An Illinois coinage

Blagodoccio.

Related reading
All Rod Blagojevich posts

Caffeine-free

For about a week, I’ve been humming along without caffeine. (See blog description above, at least for today.) I’d say I’m surprised, but in my caffeine-free equanimity, I’m only mildly puzzled.

My withdrawal began without intention. For several days, for no particular reason, I was drinking only tea, without my usual cup or two of coffee. (I like tea.) Then I began drinking less tea, more water, just to see how I would feel. (I felt fine.) Then I began drinking one cup of tea with breakfast, and decaffeinated tea and coffee for the rest of the day. After a couple of days, I could feel the unpleasant difference — call it vague anxiety — that the one caffeinated cup was making in my mornings. So I switched to decaffeinated, period.

Decaf tea and coffee make me think of filter cigarettes: flavorwise, there’s something missing — not caffeine, but whatever else gets lost in decaffeination. But I suspect that decaf, like soy milk, will soon enough turn into a real thing in its own right.

[May 22, 2010: For several days, the “blog description above” read “Now caffeine-free.” Still is. Still am.]

Grade inflation in the NYT crossword

In tomorrow’s New York Times crossword:

11-Down: “Pretty good grade.” The answer: AMINUS. In my gradebook, that’s more than “pretty good.”

[No spoilers here. Highlight the empty space to see the answer.]

“[S]omething carelessly solid”

From New Directions in Prose & Poetry, 1938, ed. James Laughlin (Norfolk, CT: New Directions, 1938).

This brief passage (concerning lines from John Milton’s L’Allegro) closes the volume; there is no commentary, and no Exhibit B. Anyone tempted to moan about a decline in literary studies might do well to consider what passed for high criticism in 1938. (The Miltonic Setting, Past and Present was published by Cambridge University Press.) A rhythm that is “solidly based” in a cottage? A slight rise in rhythm? A rhythm that “has something carelessly solid in it”? Say what? Or more formally: Explain??

As for the oaks, I think they lost their dignity by appearing in this bit of exegesis. Tillyard’s bit, I mean; not mine.

English majors of a certain age might recall being exposed to Tillyard’s The Elizabethan World Picture (1943). I remember thinking that everyone was walking around with humours and spheres and angelic orders in their heads. Worldviews! Worldviews for sale!

Roger Ebert on 3-D

He hates it:

The marketing executives are right that audiences will come to see a premium viewing experience they can’t get at home. But they’re betting on the wrong experience.

Read more:

Why I Hate 3-D (And You Should Too) (Newsweek)

Bill Moyers on public broadcasting

Bill Moyers, from a 2004 interview with Terry Gross:

I think the most important thing that we can do is to continue to treat Americans as citizens, not just consumers. If you look out and see an audience of consumers, you want to sell them something. If you look out and see an audience of citizens, you want to share something with them, and there is a difference.

Fresh Air has assembled excerpts from several interviews to mark Moyers’s retirement from PBS.

Weegee the Famous in Indianapolis

At the Indianapolis Museum of Art, through January 23, 2011:

Shots in the Dark: Photos by Weegee the Famous will showcase 48 works selected from the Museum’s recent major acquisition of 210 photographs by Arthur Fellig, the father of New York street photography better known as Weegee the Famous. The exhibition will explore a range of works that defined Weegee’s career, including photos of crime scenes in the 1930s, Harlem jazz clubs in the ’40s, audiences at Sinatra concerts or in darkened movie theaters taken surreptitiously with infrared film, strippers, transvestites, Greenwich Village coffee houses in the ’50s and portraits of the famous, shot through distorting lenses of his own devising.

A related post
Weegee in Indianapolis

Planet Proust

It’s no. 4474. But it’s not what you think:

Discovered 1981 Aug. 24 by H. Debehogne at La Silla.

Named in honor of Dominique Proust, astrophysicist at the Meudon Observatory who works on observational cosmology. By means of extensive spectroscopic observations he has carried out dynamical studies of clusters of galaxies, large-scale structures and high-redshift objects. He is also a church and concert organist, whose public and broadcast performances include the compositions of astronomer-musicians such as Galileo and Herschel [see planets (697) and (2000), respectively]. The name of this minor planet also honors the French writer Marcel Proust [1871–1922]. (M 21131)

Lutz D. Schmadel, Dictionary of Minor Planet Names (Berlin/Heidelberg: Springer-Verlag, 2003).

Marcel, l’autre Proust.



[Planet Proust, my conception, from a 1921 photograph.]

Related reading
All Proust posts (Pinboard)

Leslie Buck (1922–2010)

“The Anthora seems to have been here forever, as if bestowed by the gods at the city’s creation. But in fact, it was created by man — one man in particular, a refugee from Nazi Europe named Leslie Buck.”

Leslie Buck, Designer of Iconic Coffee Cup, Dies at 87 (New York Times)

PCs and mice

Steve Jobs on Adobe Flash: “Flash was created during the PC era — for PCs and mice.”

Note how PCs and mice suddenly sound so sadly out of date.