Carbon cruising

In the mail, an envelope holding a seemingly exciting offer — a free Caribbean cruise. But I’ve read David Foster Wallace; I don’t need no stinking cruises. Besides, there’s a small catch involving the purchase of a time-share in Florida.

There are at least six details to enjoy in the scan above: the fake stamps, the fake handwriting, the fake highlighting, the fake smears on the first and third sheets (note that the smears are identical), the fake check (Ceci n’est pas un chèque), and best of all, the fake carbon paper. Yes, that’s fake carbon paper, just a piece of purple-black paper between the “original” and “duplicate” forms. Only the perforations allowing these forms to be separated are real.

This offer evokes the world of the imprinter (aka “the knuckle-buster”), the hand-operated machine once widely used to process credit-card charges by means of a bar pulled across a carbon-paper form. O nostalgia! I’m baffled and inspired that someone would go to such trouble to conjure up the past. But I’m still not signing up.

Also in the mail
The National Dean’s List (Sketchy invitations)

From the National Jukebox

Streaming music, from the Library of Congress’s National Jukebox:

Belle Baker, “I’ve Got the Yes! We Have No Banana Blues.” A novelty song about a novelty song: very meta. Here’s the original, from the Internet Archive.

Benson Orchestra of Chicago, “Ain’t We Got Fun.” Great for dancing.

Zez Confrey Orchestra, “Kitten on the Keys.” Piano wizardry.

Frank Crumit, “Cross-Word Mamma, You Puzzle Me (But Papa’s Gonna Figure You Out).” Yes, the cross-word craze.

The Duncan Sisters, “Cross-Word Puzzle Blues.” “Some demented nut invented / This way to stay discontented.”

International Novelty Orchestra, “Hey! Hey! and Hee! Hee! (I’m Charleston Crazy).” Another craze. With a great harmonica solo.

George Washington Johnson, “The Laughing Song.” It would appear that there was much to laugh about in 1903.

James P. Johnson, “Bleeding Hearted Blues.” Stride piano.

Harry Lauder, “Stop Your Tickling, Jock!” A “Scotch laughing specialty.”

Paul Whiteman, “Somebody Loves Me.” Said George Gershwin, “Paul made my song live with a vigor that almost floored me.” With doo wacka doo effect.

And here are ten more from the National Jukebox.

[The Gershwin quotation is from Edward Jablonski’s Gershwin (New York: Da Capo, 1998.) Thanks for Stefan Hagemann for pointing me to the cross-word songs. The National Jukebox uses Flash, alas.]

Romney Wordsworth, obsolete

The state has declared Romney Wordsworth obsolete. The Chancellor speaks:

“You’re a librarian, Mister Wordsworth. You’re a dealer in books and two-cent fines and pamphlets and closed stacks and the musty insides of a language factory that spews out meaningless words on an assembly line. Words, Mister Wordsworth, that have no substance and no dimension, like air, like the wind, like a vacuum that you make-believe has an existence by scribbling index numbers on little cards.”

From “The Obsolete Man,” a Twilight Zone episode first broadcast June 2, 1961. With Burgess Meredith (Romney Wordsworth) and Fritz Weaver (The Chancellor).

Fifty years ago, a world without librarians and libraries was the stuff of a totalitarian nightmare. Now it seems that we’re closer to living in The Twilight Zone. One recent New York Times headline: Schools Eliminating Librarians as Budgets Shrink.

You can watch the episode, in three parts, at YouTube.

A related post
Cutting libraries in a recession is like …

[I caught, by chance, a single episode of a Twilight Zone holiday marathon on the SyFy Channel. Yes, Rod Serling imagined a future sans Internet. And yes, I recognize the irony of relying on the IMDb and YouTube and not the library.]

The Fourth of July

[“American flag and tiny parachute after being released from a kite.” Photograph by Bernard Hoffman, March 1949. From the Life Photo Archive.]

Typing in India

“This is the only job I can do, and I have stuck to it”: Zaheer Ahmed, typist. From a report on commercial typists in India:

Leaving Their Imprint (Bangalore Mirror)

A related post
Namaste, typewriter
Old Typewriter

Punctuation in the news

Last week, Jason Kottke tracked the fate of the Oxford comma at Oxford. Oxford University Press is for the comma. But the university’s “Branding toolkit” recommends the comma’s use only when such use clarifies a sentence’s meaning. My take: using the Oxford comma makes sense. If you always include it, you simplify in a small way the work of writing, and you never run the risk of unintended ambiguity.

Also in the news: the exclamation point, in a New York Times survey of e-mail habits. I think that sparing use of the exclamation point in work-related e-mail can be a good thing. “Thanks!” seems to suggest more-deeply-felt gratitude than “Thanks.” (The sample student-to-professor e-mail in my post on how to e-mail a professor has such a “Thanks!”) Much depends upon the conventions of a workplace: in the land of the low-key and terse, “Thanks!” will likely sound bubbly and overcaffeinated; in a more spirited environment, “Thanks” might sound begrudging. And In the right (or wrong) context, any expression of gratitude is likely to sound passive-aggressive:

Thanks.

Thanks!

Thanks a lot!

Related posts
E-mail and punctuation
How to punctuate a sentence
How to punctuate more sentences

[Should you ever need to enliven a discussion of punctuation, you might turn to this Oxford-comma conversation. It can bring a classroom to life and keep it there.]

Overheard

In the supermarket, one shopper to another: “This is Jell-O weather. Do you have any Jell-O?”

[It’s 90.1°F. Feels like 100°.]

Related reading
All “Overheard” posts

John Gruber, “Credit and Attribution”

A long and thoughtful post at Daring Fireball on giving credit where credit is due. The context: All Things Digital’s use of a story from Federico Viticci’s MacStories. The moral: be generous and respectful in crediting your sources. As Gruber asks, “If he’s not worth crediting by name or publication, why is his story worth re-reporting?”

Gmail, updated

The Official Gmail Blog calls it “a much cleaner, modern look.” I agree. The Preview (Dense) theme looks especially nice, and the grey navigation bar is far better than the black bar (still present in other Google services).

Van Dyke Parks, two singles

[Imaginary liner notes for Van Dyke Parks’s new recordings.]

“Dreaming of Paris” (Parks) b/w “Wedding in Madagascar (Faranaina).” Produced by Van Dyke Parks and Matthew Cartsonis. Sleeve art by Ed Ruscha. Bananastan B4501. 2011.

“Wall Street” (Parks) b/w “Money Is King” (The Growling Tiger). Produced by Van Dyke Parks and Matthew Cartsonis. Sleeve art by Art Spiegelman. Bananastan B4500. 2011.

These releases — the first two of six 45s, with sleeve art by eminent American artists — are Van Dyke Parks’s first commercial solo recordings since the 1998 Warner album Moonlighting: Live at the Ash Grove (an excellent introduction, by the way, to The Man and His Music). Note: the first solo recordings. Since 1998, Parks has been heard on record countless times as an arranger, co-writer, and collaborating musician (with Inara George, Joanna Newsom, Ringo Starr, Rufus Wainwright, and Brian Wilson, among others). In 2010 Parks toured for the first time in Europe and North America; in 2011 he has played in Europe and Australia. He may be, as he puts it, “redundant” in the record business, but he does get around. And now he’s recording on his own terms, with vinyl available by subscription, in a project he describes as “Nouveau Niche.”

Fans of the 1995 Parks–Wilson collaboration Orange Crate Art might associate “Dreaming of Paris” with that album’s “Sail Away.” Here the escape is by plane, a first-class flight with Cabernet and crème brûlée. But things grow dark, the delights of travel interrupted by memories (or news) of assassinations and war. The song closes on an eerie note: a ghostly chorus, strings and ukuleles, a solemn bass. A strange, beautiful trip indeed.

“Wedding in Madagascar” might serve as a reminder that Parks was one of the first pop musicians to explore what has become known as “world music”: his 1972 album Discover America celebrated the music of Trinidad and Tobago (an abiding Parks interest). “Wedding in Madagascar” is a lovely arrangement of what seems to be a traditional Malagasy melody, with horns, strings, and bright electric guitars.

In 2003, an earlier version of “Wall Street” was briefly available as a free download from Parks’s website. Comparing the two recordings is instructive: the new “Wall Street” has more varied instrumentation and a far stronger sense of theater, pausing and slowing down now and then for maximal dramatic effect. “Wall Street” is a 9/11 song, beginning with the biz-talk and chatter of a workday (“Drop me off at Walk Don’t Walk”) before turning to ash, blood, and confetti, and the indelible image of a man and woman holding hands as they fall to the pavement. Yes, that happened, and this song remembers.

“Money Is King” picks up where “Wall Street” ends, with an A major chord. Adding a dense and varied string arrangement to a melody by the Growling Tiger (Trinidadian calypsonian Neville Marcano), Parks tells some transcultural truths about the lives of the rich and the poor. The rich man?

He can commit murder and get off free,
And live in the governor’s company.

What about the poor?

But if you are poor, the people tell you “Shoo!”
And a dog is better than you.

These singles return the listener to a last-century experience: listening to a song, studying the sleeve art, and getting up to flip the record. Here is true high-fidelity: the superior sound of music on vinyl, and the work of a musician following his own idiosyncratic path.

[The recordings are available from Bananastan and iTunes. Vinyl, to my ears, offers far better listening. Idiosyncratic Path is the title of a 1995 VDP compilation album. These imaginary liner notes now appear on the Bananastan Records website, on the front page and on a page about the first two releases. I’m honored to have my writing be part of the project.]