interview
That (In)famous Line
VDP interviewed
VDP and the present tense
VDP on verb tenses
VDP speaks

Van Dyke Parks on verb tenses

From an interview with Inara George and Van Dyke Parks on the occasion of their collaboration An Invitation:

Interviewer: You said before you "stay out of the present tense." What's brought you back?

VDP: I meant in work — I don't mean psychologically. I'm in the prism of current understanding. I got the newspapers and I read them. But my reasons for that — "I stay out of the present tense." I think reverse is the most powerful gear. The torque! Things pass, and remembrance is the most instructive arena there is. It's wonderful because there’s nothing creative about it!

Related post
Van Dyke Parks and the present tense

Name brands and Brand X

In my supermarket life, I've been a sucker for name brands, having grown up in a family with a healthy respect for them. Our ice cream was Breyer's. Peas came from LeSueur. We shunned Brand X. This attitude was born not of affluence but of my parents' post-Depression intent to provide the best that it was within their means to provide.

Even as a frugal graduate student, I avoided Brand X. It never occurred to me to buy something other than, say, Skippy or Smucker's. Now things are different, and our kitchen is filled with store-brand items. But there are at least four name brands I can never forsake: Cheerios, Grape-Nuts, Gulden's, and Heinz.

As to the cereals: store brands don't compare. Oaty O's and their ilk are porous compared to Cheerios. Crunchy Nuggets and company lack Grape-Nuts', well, nuttiness.

And as to the condiments: Gulden's and Heinz are mustard and ketchup. I like Dijon too (store brand, way cheaper than Grey Poupon), but Gulden's is the Platonic ideal.

Reader, what name brands are you unwilling to forsake?

Hi and Escher?

I thought first of Lucy's psychiatry stand, but the real inspiration here might be M.C. Escher.

[Hi and Lois, August 19, 2008.]

Related posts
House?
House?
Returning from vacation with Hi and Lois
Sunday at the beach with Hi and Lois
Vacationing with Hi and Lois

NowDoThis

When keeping track of things to do, I prefer paper. But I still find NowDoThis an attractive and useful online tool. It has the virtue of extreme simplicity: a text area of unvarying size in which to enter and arrange an unlimited number of items (a scroll bar appears when needed). After you save a list, your items appear in large bold type, one at a time, waiting for you to click "done." No registration required.

NowDoThis might prove especially useful in managing time spent in front of the computer. I can imagine, for instance, making a list of everyday online reading —

NY Times obits
Arts and Letters Daily
Inside Higher Ed

and so on, so as to limit idle browsing. Putting such a list in the Firefox sidebar looks like an especially nifty way to stay on task. (Please be sure to include Orange Crate Art on said list.)

Related posts
Ta-da List
A timer to limit browsing

Violet candy and Mad Men

A candy reference in Mad Men tonight: Don Draper describes his father as a man who liked "candy that tasted like violets, in a beautiful purple and silver package." That would be Choward's Violet Flavored Mints, still available today. Violet mints offer "a very unique candy experience," as the C. Howard Company puts it. I keep a package in reserve simply to look at. It's candy from the dowdy world.

When I was a little kid (in the Mad Men era), Choward's lavender gum and violet mints provided two of the curious fragrances that seemed to accompany old people. Cigarettes and Sen-Sen, too, went with old.

Will violet mints now join Frank O'Hara's Meditations in an Emergency as a new object of consumer curiosity?

Related posts
Gum, then, now
Frank O'Hara and Mad Men

Plagiarized comment-spam

I've received two unusual comments over the past two days in response to posts on the films Laura and The Street with No Name. In each case, something was off: neither commenter said anything to engage what I'd written. Think "parallel play." Two Google searches let me understand what was going on: these were not genuine comments at all but excerpts from unrelated (and smart!) online writing about these films.

The comment-spam strategy here is to look for a blog post with a key word or phrase and adding a pseudo-comment whose content is cut and pasted from elsewhere (in these instances, from film blogs). The commenters' URLs make it clear that the sole purpose of these phony comments is to drive traffic to commercial websites, one for bail bonds, one for fountain pens. I deleted both comments after previewing them.

I don't know if such comment-spam is automated or requires manual effort. Either way, I'm amazed that a spammer would expect a return on this investment of time and energy.

By the way, if any reader needs a fountain pen recommendation: Lamy and Pelikan are excellent choices. As to bail bonds, I wouldn't know. I always make bail.

99¢ plus

"The whole thing, now, is the 'plus.'"

A new direction in NYC retail: 99¢ stores in which everything costs 99¢ or more. Read all about it:

The Cost of Retail Survival: 99¢. Or Maybe 99¢ Plus. (New York Times)