Breakfast with the Food Network

[Plunges spoon into bowl. Lifts spoon to mouth. Removes spoon from mouth, chews, grunts.]

I gotta tell ya: it’s all in there. The creamy coldness of the Silk, the crunchiness of the Grape-Nuts, the tangy sweetness of the peaches, the way they all come together: this little puppy is one mega-flavor explosion.

[Chews, swallows.]

But I have an even bigger challenge coming up in just five hours. And they call it LUNCH.

[Plunges, lifts, removes spoon. Chews. Wipes chin. Cut to commercials.]

I recently developed a short-lived comedic habit of turning real-life meals into Food Network moments. I can’t stand the Food Network. But I do like Silk Soymilk, Grape-Nuts, peaches, and yuks.

Labor Day

[“People holding up the tools of their trade during Labor Day celebrations.” Photograph by Al Fenn. September 1956. From the Life Photo Archive.]

The man in the back: a teacher holding a dictionary? I’d like to think so.

I hope that next year’s Labor Day finds us all in better economic times, with at least a little more to celebrate.

A related post
Labor Day 2010 (featuring Dorothy Lucke)

Teachers making house calls

A world away from suburban Arizona, teachers from the South Bronx’s Urban Assembly School for Applied Math and Science make house calls to meet incoming sixth-graders and their families. The short film accompanying this article might make you, too, a bit teary. So much hope, in such difficult times:

Before the First School Bell, Teachers in Bronx Make House Calls (New York Times)

Digital technology in the classroom

Says a PTO co-president, “We have Smart Boards in every classroom but not enough money to buy copy paper, pencils and hand sanitizer.” As class sizes rise and teachers buy their own supplies, an Arizona school district seeks to spend even more on digital technology. Read all about it:

In Classroom of Future, Stagnant Scores (New York Times)

My two cents, from a 2010 post: “There’s nothing more exciting in teaching and learning than unmediated communication in the little village of the classroom.”

“Darn That Dream” within a dream

I was sitting in a music shop, playing “Darn That Dream” with an old woman as a guitar duet (key of G). Her guitar: an arch-top with a painting of a yellow rose. My guitar: I don’t know. And then I was reading. The pages looked like the pages of a Paris Review interview. I attended to these words: “Every fret works,” which meant not that the guitar was in good condition but that a guitarist should use the entire range of the fingerboard — as I do, in dreams and when I’m awake.

Dream sources:

A family trip to Elderly Instruments earlier this summer. Thus the old woman in the music shop.

A passage from John Trimble’s Writing with Style: Conversations on the Art of Writing. Trimble advocates a middle style that involves “a mingling of contraries: formal and informal diction, objectivity and subjectivity, impersonality and directness,” using every fret, so to speak. I was looking at this passage with a class yesterday.

Trimble taught at the University of Texas at Austin. Thus the yellow rose.

That I was dreaming might explain the choice of “Darn That Dream,” no? My favorite recording of the song is Billie Holiday’s, with Ben Webster (tenor sax), Harry “Sweets” Edison (trumpet), Jimmy Rowles (piano), Barney Kessel (guitar), Red Mitchell (bass), and Alvin Stoller (drums). Music by Jimmy Van Heusen, lyrics by Eddie DeLange. Listen.

[Analyzing your own dreams is a good way to save money. Why hire a professional?]

The story of copyright

C.G.P. Grey’s short film Copyright: Forever Less One Day tells the story of copyright, with special emphasis on the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998.

One consequence of the Sonny Bono Act: the final three volumes of the recent Penguin edition of Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time cannot be published in the United States until 2018, ninety-five years after Proust’s death. These volumes can be had from Amazon, which also sells Sonny Bono’s And the Beat Goes On and much, much more.

A related post
Mount Prost (the Penguin edition, suitable for climbing)

Recently updated

Testing teachers for drug use: In Glasford, Illinois, current teachers will not be subject to mandatory drug tests. But new hires will be.

Sterne’s Yorick, distracted

The scene is Paris:

What the old French officer had delivered upon travelling, bringing Polonius’s advice to his son upon the same subject into my head — and that bringing in Hamlet; and Hamlet, the rest of Shakespear’s works, I stopped at the Quai de Conti, in my return home, to purchase the whole set.

The bookseller said he had not a set in the world — Comment! said I; taking one up out of a set which lay upon the counter betwixt us. — He said, they were sent him only to be got bound, and were to be sent back to Versailles in the morning to the Count de B****.

— And does the Count de B****, said I, read Shakespear? C’est un Esprit fort, replied the bookseller. — He loves English books; and what is more to his honour, Monsieur, he loves the English too. You speak this so civilly, said I, that ’tis enough to oblige an Englishman to lay out a louis d’or or two at your shop — the bookseller made a bow, and was going to say something, when a young decent girl of about twenty, who by her air and dress seemed to be fille de chambre to some devout woman of fashion, come into the shop and asked for Les Egarements du Cœur & de l’Esprit: the bookseller gave her the book directly; she pulled out a little green sattin purse run round with a riband of the same colour, and putting her finger and thumb into it, she took out the money and paid for it. As I had nothing more to stay me in the shop, we both walk’d out at the door together.

Laurence Sterne, A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy (1768). Text from the 1967 Penguin edition, ed. Graham Petrie.

I like everything about this passage: the Shakespearean earworm, the casual decision to buy a complete works, the lousy inventory, the ease with which Yorick (the narrator) forgets about buying something from the bookseller, the care with which he details the chambermaid’s purse and movements.

Petrie explains Esprit fort: “a wit; someone who expresses superiority to current prejudices.” Les Égarements du cœur et de l'esprit [The wanderings of the heart and mind] is a novel by Claude Prosper Jolyot de Crébillon. “Wanderings of the heart and mind” is a fair description of A Sentimental Journey.

VDP: the four ages of an artist

Van Dyke Parks on record companies that are “more interested in brunettes” than in music veterans:

It reminds me of a joke my agent told me. He said there are four ages to an artist. I said what are they? He said, “Who is Van Dyke Parks?” “Get me Van Dyke Parks.” “Get me a young Van Dyke Parks.” “Who is Van Dyke Parks?” I think he hit it on the head right there.

But I have never written music to fish for flattery or condemnation. I don’t pay attention to what people think of me. I pay attention to the old fella I see in the mirror in the morning who looks like my dad on a bad day.

Van Dyke Parks Interview (Songfacts)

Related reading
All Van Dyke Parks posts (via Pinboard)

The self-help guru we deserve?

“Every generation gets the self-help guru that it deserves”: Rebecca Mead profiles Timothy Ferriss in the New Yorker.