"Old-world skillz"

Mike Brown at BrownStudies likes Mark Patinkin's piece on outdated skills and has written a fine post collecting several more. Go read it: Old-world skillz.

Some skills that have come to my mind (from my student and stock-clerk days):

Calculating how many lines to leave for a footnote (yes, with a manual typewriter).

Operating a mechanical cash register.

Operating an "imprinter," the gadget once used to process credit-card charges (it involved a bar pulled across a carbon-paper form).

From The Book of Tea

Teaism is a cult founded on the adoration of the beautiful among the sordid facts of everyday existence. It inculcates purity and harmony, the mystery of mutual charity, the romanticism of the social order. It is essentially a worship of the imperfect, as it is a tender attempt to accomplish something possible in this impossible thing we know as life.

*

Tea with us became more than an idealization of the form of drinking; it is a religion of the art of life. The beverage grew to be an excuse for the worship of purity and refinement, a sacred function at which the host and guest joined to produce for that occasion the utmost beatitude of the mundane. The tea-room was an oasis in the dreary waste of existence where weary travellers could meet to drink from the common spring of art-appreciation. The ceremony was an improvised drama whose plot was woven about the tea, the flowers, and the paintings. Not a color to disturb the tone of the room, not a sound to mar the rhythm of things, not a gesture to obtrude on the harmony, not a word to break the unity of the surroundings, all movements to be performed simply and naturally — such were the aims of the tea-ceremony. And strangely enough it was often successful.

Kakuzo Okakura, The Book of Tea. 1906. (Boston: Shambala, 2001), 3, 26–27.

"This impossible thing we know as life," "the utmost beatitude of the mundane": pretty Proustian to my ears. The Book of Tea, a book of aesthetics and philosophy, is available in many print and digital editions.

Obama's "evil eye"

It must be a slow day at the Drudge Report. The big headline: "BEWARE THE OBAMA 'EVIL EYE'":

As the summer begins, White House watchers have spotted a new look by President Obama: The Evil Eye!

Staffers have joked about the menacing glance, which comes when the president meets with world leaders who are not aligned with his progressive view.

White House photographers have captured the "evil eye" in recent weeks, during sessions with German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Colombia's Alvaro Uribev.

Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi got hit with the commander's malocchio last week in the Oval office.

And at least one White House reporter has been on the receiving end of the daggers during a press conference.

As they say, "Developing."

Vietnamese coffee at home

Our kitchen is now the East-Central Illinois Institute for Vietnamese Coffee Studies, equipped with two filters, a can of Cafe du Monde, and (for the non-vegan) a can of Longevity Brand condensed milk. We found these items at our favorite Asian market.

We're now three for three making Vietnamese coffee. The photograph shows the drip process, with coffee collecting above condensed milk. Elaine and I are planning to acquire several more filters ($3.89 each) with which to serve visitors to the Institute.

*

June 6, 2018: The little glass jars that hold Yoplait Oui yogurt make great cups for Vietnamese coffee. A perfect fit for the filter.

Related reading
How to make Vietnamese coffee

Madoff punctuation

"I'm sorry, I know that doesn't help you."

"I'm sorry. I know that doesn't help you."

Chadwick Matlin explains the difference:

Punctuating Bernie (The Big Money)

A related post
After William Carlos Williams

"Nil admirari in stone, the waiter"

[Jean Lenauer as the waiter, My Dinner with André (dir. Louis Malle, 1981).]

25 février. — C'est le nil admirari en marbre, que le garçon de café. Le nimbe d'un Jésus à Emmaüs cerclerait la tête d'un dîneur ou bien le truc d'une féérie enlèverait tout à coup la robe d'une femme, qu'il continuerait à servir la femme, comme si elle était habillée, ou le dîneur comme s'il était un simple mortel.

[February 25. — That's nil admirari in stone, the waiter. The halo of Jesus at Emmaus could encircle a diner's head or a woman's dress disappear by magic, he would continue serving the woman as if she were clothed, or the diner as if he were a mere mortal.]

Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, Journal des Goncourt: 1866–1870, vol. 3 (Paris: Charpentier,1888), 29.

[I found this passage via Marthe Bibesco's The Veiled Wanderer: Marcel Proust, translated by Roland Gant (London: Falcon Press, 1949), which refers to it by means of a very loose, embellished paraphrase. The translation is mine. The Latin expression nil admirari means "to be excited by nothing," "equanimity." My Dinner with André has just been re-released on DVD by the Criterion Collection.]

Bob Koester

"I don’t pay that much attention to sales figures. You put them out and hope for the best."

That's Bob Koester, founder of Delmark Records and the Jazz Record Mart, in a New York Times profile.

How I blog

In a Father's Day post, I noted that I'd been waiting almost a year to put up Ernie Bushmiller's "DADDY-O!" That prompted Matt Thomas to wonder, in a comment, about how I blog. And so I'm writing this post.

I've written about the why in blog-anniversary posts from 2005 and 2008. As for the how: I jot ideas for posts in a pocket notebook (since last summer, an orange Quo Vadis Habana notebook). I usually draft longer posts in that notebook or on blank pages of my Moleskine page-a-day planner. Sometimes I use a legal pad. I usually write shorter posts in a text-editor on a MacBook.

I sometimes draft a post long before it appears, but that doesn't work well: those drafts often begin to seem stale, and I often end up deleting them unpublished. The time between writing and posting seems significant for me, and the explanation probably lies in the long gap between submission and publication in academia. (I've always felt strange seeing my writing in print well after the fact.) But I can work on a post for a long time or "plan" to write a post for any length of time and then write it, with no ill effect, or at least none that I can see. I "planned" to write something about the astonishing song "I Got Your Ice Cold NuGrape" for almost two years before writing a post. Right now I'm "planning" to write a post on Hooker 'N Heat, the 1971 double-album by John Lee Hooker and Canned Heat (recorded forty years ago next May).

As a regular reader knows, I've been posting almost every day for some time. This practice is a matter not of compulsion but of pleasure. "I can quit whenever I want," and so on. My greatest happiness in Orange Crate Art is that it has made writing a pleasure, not something I have to do but what I do, an always available possibility. I love the idea of "a post" — small enough to fit in the hand, like a letter or card, but as short or long as it needs to be. Addressed, reader, to you.

"More square"

My son Ben, describing a father with his son in a museum:

"He was dressed sort of like you, but more square."

(Thanks, Ben!)

Work and online life

From a thoughtful piece (with an ill-chosen title) on "work-relevant characteristics of online life":

Intrinsic rewards matter most.

The web is a testament to the power of intrinsic rewards. Think of all the articles contributed to Wikipedia, all the open source software created, all the advice freely given — add up the hours of volunteer time and it's obvious that human beings will give generously of themselves when they’re given the chance to contribute to something they actually care about. Money's great, but so is recognition and the joy of accomplishment.

Read it all:

Gary Hamel, The Facebook Generation vs. the Fortune 500 (Wall Street Journal)

(Thanks, Elaine!)