Joyce Brabner, writing, recognition

Joyce Brabner is a writer of comics. She occasionally collaborates with her husband Harvey Pekar, most notably in Our Cancer Year, with art by Frank Stack (New York: Four Wall Eight Windows, 1994). In a 1997 interview, Brabner comments on writing and recognition:

We’ve been on tour and the further away we are from Cleveland, the bigger the audience is, more or less. In Minneapolis we met more than a hundred people. In Oberlin, Ohio, maybe forty-five. At Bookseller’s in Shaker Square, which is next to Cleveland Heights, where we live: twenty. By the time we get up to our own door and inide the house, even we’ve forgotten that we’re writers.

Harvey Pekar: Conversations, ed. Michael G. Rhode ((Jackson: University Press of Misssissippi, 2008), 77.

Prisoners plagiarized poems

News from the UK:

The prisoners’ newspaper Inside Time has introduced strict checks on its poetry page because some contributors had copied out well-known poems and submitted them under their own names. . . .

The newspaper, which is published by a charity and distributed to jails across Britain, has warned its readers that each entry will now be vetted in a bid to flush out the cheats.

“We now check every poem selected before going to print,” the newspaper’s editors said in a warning printed in this month’s edition.

Among the items copied, in whole or in part: James Brown’s “King Heroin” and Robert Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.”

Prison poets caught in plagiarism bid (Telegraph)

Update: Geo-B offers a poem about plagiarized poems (it’s also in the comments):

Editor’s Lament

Whose words these are I think I know
He’s not from cell block seven though
I heard it might be Bobby Frost
Who’s doing time up on death row.

We’re publishing a prison mag
With poems and stories in the bag
It’s “Prose and Cons,” so aptly named
Yet this seems pilfered as a gag.

I’ve read it someplace else I think
But I have plenty time to do
And miles to go before I fink
And miles to go before I fink.

Mad Men yourself

You too can do the bidding of our retro overlords by turning yourself into a Mad Men person.

This image is a compromise: the beard color’s a tad optimistic, but hairwise, things look better than they do here.

Other Mad Men posts
Frank O'Hara and Mad Men
Frank O'Hara and Mad Men again
Mad Men and Frank O'Hara (not again)
Poetry and difficulty
Violet candy and Mad Men

[I didn’t say much better.]

Update: Elaine is now a Mad Woman.

Julie & Julia

Elaine and I went to see Julie & Julia today. It’s a wonderful film, full of cooking (really?), enthusiasm, friendship, high spirits, laughter, love, perseverance, and a few tears. It’s a surprisingly sexy movie, with Julia and Paul Child (Meryl Streep and Stanley Tucci) and Julie and Eric Powell (Amy Adams and Chris Messina) sharing meals at their respective tables and falling (not graphically) into their respective beds. A few random thoughts:

Meryl Streep as Julia Child is fantastic. Nina and Tim Zagat, who knew Child, agree: “We knew Julia over the years and Streep captured her in every nuance — so much so that from now on, people are likely to remember Streep playing Julia as the real Julia.” Yipes!

As David Frauenfelder has pointed out, Amy Adams seems to be channeling Meg Ryan in this film. The computer-screen closeups with voiceovers (as Powell writes blog posts) recall You’ve Got Mail. Nora Ephron of course wrote and directed both films.

A great bit of dialogue about blogging that I wrote down in the dark: “It’s like being in AA. It gives you something you have to do every day, one day at a time.” Yes, it’s funny because it’s true.

A prediction: sales of Le Creuset cookware are gonna boom. In our kitchen we have a red French oven and equally red pan. They’re going on eight months old. Best cookware ever. And for anyone doing a Google search for brand of cookware used in julia child movie, that’s it, Le Creuset.

One more thought: I’ve read through a dozen or so posts from Julie Powell’s blog The Julie/Julia Project, and I’m not impressed. Chatty, slapdash, too LiveJournal for me. For instance:

We followed the strength of our convictions and went with the Chinese food, then took it back to the apartment and ate it on the floor in front of the TV while drinking vodka tonics and watching the first three episodes of Buffy on DVD.

Uh, no, thanks. I’m a good audience for Nora Ephron’s movie, not for Julie Powell’s blog (or book). Three cheers for Nora Ephron.

A related post
Cabbage soup (A “veganed” version of a Julia Child recipe)

[I’ve corrected the movie’s title, which has an ampersand, not and.]

“Lady Aberlin’s Muumuu”

Singer-songwriter Jonathan Coulton:

I always picture her in this one particular blue dress with flowers on it, I have no idea if it’s a muumuu. But she’s pretty and has a pretty voice and she’s so nice to little Daniel Striped Tiger. I’m getting all flushed just thinking about it.

Here’s a lovely tribute in song to Betty Aberlin of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, “Lady Aberlin’s Muumuu.” Click, read, listen, and keep scrolling down for a comment from Lady Aberlin herself.

A related post
Lady Elaine’s can

Windows 7?

Many, many Microsoft XP users have resisted Vista. But perhaps they will move to Windows 7, coming in October?

Microsoft’s chart Upgrading your PC to Windows 7 doesn’t seem to offer much encouragement. As John Gruber says, “That’s a lot of blue boxes.” All upgrades from XP require a “Custom Install.” For some users, that will mean installing Windows 7 on a separate drive or partition to create a multi-boot system. Most users though will want a single operating system on an unpartitioned hard drive. They’ll need to do a clean install — backing up files and settings, wiping the drive, installing Windows 7, reinstalling programs, restoring settings, and moving back all files.

But first, they’ll need to decide which version of Windows 7 to purchase: Home Premium? Professional? Ultimate? Cool Mint?

At which point, they might decide that if there’s a move to make, it’s to a Mac.

Krugman on Rockwell

Paul Krugman, writing in the New York Times on “town hall mobs”:

There’s a famous Norman Rockwell painting titled “Freedom of Speech,” depicting an idealized American town meeting. The painting, part of a series illustrating F.D.R.’s “Four Freedoms,” shows an ordinary citizen expressing an unpopular opinion. His neighbors obviously don’t like what he’s saying, but they’re letting him speak his mind.

I don’t disagree with the analysis that follows Krugman’s opening paragraph. But just a glance at Rockwell’s painting shows that this description is off: there is no hostility, none, in the faces surrounding the speaker. What’s important in Rockwell’s painting is class: the speaker’s clothes and hands mark him as a “working man,” in clear contrast to the suits beside him and in front of him. He even looks a bit like Abraham Lincoln, which might help to explain why everyone’s paying close attention to what he says.

I wonder what Norman Rockwell would say about the chanting, the shouting, the death threats, all that is hateful and ugly in the “debate” (is it one, really?) over health care.

Reading and not reading in Jersey City

The only stolen object of Grandpa’s that I possess is a dictionary, a Webster’s Seventh New Collegiate edition, which he inscribed to my sister the year I was born: “From Grandpa. Hi Ya Paula. Year — 1965.” The call numbers on the spine and the blue stamp on a back page, which reads FREE PUBLIC LIBRARY JERSEY CITY, N.J., have been crossed out in blue indelible marker, his attempt to legitimize the gift. Grandpa obviously had his own interpretation of the phrase free public library.

*

In Jersey City, people were actively illiterate and proudly went around saying things like “I never read a book in my life.” They boasted that they had managed to get so far without reading a single page. I wanted to say, Well, good for you, you idiot. Look where you are. You’re still in Jersey City.

Helene Stapinski, Five-Finger Discount: A Crooked Family History (New York: Random House, 2002), 4, 107–108.

Part memoir, part ancestral scrapbook, part cultural history, Five-Finger Discount assembles stories of theft — petty and grand — and violence over several generations of family life and political life in Jersey City, New Jersey.

Jersey City : Helene Stapinski :: Dublin : James Joyce — a city to escape and hate and love.

Budd Schulberg (1914–2009)

From my favorite scene in On the Waterfront (dir. Elia Kazan, 1954), a conversation between Terry Malloy (Marlon Brando) and Edie Doyle (Eva Marie Saint), my transcription:

Terry: Boy, the way those sisters used to whack me, I don’t know what. They thought they was gonna beat an education into me, but I foxed ’em. [Shrugs.]

Edie: Maybe they just didn’t know how to handle you.

Terry: How would you’ve done it?

Edie: With a little more patience and kindness. That’s what makes people mean and difficult — people don’t care enough about them.

Terry: [Long pause.] Aah, what are you, kiddin’ me?

Edie: No.

Terry: Come on, I better get you home. There’s too many guys around here with only one thing on their mind. [Pause.] Am I gonna to see you again?

Edie: [Pause.] What for?

Terry: [Pause.] I don’t know.

Edie: [Pause.] I really don’t know.

Budd Schulberg, who wrote the screenplay, died yesterday.

Budd Schulberg, Screenwriter, Dies at 95 (New York Times)

“About three lines” again

David Frauenfelder has also posted regarding a choreographer’s assertion that Penelope has “about three lines” in the Odyssey:

Penelope’s three lines — or more (Breakfast with Pandora, “for a diet rich in mythos and logos”)

A related post
“About three lines”? Wrong.