The Blob and I

I recently watched The Blob (dir. Irvin S. Yeaworth, Jr., 1958) and communed a bit with the material culture of the dowdy world.


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That desk could be mine, almost: I too have an inbox, fan, and lamp, though they look nothing like these. (I have a rotary telephone too, at work.) Note the stapler, bottled ink, cigarettes, and ashtray, and the safety-themed placard in the background. The drawer seems filled with stuff, which suggests to me that this scene, like many scenes in the film, was shot on location. (Perhaps a school office?)


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Note the battered bookcase and the polio-themed placard. And that calendar!


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Did I mention that calendar? 1957 was a very big year.

The beautifully designed 2009 Field Notes calendar has something of the same feel, on a smaller scale.

[A previous post defines “the dowdy world”: “modern American culture as it was before certain forms of technology redefined everyday life.”]

Related reading
All “dowdy world” posts (Pinboard)
Time passes (Calendar pages, 1930)
Is there a pencil in The House? (Pencils in The House on 92nd Street)

Montblanc’s Gandhi pen

Could there be a pen more ill-conceived than Montblanc’s “Yes We Can” pen? Yes, Montblanc’s Mohandas Gandhi pen:

Just 241 commemorative fountain pens will be sold — a nod to the number of miles Gandhi walked in his famous 1930 “salt march,” a mass protest against salt taxes levied by the British that dealt an early blow to their control over the subcontinent.

The pens are hand-made, adorned with Gandhi's signature and a saffron-colored opal. They come with an eight-meter (26-foot) golden thread that can be wound around the pen to invoke the spindle Gandhi used to weave plain cotton cloth each day. The pens also come with a commemorative booklet of inspiring Gandhi quotes.

Says Oliver Goessler of Montblanc, “It’s not an opulent pen. It’s a writing instrument that’s very pure."

Montblanc’s $25,000 Gandhi pen sparks controversy (Forbes) The link is dead.

In Gandhi's land, a $25,000 Montblanc (Pittsburgh Post-Gazette)

*

Update, February 24, 2010: Montblanc has suspended sales of the pen while awaiting a court ruling on whether the pen may be sold in India:

India court snub for luxury Gandhi pen (BBC News)

(Thanks to Stephen at pencil talk for pointing me to this news.)

A related post
Proust's supplies (Montblanc’s Proust pen, also ill-conceived)

Princeton students and the Kindle

Princeton students have been trying Amazon’s Kindle:

“I hate to sound like a Luddite, but this technology is a poor excuse of an academic tool,” said Aaron Horvath ’10, a student in Civil Society and Public Policy. “It’s clunky, slow and a real pain to operate.”

Horvath said that using the Kindle has required completely changing the way he completes his coursework.

“Much of my learning comes from a physical interaction with the text: bookmarks, highlights, page-tearing, sticky notes and other marks representing the importance of certain passages — not to mention margin notes, where most of my paper ideas come from and interaction with the material occurs,” he explained. “All these things have been lost, and if not lost they’re too slow to keep up with my thinking, and the ‘features’ have been rendered useless.”

Another problem: no page numbers, which makes citations a challenge. Read more:

Kindles yet to woo University users (Daily Princetonian)

Related posts
From the Doyle edition
No Kindle for me

Red Cross

The American Red Cross International Response Fund

“Exclamation marks not trademarks!”

In the news:

An exclamation mark cannot be registered as a trademark, the European Court of First Instance has ruled.

The German clothing and perfume company Joop! applied to register the punctuation mark both on its own and inside a rectangle.

Read all about it:

Exclamation marks not trademarks! (BBC News)

Teleconference: Stanley Lombardo reads Homer

Classicist and translator Stanley Lombardo will read from his translation of Homer’s Odyssey in a live teleconference, December 14, 2009, 8:00 PM EST.

Lombardo is a brilliant translator and masterful reader. What Homer says of the poet Demodocus in the Odyssey — “He made them see it happen” — is true, I’d say, of Lombardo.

Tickets are free. Follow the link:

Stanley Lombardo: A Performance from Homer’s Odyssey (The Reading Odyssey)

Related reading
Stanley Lombardo interview (Jacket)
Whose Homer? (Lattimore? Fitzgerald? Fagles? Lombardo?)
Wonderland of voices, a review of Lombardo’s recordings of the Iliad and Odyssey (Jacket)

Glenn Gould’s last interview?

Jordan Sayle, from WNYC Radio:

I am writing from Studio 360, the public radio show devoted to the arts and culture. On our blog, we recently posted an audio clip of Glenn Gould talking to music critic Tim Page. . . . The clip is of an interview recorded for WNYC six weeks before Gould’s fatal stroke. It is most likely his last interview ever. With Gould assuming the part of the fictional movie actor Sir John, it’s very bizarre. But Gould also talks at great length (fifty minutes) about his music. Perhaps your readers will enjoy hearing it.

I hope so! This interview is also available as part of the three-CD set A State of Wonder: The Complete Goldberg Variations (Sony). Listen:

James Dean of classical music (Studio 360 Blog)

Thanks, Jordan.

ML + EF

Ah, yet well I know that were a woman possible as I
    am possible
then marriage would be possible —

Gregory Corso, from the poem “Marriage” (1960)

There was. There is. It was. It is.

Twenty-five years ago today, Elaine and I were married. Looking at the photographs, I am convinced that we were in our mid-teens. (Though we were in fact in Massachusetts.) How could we have known what we were doing? Who knows. But we were and are so lucky to have found one another.

Happy anniversary, Elaine!

George Clooney and yogurt

Gregor Reid, director of the Canadian Research and Development Center for Probiotics:

“To say a product contains Lactobacillus is like saying you’re bringing George Clooney to a party. It may be the actor, or it may be an 85-year-old guy from Atlanta who just happens to be named George Clooney. With probiotics, there are strain-to-strain differences.”

From an article on yogurt and health:

Probiotics: Looking Underneath the Yogurt Label (New York Times)

Guess the crime

Here’s an icon from an online map of local criminality. Can you guess the crime?

[The answer’s in the comments.]