Harvey Wang’s New York

Harvey Wang. Harvey Wang’s New York. Foreword by Pete Hamill. New York: W.W. Norton, 1990. $9.95 (paper).

Max Morrison, ninety-seven-year-old scrap-metal collector:

“I can’t sit still on a chair reading comics or walk around the streets doing nothing. I certainly do enjoy collecting metal. It’s legitimate, not too heavy.”

Harvey Wang’s New York is a book of photographs of forty-nine New Yorkers in endangered or obscure lines of work. A mannequin maker, a rabbinical tailor, a scrap-metal collector, a seltzer bottler, a television repairman: each appears in a black-and-white portrait (35mm film), with a brief life-story on the facing page. Harvey Wang’s New York feels like a book that one might have found, once upon a time, in a used-book store. Improbably and wonderfully, the book is still in print. You can see samples at Harvey Wang’s website.

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David Foster Wallace on attention

I’ve gotten in the habit of reading to my students this passage from a 2005 commencement speech:

Twenty years after my own graduation, I have come gradually to understand that the liberal arts cliché about teaching you how to think is actually shorthand for a much deeper, more serious idea: learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed.

It’s more difficult to find this speech online now that it’s been packaged as a book (one sentence per page). But here it is, still standing.

More on the iPad and college

From Forbes.com:

Many educators are pointing to Apple Computer’s recently announced iPad as the prototype for an e-reader that will be able to hold all the textbooks a student needs. Its color touch-screen, interactive-video capability and virtual keyboard, they say, give it greater potential for textbook users than monochrome readers like Amazon’s Kindle.

Apple has been quiet about its designs on the textbook business since unveiling its new device, which will go on sale this month.

Correction: next month, April 3.

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Would it have been worth it, after all

From “The Deflationist,” Larissa MacFarquhar’s profile of Paul Krugman (New Yorker, March 1, 2010). Krugman’s wife Robin Wells is speaking:

“As a spouse, you have your little list of things that you jokingly won’t forgive your spouse for. Right after he started writing for the Times and attacking George Bush, we got an invitation to have dinner with Paul Newman and his wife, but he wouldn’t go. And now he’s dead.”

“It was inconvenient,” Krugman says. “I just don’t get any joy out of thinking, Oh, here I am with the movers and shakers. It would have required really discombobulating my schedule just to be able to say I’d had dinner with Paul Newman, and it’s not worth it.”

I think Krugman has it wrong. The point of having dinner with Paul Newman and “his wife” — who too has a name, Joanne Woodward — is not to be able to say that you had dinner with Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward. The point of having dinner with Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward is to have dinner with Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward.

Re: that list: maybe you do.

[Post title with apologies to T.S. Eliot and J. Alfred Prufrock.]

Recently updated

The Michigan Theater (news of an effort to save the building)

“Reasons Why I Am Not Successful”

A list from Lost New York: Reasons Why I Am Not Successful.

(via Daughter Number Three)

Telephone exchange names on screen

[Private eye Brad Galt (Mark Stevens) extracts an eight-digit telephone number from thug “Fred Foss” (William Bendix).]

The Dark Corner (dir. Henry Hathaway, 1946) is ninety-nine minutes well spent. Snappy dialogue, great lighting, liquor in paper cups, Lucille Ball as Brad’s sharp secretary/partner, and Clifton Webb as a Waldo Lydecker-like husband.

One puzzle: A card in “Fred’s” wallet gives his address as 328 E. 23rd Street. The Chelsea district though is on the west side of Manhattan. A slip on the part of the movie-makers? Or is the point that Galt, recently arrived from San Francisco, misses the inconsistency?

As Galt says about another puzzle, later in the film, “All right, so it doesn’t add. What do you want me to do, call the Quiz Kids?”

More exchange names on screen
The Amazing Dr. Clitterhouse
Baby Face
Born Yesterday
Deception
Dream House
The Man Who Cheated Himself
Nightmare Alley
The Public Enemy

Greek islands for sale?

From German politicians, a suggestion that Greece sell some islands.

[Do not mess with Ithaka.]

From the spam folder

“Drive and talk without using your hands.”

Overheard

In the supermarket, one sweatshirted man to another:

“It pays a lovely dividend, so what the heck?”

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