No Kindle for me

From Cool Tools, a paean to the Kindle, by Alexander Rose:

Yes, it is now time to get a Kindle. . . .

I have discovered the real reason why you want one. It is because you think of books that you want to read while you are reading other books. On the Kindle you have the unique ability to buy the book right then and there, while you are thinking about it, and it appears on the device moments later all via a free cellphone link they call Whispernet. This feature is one of the least discussed, and to me most useful parts of owning a Kindle, especially compared to the other readers out there. It is because of this feature that I am now reading more than ever.

I sometimes feel that I must now be living on Twin Earth, where "reading books" means something quite different from "reading books." To my mind, reading a book involves a form of attention that make Rose's "real reason" almost laughable. I don't want to stop to buy another book while I'm reading, no more than I want to stop to buy another movie while watching one. On Rose's model, reading turns into a mode of consumer activity, impulse buying at that, the Kindle ready at every moment to take your order. The library? Posh! Get that book now. I expect the day will come when one can click on a word or phrase in an e-book — cashmere sweater, Swiss Army Knife — and be presented with a range of objects for purchase.

I don't doubt the enthusiasm with which some readers have greeted the Kindle. But there are many ways to think about one's relation to books. Annotating, re-annotating, lending — these are activities that undergo essential redefinition or become impossible via the Kindle. The craving for content-on-demand seems to miss the ways in which one might want to go back to a book — one's own copy of it — over time, as it accumulates annotations, as it begins to show wear, as it turns into a record of one's reading and one's life experience. And how does one inscribe a gift book on the Kindle?

One of my great pleasures in listening to music is listening to the copy of Miles Davis' Kind of Blue that my dad brought home in 1959. (It left the house with me when I went out on my own.) One corner is torn, the result of my "indexing" my dad's records for him with slips of paper and tape when I was a kid (dumb kid!). This 1959 LP is my favorite Kind of Blue. Such attachment is not merely sentimental — or if it is, it might be necessarily so. We human types get attached to stuff. Proust understood that.

[The last two paragraphs of this post began as a comment I made on this Boing Boing post. Yes, I have Kind of Blue on CD. My dad does too.]

Related reading
From the Doyle edition
"So cheap, so accessible"

George Wein rides again

George Wein, eighty-three, founder of the Newport Folk Festival and the Newport Jazz Festival:

"My legs are shot, but for some reason, my head is doing better than ever."

Wein is returning as producer of both festivals this summer.

The "A Hard Day's Night" chord

Elaine has pointed me to mathematician Jason I. Brown's analysis of the opening chord of The Beatles' "A Hard Day's Night":

"Mathematics, Physics, and 'A Hard Day's Night'" (.pdf download, 92KB)

The mysteries of this chord remind me of André Previn's observation re: Duke Ellington:

"Stan Kenton can stand in front of a thousand fiddles and a thousand brass and make a dramatic gesture and every studio arranger can nod his head and say, 'Oh, yes, that's done like this.' But Duke merely lifts his finger, three horns make a sound, and I don't know what it is!"

[Quoted in Mimi Clar's "The Style of Duke Ellington" (1959), in The Duke Ellington Reader, ed. Mark Tucker (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993).]

Previn must have been thinking of "Mood Indigo."

YouTube bonus links
The Beatles, "A Hard Day's Night"
Duke Ellington, "Mood Indigo"
Peter Sellers, "A Hard Day's Night"

The legendary notebook of . . .

Inspector Bucket has called on the Bagnet family on Mrs Bagnet's birthday. And he has been invited back for next year. Write it down, Inspector, so that you do not forget!

He drinks to Mrs Bagnet with a warmth approaching to rapture, engages himself for that day twelvemonth more than thankfully, makes a memorandum of the day in a large black pocket-book with a girdle to it . . . .

Charles Dickens, Bleak House (1853)

A large black pocket-book with a girdle to it? Ah, Moleskine! — the legendary notebook of Hemingway, Picasso, Chatwin, and Bucket.

I'm impatient with Moleskine's commercial mythology, but I like Moleskine notebooks a lot, girdles and all.

[Girdle: "something that encircles or confines" (Merriam-Webster OnLine), thus the elastic that keeps the notebook shut.]

Hi and Lois watch

Credit where it's due: Hi and Lois has had a three-day streak of fine cartooning. It's difficult to think that the hand behind March 1, 2, and 3 is the hand that drew, say, this February 26 strip — with trick door, lengthening curtains, and shifty muntins.

[Update: It's a four-day streak.]

[Update: The streak is over. Yes, there's an inexplicable slab behind Trixie's thought balloon today. But worse than that: Hi and Lois seems to have turned into Garfield.]

Related reading
All Hi and Lois posts

Aeneid on Facebook

[From Aeneid on Facebook. Click on the magnifying glass after following the link.]

This inspired project is by Erika Grace Carlson and Heather Day.

(via Coudal Partners)

POUND

It has 1.5 million+ views, but it might be new to you: POUND, a short film by Evan Bernard (via YouTube).

Mary Printz, 1923-2009

Mary Printz, whose work at an answering service inspired the musical Bells Are Ringing (and its "Susanswerphone"), has died:

When clients dialed PLaza 2-2232, the agency's number for many years, they knew they could count on discretion and, when required, innovation. Some messages were routine — at least in the world in which Mrs. Printz's clients moved — involving little more than having the service tell the chauffeur to be at such-and-such a place at such-and-such a time.

Others required quick thinking. There was the time, for instance, that Mrs. Printz took a frantic call from Noël Coward, recalled her husband, Bob Printz, in a telephone interview on Friday:

"Mary," Mr. Coward cried, "Marlene has just had a bottle of Scotch and is finished with it, and it's Sunday; I don't have any more. What'll I do?"

Mary Printz, an Ear for the Famous, Dies at 82 (New York Times)

In 1956, Mrs. Printz started her own answering service, Belles Celebrity Secretarial Service. As Belles' owner, she made a cameo appearance in the July 6, 1969 New York Times article "Phone Users Dial FRustration, Too," about problems resulting from "a sharp rise in telephone traffic":

"Telephone service is the worst I've seen it since 1956," Mrs. Printz complained. "There's just no way I can estimate how much business I've lost."

Belles used what the article calls "the troubled PLaza 8 exchange."

Related post
Musical-comedy pencils

"Ambercroombie & Flitch"

That's one of twenty-three ways to be cool, a page's worth of inspiration at The Daily What. Another way: "Irony."

(via notebookism)

[Links are gone.]

I, an aardvark

It was a value-added shopping experience.

[Photograph by Rachel Leddy.]