Five desks

1
The kitchen table was grey formica, or something like formica, in what could be called a linen pattern, thin crosshatched lines. I did my schoolwork at this table after dinner, first grade through sixth. I remember the groove where the table halves joined — dark, mysteriously sticky, a local line of longitude.

2
The dining-room table was from Ethan Allen, a colonial-furniture store that gave away little bottles of maple syrup. I worked at this table through high school, college, and two years of graduate school. I seldom saw the surface, which was protected by table-pads and a tablecloth, dark green or dark blue.

3
Boards and cinderblocks saw me through almost five years in a Ph.D. program. The holes in the cinderblocks held stationery supplies, correspondence, and light-bulbs. When I think of this desk, I think of tea, cigarettes, and typing at all hours in a bathrobe.

[As you may by now suspect, I've never had a desk.]

4
A utility table, made in Alabama, purchased from an office warehouse. It's the sort of table at which you might find a volunteer group in a mall, but it's much sturdier, with a better finish and no valley. This table once held an Apple //c and now holds the terminal (anybody's) computer in our house.

5
A second kitchen table, but it's in a room we call "the study," perhaps the only study in the world with "We love Randy Rhoads" written on its ceiling (courtesy of the previous owners' son). Elaine assembled and finished this "farmhouse" table, which is as close to a farmhouse as I'm going to get. What this table makes me think of is not a farmhouse but a library, though unlike a library's tables, this table is always already covered in books, papers, index cards, pens, pencils, and bits of life.

*

Here’s a 2015 view of my desk.

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Exuviation in progress

My daughter Rachel sends news of plans to remove twenty-four words from the Collins English Dictionary to make room for "up to 2,000 more."

24 Words the CED Want [sic] to Exuviate (Shed) (Time)

(Thank you, daughter!)

Arthur Parker on "East-Central Illinois"

"I got a bad territory, see? East-central Illinois. God help me."

Sheet-music salesman Arthur Parker (Steve Martin), in Pennies from Heaven (dir. Herbert Ross, 1981)

Sarah Palin's wink did nothing for my posture, but this line from Pennies from Heaven made Elaine and me both sit up a little straighter. I wonder how "east-central Illinois," a term that only east-central Illinoisans seem to use, found its way into Dennis Potter's screenplay.

Thinking with pens and pencils

[See correction below.]

Dutch psychologist Christof van Nimwegen has written a dissertation arguing that pens and pencils are crucial in the development of creativity and intelligence:

In "The Paradox of the guided user: assistance can be counter-effective," van Nimwegen asked two groups to perform the same tasks. The first was allowed use a computer; the second group only got a pen and pencil. The second group executed all tasks faster and performed substantially better. In addition, their solutions to complicated problems were more creative.

What's crucial of course is not ink or graphite (or paper!) but self-reliance—trusting one's mind rather than the machine.

Paper and pencil, not computer, boosts creativity (eNews 2.0)

[Correction, October 8, 2008: I received an e-mail from Christof van Nimwegen stating that he has never investigated the use of pens, pencils, and paper. The description of his work and the quotations attributed to him in the eNews piece thus appear to be wholly inaccurate.]

John, also

Word Face-Off fed a transcript of last night's debate into Wordle, the word-cloud generator.

Joe Biden's most frequently used word (well, name): John, as in John McCain.

Sarah Palin's most frequently used word: also.

(Found via a comment at Boing Boing.)

Sem Co-op snags Penguins

I'm happy to report that the Seminary Co-op Bookstore is able to obtain the third series of Penguin's Great Ideas paperbacks (which Penguin does not plan to publish in the United States). The four books I ordered came in the mail today, same shipping costs as with any other books. Go Sem Co-op!

My favorite cover is this one.

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Thursday Night Live

Says CNN, "You won't want to watch the debate anywhere else." Yes, you might.

The best choice for watching a presidential or vice-presidential debate is C-SPAN. Why? C-SPAN's continuous split-screen lets you see both participants at all times, allowing for all sorts of observations about body language and facial expression.

Dying metaphor of the day

It's "Main Street." As in "Main Street, not Wall Street."

The Main Streets that I know best are largely beyond help, having devolved into lonely stretches of consignment shops, pawnshops, taverns, empty storefronts, empty second-story apartments, more empty storefronts, and the occasional law office or tanning salon. The retail action has gone elsewhere.

Watching CNN today, I caught a sentence about the bailout benefiting "Elm Street." A metaphor in the making?

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Lois and refrigerators

[Hi and Lois, September 30, 2008.]

I'm not sure what's strangest: that the new refrigerator is smaller than the old one (yet fills the same space), that Lois left the family's artworks on the old fridge, that the deliverymen are browsing those works, that they took the fridge with those works still attached, that they haven't realized that the fridge cannot fit in their truck, that Lois' friend didn't see the truck, that Lois' friend doesn't know where old refrigerators go, that refrigerators old and new have wood-grained sides, that the new refrigerator has no handles, or that the new refrigerator has muntins. Follow the lines: they cannot represent doors. Which does make the absence of handles plausible, I suppose.

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Leadbelly at the MLA

A story from Marybeth Hamilton's In Search of the Blues (New York: Basic Books, 2008):

[W]ord of Leadbelly had begun to spread. [John] Lomax's American Ballads and Folk Songs had been published in late October 1934, and it included many of the songs gathered from convicts and credited Leadbelly as an important source. The glowing reviews the book received provoked the head of the Modern Language Association to invite Lomax to unveil his discovery at its annual convention in Philadelphia in late December. Though Lomax claimed to be apprehensive — the idea, he said later, "smacked of sensationalism" — he, Alan [Lomax], and Leadbelly duly took the stage with lecture notes and guitar at the evening smoker in the Crystal Ballroom in the Benjamin Franklin Hotel, billed as "Negro Folksongs and Ballads, presented by John Lomax and Alan Lomax, with the assistance of a Negro minstrel from Louisiana," and sandwiched between a performance of Elizabethan madrigals and a sing-along of sea chanteys.

"[W]ith the assistance of"! The most important person on the stage is thus transformed into a personal assistant and a nameless representative of a type. (Yes, an invisible man.) It's no surprise to learn that John Lomax employed Huddie Ledbetter as a driver and valet.

Edward Sorel could turn this improbable MLA scene into a wonderful First Encounters illustration.