SMiLE, #1

Metacritic lists SMiLE (2004), music by Brian Wilson, words by Van Dyke Parks, as the best-reviewed recording of the aughts (2000–2009). Read all about it:

The Best Music of the Decade (Metacritic)
SMiLE reviews (Metacritic)

Stealing books

From a Margo Rabb essay on book theft:

“It’s mostly younger men stealing the books,” Zack Zook, the general manager of BookCourt in Brooklyn, suggested. “They think it’s an existential rite of passage to steal their homeboy.”

Steal These Books (New York Times)

Even in my little town, the barely solvent bookstore had to keep Charles Bukowksi and Jack Kerouac at the front desk.

Reader, have you ever stolen a book? Me, never.

More:

My friend Linda pointed me to this beautiful story:

Boy Lifts Book; Librarian Changes Boy’s Life (NPR)

(Thanks, Linda!)

Geo-B’s art

Geo-B, a longtime reader of this blog, was in the hospital recently with a broken leg. He turned his stay into sixteen pictures. Take a look:

Two and a Half Weeks at the Rehabiliation Hospital

I especially like the grilled cheese and the ramp.

To George, I offer Duke Ellington’s wishes in such situations: Merry mending.

A related post
“Editor’s Lament” (A poem by the artist)

Domestic comedy

“I wonder how the word nut came to refer to people like me.”

The Oxford English Dictionary has the answer:

7. colloq. (orig. U.S.).

a. A mad or crazy person; an eccentric, a crank.

1908 H. C. FISHER in San Francisco Examiner 23 Nov. 6 (comic strip) They’ll just think I’m some old nut.

Related reading
All “domestic comedy” posts

Gingerbread film

A short film by Eric Slatkin and Blake Smith: A Gingerbread Home for the Holidays. Very sweet.

(Found via Coudal Partners)

YouTube download script

“Lightweight and unobtrusive,” as its creator says: YouTube Video Download.

This script is the best tool I’ve found for saving YouTube clips. It works with Greasemonkey, Chrome 4, and Opera 10.

Related resources
Greasemonkey (Firefox add-on)
How to run Greasemonkey scripts in Safari (Simple Help)

Library slip (1941, 1992)

Such slips aren’t easy to find: even neglected books (stenography, typewriter repair) seem to have shiny new slips, with no stamped due dates. Library staff no doubt replace the old slips when crawling the stacks.

I’d like to think that the 1992 borrower gave this slip’s book a reprieve from the DISCARD stamp.


A related resource
Catalog Card Generator

Dylan, Cooder, Parks

From the History Channel’s The People Speak, Bob Dylan, Ry Cooder, and Van Dyke Parks performing a Woody Guthrie song:

“Do Re Mi” (YouTube)

Aunt Maud’s clippings

Commentator Charles Kinbote notes several items in poet John Shade’s Aunt Maud’s room:

Among these was a scrapbook in which over a period of years (1937–1949) Aunt Maud had been pasting clippings of an involuntarily ludicrous or grotesque nature. John Shade allowed me one day to memorandum the first and the last of the series; they happened to intercommunicate most pleasingly, I thought. Both stemmed from the same family magazine Life, so justly famed for its pudibundity in regard to the mysteries of the male sex; hence one can well imagine how startled or titillated those families were. The first comes from the issue of May 10, 1937, p. 67, and advertises the Talon Trouser Fastener (a rather grasping and painful name, by the way). It shows a young gent radiating virility among several ecstatic lady-friends, and the inscription reads: You’ll be amazed that the fly of your trousers could be so dramatically improved. The second comes from the issue of March 28, 1949, p. 126, and advertises Hanes Fig Leaf Brief. It shows a modern Eve worshipfully peeping from behind a potted tree of knowledge at a leering young Adam in rather ordinary but clean underwear, with the front of his advertised brief conspicuously and compactly shaded, and the inscription reads: Nothing beats a fig leaf.

I think there must exist a special subversive group of pseudo-cupids — plump hairless little devils whom Satan commissions to make disgusting mischief in sacrosanct places.

Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire (1962)

Used to be a reader went to the periodical stacks in a library to find those advertisements (as I did, last century). But now they may be had via Google Books.





Aunt Maud’s room also holds a clipping of the newspaper headline “Red Sox Beat Yanks 5–4 On Chapman’s Homer.” Yes, Chapman’s Homer.

Pale Fire, a novel in the form of a critical edition of a poem, is one of my favorite novels.

[Pudibundity: bashfulness; prudery.]

Library book returned after fifty-four years

Frank Lancellotti has returned the New Spanish-English and English-Spanish Dictionary to the Jersey City Free Public Library. He borrowed the book as a college student fifty-four years ago — on another patron’s card.

Man returns Jersey City library book 54 years late (Star-Ledger)

A related post
Reading and not reading in Jersey City (Another dictionary gone missing)