Van Dyke Parks on Bananastan, cont’d.

In an interview with Mojo, Van Dyke Parks offers some more details about his forthcoming 7"-vinyl singles. And some observations about age and resilience:

“I know my best work is ahead of me. That’s the only thing that gets me out of the decrepitude of my advanced age. Every day the hand is farther from the head! Just to play the things I played when I was a brunette, I want to tell you, it ain’t for sissies! And I beat the shit [out] of the piano!”

A related post
Van Dyke Parks on Bananastan (with Art Spiegelman’s label design)
Van Dyke Parks, two singles (imaginary liner notes)

Word of the day: jalousie

It’s Merriam-Webster’s Word of the Day:

jalousie \JAL-uh-see\ noun
1 : a blind with adjustable horizontal slats for admitting light and air while excluding direct sun and rain
2 : a window made of adjustable glass louvers that control ventilation

*

Etymologists are clear on the source of the word “jalousie” — it’s French for “jealousy” — but the relationship between the emotion and the window treatments originally referred to as jalousies is not something they’ve speculated much about. Is it that those peering out through the original jalousie blinds were jealous of the people outside? Or is it more likely that the jealousy festered in the hearts of those outside, who could see the blinds but not the faces and lives of the people they hid? This excerpt from the October 23, 1766 entry in the Duchess of Northumberland’s diary perhaps provides a clue: “Rows of Seats with Jalousies in Front that [the women] may not be seen.”

Storm doors with glass louvers were common in the Brooklyn of my childhood, where they were called juh-LAU-sees.

You can clear your head of that pronunciation by listening to the Tango Project’s recording of Jacob Gade’s “Jalousie.”

“Doris Day parking”

From the Urban Dictionary:

Any parking spot that seems as though it was meant to be, as evidenced by the spot’s convenience to one’s destination as well as the smoothness with which one can park their car in said spot.

Derived from the sort of parking found by Doris Day in any Doris Day movie.

Read more:

Doris Day Parking Has “Street Cred” (Seattle Post-Intelligencer)

“Street cred?”

[Photograph via A Certain Cinema.]

Phooey, a caption

[My pairing.]

The first recorded appearance of phooey seems to pair well with David Borchart’s cartoon from a recent New Yorker Caption Contest. No, I don’t understand it either. But I like it.

Re: “distracting little rituals”

In The Pale King, David Foster Wallace calls them “distracting little rituals” — ways to break up deskwork. Mine (from most to least frequent): checking my “stuff” (e-mail accounts and blog stats), making a cup of tea, playing the piano for a few minutes, choosing pens and pencils, removing files and folders from my Mac’s desktop, filling a seldom-used fountain pen.

What are your preferred forms of work-avoidance?

The Pale King, deskwork

IRS newcomer David Wallace is “frightened and thrilled” by his first sight of tax examiners at work, silent, unmoving, wholly focused. The scene doesn’t jibe with his sense of deskwork:

I had spent massive amounts of time in libraries; I knew quite well how deskwork really was. Especially if the task at hand was dry or repetitive, or dense, or if it involved reading something that had no direct relevance to your own life and priorities, or was work that you were doing only because you had to — like for a grade, or part of a freelance assignment for pay from some lout who was off skiing. The way hard deskwork really goes is in jagged little fits and starts, brief intervals of concentration alternated with frequent trips to the men’s room, the drinking fountain, the vending machine, constant visits to the pencil sharpener, phone calls you suddenly feel are imperative to make, rapt intervals of seeing what kinds of shapes you can bend a paperclip into, & c.¹ This is because sitting still and concentrating on just one task for an extended period of time is, as a practical matter, impossible.

¹ For me, the pencil sharpener is a big one. I like a very particular sort of very sharp pencil, and some pencil sharpeners are a great deal better than others for achieving this special shape, which then is blunted and ruined after only a sentence or two, requiring a large number of sharpened pencils all lined up in a special order of age, remaining height, & c. The upshot is that nearly everyone I knew had distracting little rituals like this, of which rituals the whole point, deep down, was that they were distracting.

David Foster Wallace, The Pale King (Boston: Little, Brown, 2011)

Other Pale King excerpts
Dullness
Heroism

[The Pale King is a novel in the form of “basically a nonfiction memoir” by former IRS examiner David Wallace, “with additional elements of reconstructive journalism, organizational psychology, elementary civics and tax theory, & c.” In the novel, the footnote number is 45.]

“This is the world”

“Irrelevant” Chris Fogle has walked into the “wrong but identical classroom” — not American Political Thought but Advanced Tax, where he hears an extraordinary lecturer. A sample:

He made a gesture I can’t describe: “Gentlemen, welcome to the world of reality — there is no audience. No one to applaud, to admire. No one to see you. Do you understand? Here is the truth — actual heroism receives no ovation, entertains no one. No one queues up to see it. No one is interested.”

He paused again and smiled in a way that was not one bit self-mocking. “True heroism is you, alone, in a designated work space. True heroism is minutes, hours, weeks, year upon year of the quiet, precise, judicious exercise of probity and care — with no one there to see or cheer. This is the world. Just you and the job, at your desk. You and the return, you and the cash-flow data, you and the inventory protocol, you and the depreciation schedules, you and the numbers.”

David Foster Wallace, The Pale King (Boston: Little, Brown, 2011).

Another Pale King excerpt
The Pale King, dullness

“Justice has been done”

“On nights like this one, we can say that justice has been done”: President Barack Obama, just a few minutes ago, announcing the death of Osama bin Laden.

As exams approach

Exam-takers, take your pick:

How to do horribly on a final exam
How to do well on a final exam

Best wishes to all for finals week.

DFW in Peoria

Gary Panetta of the Peoria Journal Star writes about David Foster Wallace and the unfinished novel The Pale King.

Other Pale King posts
A Pale King event
The Pale King and commerce
The Pale King, dullness

[The setting for The Pale King is an IRS Regional Examination Center in Peoria, Illinois.]