January 31, 1971 (?)

John Ashbery on “the dictatorship of the months and years”:

On this Sunday which is also the last day of January let us pause for a moment to take note of where we are. A new year has just begun and now a new month is coming up, charged with its weight of promise and probable disappointments, standing in the wings like an actor who is conscious of nothing but the anticipated cue, totally absorbed, a pillar of waiting. And now there is no help for it but to be cast adrift in the new month. One is plucked from one month to the next; the year is like a fast-moving Ferris wheel; tomorrow all the riders will be under the sign of February and there is no appeal, one will have to get used to living with its qualities and perhaps one will even adjust to them successfully before the next month arrives with a whole string of new implications in its wake.

“The System,” in Three Poems (1972).

[Sounds like a parody of a sermon. In 1971, January 31 fell on a Sunday.]

From Gilbert Sorrentino’s final work

It begins:

Mundane things, pitiful in their mundane assertiveness, their sad isolation. Kraft French dressing, glowing weirdly orange through its glass bottle, a green glass bowl of green salad, a bottle of Worcestershire sauce, its paper wrapper still on. All are in repose, in their absolute thingness, under the overhead alarming bright light of the kitchen. They may or they should, they must, really, reveal the meaning of this silent room, this silent house, save that they won’t. There is no meaning. These things will evoke nothing.

In years to come, almost three-quarters of a century, they still evoke nothing. Orange, green, incandescent glare. Silence and loss. Nothing. There might be a boy of four at the table. He is sitting very straight and is possibly waiting for someone.

Gilbert Sorrentino, The Abyss of Human Illusion (Minneapolis: Coffee House Press, 2009).

The back cover calls The Abyss of Human Illusion a novel. In fact it is a collection of fifty short pieces of doom and wit. I love Sorrentino’s writing. The details of his Brooklyn are the details of my Brooklyn.

Related posts
Bandbox (a word in a Sorrentino novel)
Gilbert Sorrentino (1929–2006)

[This book is available at a sadly low price from you-know-where.]

The Artist (and typography)

I can’t remember when I last saw a new comedy-drama as good as The Artist (2011, dir. Michel Hazanavicius). In these troubled times, The Artist offers the viewer a sweet escape into a world of laughter, music, and tears. Jean Dujardin and Bérénice Bejo are brilliant performers, and they look like the people they’re playing, actors from the 1920s and 30s. Everyone in the cast looks right: James Cutler and John Goodman in particular seem to be genuine time-travelers. (Contrast, say, Mad Men, in which everyone appears to be playing dress-up.) The film itself looks the part too, especially in outdoor scenes, which have the thin, watery light that suggests old. Three cheers for cinematographer Guillaume Schiffman.

There’s only one false touch in the film, and I’m not embarrassed to point it out: the intertitles use straight (“dumb”) quotation marks (" ") around dialogue, not curved (“ ”) quotation marks, aka “book quotes” or “curly quotes” or “smart quotes” or “typographic quotation marks.” Glance through an assortment of silent-film intertitles and it’s easy to see that proper quotation marks were the norm. Elaine and I are hardly typomaniacs: that we noticed the glitch makes me think that it will be widely noticed. (And perhaps corrected for the DVD, please?)

Umberto Eco says that Casablanca is “the movies.” So too is The Artist. Go see the movies!

March 6: Type designer Mark Simonson writes about The Artist and typography: The Artist vs. The Lettering Artist. Thanks to Daughter Number Three for the link.

[“In these troubled times”: yes, that’s a cliché. We saw The Artist at east-central Illinois’s best theater, The Art Theater.]

Barnes & Noble v. Amazon

From an article on Barnes & Noble and the future of the book business:

Carolyn Reidy, president and chief executive of Simon & Schuster, says the biggest challenge is to give people a reason to step into Barnes & Noble stores in the first place. “They have figured out how to use the store to sell e-books,” she said of the company. “Now, hopefully, we can figure out how to make that go full circle and see how the e-books can sell the print books.”

Barnes & Noble, Taking on Amazon in the Fight of Its Life (New York Times)

Alas, the logic here defies logic. Using the bookstore to sell e-books makes it unnecessary to go to the bookstore, except to use it as a library or life-sized catalogue, or to have coffee.

A related post
Whither Barnes & Noble? (“Bookstore survival-strategy seems to be premised on everything but books.”)

Overheard

At our friendly neighborhood multinational retailer, a tyke, maybe three, looking at the fishtanks:

“Dolphin! Dolphin!”

Related reading
All “overheard” posts (via Pinboard)
The iPad and dolphins (for real)

Blogger interface on the iPad

[“A blanker whiteness.” Click for a larger view.]

Blogger’s new interface is broken on the iPad. It’s been broken for at least two weeks. Open an existing draft that you’d like to edit: no text. The only fix for now is to use the old interface.

When it’s working, the new Blogger interface is hardly problem-free on the iPad: text is too faint to be easily readable. But faint beats invisible ink.

A related post
The new Blogger interface

[“A blanker whiteness”: Robert Frost, “Desert Places.”]

SSNs

[“Man looking at film records containing social security numbers at the Social Security Board.” Photograph by Thomas D. Mcavoy. Baltimore, Maryland, 1938. From the Life Photo Archive.]

Thinking about Google’s new [Lack of] Privacy Policy reminded me of this photograph, which for some time I’d been planning to post.

Politics as infotainment

I turned on the television to watch a few minutes of the Republican debate and heard the voice of hard-hitting journalist Wolf Blitzer: “Stay tuned to find out why each man on this stage thinks his wife would be the best First Lady.”

That was enough.

“Fine-grained choices”

From Google’s Privacy Principles:



From Google’s new Privacy Policy:



So much for “fine-grained choices.” The choice now, as we used to say in Brooklyn: Like it or lump it.

Logic and porridge

When I teach ancient works, I like to point out that logical coherence is not always the point. For instance: if it’s the tenth year of the war, why is King Priam only now asking Helen to identify the various Achaeans laying siege to Troy? I think there’s only one good answer to such a question: “It’s a story.” For the purposes of the story, it makes sense to have Priam ask about these things, tenth year or no tenth year: his questions and comments let us understand his attitude toward “the enemy” (quite different from those that hold in our world). And in Iliad 3, it really is as if the war is just beginning, tenth year or no tenth year: single combat between Menelaus and Paris — now they think of it? — might settle the Helen question, until Athena breaks the armies’ truce and battle begins in 4.

When I raise or respond to this kind of logical question, I invoke the story of Goldilocks and the three bears. How can one bowl of porridge be too hot, one too cold, and one just right? Well, it’s a story. I am now happy (I think) to see that I am not the first person to have wondered about the temperature differences. Physicist Chad Orzel addressed the question in a 2009 blog post: The Faulty Thermodynamics of Children’s Stories (Uncertain Principles: Physics, Politics, Pop Culture). And there’s a 2007 novel that investigates the question (and many more questions), Jasper Fforde’s The Fourth Bear.

[Reader, have you read Jasper Fforde?]