Studs Terkel interviews, coming online

An agreement between the Chicago History Museum and the Library of Congress will preserve in digital form thousands of hours of interviews that Studs Terkel conducted on Chicago radio station WFMT.

Russell Lewis of the CHM: “While we like to claim Studs as one of our own, he is a national treasure and he should have national-treasure status, something he gets with affiliation with the Library of Congress. I think he would be thrilled.”

The New York Times calls the agreement a “deal.” (It does involve Chicago.) Read more:

Terkel Coming Online (New York Times)

(Thanks to Stefan Hagemann for this news.)

Infinite Jest, attention

Watching the teleputer (TP):

He sat on the edge of his bed with his elbows on his knees and scanned the stack of cartridges. Each cartridge in the dock dropped on command and began to engage the drive with an insectile click and whir, and he scanned it. But he was unable to distract himself with the TP because he was unable to stay with any one entertainment cartridge for more than a few seconds. The moment he recognized what exactly was on one cartridge he had a strong anxious feeling that there was something more entertaining on another cartridge and that he was potentially missing it.

David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest (Boston: Little, Brown, 1996).

I have heard young adults describe in similar terms their difficulties in reading a book: giving their attention to one thing means that they will be missing other things. As if one could, yes, have it all — with the exception, I suppose, of that book.

Speaking of books — this book, Infinite Jest: I am 100 pages in, or more with endnotes. My readerly intuition was telling me: read Infinite Jest. So I am, twenty-five pages a day. Having taught Charles Dickens’s Bleak House over eight weeks this past semester, I am happily surprised to see that Infinite Jest too seems to be a novel of — to use Dickens’s word — “connexions,” with seemingly unrelated characters beginning to show up in one another’s stories. Do I like Infinite Jest? Oh yes.

A related post
David Foster Wallace on attention

Sinatra, on sale

On sale at the Frank Sinatra website, Capitol Records Concept Albums, a boxed-set of fourteen albums on fourteen CDs, $60, with free shipping. Yes, Capitol has discontinued this set.

Jonathan Schwartz and Frank Sinatra

Paris, 1962: Sinatraphile Jonathan Schwartz met Sinatra for the first time, at La Tour d’Argent:

He was forty-six years old, effortlessly imperial, shyly suspicious, dangerously iconic. With us he was somewhat charming, greeting Betsy warmly, Mosk with a handshake. When he was introduced to me, I threw Arthur at him. “He’s a good friend of mine,” Sinatra said with a strong squeeze of my hand, though my father had met him once and spoken to him on the phone twice about ASCAP business.

“Why are there two different versions of ‘To Love and Be Loved’?” is what came out of my mouth.

“I don’t know,” Sinatra said, correctly sensing one of the music lunatics.

“There’s one with the high note and the other is shorter with the same arrangement by Riddle but it’s a different take and it doesn’t have the high note so I was wondering why the two versions were released and also recorded on two different dates because . . .”

Sinatra turned away.

Mosk asked me what that was all about.

I told him that I had simply lost it.

Jonathan Schwartz, All in Good Time: A Memoir (New York: Random House, 2004).

The other players: Betsy Blair, actress; Gene Moskowitz, Variety writer; Nelson Riddle, composer and arranger; Arthur Schwartz, composer. All in Good Time chronicles the ups and downs of Schwartz’s later encounters with Sinatra.

Here’s one version of “To Love and Be Loved” (Sammy Cahn–Jimmy Van Heusen). I’m guessing that it’s the one with the high note.

Related posts
Frank Sinatra and Tom Waits
Frank Sinatra’s popcorn
Jonathan Schwartz and WKCS

Jonathan Schwartz and WKCS

1949: Jonathan Schwartz, eleven years old, lived with his parents in a penthouse at Ninety-fourth Street and Lexington Avenue. There he created a radio station:

A radio station was born from the newly invented Electronic Baby-Sitter, a device that, when placed by a crib, would transmit any disturbance to a radio in another room at 600 on the dial, where there was no New York station. I used the Electronic Baby-Sitter as a microphone, placing it in front of my record player. The result in the living room and in my mother’s room and in my father’s study was nothing short of what my mother called “a miracle.” The music that I was playing in my room was as clear as a chime on every radio in the house. My father’s battery portable, which rested on a bed table by the brown couch, gave me the big idea.

I took it, one morning, down the back stairs of the building, all twelve floors, to the street.

The reception remained clear as my father changed the recordings in my room. Absolutely clear, even on the street, even across Ninety-fourth and down Lexington toward Ninety-third.

I lost the signal a block from home, but it returned and became its powerful self in the lobby of our building.

A real opportunity here. A real station, WKCS, in honor of my mother.

Jonathan Schwartz, All in Good Time: A Memoir (New York: Random House, 2004).

As Schwartz explains, the station’s call letters “had the W for the eastern stations, the K for western stations, and the KCS for my mother’s initials, Katherine Carrington Schwartz.” (His father was the composer Arthur Schwartz.) The schedule, distributed to every apartment in the building:

Monday–Friday, 7:00–7:30 A.M., The Sunrise Salute
Saturday and Sunday, 7:00–8:00 A.M., The Weekend Salute

Jonathan Schwartz, disc jockey, grew up to be Jonathan Schwartz, disc jockey, writer, Sinatra maven. You can still hear Schwartz on the weekends: The Saturday Show and The Sunday Show run from noon to four (Eastern Time) on WNYC-FM, 93.9, streaming at wnyc.org. Some jazz, some pop, some show tunes, some familiar, some rare and out of the way. It’s difficult to stop listening.

Tenuously related posts
Call Letter Origins
96th and Lexington

Cutting libraries

[Design by Daniel Solis, from an observation by Eleanor Crumblehulme. Licensed under a Creative Commons 2.0 License. Found at Boing Boing.]

The OED siphon

“We would all have an issue if the dictionary defined a koala as a species of bear, or a rose as a tulip”: physicist Stephen Hughes is asking that the Oxford English Dictionary definition of siphon be changed.

Dictionary mistake goes unnoticed for 99 years (Sydney Morning Herald)

Viriginia Heffernan on datebooks

Virginia Heffernan misses her Filofax:

It was, in every sense, a diary — a forward-running record, unlike backward-running blogs. The quality of the paper stock, the slot for the pen, the blank but substantial cover, the hints of grand possibilities that came with the inserts — all of these inspired not just introspection but also the joining of history: the mapping of an individual life onto the grand old Gregorian-calendar template.

Google Calendar, she says, cannot compare.

The Demise of Datebooks (New York Times)

(Found via Submitted for Your Perusal)

In defense of the telephone book

Patrick McGeehan, writer of the recent New York Times article on the possible disappearance of New York City’s White Pages, follows up with a summary of readers’ responses. Most of those readers professed no use for phonebooks. But —

Quite a few readers argued that the White Pages still serve a useful purpose — other than as doorstops or booster seats — particularly for the elderly, people who live in rural areas and others who have a hard time accessing computers.

I’d add that the sheer ease of looking up a number in print makes the phonebook preferable to an online search. Then again, I live in a “rural area.”

A bonus: McGeehan’s follow-up has a photograph of a 1951 Manhattan phonebook page with J.D. Salinger’s listing. Exchange name: SAcramento.

Stephen Sondheim on pencils, paper

From a 2005 interview:

Do you use any special kind of paper or pencil?

I use Blackwing pencils. Blackwings. They don’t make ’em any more, and luckily, I bought a lot of boxes of ’em. They’re very soft lead. They’re not round, so they don’t fall off the table, and they have removable erasers, which unfortunately dry out.

And paper?

Yes. Yellow lined pads. I used to have them so it was, I think 26 lines to a page, and my friend, Burt Shevelove, who was a stationery freak, said, “Buy cartons of them!” I said, “Oh Burt, come on. I’ll buy 12 pads. That will be enough.” God, was he ever right, because they discontinued making them about 20 years ago. I’m used to the other pads now. You get used to the exact amount of space between lines, because you write a word and then you write an alternate word over it. You want enough room so you can read it, so the lines can’t be too close. But if they’re too far apart, you don’t get enough lines on the paper. I could go on. I’m sure many writers have these tiny little habits. All over the United States there are people who only use Blackwings. I sometimes get letters, “Do you have any source for the Blackwings?”

And they’re extinct?

Yeah, they’re extinct. Adam Green, Adolph Green’s son, has written an article for The New Yorker, which I think will be published next year. Quite a long article on the Blackwing pencil and the fanatics who go crazy when they don’t have a Blackwing in their hand. You just get habituated. Of course you can still write. If there were no yellow pads in the world, I’d find a way of writing on white paper or on non-lined pads. It’s the lined pads that make it. Yellow is just good because the contrast of the yellow and the black lead is just easier on the eyes than white.

If you’ve never seen a Blackwing, here are photographs. And here is a photograph of Sondheim with a Blackwing. For the Blackwing slogan, stamped into each pencil, see the blog description above.

A search for blackwing at the New Yorker shows no trace of Adam Green’s article.

[The slogan, no longer appearing above: “Half the pressure, twice the speed.”]

Other Blackwing posts
Blackwing 2: The Return
The new Blackwing pencil (a review)
Nelson Riddle on the Blackwing pencil
John Steinbeck on the Blackwing pencil