Love, “born into every human being”

Once upon a time, human beings were of three kinds: male, female, and androgynous. They had four hands, four legs, and two faces on a single head on a single neck. Zeus split each of these human beings in two, and so each half longed for its other. Aristophanes explains it all in Plato’s Symposium:

“This, then, is the source of our desire to love each other. Love is born into every human being: it calls back the halves of our original nature together; it tries to make one out of two and heal the wound of human nature. . . .

“[W]e used to be complete wholes in our original nature, and now ‘love’ is the name for our pursuit of wholeness, for our desire to be complete.”

Happy Valentine’s Day to all.

[Translation by Alexander Nehemas and Paul Woodruff (Hackett, 1989).]

Lawrence Wright on writing tools

Lawrence Wright is a New Yorker staff writer and author of The Looming Tower: Al Qaeda and the Road to 9/11. He likes index cards (4 x 6), legal pads, and a fountain pen:

I know it seems like an affectation, and it often stains your fingers, and I sometimes have made the mistake of carrying it in my pocket on an airplane and have had it leak all over my shirt. But if you take a lot of notes — and I may spend ten hours in a day constantly writing as fast as I can — you will pay for it. A fountain pen diminishes the physical toll. A rollerball pen would probably do as well. The point is to eliminate as much friction as possible. Of course, you also have to carry ink. It’s messy and old fashioned, like smoking a pipe, but it is still the best way to write for long periods of time.

Author says basics are best (The Press-Enterprise)
Secrets of the Writer’s Craft, Lawrence Wright at University of California, Riverside, February 11, 2010 (PDF download via The Press-Enterprise)

Domestic comedy

While on the road, or a road:

“We usually don’t drive on this road at 12:07. At 12:07 we’re usually firmly ensconced in lunch.”

Related reading
All “domestic comedy” posts
Jeremy Wagstaff on ensconced

Another Salinger catalogue

The Glass family’s living room:

The room was not impressively large, even by Manhattan apartment-house standards, but its accumulated furnishings might have lent a snug appearance to a banquet hall in Valhalla. There was a Steinway grand piano (invariably kept open), three radios (a 1927 Freshman, a 1932 Stromberg-Carlson, and a 1941 R.C.A.), a twenty-one-inch-screen television set, four table-model phonographs (including a 1920 Victrola, with its speaker still mounted intact, topside), cigarette and magazine tables galore, a regulation-size ping-pong table (mercifully collapsed and stored behind the piano), four comfortable chairs, eight uncomfortable chairs, a twelve-gallon tropical-fish tank (filled to capacity, in every sense of the word, and illuminated by two forty-watt bulbs), a love seat, the couch Franny was occupying, two empty bird cages, a cherrywood writing table, and an assortment of floor lamps, table lamps, and “bridge” lamps that sprang up all over the congested inscape like sumac. A cordon of waist-high bookcases lined three walls, their shelves cram-jammed and literally sagging with books — children’s books, textbooks, second-hand books, Book Club books, plus an even more heterogeneous overflow from less communal “annexes” of the apartment. (“Dracula” now stood next to “Elementary Pali,” “The Boy Allies at the Somme” stood next to “Bolts of Melody,” “The Scarab Murder Case” and “The Idiot” were together, “Nancy Drew and the Hidden Staircase” lay on top of “Fear and Trembling.”)

J.D. Salinger, Franny and Zooey (1961)

[Bolts of Melody: New Poems of Emily Dickinson, ed. Mabel Loomis Todd and Millicent Todd Bingham (1945). The Scarab Murder Case: a Philo Vance mystery by S.S. Van Dine (1929). Clair W. Hayes’s The Boy Allies on the Somme (1917) may be found at Google Books. Fyodor Dostoyevsky, the pseudonymous Carolyn Keene, Søren Kierkegaard, and Bram Stoker are the other writers whose works appear in the parenthetical catalogue.]

A related post
A Salinger catalogue

2010: the year of Van Dyke Parks?

Suddenly — as my son Ben would’ve put it, telling a story at the age of five or six — suddenly, Van Dyke Parks seems to be everywhere, taking to the road. From an article in yesterday’s newspaper:

“My motto is, ‘I’ve suffered like hell for my music. Now it’s your turn.’”

May 2010 suddenly be the year of Van Dyke Parks. Read more:

Van Dyke Parks: Reasons To “Smile” (Palo Alto Mercury News)

Stopette

[Life, July 10, 1950. Via Google Books.]

Everything you need to know about Stopette. And a clip from What’s My Line? with Stopette’s inventor, Dr. Jules Montenier. And a television commercial. And that is all. Poof.

Stopette is an item in this J.D. Salinger catalogue. Other items in the catalogue: Argyrol, Musterole, Sal Hepatica.

Sal Hepatica

[Life, August 16, 1948. Via Google Books.]

“Now everything’s clicking.” Time for a new roll. Of film, I mean. Yipes.

Nostrums and Quackery (Chicago: American Medical Association, 1912) reports that Sal Hepatica was sold as a “uric-acid eliminant, hepatic stimulant, a specific for gout, rheumatism, cirrhosis of the liver, Bright’s disease, gravel, tuberculosis, struma, marasmus, dyspepsia, infantile fluxes, etc.” Like Duz, it did everything. But it lost its magical powers and ended up a laxative. Poor Sal.

Sal Hepatica is an item in this J.D. Salinger catalogue. Other items in the catalogue: Argyrol, Musterole, Stopette.

Caroline’s Crayons’ telegram story

It’s a story in pictures: Telegram.

A related post
How to send telegrams

Musterole

[Ebony, December 1959. Via Google Books.]

The 1917 Year Book of the American Pharmaceutical Association (Chicago: American Pharmaceutical Association, 1919) describes Musterole as “composed essentially of lard or some similar material, oil of mustard, menthol and camphor.” Ads older than the one above offer grisly reassurance:


[Popular Mechanics, April 1921. Via Google Books.]

Our ancestors were made of strong stuff, stronger than mustard even.

Musterole is an item in this J.D. Salinger catalogue. Also in the catalogue: Argyrol, Sal Hepatica, Stopette.

Argyrol

[New and Nonofficial Remedies, 1921 (Chicago: American Medical Association, 1921). Via Google Books.]

Argyrol is an item in this J.D. Salinger catalogue. Also in the catalogue: Musterole, Sal Hepatica, Stopette.