Diane Schirf’s relics

Diane Schirf is memorializing what she calls “relics,” “bygone (or altered) things, products, services, and brands.” She’s started with “the one-color, non-sticky postage stamp.”

Hi and Lois watch

[Hi and Lois, September 30, 2011.]

Odd: the rooms of the Flagston residence are sometimes missing all furniture, yet this guy has an easy chair to the side of his front door. I wonder if there’s a new man on the line at Hi-Lo Amalgamated.

Related reading
All Hi and Lois posts

[And since we’re doing close reading, “Halloween is a month away” would be more logical: a month away, not a month away (as opposed to — what? — a week away?).]

Kindle Fire kindles fears

On Amazon’s Kindle Fire:

Amazon will capture and control every Web transaction performed by Fire users. Every page they see, every link they follow, every click they make, every ad they see is going to be intermediated by one of the largest server farms on the planet. People who cringe at the data-mining implications of the Facebook Timeline ought to be just floored by the magnitude of Amazon’s opportunity here. Amazon now has what every storefront lusts for: the knowledge of what other stores your customers are shopping in and what prices they’re being offered there. . . .

This is the first shot in the new war for replacing the Internet with a privatized merchant data-aggregation network.

Chris Espinosa on the Kindle Fire (cdespinosa’s posterous, via Daring Fireball)

I keep thinking about whether it’s wise to buy books from a corporation whose CEO has this to say about books:

“I kind of am grumpy when I am forced to read a physical book. Because it’s not as convenient. Turning the pages . . . I didn’t know this either, until I started using the Kindles a couple months ago, I mean a couple years ago, I didn’t understand all of the failings of a physical book, because I’m inured to them. But you can’t turn the page with one hand. The book is always flopping itself shut at the wrong moment. They’re heavy. You can only take one or two of them with you at a time. It’s had a great 500-year run. [Audience laughter.] It’s an unbelievably successful technology. But it’s time to change.”

For Jeff Bezos, the “great run” for books is over. Really? (Los Angeles Times)

Update, October 1, 2011: Amazon’s response to the question of whether it will track browsing and alter its offerings accordingly is “no.” An Amazon spokesperson says that “URLs are used to troubleshoot and diagnose Amazon Silk technical issues.” Read more:

(Amazon) Silk or a spider web? (GigaOM, via Daring Fireball).

On “Surf Board Riding.”

I posted an illustration earlier today (from Henry Seidel Canby and John Baker Opdycke’s 1918 book Good English) for the pleasure of its improbability: youngsters in period-apparel atop surfboards (or “surf boards”). To my eyes, the scene looks like something from the imagination of Glen Baxter. Here it is again:

As I think about this illustration and its writing prompt, I begin to see them as more than an occasion for twenty-first-century amusement. The prompt asks the student to read the illustration in a number of ways, one of which involves putting together an implied narrative (clockwise from bottom right) that shows how to ride a surfboard. I like it that the writers drop no hints, allowing the student the pleasure of discovering that narrative independently. And though it’s a surfer dude who rides the wave, I like it that young ladies are sharing in the danger and excitement of the sport. Good English seems to be a forward-looking textbook: it seems no coincidence that its final illustration depicts a young woman making a speech in favor of women’s right to vote. (Congress passed the Nineteenth Amendment in 1918).

I also like the writers’ willingness to expose their reader to what is most likely unfamiliar. Diane Ravitch’s The Language Police (2003) points out many ways in which present-day textbook publishers create generic realities in texts for reading. The vivid example I remember: no stories with mountains, because some children don’t live near mountains. Canby and Opdycke understood that reading need not reflect the reader’s reality. They knew what some present-day “educators” need to relearn.

“Surf Board Riding.”

Your assignment:

Surf board riding is a popular sport with the bathers on the beautiful beach at Waikiki near Honolulu. It is also indulged in at sea beach resorts nearer home. The picture below shows what the board is like and how the “riding” is done. Explain what each one in the picture is doing. From your study of the picture tell some one else how to enjoy the sport. Make each paragraph count for a definite point in each explanation.

[Henry Seidel Canby and John Baker Opdycke, Good English. Illustrated by Maud and Miska Petersham. (New York: Macmillan, 1918). Click for larger waves.]

From Wikipedia
Henry Seidel Canby
Maud and Miska Petersham

[John Baker Opdycke (d. 1956) was a journalist and head of the Haaren High School English Department in New York City.]

Beach Boys’ reunion?

Rolling Stone reports that the four surviving Beach Boys (Brian Wilson, Mike Love, Al Jardine, Bruce Johnston) are planning a 2012 fiftieth-anniversary reunion tour. Brian Wilson seems to be nothing but honest about what’s behind the decision:

Asked if he’s looking forward to the anniversary, he responds, “Not particularly,” adding, “I don’t really like working with the guys, but it all depends on how we feel and how much money’s involved. Money’s not the only reason I made rec­ords, but it does hold a place in our lives.”

Beach Boys Plan Anniversary Blowout With Likely Reunion Tour (Rolling Stone)

Way to manage your artistic legacy there, Brian.

Can you name the film?

I woke up this morning thinking of the ending of a film whose plot involves a heist of some sort. The ending takes place at an airport, where a suitcase filled with money falls off a baggage cart and opens. Bills fly everywhere. I think the film dates from the 1960s. I’m not sure if it’s in color.

Reader, can you name the film?

[Sometimes the Google is of no avail.]

Update: But readers are. The title is in the comments, and I’m grateful.

Paul Chiappe’s pencil drawings

Paul Chiappe’s pencil drawings look like eerie, blurred school photographs.

(via CollabCubed)

Poetry stamps

I just went to check whether the poet William Carlos Williams has appeared on a United States postage stamp. He hasn’t. But it turns out that the Postal Service just announced a 2012 set of stamps honoring American poets: Elizabeth Bishop, Joseph Brodsky, Gwendolyn Brooks, E.E. Cummings, Robert Hayden, Denise Levertov, Sylvia Plath, Theodore Roethke, Wallace Stevens, and Williams. Welcome news. The literary critic Hugh Kenner, in a documentary about Williams: “A great poet is one who makes a difference to the art of poetry. I think it’s as simple as that. And he made more difference to American poetry than anyone other than Walt Whitman.”

Related reading
Rutherford native and author of Paterson poem commemorated in stamp (Northjersey.com)

Stamps of the living

The New York Times reports that beginning in 2012, the United States Postal Service will begin considering the non-dead as stamp subjects:

When the news broke Monday on the Web sites of various news organizations, including The New York Times, readers began promoting their favorite candidates. Popular nominees included Lady Gaga, Steve Jobs, Bill Gates and Bob Dylan. CBS News gave readers a choice, listing options like Neil Armstrong (very popular) and Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook (not so much).

Armstrong and Dylan, yes. If there is a Gates stamp, there will have to be a Jobs stamp first, so that the Gates stamp’s designer has something to imitate.

What living person would you like to see on a U.S. stamp? Pete Seeger comes first to my mind. Among the dead, Eudora Welty, who did, after all, write the short story “Why I Live at the P.O.”