Newsstand paperweights

“Though they were once as omnipresent as phone booths, the heyday of the cast-iron weights has come and gone”: a New York Times slideshow of newsstand paperweights.

And in Fluence, an illustrated interview with collector Harley Spiller. (Go to the May-June 2010 issue.)

[Toronto Star newsstand paperweight. Photograph by Micki Watanabe Spiller, from the New York Times slideshow.]

Ben Leddy is blogging

My son Ben has begun blogging at Good Reason (“thoughts on philosophy, music, law, and everything else”). An excerpt from his first post:

Perhaps publishers ought to begin selling ‘great books’ with the pages blank. This would remind us that when we reach for an interesting title, we’re not always after great thoughts, but rather, the great challenge of thinking and creating. If you find yourself caught in a cycle of checking out books and returning them a few days later in defeat, ask yourself whether you’re looking to read, or if you’re actually looking to create something new.

“A degree is a degree”

My friend Stefan Hagemann pointed me to a choice bit from a New York Times article about Pakistani politicians accused of claiming fraudulent degrees. Says Nawab Aslam Raisani, chief minister of Baluchistan Province:

“A degree is a degree. Whether fake or genuine, it’s a degree. It makes no difference.”

(Thanks, Stefan!)

Semi-mysterious J.D. Salinger Boxed Set mystery deepens, perhaps

Re: the semi-mysterious J.D. Salinger Boxed Set: I called Little, Brown’s Customer Service number yesterday morning to ask the simplest question: how many volumes? The person on the other end looked up the boxed set and found no answer (and sounded puzzled about that). She took my number and promised to get back to me. No one has returned my call.

So the mystery deepens, perhaps.

Bandbox

The Merriam-Webster Word of the Day is bandbox:

bandbox   \BAND-bahks\   noun

1 : a usually cylindrical box of cardboard or thin wood for holding light articles of attire
*2 : a structure (as a baseball park) having relatively small interior dimensions

Example sentence: “Baseballs flew out of there at a record pace for a while, and everyone had theories about why this stadium was behaving like a bandbox, despite similar dimensions to the old place.” (Filip Bondy, Daily News [New York], November 8, 2009)

Did you know? In the 17th century, the word “band” was sometimes used for ruffs, the large round collars of pleated muslin or linen worn by men and women of the time period, and the bandbox was invented for holding such bands. The flimsy cardboard structure of the box inspired people to start using its name for any flimsy object, especially a small and insubstantial one. But people also contemplated the neat, sharp appearance of ruffs just taken from a bandbox and began using the word in a complimentary way in phrases such as “she looked as if she came out of a bandbox.” Today, “bandbox” can also be used as an adjective meaning “exquisitely neat, clean, or ordered,” as in “bandbox military officers.”

The word bandbox sticks in my head because of Gilbert Sorrentino’s novel Aberration of Starlight (1980). The word appears twice in Marie Recco’s interior monologue, first in Marie’s mother Bridget McGrath’s description of Marie, then in Marie’s description of her ex-husband Tony:

He worshiped the ground she walked on. Went out for chow mein and came back with little red embroidered slippers. Chinese apples. Bouquets of flowers. In January. Why not? her mother said. You always looked like you stepped out of a bandbox. Where did their kind ever see a girl with your looks and breeding?

*

What happened? Red silk slippers. Bouquets and boxes of chocolate. Coming out of the hold of that ship like he just stepped out of a bandbox.

Is it unusual to associate a word with its appearance in a work of literature? Apoplexy has meant Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island to me since sixth grade. Since college, sempiternal has equalled T.S. Eliot’s Little Gidding. Avatar: William Faulkner’s Light in August. Sanguine: Willa Cather’s The Professor’s House. And heifer: John Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” though I had to teach the poem in east-central Illinois to learn the proper pronunciation. (Thanks, Sally.)

What words have these sorts of literary associations for you?

A related post
Gilbert Sorrentino (1929–2006)

Buster Keaton in the rain

[Buster Keaton as Ronald, in College (dir. James W. Horne, 1927).]

There’s an explanation: young Ronald has been sharing that umbrella with his mother (played by Florence Turner, formerly the Vitagraph Girl of early silents).

College has many delights, including a spectacular scene of soda-jerkery. The film’s ending is extraordinarily funny and extraordinarily grim, tracking two lifetimes in just ten seconds. Life’s short.

Eighty-three years later, it’s still raining.

Semi-mysterious J.D. Salinger Boxed Set

This news that an uncollected 1945 Salinger story is about to be reprinted makes me wonder about the contents of the hardcover J.D. Salinger Boxed Set forthcoming from Little, Brown in November 2010. Borders lists it as retailing for $99. Chapters Indigo lists it with must be the dimensions of an individual volume: 7.24 x 9.41 x 0.98 inches. As you might have guessed, there are no photographs of this set.

More interesting: there is no indication as to how many volumes this set will contain. Will there be four — The Catcher in the Rye, Nine Stories, Franny and Zooey, and Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters / Seymour: An Introduction? Or will there be a fifth volume with the uncollected stories? The reprinting of a 1945 story would seem to suggest that the Salinger estate has been negotiating with publishers. And the lack of information about this boxed set makes me suspect that something’s being kept quiet, for now. (If that turns out to be the case, you read it here first.)

If the boxed set includes only the four previously published books, it’d be nice to see, say, a Library of America volume with the uncollected stories. I’m optimistic, always. And yes, the uncollected stories can already be had as bootlegs. But a book is better, no?

Update, November 2, 2010: The semi-mysterious boxed set is no longer semi-mysterious. The Borders and Chapters Indigo pages now list the set’s contents — the four books, nothing more.

Related reading
All Salinger posts
Roger Lathbury, Betraying Salinger (New York)

Saturday Evening Post to reprint 1945 Salinger story

The July/August 2010 issue of The Saturday Evening Post will reprint J.D. Salinger’s story “A Boy in France,” first published in The Post in 1945. Says Joan SerVaas, chief executive officer and publisher:

This evocative tale of a young solider struggling to maintain his sanity during the madness of war is just one of the many Salinger short stories tucked away in our archives. We think readers will find this one is as fresh and meaningful now as when it was first published.

[Did you have any idea that The Saturday Evening Post is still publishing?]

Related reading
All Salinger posts

Domestic comedy

After a stint of mowing:

“I don’t think I could ever really say ‘Farm livin’ is the life for me.’ Maybe a farm with hired hands.”

“And feet.”

[With apologies to Green Acres.]

Related reading
All “domestic comedy” posts

Infinite Jest, television

There is no broadcast television in the near-future of Infinite Jest, only cartridges and disks and “Spontaneous Disseminations” from InterLace TelEntertainment. Orin Incandenza misses the old days:

“I miss commercials that were louder than the programs. I miss the phrases ‘Order before midnight tonight’ and ‘Save up to fifty percent and more.’ I miss being told things were filmed before a live studio audience. I miss late‐night anthems and shots of flags and fighter jets and leathery‐faced Indian chiefs crying at litter. I miss ‘Sermonette’ and ‘Evensong’ and test patterns and being told how many megahertz something’s transmitter was broadcasting at.” He felt his face. “I miss sneering at something I love. How we used to love to gather in the checker‐tiled kitchen in front of the old boxy cathode‐ray Sony whose reception was sensitive to airplanes and sneer at the commercial vapidity of broadcast stuff. . . . I miss summer reruns. I miss reruns hastily inserted to fill the intervals of writers’ strikes, Actors’ Guild strikes. I miss Jeannie, Samantha, Sam and Diane, Gilligan, Hawkeye, Hazel, Jed, all the syndicated airwave‐haunters. You know? I miss seeing the same things over and over again.”

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

As Orin goes on to explain, the freedom to watch something on disk again and again is not the same: “‘The choice, see. It ruins it somehow. With television you were subjected to repetition. The familiarity was inflicted.’”

Other Infinite Jest posts
Attention : Description : Loveliness : “Night-noises” : Romance : Telephony