Infinite Jest, novelty

Keith Freer and Ortho (“The Darkness”) Stice are students at the Enfield Tennis Academy:

Freer’s from inland Maryland, originally, his family’s riches nouveaux, a family Amway business that hit big in the B.S. ’90s with his now-deceased father’s invention of a Pet-Rockish novelty that was ubiquitous in stockings for two straight pre-millennial Xmases — the so-called Phoneless Cord. Stice dimly recalls his old man getting a Phoneless Cord in his stocking, ostentatiously packaged, on Ortho’s first recallable Xmas, back in Partridge KS, the old man cocking an eyebrow and The Bride laughing and slapping her big knee. Nobody now much even gets the remembered gag, though, so few things needing cords anymore. But Freer’s old man had invested his windfall shrewdly.

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

“[T]he B.S. ’90s”: Before Subsidization. In post-millennial Subsidized Time, years are named for corporate sponsors: Year of the Whopper, Year of the Tucks Medicated Pad, &c.

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

Borders files for bankruptcy

The Wall Street Journal reports that Borders Group Inc. has filed for bankruptcy. Here’s the list of store closings. It’s on four pages, so seeking the fate of a particular store is a bit excruciating. My Borders, I’m surprised to see, lives, for now. But the wall seems to be covered with handwriting. From the
New York Times:

One potentially major concern is whether Borders will still receive shipments from publishers. A spokesman for the Ingram Book Group, one of the country’s biggest book distributors, said on Wednesday that the company is no longer shipping books to Borders.

Garner’s Usage Tip of the Day

Re: process:

The phrase “in the process of” never adds anything to the sentence in which it appears. You can safely omit it and thereby tighten your sentence — e.g.:

“I have on my desk a little manuscript from the fourteenth century written by an unknown author, which I am in the process of [delete ‘in the process of’] editing.” Donald J. Lloyd, “Our National Mania for Correctness,” in A Linguistics Reader 57, 58 (Graham Wilson ed., 1967).

“Appropriately for a community that was in the process of [delete ‘in the process of’] acquiring the sophistication of golf and drugs, this was not a case of a mean little robbery gone wrong but a thoroughly contemporary killing.” Owen Harris, "A Long Time Between Murders," Am. Scholar, Winter 2001, at 71, 79.

The singular of “process” is pronounced /PRAH-ses/ in American English, /PROH-ses/ in British English. But what about the plural? Is it /PRAH-ses-iz/ (/PROH-/ in British English) or /PRAH-suh-seez/? The first, preferably: the second is an affectation because the word is English, not Greek.

Bryan Garner, author of Garner’s Modern American Usage (Oxford University Press, 2009), offers a free Usage Tip of the Day. You can sign up at LawProse.org. Orange Crate Art is a Garner-friendly site: Modern American Usage is, to my mind, a model of clarity and good sense (though I like to type out numbers up to ninety-nine).

Hi and Lois watch

[Hi and Lois, February 16, 2010. Click for a larger view.]

They’ve sold off the furniture, but they’re keeping the art. Yes, it’s Edvard Munch’s The Scream. Any guess as to what’s on the other wall?

Related reading
All Hi and Lois posts

IBEW logo

[From Wikipedia.]

Slywy’s discovery of a pencil with an IBEW clip prompted me to write this post, which I’ve been meaning to do since December. I love the IBEW logo. It leaves me feeling like I’m in the wrong union. What makes the logo great for me is the jacket-clad arm. A bare arm would be a predictable design element here — brute strength and all that. It’s the juxtaposition of crackling electricity and proper attire that gets me. No doubt there’s a handkerchief, neatly folded, in the clencher’s breast pocket.

Related reading
International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (Wikipedia)
Look for the Union Label: A Celebration of Union Logos and Emblems (Labor Archives and Research Center at San Francisco State University)

Domestic comedy

“Now that it’s warmer, it feels colder.”

Related reading
All “domestic comedy” posts

Van Dyke Parks at Daytrotter

From Daytrotter, five performances by Van Dyke Parks with Clare and the Reasons, recorded in Asheville, North Carolina, October 2010. The performances are killer, and the download is free and legit.

From the same tour
Van Dyke Parks in Chicago (1)
Van Dyke Parks in Chicago (2)
Van Dyke Parks and Clare and the Reasons, on the radio
Van Dyke Parks and Clare and the Reasons, on the radio again

George Shearing (1919–2011)

From the New York Times obituary:

George Shearing, the British piano virtuoso who overcame blindness to become a worldwide jazz star, and whose composition “Lullaby of Birdland” became an enduring jazz standard, died on Monday in Manhattan.

A Shearing sampler, via YouTube:

“Conception” : “I Cover the Waterfront” : “It Never Entered My Mind” : “Lullaby of Birdland” : A conversation with Billy Taylor

[Shearing on “I Cover the Waterfront”: “I think this was written by Marlon Brando.”]

Town-talk

Lady Dedlock’s questions caught my attention:

“Is it the town-talk yet? Is it chalked upon the walls and cried on the streets?”

Charles Dickens, Bleak House (1853)

The Oxford English Dictionary traces town-talk — “The common talk or gossip of the people of a town; the subject or matter of such talk or gossip” — to a 1654 speech by Oliver Cromwell: “If it be not folly in me to listen to town-talk, such things have been proposed.” I know the term from a local newspaper editor who has an annoying way of citing town-talk when referencing hitherto unreported news: “As many of you already know,” &c. I usually don’t, as I don’t keep my ear to the town ground.

A related post
Goodbye, local paper

Supporting NPR

A site worth visiting, right now: 170 Million Americans for Public Broadcasting.