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Count von Faber-Castell on pencils Now with a link to a short clip of the Count talking about pencils with Martha Stewart. Thanks, Sean.

The Master

Elaine and I saw The Master (dir. Paul Thomas Anderson, 2012) yesterday and were both disappointed. The film’s cinematography (Mihai Malaimare Jr.) is beautiful. As Lancaster Dodd and Freddie Quell, Philip Seymour Hoffman and Joaquin Phoenix give great performances. The former suggests to me Charles Foster Kane; the latter, Neal Cassady.

The Master is worth seeing for its imagery and acting. But on many points — that’s all I’ll say, no spoilers — the film is vague and inchoate. I’m all for mystery and opacity. But vagueness, not so much.

Count von Faber-Castell on pencils

Count Anton Wolfgang von Faber-Castell is one of my three favorite counts. He recently spoke with the Wall Street Journal about pencils:

Q. Will the pencil go the way of the quill pen?

A. May I ask you a question? Have you ever seen a paperless office? People may not be writing things out on legal pads but they like to print out e-mail and make notations. Then pencils and pens disappear and you go grab another.

Yes, there are executive types who have their e-mail printed out for them, but e-mail annotation seems like a dubious basis for resisting extinction. And Faber-Castell pencils are hardly the semi-disposable supply-room products that disappear from desks in a workplace. I wish that the Count had spoken of the pencil as a tool for writing. People are indeed writing things out on legal pads, on music paper, and in notebooks. Why not proclaim the tactile joys of writing on paper?

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6:54 p.m.: Here’s the Count talking about pencils with, of all people, Martha Stewart. Thanks, Sean.

Related reading
All pencil posts (Pinboard)

[My other favorite counts: Basie and von Count.]

Why save PBS?

[Click for a larger view.]

A candidate who seeks to add $2 trillion to military spending while eliminating funding for PBS has a very strange sense of proportion and deeply mistaken priorities.

Sharking up

A phrasal verb has caught my eye and imagination: to shark up. In the first scene of Hamlet, Horatio reports that young Fortinbras has “Sharked up a list of lawless resolutes,” a band of desperados. The Oxford English Dictionary explains: “to collect hastily (a body of persons, etc.) without regard to selection.” The New Penguin Shakespeare text that I have at hand suggests that to shark up might be meant to suggest a shark “seizing its prey at haphazard.” The expression appears to originate with Shakespeare; the OED cites texts from 1827 and 1900 that echo the line I’ve quoted.

Clearly, the time has come to revive this phrasal verb. One might describe any quick and undiscriminating effort as a matter of sharking up. Put together an hour of music by pulling out ten random recordings: you’ve sharked up a radio show. Toss some arbitrarily chosen sources into a piece of writing (for a teacher who requires, say, the magical “five sources”): you’ve sharked up a Works Cited list. It’s better though to work hard, choose carefully, and not shark things up.

Planning on paper

At Plannerisms and the Quo Vadis Blog, some thoughts about the future of paper planners. I suspect that such planners will be around for many more years, if only from a smaller and smaller number of “specialty” retailers in larger cities and online. In that respect, the paper planner may come to resemble a fountain pen or phonograph needle.

I like paper. As David Allen says, paper is “in your face.” In my face, since 2007: the Moleskine page-a-day pocket planner. If it disappears, I will likely make DIY planners from plain old Moleskine notebooks.

[I long ago moved past the thought that there’s irony in writing about paper online.]

Edgewise

Silent Jim Lehrer.

Newton Minow’s advice

In the New York Times, Newton Minow’s advice for watching tonight’s presidential debate:

Let me suggest that after you watch the debate on Wednesday night, you turn off your television set and do your best to avoid the spin that will follow. Talk about what you saw and heard with your family, your friends, your neighbors, your co-workers. You are smarter than the spinners.

Minow has been involved in every televised presidential and vice-presidential debate.

A related post
Newton Minow, fifty years later

Words from Theodore Roosevelt, sort of

On the September 28 page of my New Yorker cartoon calendar, words attributed to Theodore Roosevelt: “Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.”

Every day, man, every day. But the words aren’t Roosevelt’s, though something close to them appears in his 1913 autobiography:


[“Do what you can, with what you’ve got, where you are.”]

I like the informality of the contraction even better. This advice makes me think of Harvey Pekar’s “Keep on pushin’,” also good advice.

Here’s a page with the results of an effort to track down Squire Bill Widener.

A tip for debate-watching

I will quote advice that I offered on October 2, 2008:

The best choice for watching a presidential or vice-presidential debate is C-SPAN. Why? C-SPAN’s continuous split-screen lets you see both participants at all times, allowing for all sorts of observations about body language and facial expression.

I hope this advice still holds.

Some expect very little from Mitt Romney tonight. Not me. I expect both body language and facial expressions, visible at all times on a split-screen. And I expect that Governor Romney will deliver his “zingers” in a way that makes clear the month-plus of rehearsal he has put into them.

[From the New York Times: “Mr. Romney’s team has concluded that debates are about creating moments and has equipped him with a series of zingers that he has memorized and has been practicing on aides since August.”]