The Pale King, making conversation

It’s Russell speaking, in a restaurant, to a woman who’s just removed her chewing gum from her mouth and placed it in a Kleenex:

“Do you suppose it’s so much easier to make conversation with someone you already know well than with someone you don’t know at all primarily because of all the previously exchanged information and shared experiences between two people who know each other well, or because maybe it’s only with people we already know well and know know us well that we don’t go through the awkward mental process of subjecting everything we think of saying or bringing up as a topic of light conversation to a self-conscious critical analysis and evaluation that manages to make anything we think of proposing to say to the other person seem dull or stupid or banal or on the other hand maybe overly intimate or tension-producing?”

“…”

“…”

“What did you say your name was again?”

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

The logic of Wallace’s ellipses is a wonderful thing: she says nothing; he says nothing; and then she asks a question. The awkward silence itself becomes a form of conversation.

Other Pale King excerpts
Deskwork : Dullness : Heroism

“The kids”

This photograph of “the kids” is a sequel to one that Elaine took almost two years ago, when our daughter Rachel graduated from college. Today it was our son Ben’s turn. Our family is now 75% Phi Beta Kappa. Represent! Elaine went to a trade school (Juilliard): no ΦBK there.

Yesterday, I was a mess, scattered and wired. “Big changes in our family,” I explained to my family, who pointed out to me that it’s not our family that’s changing: it’s circumstances. Yes, they are, in a way that makes all of us excited about what’s to come.

Congradulations, Ben!

[Photograph by Michael Leddy, at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, May 13, 2011.]

“Death to high school English”

As a high-school student, Kim Brooks loved English class. Now she has second thoughts:

Only now, a decade and a half later, after seven years of teaching college composition, have I started to consider the possibility that talking about classics might be a profound waste of time for the average high school student, the student who is college-bound but not particularly gifted in letters or inspired by the literary arts. I’ve begun to wonder if this typical high school English class, dividing its curriculum between standardized test preparation and the reading of canonical texts, might occupy a central place in the creation of a generation of college students who, simply put, cannot write.

Brooks’s “Death to high school English” would make a provocative first piece of reading for anyone teaching college writing in the fall.

My quick memories of high-school English: The Bald Soprano, Dandelion Wine, diagramming sentences, The Glass Bead Game, grammar, The Martian Chronicles, grammar, The Metamorphosis, diagramming sentences, Oedipus Rex, grammar, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, grammar. In other words, lit and grammar. What did you do in English class?

Thanks to Daughter Number Three for pointing me to Brooks’s essay.

[I prefer the hyphen in “high-school English.” Bryan Garner’s Modern American Usage on hyphens in phrasal adjectives: “Reputable newspaper publishers are as conscientious about this point as reputable book publishers.” Reputable bloggers too. Reposted after the Blogger outage of May 2011.]

Getting my ducks in a row

Day one: Elaine and I watch the film Lord Love a Duck.

Day two: I find a reference to the film in David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King.

Day three: I begin reading Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49: “‘Lord love a duck,’ summarized a boy holding a passkey, and Oedipa decided this was Miles.”

[Reposted after the Blogger outage of May 2011.]

Bananastan Records

Van Dyke Parks’s Banastan label has a website: Bananastan Records: Music with a Peel!

A related post
Van Dyke Parks on Bananastan

[Reposted after the Blogger outage of May 2011.]

Unabomber auction

The Wall Street Journal reports that Theodore Kaczynski’s personal effects will be sold at auction, with the proceeds going to Kaczynski’s victims. A Flickr set of fifty-one photographs shows letters and manuscripts, shoes, sunglasses, tools, and a L.C. Smith & Corona manual typewriter.

No photographs of books, of which there are several hundred. The Smoking Gun has the list. Did you know that Kaczynski owned a copy of The Elements of Style? At least one reader has made much of that fact, characterizing Kaczynski and E.B. White as reactionary makers of primitivist manifestos.

Blogger is back, sort of

Blogger — the service, that is — is back, sort of. I’m waiting for three missing posts to reappear.

From the National Jukebox

At the Library of Congress, the National Jukebox is open for business. Here are a few items I’ve listened to, every one a winner:

Marian Anderson, “My Lord, What a Mornin’”

Eubie Blake and Noble Sissle, “Old Fashioned Love”

The Dizzy Trio, “Hayseed Rag”

Marion Harris, “After You’ve Gone”

Billy Murray and Ed Smalle, “Choo-Choo (I Gotta Hurry Home)” (An early Ellington tune)

Original Dixieland Jazz Band, “Tiger Rag”

Aileen Stanley and Gene Austin, “When My Sugar Walks Down the Street (All the Little Birdies Go Tweet-Tweet-Tweet)”

Fred Van Eps, “Ragging the Scale”

Paul Whiteman, “Fascinating Rhythm”

Rudy Wiedoeft, “Saxophobia”

[If you’re using an iPad, no soap: everything’s Flash.]

Word of the day: subitize

The word-of-the-day from Anu Garg’s A.Word.A.Day is subitize (SOO-bi-tyz):

verb tr., intr.: To perceive, without counting, the number of objects in a small group.

From Latin subitus (sudden), from past participle of subire (to appear suddenly), from sub- (under) + ire (to go). Earliest documented use: 1949.

When you throw a die, you don’t count the number of pips to determine the value of the throw. You subitize. Now here’s a word you want to use when you take part in one of those “How many marbles are in the jar?” contests, though subitizing works only for a small group of items. Estimates of the upper limit of humans’ subitizing capability range from four to seven. Subitizing also depends on the arrangement of the objects.

Try this subitizing test.

Reading about this word (new to me) made me think of a sentence from Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay “Thoureau” (1862):

From a box containing a bushel or more of loose pencils, he could take up with his hands fast enough just a dozen pencils at every grasp.

I suspect though that Thoreau was relying upon muscle memory, not subitizing. Oh well. Here’s a brief intro to Thoreau’s career in pencils.

DFW Endnote Generator

From the David Foster Wallace Endnote Generator.