“All time”

Kanye West to Taylor Swift, at the 2009 MTV Video Music Awards this past Sunday:

“Yo, Taylor, I’m really happy for you. I’ma let you finish, but Beyoncé had one of the best videos of all time! One of the best videos of all time!”

The words “all time” play such an odd role in pop culture. Rolling Stone is a prime offender: its list of the 500 greatest songs of “all time” begins in 1949, with Hank Williams’ “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry.” We are the world, I guess; nothing before “us” counts.

If the “videos” in Kanye’s proclamation are synonymous with “MTV,” “all time” extends from August 1, 1981 to September 13, 2009.

Smoke gets in my dreams

It’s almost twenty years since I stopped smoking, but I still dream about cigarettes once in a while. It happened last night:

I walked into Jon’s Pipe Shop, where for three years or so I bought tobacco and cigarette papers. Lorraine, Jon’s mother, was still there working. Did they still have Old Holborn tobacco? Yes, of course. But the packages were skinny little versions of the real thing, and each contained nothing more than a ballpoint-pen refill. And Abadie papers? Yes, of course, but they could only be had from “the warehouse.” So I walked out into an empty cityscape, something like the opening scene in The Asphalt Jungle. I found the warehouse door and knocked. No answer. End of dream.

My family will be happy to know that even in dreams I still haven’t smoked the dang things. And they will attest that the ballpoint refills make sense. When I stopped smoking, pens and pencils became for me the new cigarettes, new objects of consolation.

I learned this morning that Lorraine Callaghan died last year at the age of ninety-three. She was a lovely lady.

A related post
Nineteen years later

Five

My daughter Rachel, five years ago tonight:

“If you’re going to be this uptight and worried about it, you’re not going to be a very happy blogger. Just say ‘This is my new blog; I’m trying it out. Thanks to my son and daughter. I hope it works out.’”

Earlier this evening, Orange Crate Art turned five. Or as Webster’s Third New International explains, “one more than four.”

Thanks again, Rachel and Ben, for getting me started writing online. Thanks, Elaine, for your constant encouragement. Thanks, everyone, for reading.

An experiment in procrastination

It goes like so:

Students have three papers to write. Students in one class make their own deadlines. Students in a second class are given one deadline for all three papers: the last day of class. Students in a third class are given three deadlines for the three papers: the fourth, eighth, and twelfth weeks of classes. Which class gets the best grades?

Dan Ariely recounts such an experiment in what looks like a worthwhile book, Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions (New York: HarperCollins, 2009). Ariely is the James B. Duke Professor of Behavioral Economics at Duke University.

If the answer to the above question isn’t obvious: the class with three teacher-imposed deadlines had the best grades. And yes, the class with the last-day deadline had the worst grades. But a further question: which class and teacher would most students think the coolest?

A related post
45/15 (An anti-procrastination strategy)

(Book found via Boing Boing)

E.B. White’s willow tree

[Illustration by Edward C. Caswell.]

Here is the illustration that furnished what E.B. White called “the tailpiece” for his book Here Is New York (1949). This tailpiece is missing from the 1999 edition (titled Here is New York).

Illustrator Edward C. Caswell (1879–1963) did many New York scenes for the weekly New York newspaper The Villager. Three of those works are for sale at the Deep Archives.

Thanks to Benjo, who found a 2002 New York Times article about the willow tree in this illustration. The tree was still standing in 2002, in the (private) Turtle Bay Gardens, between East 48th and 49th Streets.

[“[T]he tailpiece”: from a July 3, 1949 letter to Cass Canfield of Harper & Row, in Letters of E.B. White, ed. Dorothy Lobrano Guth (New York: Harper & Row, 1976), 308.]

Related reading
Here is New York (1999 edition)
E.B. White on New York City (An excerpt)
Mr. White’s neighborhoods (An excerpt)
Turtle Bay Historic District (PDF download, 102K, nyc.gov)

E.B. White on New York City

E.B. White was writing three years after the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, two years after the New Yorker publication of John Hersey’s “Hiroshima,” and weeks before construction began on the United Nations headquarters in the Turtle Bay section of Manhattan:

The subtlest change in New York is something people don’t speak much about but that is in everyone’s mind. The city, for the first time in its long history, is destructible. A single flight of planes no bigger than a wedge of geese can quickly end this island fantasy, burn the towers, crumble the bridges, turn the underground passages into lethal chambers, cremate the millions. The intimation of mortality is part of New York now: in the sound of jets overhead, in the black headlines of the latest edition.

All dwellers in cities must live with the stubborn fact of annihilation; in New York the fact is somewhat more concentrated because of the concentration of the city itself, and because, of all targets, New York has a certain clear priority. In the mind of whatever perverted dreamer might loose the lightning, New York must hold a steady, irresistible charm. . . .

This race — this race between the destroying planes and the struggling Parliament of Man — it sticks in all our heads. The city at last perfectly illustrates both the universal dilemma and the general solution, this riddle in steel and stone is at once the perfect target and the perfect demonstration of nonviolence, of racial brotherhood, this lofty target scraping the skies and meeting the destroying planes halfway, home of all people and all nations, capital of everything, housing the deliberations by which the planes are to be stayed and their errand forestalled.

A block or two west of the new City of Man in Turtle Bay there is an old willow tree that presides over an interior garden. It is a battered tree, long suffering and much climbed, held together by strands of wire but beloved of those who know it. In a way it symbolizes the city: life under difficulties, growth against odds, sap-rise in the middle of concrete, and the steady reaching for the sun. Whenever I look at it nowadays, and feel the cold shadow of the planes, I think: “This must be saved, this particular thing, this very tree.” If it were to go, all would go — this city, this mischievous and marvelous monument which not to look upon would be like death.

E.B. White, Here Is New York (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1949), 50–51, 53–54.

A related post
At the World Trade Center and St. Paul’s Chapel

Joe Wilson’s “he”

Congressman Joe Wilson spoke briefly to reporters this morning, looking and sounding like a kid who’s just been to the principal’s office. Well, that’s what happens when you act up during a school assembly. Watch and listen as Wilson meets the press. Do you notice something missing?

What I notice is not the absence of “I apologize,” not the absence of “I’m sorry”: what’s really noticeable here is the absence of any reference to President Obama by name. Note what Wilson says at 2:07: “When he stated, as he did.” There’s no earlier mention of President Obama in these remarks. Is it too much to expect Wilson to refer to the president by name?

I don’t think I’m making too much of this bit of reference. To omit a name often implies contempt. Remember John McCain’s “That one”? I’m reminded too, rightly or wrongly, of the way in which kids when angered and upset will refer to the offending parent only by pronoun: “Mom, he’s not being fair!” I think that any parent or child from a pronoun-using family can confirm this observation.

I for one really like the sound of “President Obama.” I like typing the words too. And I should note that Wilson’s written statement does refer to “the president.”

In other news, a website for Congressman Wilson’s Democratic opponent Rob Miller has raised $133,399 since last night. Correction: $133,424.

Related posts
Advice for Joe Wilson
Going to the meeting

Advice for Joe Wilson

Congressman Joe Wilson (R, South Carolina-2), he of the “You lie!” outburst last night, might take to heart a reminder from President Obama’s Tuesday address to the nation’s schoolchildren:

If you get in trouble, that doesn’t mean you’re a troublemaker, it means you need to try harder to behave.

Let’s hope that Congressman Wilson can try harder to behave, by showing courtesy to others and not interrupting.

Speaking more seriously, I’ll note that Obama’s refusal to be rattled (“That’s not true” was his only response) offers a useful model for any teacher contending with disruption and rudeness. Keeping cool is the only way to go.

Van Dyke Parks down under

Van Dyke Parks:

“My mother once told me as a child, ‘Better to be interested than appear interesting,’ and I think that that has served me well.”

*

“Just to hear an orchestra tune up, to me, is the most profoundly enjoyable — well, I don’t want to seem Squaresville, but it just about beats sex for me. It’s a big thing. It’s good.”

From a lovely radio interview, now online:

Kelly Higgins-Devine interviews Van Dyke Parks (ABC Brisbane)

Van Dyke Parks is the keynote speaker at the Big Sound 2009 music conference in Brisbane, Australia.

A related post
“A song is an intimation of immortality”

Carnival of pens, pencils, and paper

At The Pen Addict (“. . . there are WORSE addictions, right?”), there’s a carnival of pens, pencils, paper, and supplies. Ink! Staplers! And a 1945 Westinghouse pocket diary!

I’m honored to see that my July post on Fineline erasers is part of the fun. Notebook Stories curates this monthly carnival.

The Second Carnival of Pen, Pencil, and Paper (The Pen Addict)