“[F]lapping his arms like Roddy McDowall”

A puzzling sentence:

Lane Dean imagines running out into the field in an enormous circle, flapping his arms like Roddy McDowall.

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

Such serendipity: the movie Elaine and I watched last night explains it. Alan “Mollymauk” Musgrave, McDowall’s character in Lord Love a Duck, flaps and squawks with abandon. His name? That of a bird.

Other Pale King passages
Deskwork : Dullness : Heroism

Blackwing sighting

[Harvey Korman and Blackwing pencil. Click for a larger view.]

Lord Love a Duck (1966) is a dark comedy directed by George Axelrod, who wrote the screenplay for The Manchurian Candidate (1962). That alone says watch it. The film mocks beach movies, education (high-school Botany has been renamed Plant Skills for Life), family life, home decor (a living-room conversation pit so deep that it echoes), sexual mores, teenaged in-groups, and everything else. As Axelrod says in a promotional trailer, whatever it might be, Lord Love a Duck is against it.

Even Blackwing pencils. Silly high-school principal Weldon Emmett (“e-double-m, e-double-t”) has a cupful on his desk. He does everything with them but write.

Related reading
Other Blackwing posts (via Pinboard)
Is there a pencil in The House? (More pencils in the movies)

[The Concise New Partidge Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English (2008) explains “Lord love-a-duck” as “a mild expression of shock or suprise.” The expression turns up in James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922): “‘Lord love a duck,’ he said. ‘Look at what I’m standing drinks to!’”]

Happy Mother’s Day

[Photograph by James Leddy, August 11, 1957.]

That’s my mom, Louise Leddy, and me, smiling at my dad, probably in Owl’s Head Park in Brooklyn. When I look at the photographs in my “baby book,” I kinda suspect that we lived in the park.

Happy Mother’s Day, Mom. And Happy Mother’s Day to all.

Record Service

Founded in 1969 as a record-buying co-op, Record Service stood at 621 E. Green Street, Champaign, Illinois, less than a block from the University of Illinois — “in the heart of Campustown,” as the card’s flip side puts it. Record Service was a very good record store — I always found something unexpected and worthwhile when browsing there. I remember making premeditated purchases too: Robert Johnson’s Complete Recordings (1990 — LPs!), Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music (1997), Louis Armstrong’s Complete Hot Five and Hot Seven Recordings (2000). Sony’s Armstrong set was a disaster, with execrable remastering and shoddy cardboard sleeves that left glue all over the discs. The store gave me credit, which I immediately spent on CDs to replace some worn Thelonious Monk LPs. Thanks, Record Service.

You can guess where this post is going: Record Service folded, in 2004. Figaro’s, a sister store for classical records at the same address, one flight up, had folded sometime earlier. Here’s a photograph of the way they were. 621 E. Green now houses a sushi restaurant on its first floor, townhouses above.

It was in Record Service that I first had the feeling that perhaps I was getting a little too old to be frequenting record stores. I never let it stop me. I wish I could still walk in and feel slightly out of place.

Further reading
Profile of Record Service owner Phil Strang (the217.com)
Profile: Record Service (CMJ New Music Report)
Figaro’s a Power in University Town (Billboard)
The end of Record Service (CMJ New Music Report)

Related posts
New York, 1964: record stores
Record stores (Relic Rack, Sam Goody’s, J&R)

[I found the discount card while reaching for an envelope in which to stick the water bill.]

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.]