Pnin’s pencil sharpener

With the help of the janitor he screwed onto the side of the desk a pencil sharpener — that highly satisfying, highly philosophical implement that goes ticonderoga-ticonderoga, feeding on the yellow finish and sweet wood, and ends up in a kind of soundlessly spinning ethereal void as we all must. He had other, even more ambitious plans, such as an armchair and a tall lamp.

Vladimir Nabokov, Pnin (1957)

The pencil sharpener is part of Timofey Pnin’s effort to “Pninize” his office, “Office R.” As this tribute to the Dixon Ticonderoga suggests, Nabokov was a pencil man. And yes, I have a touch of Nabokov fever. The Original of Laura drops, as they say, on November 17.

Related posts
Is there a pencil in The House? (Dixon Ticonderogas in film)
Musical-comedy pencils (more Dixon Ticonderogas)
Pnin’s posy
Vladimir Nabokov’s index cards

Pnin’s posy

He worked very slowly, with a certain vagueness of manner that might have been taken for a mist of abstraction in a less methodical man. He gathered the wiped spoons into a posy, placed them in a pitcher which he had washed but not dried, and then took them out one by one and wiped them all over again.

Vladimir Nabokov, Pnin (1957)

These sentences have stuck with me for twenty-five years or so. I often think of Timofey Pnin’s posy (bouquet) when I’m gathering forks, knives, and spoons from the sink.

“A Woman in the House”

[The second of two posts on Father Knows Best.]

Real problems, for men, women, and children, are everywhere in Father Knows Best. Cheating, vandalism, sexual discrimination, rigid class distinctions, divorce, adoption, poverty, even child-abandonment and homelessness figure in the events of the show’s first two seasons. But the strangest problems of all come in what seems to me the strangest episode of those I’ve watched, “A Woman in the House.” Written by Roswell Rogers and directed by William D. Russell, it first aired on September 28, 1955. What happens:

Verg Carlson (Harry Hickox), an old friend of Jim’s, is relocating to Springfield. With him is his new wife, Jill (Mary Webster). For now, they’re staying in a hotel. Meet Jill.



Verg and Jill met at a fiesta in El Paso, when she fell from a tamale wagon into his arms. It’s his first marriage. Why it took him so long we don’t know (though it seems his mother might have had something to do with that). What we do know is that the age difference between Verg and Jill is great. Jill herself is the only character who acknowledges this difference: “You know, I think Verg has a daughter complex. That’s how he treats me most of the time, as if I were his daughter.” Then she giggles. Yes, this episode is not your father’s Father Knows Best.



The cultural differences between Jill and Verg, Jill and the Andersons, seem even greater than the age difference. Jill’s an intellectual, or an existentialist, or a beatnik, or something. Here’s some dialogue from the Anderson living room, as Jim and Margaret get acquainted with the Carlsons. Jill has picked up a book from the coffee table:

Jill: Silas Marner?

Margaret: Well, I think that one of the children is reading that for school. It’s, uh, well, it’s required reading.

Jill: No wonder they don’t learn anything. Oh, say, have you read Kafka?

Margaret: No, I don’t even know who wrote it.

Jill [Laughing wildly.] You’re priceless. Franz Kafka, he's one of my pets. Writes beautifully. You must read The Trial, you absolutely must. I think it compares with Jean-Paul Sartre’s Nausea.

Jim: That’s a book?

Jill: That’s a book. His first novel, and better than Baudelaire, I think. Of course you’ve read Baudelaire.

Margaret: No, I haven’t.

Jill: You haven’t?

Verg: Honey, everyone doesn’t have the time to read that you do.

Jill: Well, I don’t either, but I make time.

Verg: Jill loves to read. She reads things that I don’t even understand.

Jill: You don’t try. Verg is the kind who reads a story in the New Yorker and asks, “Where’s the ending?” [Laughs.] Oh, poor Verg, he wants everything spelled out for him in neon and in capital letters.



[“Silas Marner?”]

Verg and Jill have no children. Jill cannot cook. Shoes give her claustrophobia, she says. She speaks in nicknames: Jimmy, Marge. As Margaret confesses to Jim at the evening’s end, even Jill’s compliments leave her feeling humiliated: “My home cooking, my home sewing, my home stupidity — a sweet, prim, dumb, little provincial wife.”

Greater difficulties develop when Verg flies off to visit his ailing (and controlling) mother and Jill stays with the Andersons. She reads and smokes, smokes and reads. Margaret refuses to let Jill help in any way, resenting yet insisting upon playing the role of gracious host. When Margaret is alone with Jim, she goes to pieces: Jill’s presence is making her miserable. Margaret even fears that she’s becoming “a repressed neurotic.”

But all shall be well. When daughter Kathy (now "Kath") needs someone to help her wash her hair and no one else is around, Jill volunteers and ends up answering Kathy’s many questions by confessing her loneliness: her mother’s dead, she says, and she has just one friend in the world, “a wonderful one, and I’m married to him.”



Kathy volunteers to be Jill’s friend; Jill runs from the bathroom crying; Kathy shares what she's learned; Margaret softens. She realizes that she’s never given Jill a chance and quickly enlists her help in mashing potatoes. By the end of the episode, Jill has been brought into the zone of domesticity — that is, the kitchen. Here she helps Betty with the dishes and smiles as she recalls her fall from the tamale wagon.



If all the Anderson women were found in the kitchen at this episode’s end, the Stepford overtones would be unbearable. But Margaret is taking time off.



[On the age difference between Verg and Jill: Harry Hickox was born in 1910. The IMDB has no information for Mary Webster. In 1957, she had the lead in the film Eighteen and Anxious. Yes, two years after her appearance on Father Knows Best, Mary Webster was playing a teenager. However old she was in this episode, she looks remarkably young, perhaps twenty-two or so. And to my eyes, Verg looks older than Harry Hickox.]

*

January 30, 2017: The Hollywood Reporter reports that Mary Webster (b. 1935) has died at the age of eighty-one. Thanks to Scott Lahti for sharing the news in a comment.

*

July 2020: As I discovered with further viewing, racism and xenophobia come up in later seasons.

A related post
“Betty’s Graduation”

Soupy Sales (1926–2009)

How lucky to have been a kid in New York in the days of The Soupy Sales Show. Here’s a sample, with White Fang and Fess Parker, television’s Daniel Boone.

And here’s a complete show from 1965, in three parts.

Soupy Sales, Slapstick Comedian, Dies at 83 (New York Times)

Today’s Hi and Lois

[Hi and Lois, October 22, 2009.]

No door, no privacy, no surprise.

It is Ditto’s dream: “to be the skipper of the America’s Cup yacht."

Related reading
All Hi and Lois posts

Paper products and The Onion

The grad-school-ruled notebook. Creamsby’s Sheaves. Now, this item. There must be a stationery addict working at The Onion.

Mad Men search results

Via Google, October 22, 2009:

“mad men is great”: 498,000

"mad men is great but": 189,000

“mad men is overrrated”: 55,600

“mad men is underrated”: 1

If the results for “mad men is great” include all instances of "mad men is great but," the unqualified “mad men is great" would appear to yield 309,000 results. If anyone knows how to search for “mad men is great” while excluding "mad men is great but," I’m all ears.

Life in colledge

At East Carolina University:

The destruction of a sculpture outside ECU’s Jenkins Fine Arts Building over the weekend brought disappointment and disgust.

Someone shattered the recently donated sculpture, Song of the Sirens, in a sculpture garden near Fifth Street over the homecoming weekend. The piece, a conception of the creature in Homer’s The Odyssey, was valued at $12,000.

The sculpture was created by former graduate student Adam Caleb Buth as part of a larger exhibition and was left in the sculpture garden on loan by the artist, ECU sculpture professor Carl Billingsley said.

Buth expressed disappointment but not surprise Tuesday from his Wisconsin home, where he continues his work as an artist.

“I expected this would happen at this university, with all the debauchery and excessive alcohol consumption that goes on there,” Buth said. “It’s not the first time artworks have been destroyed or vandalized at the sculpture garden and on the campus.”

Billingsley also expressed disgust at the destruction of Buth’s work. He said disregard for artworks happens fairly regularly, particularly following homecoming football games. He said another piece was destroyed two years ago on homecoming weekend.

Read all about it:

Art destruction stirs ire (Reflector)

A related post
Homeric blindness in “colledge”

[Colledge: “the vast simulacrum of education that amounts to little more than buying a degree on the installment plan.” My coinage. Colledge cheapens the degree of any student who’s really in college.]

“And a cool four thousand, Pip!”

“Well, old chap,” said Joe, “it do appear that she had settled the most of it, which I meantersay tied it up, on Miss Estella. But she had wrote out a little coddleshell in her own hand a day or two afore the accident, leaving a cool four thousand to Mr. Matthew Pocket. And why, do you suppose, above all things, Pip, she left that cool four thousand unto him? ‘Because of Pip’s account of him the said Matthew.’ I am told by Biddy, that air the writing,” said Joe, repeating the legal turn as if it did him infinite good, “‘account of him the said Matthew.’ And a cool four thousand, Pip!”

I never discovered from whom Joe derived the conventional temperature of the four thousand pounds, but it appeared to make the sum of money more to him, and he had a manifest relish in insisting on its being cool.

Charles Dickens, Great Expectations (1861)

Why cool? The Oxford English Dictionary is unable to explain the conventional temperature:

colloq. Used to emphasize the size of a quantity, orig. and chiefly a sum of money. Originally preceded by a with hundred or thousand; subsequently also with any numeral.

More helpful: the OED notes a suggestion in the New English Dictionary (1893) that the word meant “perhaps originally ‘deliberately or calmly counted, reckoned, or told,’ and hence ‘all told,’ ‘entire,’ ‘whole.’” The earliest OED citation — “a cool Thousand” (1721) — is from Colly Cibber, now remembered as a target of Alexander Pope’s mockery in The Dunciad (1743).

[Coddleshell: codicil.]

Disney’s Dickens’s A Christmas Carol

If you watch the trailer or any one of three commercials for the forthcoming Disneyfication of A Christmas Carol, you’ll notice that the name Dickens is neither seen nor heard. The story is now “Disney’s A Christmas Carol.”

This sort of appropriation is offensive, especially when the appropriator is the very corporation that lobbied for the Copyright Term Extension Act (the piece of legislation that now frustrates American readers in search of the final volumes of In Search of Lost Time).

It might be possible to argue that “everyone” already knows of course that this story is Dickens’s, but that seems to me a stretch. What I see here is crass rebranding, with merchandise and promotional tie-ins to follow.

Note to Disney: don’t ever try it with Homer.