Time passes

[From Other Men's Women, dir. William A. Wellman, 1931.]

I like calendar shots in movies — such a lovely way to note time's passing. These pages remind me of the Field Notes calendars gracing the kitchen and study in my house.

Another William A. Wellman post
EATS

How to type ¢, é, and ß

A useful website, with keyboard shortcuts for typing symbols, accents, special characters, and "weird punctuation":

How to Type Symbols, Accents, and Special Characters

Florida Citrus responds

The Florida Department of Citrus has responded to Alissa Hamilton's book Squeezed: What You Don't Know About Orange Juice with a website, created in March, Orange Juice Facts. Well, sort-of facts: "The basic principle of orange juice processing is similar to how you make orange juice at home."

A related post
A review of Squeezed

EATS

Look at that sky. Look at that train. Look at that guy flouncing into EATS. Look at EATS.

The opening scene of Other Men's Women (dir. William K. Wellman, 1931) is a beaut. This pre-Code film focuses on a love triangle involving trainmen Bill White (Grant Withers) and Jack Kulper (Regis Toomey) and Jack's wife Lily (Mary Astor). Great lunch-counter talk, great train scenes, great rain, and one remarkable moment of desire and guilt and more desire between Withers and Astor. Joan Blondell shows up as a fast-talking waitress named Marie (just Marie), and trainman Eddie Bailey (James Cagney) sheds his work clothes to dance in evening wear across a floor. (Could this bit have inspired the bit with the dancing maître d' in Woody Allen's The Purple Rose of Cairo?)

Other Men's Women is available in Volume Three of the Forbidden Hollywood Collection (TCM Archives), a set of six Wellman films and two documentaries about this relatively neglected director. Elaine and I have been on a Wellman kick all week. His films are beautifully made, their stories told with great economy and visual imagination. They are now packaged as little scandals, but they are intensely moral films, with a consistent emphasis on figuring out and then doing the right thing — which means, always, self-sacrifice. Wellman's sturdy realism and social conscience seem made for our times. Watch the homeless vets in Heroes for Sale (1933) talking over FDR's Inaugural Address and their country's future, and you'll feel right at home.

As to what's happening in that opening scene: Bill, a hard-drinking joker, has dropped off the engine for a bite to eat. He will count cars while bantering with his waitress, leaving just in time to catch the caboose and run across the tops of cars back to the engine.

Crayola madeleines

A wax museum of sorts, Crayolas through the years:

Brand Spotlight: Crayola (The Dieline, via Coudal Partners)

My madeleine: the 1964 eight-pack (but yes, I had a sixty-four pack).

Other crayon posts
Blue crayon
Early writing

Safari 4

I've been loyal to Firefox for a long time, but Apple's new Safari 4 may change that. It is blazingly fast, available for Mac and PC.

Proust's supplies

Céleste Albaret, Marcel Proust's housekeeper, has been describing Proust's writing posture — "more than half lying down," with knees for a desk:

It was astonishing how fast he could write in a position no one but he could have found comfortable. The pen flew along, line after line of his fine cursive writing. He always used Sergeant-Major nibs, which were plain and pointed, with a little hollow underneath to hold the ink. I never saw him use a fountain pen, though they were becoming popular at that time. I used to buy stocks of nibs, several boxes at a time. He always had fifteen or so pen holders within reach, because if he dropped the one he was using it could only be picked up when he wasn't there, because of the dust. They were just little bits of wood with a metal holder for the nib — the ordinary kind used in schools, like the inkwell, which was a glass square with four grooves to rest the pen and a little round opening with a stopper.

"Some people need a beautiful pen to write with, but all I need is ink and paper. If I didn't have a pen holder, I would manage with a stick."

Céleste Albaret, Monsieur Proust, translated by Barbara Bray (New York: New York Review Books, 2003), 270–271.

I suspect that Montblanc, the maker of this dubious tribute, has no idea how far removed its efforts are from the spirit of Proust's writing. Note in the "About the Author" sidebar the reference to In Search of Lost Time/Remembrance of Things Past as "probably [Proust's] most important work." "Probably": in other words, Montblanc's people have no idea what they're talking about. O tempora, o mores!

But all's not lost. One can still buy Sergeant-Major nibs: here, for instance.

Related reading
All Proust posts (Pinboard)

[About the title: supplies is my word, and has become my family's word, for all manner of stationery items.]

Fun with APA style

Someone has been having fun — of the good clean sort — working on Wikipedia's article on APA style. A sample entry:

Electronic copy of a journal article, three to five authors, retrieved from database:

Costanza, G., Seinfeld, J., Benes, E., Kramer, C., & Peterman, J. (1993). Minutiæ and insignificant observations from the nineteen-nineties. Journal about Nothing, 52, 475–649. Retrieved October 31, 1999, from NoTHINGJournals database.

George must have fought hard to get top billing here.

There are also some Canadian in-jokes, which Canadian readers will understand better than I do.

Andrew Keen, amateurs, Wikipedia, and the Oxford English Dictionary

I've now read a book that I'd long been getting around to reading, Andrew Keen's The Cult of the Amateur: How Today's Internet Is Killing Our Culture (New York: Doubleday, 2007). I too mourn the disappearance of book stores and record stores, but Keen's polemic seems to me mistaken in countless ways. What most bothers me in this book — aside from its soon-predictable reliance on sensationalist anecdotes, sweeping generalizations, and rhetorical questions — is its uncritical trust of those whom Keen calls "gatekeepers," the "seasoned," the "trained," the professionals whose work it is to select for everyone else what is worthy of attention. Keen equates these gatekeepers with those who manage traditional media, whose expert judgments are supposedly being undermined by anyone with an Internet connection. He misses the real point of the Internet: not that it makes everyone an expert (it doesn't of course), but that it allows independent expertise to flourish.

Keen reserves special contempt for Wikipedia. This passage gives a sense of his argument and tone:

On today's Internet, . . . amateurism, rather than expertise, is celebrated, even revered. Today, the OED and the Encyclopaedia Britannica, two trusted reference volumes upon which we have long relied for information, are being replaced by Wikipedia and other user-generated resources. The professional is being replaced by the amateur, the lexicographer by the layperson, the Harvard professor by the unschooled populace.

One might argue about whether the Britannica is what "we" have long relied upon for information (I grew up in a World Book house), but to present the Oxford English Dictionary as the people's choice is to distort reality. And it's certain that there's no user-generated resource now replacing it.

Moreover — here comes irony — Keen seems unaware that the OED is the result of the volunteer work of a considerable number of laypeople, reading books and sending in quotations to document words in use. Granted, laypeople did not write the entries, nor did OED editor James A. H. Murray believe them capable of doing more than collection work: "I have had to come to the conclusion that practically the only valuable work that can be done by the average amateur, & out of the Scriptorium, is that of reading books and extracting quotations."

Keen's contempt for Wikipedia is not shared by everyone on the Oxford side of things. In a recent (post-Cult) interview, Niko Pfund of the Oxford University Press says that he's "very fond" of Wikipedia and uses it daily, and he likens the resource to — yes, here comes more irony — the Oxford English Dictionary:

I'm actually increasingly bored by this question of whether Wikipedia is good or bad, and even more so by the easy vilification of it, a reaction often rooted in professional self-interest. After all, the Oxford English Dictionary, arguably the greatest reference work in the English language (and certainly the greatest reference work ABOUT the English language) found its origins in a wiki model, whereby scholars put out the word to English speakers far and wide that they would welcome hard evidence of the earliest appearances of English words. The response was astonishing (never underestimate the enthusiasm of amateur lexicographers), so much so that the building in which the word submissions were kept, called The Scriptorum, began to sink under the weight of all the paper. Wikipedia is here to stay and its evolution will be one of the more interesting publishing and technology stories in the next decade.

I wonder what Andrew Keen would say to that.

[The Murray quotation is from K.M. Elisabeth Murray, Caught in the Web of Words: James A. H. Murray and the Oxford English Dictionary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979). One prolific OED contributor, William Chester Minor, did his work from an insane asylum. That story is told in Simon Winchester's The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary (New York: HarperPerennial, 1998).]

Who blogs?

Jonathan Rauch suspects that it's introverts who blog. Recent studies suggest that "openness to new experience" and neuroticism are key factors:

The results of two studies indicate that people who are high in openness to new experience and high in neuroticism are likely to be bloggers. Additionally, the neuroticism relationship was moderated by gender indicating that women who are high in neuroticism are more likely to be bloggers as compared to those low in neuroticism whereas there was no difference for men.

Rosanna E. Guadagno, et al., Who blogs? Personality predictors of blogging (Computers in Human Behavior)

So if someone accuses me of being neurotic, I can reply, "What difference does it make?"