David Foster Wallace

February 21, 1962 – September 12, 2008

[B]ut by then it was too late, when it wouldn’t stop and they couldn’t make it the child had learned to leave himself and watch the whole rest unfold from a point overhead, and whatever was lost never thenceforth mattered, and the child’s body expanded and walked about and drew pay and lived its life untenanted, a thing among things, its self’s soul so much vapor aloft, falling as rain and then rising, the sun up and down like a yoyo.

David Foster Wallace, “Incarnations of Burned Children,” in Oblivion (New York: Little, Brown, 2004).

[Photograph by Gary Hannabarger.]

Some Infinite Jest posts
Attention : Description : Loveliness : “Night-noises” : Romance : Sadness : Telephony : Television

Another review of the new Blackwing

Pencil talk has a discerning review of pre-production samples of the Palomino Blackwing pencil. Great photographs too.

A related post
The new Blackwing pencil (My review)

Chock full o’Nuts!

Chock full o’Nuts returns to New York!

Related posts
Chock full o’Nuts (Remembrance of things past)
Chock full o’Nuts lunch hour (An Alfred Eisenstadt photograph)
New York, 1964: Chock Full o’Nuts (From Hart’s Guide to New York City)

Irwin Silber (1925–2010)

Irwin Silber, founder and longtime editor of the folk-music magazine Sing Out!, has died:

Mr. Silber borrowed the title from the third verse of “The Hammer Song” (later known as “If I Had a Hammer”), written in 1949 by [Pete] Seeger and [Lee] Hays, with its refrain “I’d sing out danger, I’d sing out a warning, I’d sing out love between all my brothers (and my sisters) all over this land.”

Irwin Silber, Champion of the Folk Music Revival, Dies at 84 (New York Times)

Philippe Petit on the past and present tenses

Philippe Petit:

Eleven years ago, when my young daughter died without warning, the dean of the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine, the Very Rev. James Parks Morton, came to my side. He offered me guidance from his heart, but quite commandingly: “Speak of her in the present; you must not use the past tense!”

When asked today, “Do you have children?” I answer, “Yes, I have a daughter named Gypsy. She is 9 1/2 years old, and no longer alive.”

So are my twin towers, our twin towers, gone, yet still standing tall, made of thin air, yet gloriously defying the sunset on this warm late summer evening.

Look at them!

From “My Towers, Our Towers” (Wall Street Journal, September 13, 2003)

Andrew Sullivan, telling it like it is

At The Daily Dish:

Religious warfare, once begun, is hard to stop; and when it is tacitly endorsed by a political party many of whose members believe that the president is a Muslim and no one in the GOP directly attacks, rebuts and discredits this nonsense, we are in very dangerous territory.

Cheating and psychopathy

From a summary of research published by the American Psychological Association:

Students who cheat in high school and college are highly likely to fit the profile for subclinical psychopathy — a personality disorder defined by erratic lifestyle, manipulation, callousness and antisocial tendencies . . . .

College students who admitted to cheating in high school or turned in plagiarized papers ranked high on personality tests of the so-called Dark Triad: psychopathy, Machiavellianism (cynicism, amorality, manipulativeness), and narcissism (arrogance and self-centeredness, with a strong sense of entitlement).

Read more:

Personality predicts cheating more than academic struggles, study shows (American Psychological Association)

“Barthes’s Hand”

At the New Yorker: four samples of Roland Barthes’s handwriting. (He was using a fountain pen.)

“[A]s Edwin Denby would / write”

After knowing Frank O’Hara’s poem “A Step Away from Them” for thirty years, I woke up this morning and realized (I think) the point of these lines:

                   Neon in daylight is a
great pleasure, as Edwin Denby would
write

The key word (I think) is write (not say). Edwin Denby (1903–1983) was a celebrated writer on dance and, in a much less public way, a terrific poet. (He was also a friend of FOH’s.) Denby’s poems are usually sonnets, what might be called American vernacular sonnets, made with a deliberate awkwardness in meter. A few opening lines:

I myself like the climate of New York. (“The Climate”)

The subway flatters like the dope habit. (“The Subway”)

The great New York bridges reflect its faces. (“A New York Face”)

In such company, the seven words from O’Hara’s poem sound like a line of Denby’s pentameter:

Neon in daylight is a great pleasure.

I’d scan the line like so: NEon in DAYlight is a GREAT PLEASure. That’s iambic pentameter, with a pyrrhic in the middle and trochees substituting for iambs at the beginning and end:

/ x  |  x /  | x x  |  x /  |  / x

Or, for emphasis: NEon in DAYlight IS a GREAT PLEASure. That’s a more recognizably iambic line:

/ x  |  x /  | x /  |  x /  |  / x

Part of what makes O’Hara’s homage to Denby itself a great pleasure is that these words appear in the guise of O’Hara lines, so (seemingly) casually enjambed: “a / great pleasure.” I’m reminded of how Ted Berrigan relineates William Shakespeare’s pentameter in “A Final Sonnet” and of how Robert Creeley relineates Emily Dickinson stanzas in his poem “Desultory Days.” Creeley relineates William Wordsworth too, somewhere — where?

It is 6:36 in east-central Illinois, a Friday (as Frank O’Hara never wrote). That’s enough.

Related posts
Minetta Tavern (Neon in daylight)
Saratoga Bar and Cafe (Neon in daylight)
September 10, September 11 (Frank O’Hara’s poem)

Minetta Tavern

[Photograph by Elaine Fine.]

                   Neon in daylight is a
great pleasure, as Edwin Denby would
write

Frank O'Hara (1926–1966), “A Step Away from Them”

Here’s a forty-six-year-old description of the Minetta Tavern, from Harold H. Hart’s Hart’s Guide to New York City (1964).

Related posts
Saratoga Bar and Cafe (Neon in daylight)
September 10, September 11 (Frank O’Hara’s poem)