Telephone Brand Agar-Agar

[Photograph by Michael Leddy.]

Agar-agar! The substance so nice, they named it twice. (Like New York, New York.) I long knew agar only as a word in crossword puzzles. I noticed the thing itself (derived from red algae) in a market this past weekend.

Wikipedia says that agar-agar can be used “as a laxative, a vegetarian gelatin substitute, a thickener for soups, in jellies, ice cream and other desserts, as a clarifying agent in brewing, and for paper sizing fabrics.” I have verified none these uses: I take agar-agar’s versatility on faith. I do know from experience that agar-agar can be used in blog posts, at least when it’s packaged in such a striking way.

On the back of the package, a glossy woman speaks. Listen: do you hear what she is saying? Yes, she is telling a friend about Telephone Brand Agar-Agar Powder.

Found tombstone

From the New York Times, the story of a tombstone found on a Lower East Side sidewalk.

Studying on the decline

It’s not exactly news that studying is on the decline. But still:

According to time-use surveys analyzed by professors Philip Babcock, at the University of California Santa Barbara, and Mindy Marks, at the University of California Riverside, the average student at a four-year college in 1961 studied about 24 hours a week. Today’s average student hits the books for just 14 hours.

The decline, Babcock and Marks found, infects students of all demographics. No matter the student’s major, gender, or race, no matter the size of the school or the quality of the SAT scores of the people enrolled there, the results are the same: Students of all ability levels are studying less.

The greatest decline: between 1961 and 1981, from 24.4 to 16.8 hours a week.¹ As to why: Murray Sperber, quoted in this article, seems to me to hit the mark. See what you think:

What happened to studying? (Boston Globe, via Arts & Letters Daily)

¹ Jeez, I spent way too much time studying in college.

R. Crumb’s supplies

R. Crumb has just explained that he uses crow-quill pens for drawing: “An old steel-point nib, that’s what I use to draw with — for my artwork, I have to use antique, archaic tools.”

What kind of paper do you use, what kind of pen and ink?

Well, I use the old Strathmore vellum surface paper, which is the best paper you can get in the Western world for ink line drawing. It has a good, hard surface. I have it mailed from the New York Central Art Supply in New York. For a while I was using this old Strathmore paper from fifty years ago that some guy sent me, it had bad comic art on one side, hacked-out comic work from 1959, 1960, but the paper is superior to anything you can get now. It just holds the ink better. I ran out of that and now I use this new stuff that’s not quite as good.

And how about the ink?

I use Pelikan black drawing ink, and the crow-quill pen nibs. And you stick them in a handle. They’re all getting harder to find, all these antique art instruments. The companies that have made them are dying off one by one. But I got lucky. One day about six or seven years ago, my daughter, Sophie, bought a box of old pen points at a flea market in France. She found a box of about a hundred drawing pen points, and they’re the best ones I’ve ever used. They last and last, everything about them is fine, the point, the tensile quality, even the metal, the glass. The metal was just better, back then. I’ve still got maybe fifty of those. I think they’ll probably last me the rest of my life.

On notebooks and sketchbooks:

I lived out my youth on paper, basically. I am a bookmaker. I see blank books, I want to fill them — notebooks, sketchbooks, blank pages.

From “The Art of Comics,” an interview with Ted Widmer, in the Summer 2010 Paris Review.

Related posts
Proust’s supplies
Stephen Sondheim on pencils, paper

Infinite Jest, “night-noises”

A great descriptive passage:

The night-noises of the metro night: harbor-wind skirling on angled cement, the shush and sheen of overpass traffic, TPs’ laughter in interior rooms, the yowl of unresolved cat-life. Horns blatting off in the harbor. Receding sirens. Confused inland gulls’ cries. Broken glass from far away. Car horns in gridlock, arguments in languages, more broken glass, running shoes, a woman’s either laugh or scream from who can tell how far, coming off the grid. Dogs defending whatever dog-yards they pass by, the sounds of chains and risen hackles. The podiatric click and thud, the visible breath, gravel’s crunch, creak of Green’s leather, the snick of a million urban lighters, the gauzy far-off humming ATHSCMEs pointing out true plumb north, the clunk and tinkle of stuff going into dumpsters and rustle of stuff in dumpsters settling and skirl of wind on the sharp edges of dumpsters and unmistakable clanks and tinkles of dumpster-divers and can-miners going after dumpsters’ cans and bottles, the district Redemption Center down in Brighton and actually even boldly sharing a storefront with Liquor World liquor store, so the can-miners can do like one-stop redeeming and shopping.

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

TPs: teleputers, which have replaced broadcast television. “Green’s leather”: Bruce Green, out on a walk with Randy Lenz, wears a leather jacket. ATHSCMEs: “Air-Displacement Effectuators,” giant fans that blow pollution north to Canada. Brighton: one half of Allston-Brighton, the Boston neighborhoods that serve as the setting for much of Infinite Jest.

Infinite Jest is filled with acronyms, but with under 200 pages of the novel to go, I’ve yet to see an explanation of ATHSCME. I suspect (and suspect that I will continue to suspect) that the name is a joke on the Acme Corporation of cartoondom and on the words “Ask me.” What does ATHSCME stand for? Athsc me. I think of ATHSCME as a distant relation of an acronym from John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath: IITYWYBAD?

I remember a similar acronym from Allston-Brighton — YOADTMD, more or less, which hung above the bar of the El Phoenix Room in Brighton. Infinite Jest names several now-defunct Allston-Brighton landmarks: Bunratty’s (a bar, aka Scumratty’s), Ellis the Rim Man (an auto-parts store), Marty’s Liquors (previously Macy’s Liquors, located at the center of the universe, the intersection of Commonwealth Avenue and Harvard Avenue), Play It Again Sam’s (a bar), Purity Supreme (a supermarket). No mention though of the El Phoenix, still unrisen.

Other Infinite Jest posts
Attention : Description : Loveliness : Romance : Telephony

Colleges catching cheaters

From a New York Times article, a few details of life at the University of Central Florida:

No gum is allowed during an exam: chewing could disguise a student’s speaking into a hands-free cellphone to an accomplice outside.

The 228 computers that students use are recessed into desk tops so that anyone trying to photograph the screen — using, say, a pen with a hidden camera, in order to help a friend who will take the test later — is easy to spot.

Scratch paper is allowed — but it is stamped with the date and must be turned in later.

When a proctor sees something suspicious, he records the student’s real-time work at the computer and directs an overhead camera to zoom in, and both sets of images are burned onto a CD for evidence.

To Stop Cheats, Colleges Learn Their Trickery (New York Times)

If you click through to read the article, note that the accompanying photograph — of a man monitoring cameras at a “testing center” — suggests not “college” but “prison.”

Bedbugs of New York

At Abercrombie & Fitch. At Hollister. At the movies.

Related reading and listening
“Ambercroombie & Flitch”
Furry Lewis, “Mean Old Bedbug Blues” (YouTube)

Analogy

From today’s xkcd, Analogies:

“Is that simile itself a metaphor for something?”

“Maybe it’s a metaphor for analogy.”

Related posts
All metaphor posts
All simile posts (Pinboard)
Bad analogy of the day (Faculty : students :: waiters : customers)

Domestic comedy

“You know, I think competitiveness is a default male setting.”

“It is not.”

Related reading
All “domestic comedy” posts

American ones

Ivie Anderson : Louis Armstrong : Clarence Ashley : Fred Astaire : Joan Baez : Mildred Bailey : Tony Bennett : Dock Boggs : James Brown : Chester Burnett (Howlin’ Wolf) : A.P. Carter : Betty Carter : Bo Carter : Maybelle Carter : Sara Carter : Johnny Cash : June Carter Cash : Ray Charles : Patsy Cline : Bing Crosby : Bo Diddley : Bob Dylan : Sleepy John Estes : Ruth Etting : Ella Fitzgerald : Slim Gaillard : Tess Gardella : Art Garfunkel : Judy Garland : Inara George : Lowell George : Clifford Gibson : Ronnie Gilbert : Al Green : Woody Guthrie : Bill Haley : Annette Hanshaw : Johnny Hartman : Screamin’ Jay Hawkins : Lee Hays : Fred Hellerman : Al Hibbler : Bob Hite : Billie Holiday : Judy Holliday : Buddy Holly : Son House : Alberta Hunter : Mississippi John Hurt : Mahalia Jackson : Skip James : Al Jardine : Blind Lemon Jefferson : Robert Johnson : Tommy Johnson : Rickie Lee Jones : B.B. King : Carole King : Tom Lehrer : Matthew and Mark (The NuGrape Twins) : Mike Love : Randy Newman : Laura Nyro : Anita O’Day : Van Dyke Parks : Charley Patton : Wilson Pickett : Elvis Presley : Gertrude “Ma” Rainey : Otis Redding : Malvina Reynolds : J.P. Richardson (The Big Bopper) : Jimmie Rodgers : Jimmy Rushing : Pete Seeger : Joya Sherrill : Paul Simon : Frank Sinatra : Bessie Smith : Jo Stafford : Sufjan Stevens : Koko Taylor : Elvie Thomas : Mel Tormé : Joe Turner : Ritchie Valens : Tom Waits : Thomas “Fats” Waller : Ethel Waters : Muddy Waters : Gillian Welch : Geeshie Wiley : Lee Wiley : Joe Williams : Alan Wilson : Brian Wilson : Carl Wilson : Dennis Wilson : Jackie Wilson

One-hundred American voices for this Fourth of July.

[Title borrowed from Clark Coolidge’s American Ones (Noise & Presentiments) (Bolinas, CA: Tombouctou, 1981).]