Rock the mic

[From the Oxford English Dictionary.]

First M.C. to rock (“To handle effectively and impressively; to use or wield effectively, esp. with style or self-assurance”) the mic: Melle Mel, says the OED. Ben Zimmer explains:

When Did We First “Rock the Mic”? (New York Times)

Joyeux anniversaire, M. Proust

Marcel Proust was born on July 10, 1871.

The philosophers have certainly persuaded us that time is a process of reckoning that corresponds to no reality. We know that, but the ancient superstition is so strong that we cannot escape it, and it seems to us that on a given date we are inevitably older, like the government, which finds that because it should be warm the 1st of April, after that central heating is no longer needed. For a long time we have found this ridiculous of the government, but for age we don’t find it so.

Marcel Proust, in a letter to Geneviève Bizet Straus, October or November 1912. From Letters of Marcel Proust, translated by Mina Curtiss (New York: Helen Marx Books / Books & Co., 2006).

Thanks, Mari, for reminding me of the date.

Related reading
All Proust posts (Pinboard)

Charlie Rose and David Foster Wallace

March 27, 1997: Charlie Rose interviewed David Foster Wallace. These thirty-two minutes (edited from who-knows-how-many-more) appear to have been, to borrow a Wallace phrase, “hellaciously unfun.” Samples:

Rose: I want to talk about David Lynch, who after I read your piece in Esquire — was it Esquire? — no, Premiere, Premiere — I interviewed David Lynch. You never got to interview David Lynch.

More discussion of movies:

Rose: English Patient.

Wallace: You’re seriously asking me for my view on English Patient?

*

Rose: How about Shine? I’m going to go down [a list of] three, David.

Wallace: This is — a lot of this is going to get cut out, right?

Rose: Perhaps. But I’ll make the decision as to what’s cut out.

The best exchange:

Rose: Quit worrying about how you’re gonna look and just be.

Wallace: I’ve got news for you: coming on a television show stimulates your what-am-I-gonna-look-like gland like no other experience.

I’ve never been a fan of Charlie Rose, who often seems more interested in laying claim to authority and expertise than in listening to what his interviewee has to say. (Is it an interview, or is it a competition?) If you watch this interview, you’ll see that the David Lynch bit interrupts Wallace’s patient taking-apart of Rose’s out-of-nowhere assertion that respect is very important to Wallace.

Note too Wallace’s comment about his knowledge of “elementary arithmetic” (he knows that many people praising Infinite Jest could not have had time enough to read it) and his observations about belligerent questions coming out of nowhere after readings.

Me, I finished reading Infinite Jest last night. That’s all I can say right now.

Charlie Rose interviews David Foster Wallace (March 27, 1997)
Charlie Rose talks with David Foster Wallace, Jonathan Franzen, and Mark Leyner (May 17, 1996)

[“Hellaciously unfun”: from the 1996 conversation, Wallace’s characterization of contemporary avant-garde fiction.]

Toy Story 3

Here’s a brief but heartfelt recommendation: go see Toy Story 3 (dir. Lee Unkrich, 2010). And if you or your children grew up with the first two Toy Story films and you think you’re too old: go see Toy Story 3.

Our daughter Rachel and son Ben urged Elaine and me to see 3. We are glad that we did. The film enters deeply emotional, even philosophical territory: objects and their associations, remembrance of things past, and identity. We are ourselves, this film seems to say, only in relation to others.

Most unexpectedly moving moment: holding hands. Meant, I think, to evoke a matter of recent history.

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.”