“Time just seems to get quicker. You look in the mirror in the morning and you think, ‘I’m already shaving again!’”Terry Jones of Monty Python, quoted in an article on the fortieth anniversary of the BBC series Monty Python’s Flying Circus. Read all about it:
“A blowtorch?!”
If you live in the United States, have cable television, and need to get things done today, you may not benefit from knowing that there’s an I Love Lucy marathon now playing on the Hallmark Channel (through Monday, 3:00 AM EDT).
As I type, Lucy has a loving cup stuck on her head.
I recently watched The Blob (dir. Irvin S. Yeaworth, Jr., 1958) and communed a bit with the material culture of the dowdy world.
[Click for a larger view.]
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?)
[Click for a larger view.]
Note the battered bookcase and the polio-themed placard. And that calendar!
[Click for a larger view.]
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)
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.Says Oliver Goessler of Montblanc, “It’s not an opulent pen. It’s a writing instrument that’s very pure."
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.
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.”Another problem: no page numbers, which makes citations a challenge. Read more:
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.”
In the news:
An exclamation mark cannot be registered as a trademark, the European Court of First Instance has ruled.Read all about it:
The German clothing and perfume company Joop! applied to register the punctuation mark both on its own and inside a rectangle.
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)
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:
Ah, yet well I know that were a woman possible as IThere was. There is. It was. It is.
am possible
then marriage would be possible —
Gregory Corso, from the poem “Marriage” (1960)
