Snowbound

(A house, in the village.)

MAN
    My little house must think it queer
    To watch my woods fill up with snow.

(He looks out his window, at his woods, distant, wistful. Curtain.)

Life imitating life

"Let me make this perfectly clear. Let me make this perfectly clear: I didn't do anything wrong. I'm not guilty of any criminal wrongdoing."

Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich, on The View this morning, after declining an invitation to do his (reportedly great) Nixon impersonation

A cup, a cup, a cup, a cup, a cup!

In the news:

A team of Swedish and Danish researchers tracked coffee consumption in a group of 1,409 middle-age men and women for an average of 21 years. During that time, 61 participants developed dementia, 48 with Alzheimer’s disease.

After controlling for numerous socioeconomic and health factors, including high cholesterol and high blood pressure, the scientists found that the subjects who had reported drinking three to five cups of coffee daily were 65 percent less likely to have developed dementia, compared with those who drank two cups or less. People who drank more than five cups a day also were at reduced risk of dementia, the researchers said, but there were not enough people in this group to draw statistically significant conclusions.

Dr. Miia Kivipelto, an associate professor of neurology at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm and lead author of the study, does not as yet advocate drinking coffee as a preventive health measure.

Coffee Linked to Lower Dementia Risk (New York Times)

[Post title from the song "Jave Jive" (1940), words by Milton Drake, music by Ben Oakland.]

Hi (and Lois) tech

Last week, the Flagstons sat in their living room watching a wood-grained grey television set. On Inauguration Day, the living room held a flat-screen television. And now it's gone. Perhaps it was a rental?

In today's living room (whose curtains, by the way, have lost their spots), the television, tucked away in a corner, appears to be of a still-older design (as does Thirsty Thurston). Nothing too surprising here: the Flagstons have changed refrigerators twice in the past four months. (Thanks, Jai, for pointing out that second new fridge.)

Elsewhere in today's living room, Hi is talking on an LPhone, whose name derives not from Lois' telephone habits but from the L-shaped dock. Note that the keypad changes as you talk. Sweet.



The strangest bit of Hi (and Lois) tech in the room is that light switch, resembling no known light switch.

Related reading
All Hi and Lois posts

Five pens

1
A Parker T-Ball Jotter: the first pen I remember using with pleasure, probably in the fourth grade. The pen was made of stainless steel and grey plastic. The neutral tones blended nicely with the graphite-smeary interior of the pencil case at the front of my loose-leaf. At some point the grey plastic developed a crack that filled with blue ink.

Ink: the Jotter's was gummy and sweetly fragrant. I wish that it were available to the nose as well as to memory.

This pen must have come from the OK Bookshop, the source of all school supplies, a corner paperbacks and stationery store on New Utrecht Avenue, Borough Park, Brooklyn, under the El tracks. The owner of the store sat at a desk in a small alcove. He used a device on his shoulder that allowed him to talk on the telephone hands-free. My mother once checked with him — or with someone else who worked there — about whether Man from U.N.C.L.E. novels were "appropriate" for readers my age. (They were.) Ian Fleming's work no doubt put that worrisome question in her head.

As a boy, I must have liked this pen's multi-sectioned name. "Hey, Mike, what kind of a pen is that?" "It's a Parker T-Ball Jotter." Like "United States of America" or "John Fitzgerald Kennedy."

2
A variety-store ball-point pen, transparent red plastic with a white push-button mechanism. Push the plunger down and the point appears. Press the little button on the side of the pen and the point retracts. I cannot remember writing with this pen, but I remember using it as a walkie-talkie one night while spying in a Robert Hall clothing store in Brooklyn. (The rest of the family was shopping.) Espionage and cryptography were major factors in my childhood, which drew considerable inspiration from U.N.C.L.E. and Clifford Hicks' novel Alvin's Secret Code.

[Lost years: a long blur of Bics, Flairs, and Pilot Razor Points.]

3
The Faber-Castell Uni-Ball: I wrote my dissertation with it, or them. Many Uni-Balls!

The Uni-Ball was part of a work routine that I remember as strangely pleasant. I wrote in longhand on legal-sized pads with a Boston University Law School imprint. These pads had an enormous left margin, great for endnotes and revision by accretion. (I've never seen such pads since, though I know they're still around.) Every weekday, I'd write, then type (first on an Olympia manual, later on a Panasonic electronic typewriter). In the afternoon I'd walk to a photocopy shop in the Coolidge Corner Arcade (Brookline, MA) and get my typescript copied before editing. I often added a trip to Beacon Stationery to buy envelopes, folders, and another Uni-Ball or two.

The matte black plastic, the flat clip, the funny notches at the top of the cap: all features of a simple, beautiful design. For a long time, the Uni-Ball meant "writing."

4
"Please don't get me a fountain pen": I remember telling my wife Elaine that while disserting. Yes, she was thinking about a present to celebrate the end. I'm not sure how it is that fountain pens were in the air. Elaine wrote with one — an inexpensive Geha with an incredibly smooth nib. I'm guessing that my pleasure in trying the Geha made a fountain pen an obvious choice.

The pen that Elaine gave me was a Montblanc of Uni-Ball-like simplicity, made of stainless steel, not "precious resin." It was, of course, just what I needed. I wrote with it through my first years of teaching and turned into a serious fountain-pen fan, switching early on from cartridges to bottled ink (the hard stuff). And then the grippers inside the slip-on cap began to lose their grip, and a shirt pocket turned black, and it was time to put the pen in its case and find another.

5
I had no idea how complicated finding another fountain pen would prove. I started with a Sheaffer that refused to dispense ink. (I knew nothing about cleaning a pen, nor did the people at the office-supply store, who just gave me a refund.) Getting a pen turned into getting pens, all relatively modest, before I found what has become my everyday writer, a Pelikan, purchased in the summer of 1998. This pen has green stripes, a fine nib, and takes bottled ink. It has never leaked or failed to write. Its maintenance has involved nothing more than an occasional flushing with water and — just twice — a dab of silicone paste to keep the piston moving freely.

My Pelikan has taught me to think about price in relation to use: this pen has turned out to be a much less expensive proposition than, say, a ten-year supply of Uni-Balls. Since 1998, virtually everything of any length that I've written, I've written with this pen (including the draft of this post).

Thank you, Elaine, for not listening to me, all the way back in Brookline.

Happy National Handwriting Day to all.

Related posts
Five desks
Five radios
National Handwriting Day

On "American music"

Van Dyke Parks, in an interview concerning Song Cycle:

Aaron Copland (who'd given me an A in a collegiate test) was once asked, "What is American music?" He answered, “American music is music that was written in America.” I believe that explains the penchant that some music observers have for branding Song Cycle "American."

It appears that Song Cycle will be reissued in 5.1 sound later this year.

A related post
Van Dyke Parks' Song Cycle

Living on credit (Dickens)

For these times:

"Responsibility, my dear Miss Summerson?" he repeated, catching at the word with the pleasantest smile, "I am the last man in the world for such a thing. I never was responsible in my life — I can't be."

"I am afraid everybody is obliged to be," said I, timidly enough: he being so much older and more clever than I.

"No, really?" said Mr Skimpole, receiving this new light with a most agreeable jocularity of surprise. "But every man's not obliged to be solvent? I am not. I never was. See, my dear Miss Summerson," he took a handful of loose silver and halfpence from his pocket, "there's so much money. I have not an idea how much. I have not the power of counting. Call it four and nine pence — call it four pound nine. They tell me I owe more than that. I dare say I do. I dare say I owe as much as good-natured people will let me owe. If they don't stop, why should I? There you have Harold Skimpole in little. If that's responsibility, I am responsible."

Charles Dickens, Bleak House (1853)

Three inaugural moments

Two of my three favorite moments from today's speaking are from President Obama's Inaugural Address:

Starting today, we must pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, and begin again the work of remaking America. For everywhere we look, there is work to be done. . . .

What is required of us now is a new era of responsibility — a recognition, on the part of every American, that we have duties to ourselves, our nation, and the world, duties that we do not grudgingly accept but rather seize gladly, firm in the knowledge that there is nothing so satisfying to the spirit, so defining of our character, than giving our all to a difficult task.

These passages speak for themselves in their insistence upon dedication and seriousness of purpose. But I hope I'm not hearing things when I detect an echo of Dorothy Fields and Jerome Kern in the exhortation to pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, and start all over again. I like the idea of bringing the lyric of an American popular song to the most solemn of occasions. If you've never seen Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers in Swing Time (1936), go ahead: click on that link. Right now: I insist. But do come back.

Moment no. 3 is from Rev. Joseph Lowery's benediction, the closing passage, which joins an 1864 Anglican hymn, "For All the Saints," to a bit of African-American folkloric observation:

Lord, in the memory of all the saints who from their labors rest, and in the joy of a new beginning, we ask you to help us work for that day when black will not be asked to get back, when brown can stick around, when yellow will be mellow, when the red man can get ahead, man, and when white will embrace what is right. Let all those who do justice and love mercy say Amen.

I think that "yellow, mellow" and "red man, get ahead, man" are Lowery's rhymes, not traditional ones. Either way, that benediction made it difficult to remember much of anything about Rick Warren's invocation or Elizabeth Alexander's rather bland poem. If I were thirty years younger, I'd say that Rev. Lowery brought it.

If you're wondering about the beginning of Lowery's benediction, it's the final verse of the poem that became the song known as "The Negro National Anthem," James Weldon Johnson's "Lift Every Voice and Sing."

And if you want to see Elizabeth Alexander's poem with its proper line breaks (they seem to have eluded all news organizations), the poem is at Poets.org: "Praise Song for the Day."

More reading
Text of President Obama's Inaugural Address (Time)
Text of Rev. Lowery's benediction (Associated Press)

[I just realized: "there is work to be done": George and Ira Gershwin, "Strike Up the Band" (1927)!]

An inaugural poem

[Prose poem by me. Thanks to David Frauenfelder, who alerted me to the 1000 inaugural poets project, and to Elaine, who just wrote a piece to celebrate Inauguration Day. David wrote a poem too: "Blue Janus."]

MLK

One day before Inauguration Day, this passage seems especially appropriate:

Because Negroes can quite readily become a compact, conscious and vigorous force in politics, they can do more than achieve their own racial goals. American politics needs nothing so much as an injection of the idealism, self-sacrifice and sense of public service which is the hallmark of our movement. Until now, comparatively few major Negro leaders of talent and unimpeachable character have involved themselves actively in partisan politics. Such men as Judge William Hastie, Ralph Bunche, Benjamin Mays, A. Philip Randolph, to name but a few, have remained aloof from the political scene. In the coming period, they and many others must move out into political life as candidates and infuse it with their humanity, their honesty and their vision.

Martin Luther King Jr., Why We Can't Wait (1964)

Wikipedia articles
Ralph Bunche
William Hastie
Benjamin Mays
A. Philip Randolph