"[T]hree days after Bastille day, yes"

It is 12:20 in New York a Friday
three days after Bastille day, yes
it is 1959 and I go get a shoeshine

Frank O'Hara, lines from "The Day Lady Died"

Three days after Bastille Day, fifty years ago today, Billie Holiday died.

Things to do:

Read Frank O'Hara's poem. Read the New York Times obituary. Listen to Billie Holiday: "Fine and Mellow," "I Loves You, Porgy," "These Foolish Things," "Travelin' Light," "What a Little Moonlight Can Do."

[A note for the fan: "Travelin' Light" seems to be a very rare bit of film footage.]

A related post
On December 8

Poems, "made of words"

"Now you notice what I said: there is no subject that the modern poem cannot approach. There is no selected material. It's what you do with a work of art. It's what you put on the canvas and how you put it on that makes the picture. It's how the words fit in. Poems are not made of thoughts, beautiful thoughts. It's made of words, pigments, put on. Here, there, made, actually."

William Carlos Williams, to an audience at Harvard University, December 4, 1951

PennSound at the University of Pennsylvania is an audio archive for poetry. It offers, among other treasures, what appear to be all extant recordings of William Carlos Williams.

{The above passage is my transcription.]

"Plenty of stationery"

Pip and Herbert prepare to take stock of their debts:

We ordered something rather special for dinner, with a bottle of something similarly out of the common way, in order that our minds might be fortified for the occasion, and we might come well up to the mark. Dinner over, we produced a bundle of pens, a copious supply of ink, and a goodly show of writing and blotting paper. For, there was something very comfortable in having plenty of stationery.

Charles Dickens, Great Expectations (1861)

NYPD typewriters

Remember the All in the Family episode in which Archie unwittingly insults a police officer and is made to wait while the slowest typist in the precinct pecks out a report? Typewriters are still in use in the NYPD:

New York Police Department officials said the city is spending nearly $1 million to purchase and maintain typewriters for the police force.

City officials signed a $982,269 contract last year with New Jersey typewriter manufacturer Swintec for the purchase of manual and electric typewriters during the next three years and last month the city inked a $99,570 deal with New York's Afax Business Machines for maintenance on the typing machines, the New York Post reported Monday.

NYPD sources said the vast majority of the typewriters are for use by police.

Most of the city's arrest forms have been computerized, but property and evidence vouchers printed on carbon-paper forms still require the use of typewriters.

Carbon-paper forms!

The Swintec site is worth a look. No carbon-paper forms for sale, but you will find clear typewriters ("especially designed for inmate use") and a $1678 Word Processing System that boasts "60K Large Working Memory" and "Unlimited Document Storage on 3 1/2" Floppy Disks."

André Gregory tells a story

It concerns Jean Lenauer, who played the waiter in My Dinner with André (1981). "Louis" is Louis Malle, the film's director. "Wally" is Wallace Shawn.

The first day of shooting, Louis wanted to fire him, because of course he wasn't a waiter [laughs], so he didn't know what to do with the serving of stuff. So Wally and I, who grew up on the upper East Side [laughs], been to these restaurants, we stayed up all night with Jean, coaching him on being a waiter.

And he was amazing. In fact, Wally and I were coming from a rehearsal, I think of The Master Builder, a couple of years ago, and this guy ran up to Wally and said "My Dinner with André! I've seen it eight times! What an amazing movie! You were great! God, I love" — you know. And Wally after a while said, "I suppose you know my friend." And he looked at me and said, "I don't think so." And I said, "I was the other guy." And he said, "Oh." And he went back to talking with Wally and then shook his hands and went off down the street, and then he came running back, and he grabbed me by the arm. He said, "I'm so sorry — you were the waiter. I didn't recognize you." [Laughs.]

André Gregory tells this story to filmmaker Noah Baumbach in a video interview included in the Criterion Collection edition of My Dinner with André. A thousand thanks to Criterion for giving this film the digital transfer and DVD edition it deserves.

A related post
"Nil admirari in stone, the waiter"

REHC SÈRT SAP

In today's Hi and Lois, Hi and Lois seem to be preparing to drink themselves under the table (or sous la table — it's a French restaurant), in which case they will find themselves on a pink floor. Note that Lois, sober, cannot tell a cap from a cork.

But what really caught my eye in today's strip is the lettering on the window. It's ETATSE LAER all over again.

Related reading
All Hi and Lois posts

Pre-Socratic fragment

[Pencil on cardboard.]

"Of practical wisdom these are the three fruits: to deliberate well, to speak to the point, to do what is right."

My son Ben (philosophy major) left this bit of Democritus on our kitchen countertop not long ago.

(Thanks, Ben!)

"Secrets of the Post Office"

Dave Gathman wondered how the mail works:

Every time I dropped a letter into a mailbox (usually a bill payment that had to get there fast, or my interest rate would shoot up to 33 percent), questions lingered. Would the letter get there just as fast if I mail it at the corner "blue box" as it would if I mailed it at the post office? Would a letter mailed in the little Hampshire post office arrive as soon as one mailed in downtown Elgin? Is it true, as someone once told my mother-in-law, that "mail doesn't move on weekends?"

So we did some experimenting.

Read all about it:

Secrets of the Post Office (Elgin Courier News)

So gangsta

From a Flickr photoset by Quinn Dombrowski:

University of Chicago: Library Graffiti

[Photograph licensed under a Creative Commons License.]

A related post
Graffiti (in Hyde Park)

Joyeux anniversaire, M. Proust

"His demeanor is both proud and slightly confused, as he squints against the bright sunlight."

William C. Carter, Marcel Proust: A Life (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 753.

[Marcel Proust, photographed April 21, 1921.]

Related reading
All Proust posts (via Pinboard)