Four (no, six) gift recommendations

All modestly priced, all in time for upcoming holidays. My only connection to these items is as a happy user.

Field Notes 18-Month Calendar. Beautifully printed. Very dowdy. $8.95.

The Jimi wallet. A colorful, sturdy minimalist wallet, made of recycled plastic. A demo explains the design. I've been using a "Safety" Jimi (orange!) for two-and-a-half years. $14.95.

Republic of Tea Assam Breakfast and Earl Greyer. Assam is mighty and malty. Earl Greyer is the best bergamot-flavored tea I've tasted. Elaine and I are big tea-drinkers; these teas are our "good stuff." Fifty teabags for $9.50.

Zebra Mini T3 Ballpoint Pen and TS-3 Mechanical Pencil. Who can resist super-cool miniature writing instruments? What? You know someone who can? Oh. I was asking a rhetorical question. Oh well. $4.75 each.

Multiple-choice (Hi and Lois)

Choose the answer that best explains today's Hi and Lois:

a. The Flagstons have attached a handle to their refrigerator.
b. Spontaneous generation.
c. a. or b.
d. "Leftovers."
e. Who cares? Lois is going goth.

Related reading
All Hi and Lois posts

"Lack of American Roots"

The Atlantic has online a sampling of memos from the Clinton campaign. From Mark Penn to Hillary Clinton, "WEEKLY STRATEGIC REVIEW ON HILLARY CLINTON FOR PRESIDENT CAMPAIGN," March 19, 2007, a passage concerning Barack Obama:

Lack of American Roots

All of these articles about his boyhood in Indonesia and his life in Hawaii are geared towards showing his background is diverse, multicultural and putting that in a new light.

Save it for 2050.

It also exposes a very strong weakness for him — his roots to basic American values and culture are at best limited. I cannot imagine America electing a president during a time of war who is not at his center fundamentally American in his thinking and in his values. He told the people of NH yesterday he has a Kansas accent because his mother was from there. His mother lived in many states as far as we can tell — but this is an example of the nonsense he uses to cover this up.

Elsewhere in this memo (page four), Penn says that the right knows (as Penn of course knew) that Obama is "unelectable except perhaps against Atila [sic] the Hun." Read more:

The Hillary Clinton Memos (The Atlantic)
Mark Penn: The man who blew the presidency (The Independent)

From Lady Killer (1933)

[A cup and saucer have a proud moment on screen.]

In the pre-Code comedy Lady Killer (dir. Roy Del Ruth, 1933), Dan Quigley (James Cagney) rises from theater usher to criminal to movie extra to movie star. Myra Gale (Mae Clarke) is right there with him, sort of. Cagney and Clarke — who shared a grapefruit in The Public Enemy (dir. William A. Wellman, 1931) — are wonderfully dissolute partners. Lady Killer is very funny, rather racy, and now on DVD.

That's Cagney's hand sharing the screen with the china.

Related post
Dowdy cup and saucer

Mellotron demo

"It's a musical computer."

Conductor Eric Robinson (1908-1974) and magician David Nixon (1919-1978) introduce the Melltron:

Mellotron demo (YouTube)

Watch for the slightly crazed look on the face of the "professional pianist" at 2:41: "Mine! All mine!"

Auden and Ashbery

Jascha Kessler fires; John Ashbery fires back: two letters to the Times Literary Supplement concerning Ashbery, W.H. Auden, and the Yale Younger Poets Series. Scroll down for the letters.

(Kessler's real, not a Nabokov character.)

Good advice from Kenneth Koch

I like these lines from Kenneth Koch — the funny generalities ("something," "it"), the figurative railroads ("Internal tracks"), the sudden lapse into philosophy ("contemplated entities"), the simile joining Tristram Shandy and a church, and the shift (at what is the poem's end) from the sound of a kind, wise elder to a more ominous tone and a reminder of "what was" — and is? —"already there."

A sign in Kenya — One Train May Hide Another — inspired this poem. Flickr has photographs of such signs in French. You can hear Koch read the poem at PennSound.

Citation styles (PDFs)

Really useful for students at the end of a semester: three guides to citation styles, PDFs courtesy of the University of California at Berkeley Library:

APA Style Guide
Chicago-Turabian Style Guide
MLA Style Guide

Missing though are explanations of what do with multiple works by one author.

APA: If the works are from the same year, use a letter: (2008a), (2008b).

Chicago: Use a 3-em dash for the author's name: ———.

MLA: Use three hyphens for the author's name: ---.

These are the best guides in PDF form I've found. If anyone can recommend better ones, please do.

Thumb-notches and a ghost

There's something going on wrong (as we say in the blues) in today's Hi and Lois. Or lots of things: the shifting blackboard, the shrinking eraser, the swelling blackboard sill, the creeping W on Hi's jacket (or is that an upside-down M?), and the metamorphosing teacher. And in the second panel, on the far right: a ghost!

But it's good to see that the dictionary's three thumb-notches are where they ought to be. Perhaps this dictionary is a Teacher's Edition, made for use, not display.

Related reading
All Hi and Lois posts

Diane Arbus meets the Platters

Watching The Girl Can't Help It (dir. Frank Tashlin, 1956), I thought of an exchange from Ghost World (dir. Terry Zwigoff, 2001). Rebecca Doppelganger and Enid Coleslaw are attending a high-school graduation party:

Rebecca: This is so bad it's almost good.

Enid: This is so bad it's gone past good and back to bad again.

Those two descriptions cover most of the ninety-seven minutes of The Girl Can't Help It. But there are several minutes in the film that are plainly good — among them, those of a beautiful lip-synced performance by the Platters. As the group pretends to sings "You'll Never Know," there are two brief crowd shots of Diane Arbus-like strangeness:




[Click for larger views.]

These shots were no doubt meant for laughs. In my house, we screamed, "went back" (can't say rewind anymore), hit Pause, and screamed again. Aiee!

Here's a portfolio of Arbus' photographs (browse at your risk).