Blackwing Pages for the taking

I will phrase carefully: it appears that California Cedar, maker of the replica Palomino Blackwing pencil, may have used images from Blackwing Pages for commercial purposes with neither permission nor attribution.

Cal Cedar has previously claimed “fair use” concerning a photograph from Blackwing Pages that it used in a promotional video with neither permission nor attribution. Use is the key word, and this company’s business practices give new meaning to the term Blackwing user. Nobody likes to be used.

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All Blackwing posts (via Pinboard)

Inappropriate stock photo accompanies news item

[Daily News, as seen on April 26, 2012.]

The New York Daily News’s version of a news item about a woman attempting to live on sunlight and dying in the attempt is accompanied by a stock photo whose infotip reads “Female healthy lifestyle.” You can mouse over the photograph at the Daily News to see the infotip in all its inappropriateness.

Overheard

“I’m gonna give you three seconds to put that violin down, nice and easy.”

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All “overheard” posts (via Pinboard)

[The television was on in the background, for “warmth.” It was Steve McGarrett (Jack Lord) speaking. ¿Quién es más macho: David Janssen, Lloyd Bridges, o Jack Lord?]

Hi and Lois watch

[Hi and Lois, April 26, 2012.]

There are five-string cellos, and there are left-handed cellists, Charlie Chaplin among them. And there may be, somewhere, a left-handed five-string cellist. But come on.

If there is an in-joke here, it remains very inner. To the average comics reader, or to me, today’s Hi and Lois will look merely goofy. I made a few improvements in about five seven ten minutes, using the open-source Mac image-editor Seashore. Nothing to be done about those F-holes though. Skritch.

[Hi and Lois, later that same day.]

Related reading
All Hi and Lois posts (via Pinboard)

[“Very inner”: after the poet Ted Berrigan: “There’s a great inner logic to this poem, which I try to keep very inner.”]

Tim Johnson on the line

My congressman made the New York Times yesterday: Tim Johnson (R, Illinois-15), who retires this year, was the subject of a short profile that emphasized above all his habit of telephoning his constituents:

“I am almost like a dinosaur,” said Mr. Johnson, who would agree to be interviewed only by, yes, phone. “I think people think I am unique,” he added, clearly embracing the notion of understatement. “My style makes you sufficiently out of the mainstream, and people can wonder how effective you are.”

He cuts a slightly disheveled swath through the Capitol at all hours, his calling often cited by colleagues as his chief accomplishment after a decade of service here. “Tim had his finger on the pulse of his district,” Speaker John A. Boehner said in an e-mail, “and always reminded members that at the heart of every democracy are representatives who will listen first, learn, and then lead.”

I’ve never understood what’s so extraordinary about this phone habit. According to the Times, Johnson calls 4,000 constituents a year. (His district has a population of 700,000.) Skip Thanksgiving and Christmas and the calls average eleven a day. Count only working days (251 in 2012), and the average jumps to sixteen, still not that many calls to make. Johnson has never called me, though he has sent long and thoughtful responses to several letters and e-mails. The one occasion on which I heard him respond to constituents, a 2009 “town-hall meeting” on health care, was deeply dispiriting. I wanted to hang up.

[If you click through to the Times article, don’t miss the lively comment thread.]

Infinite Jest in the App Store

To the left, the App Store rating for the iOS version of David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest. The most hilarious element, for a novel with a halfway house as a principal setting: “Infrequent/Mild Alcohol, Tobacco, or Drug Use or References.” O RLY? No one who’s read the novel could possibly describe the drug use therein — or sexual content or violence, for that matter — as infrequent or mild. Unless, of course, they were on drugs.

That must be it: the App Store is on drugs.

I don’t mean to suggest that those under twelve not be permitted to read Infinite Jest. Nor do I mean to suggest that the novel should be available with a higher age restriction. I would salute any reader inspired to try Infinite Jest. But I don’t think a youngster would get very far. Matters of syntax, vocabulary, and range of reference would have something to do with it.

Related posts
All David Foster Wallace posts (via Pinboard)
The Daily v. NYTimes for iPad

More imaginary liner notes

My imaginary liner notes for the fifth and sixth 45s in Van Dyke Parks’s singles project are now available for your reading pleasure at Bananastan Records. Number five: “The All Golden” b/w “Sassafras,” with art by Klaus Voorman and Billy Edd Wheeler. Number six: “Missin’ Missisippi” b/w “The Parting Hand,” with art by Sally Parks and Stanley Dorfman. My favorite passage from the notes:

Journeying from Malibu to Paris to Madagascar to Wall Street to Trinidad to Galicia to Mississippi and beyond, these recordings are the work of a musician whose windshield is bigger than his rear-view mirror. Fare forward, traveller.

I feel honored to be part of the endeavor.

[The windshield may be found in this interview.]

Recently updated

Phones Are For People With another excerpt from the 1962 pamphlet manifesto of the Anti-Digit Dialing League.

Phones Are For People

[Hello, Atlantic readers. Yes, that’s my photograph over there. There’s more on the Anti-Digit Dialing League in this previous post.]

I am now the proud custodian of a copy of the Anti-Digit Dialing League’s pamphlet manifesto Phones Are For People (1962). This pamphlet seems to qualify as scarce: I found one copy for sale online. Thanks, SuburbanBooks.

The pamphlet is ten pages. The cover cartoon — “Hello, 274-435-4946? This is 483-235-5897” — is by Bob Bastian. A listing of the League’s Board of Directors appears on what would be the title page: Hiram Johnson III (1914–1992, attorney, grandson of a California governor-then-senator), Jack Block (1924–2010, professor of psychology at U Cal Berkeley), Bonnie Burgon (“editorial assistant,” associated at one point with ETC: A Review of General Semantics), Robert Carrow (1934–2008, attorney), S.I. Hayakawa (1906–1992, professor of English at San Francisco State, later a senator), Carl V. May (“public relations counselor”), and John D. Schick (“investments”).

Phones Are For People makes its case in Q. and A. format, entertaining possible objections and making clear the reasonableness of the case, as if to say, “We’re not, not — I repeat not — a bunch of crackpots.” It is 1962 after all, and they are Questioning Authority. Here is the group’s origin story:

The Anti-Digit Dialing League started over a cup of coffee in San Francisco when the conversation, quite by accident, drifted to the new Digit Dialing system. Both coffee drinkers had found the new system extremely confusing and difficult to use. They also wondered whether the change was really necessary. As a consequence they inserted a tiny notice in the classified section of a newspaper inquiring whether other people had experienced the same thoughts. They signed the ad, Anti-Digit Dialing League.

The response was incredible. Over thirty-five hundred people responded within ten days in the San Francisco Bay Area alone. As word about ADDL spread throughout the country, people wrote in wanting to start chapters of ADDL in other cities across the country. It quickly became obvious that ADDL was expressing a deep but previously unorganized concern of telephone users that the telephone company had somehow forgotten about them. This is the reason that ADDL started; it was an expression of widespread concern.

Another excerpt:

Q. But isn’t all this fuss simply a tempest in a teapot? Aren’t the people opposing Digit Dialing really just opposing progress? Isn’t the present furor nothing more than an emotional reaction to any kind of change?

A. Most decidedly not! Most people, and certainly the members of ADDL, welcome constructive change. However, the telephone is an extremely important part of everyday life, and major changes in its use will have widespread effects.

And according to this pamphlet, the opposition to digit dialing finds strong support in science. The ADDL points to “numerous psychological experiments” confirming that it is easier to memorize letters and numbers than numbers alone, and easier still to memorize names and numbers. The ADDL points also to a 1955 finding that seventy-five percent of adults could not remember a sequence of seven digits. Why then the move to digit dialing? Not, according to the ADDL, because of a looming shortage of telephone numbers: by its calculations, more than 820 million numbers are available by means of exchange names and numbers. No, the reason for the switch is ease in achieving “internal automation.” Nice try, telephone company. The ADDL isn’t buying:

But automation is an advance only if it frees people and takes them away from what is undignified and better done by machines. Digit Dialing places an added burden upon people by requiring them to fulfill the needs dictated by accounting machines and computers.

I’m surprised and disappointed to see that the humble poetry of exchange names plays only a small part in the ADDL’s argument, mentioned in passing before the emphasis on utility starts up again:

The reasons for preferring such historic exchanges as KLondike or YUkon or BUtterfield or MUrrayhill are not simply sentimental or emotional. Because of their traditional value, such named exchanges are much easier to remember and to use.

So instead of a paean to exchange names, I found “numerous psychological experiments.” I would have joined anyway. The $2.00 membership donation got you a membership card and badge.

If, fifty years later, anyone from the ADDL is out there, I would love to hear from you.

[June 2019: Phones Are for People is copyrighted; I’m not in a position to share scanned copies. There’s a listing for the pamphlet in the WorldCat.]

Sherry Turkle on the flight from conversation

Sherry Turkle writes about the flight from conversation:

I spend the summers at a cottage on Cape Cod, and for decades I walked the same dunes that Thoreau once walked. Not too long ago, people walked with their heads up, looking at the water, the sky, the sand and at one another, talking. Now they often walk with their heads down, typing. Even when they are with friends, partners, children, everyone is on their own devices.

I see the flight from conversation every day in college hallways: a dozen or more students waiting to enter a classroom, every student silent, sitting or standing against the wall and staring at a device. The students are, as Turkle would say, “alone together.” And yes, I talk with my students about this phenomenon, which, I admit, I find unnerving.

The saddest details in Turkle’s piece: a high-school student who “wishes he could talk to artificial intelligence program instead of his dad about dating,” and another who says, “Someday, someday, but certainly not now, I’d like to learn how to have a conversation.”