Reality distortion fields

There are reality distortion fields, and there are reality distortion fields. The term “reality distortion field” (RDF) is associated of course with Steve Jobs, who was able to convince Apple employees that they could accomplish difficult or seemingly impossible tasks — deadlines and the limits of technology be damned. Such feats are hardly limited to charismatic executive types. Any teacher who gives students the sense that they are smarter than they believe, that they can do more than they suspect, has a good RDF at work. Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign mantra “Yes, we can” captures what’s involved: a belief that success is possible despite long odds. A good RDF reshapes one’s sense of what is possible.

Then there is the other kind of RDF, the kind that distorts matters of fact and history. Such fields were in force all through the 2008 presidential campaign, and they have been in force ever since, turning a candidate and president into a non-citizen, a secret              (you can fill in the blank, in several ways), turning healthcare reform into communism and death panels and theft from Medicare. This year’s presidential campaign has a challenger who has trained an RDF on his own record, obscuring or simply denying positions he has taken not just in recent years but in recent months, in this very campaign.

Distortions so blatant, so cynical, suggest that such a candidate and his advisors must see American voters as credulous fools, ready to believe one thing after another after another. I think though that the majority of American voters are smarter than that. Tomorrow we will find out.

Related posts
George Orwell on historical truth
George Orwell on totalitarian history
Stepping in it

Ted Curson (1935–2012)

The trumpeter Ted Curson has died at the age of seventy-seven. I know him best from his work with Charles Mingus. Here is one of Curson’s finest moments, from 1960: “Original Faubus Fables,” with Eric Dolphy (alto saxophone), Mingus (bass and vocal), and Dannie Richmond (drums and vocal).

Art by Geo-B

Oscar’s Day No. 75: Lost Smells. I’m four for four. How many do you remember?

Bryan Garner on snoot

“The corresponding abstract noun is ‘snootitude’”: Bryan Garner glosses David Foster Wallace’s snoot .

A related post
Bryan Garner and David Foster Wallace

[Bryan Garner, author of Garner’s Modern American Usage (2009), offers a free Usage Tip of the Day. You can sign up at LawProse.org. Orange Crate Art is a Garner-friendly site.]

Harry Truman with pencil

[“Harry S. Truman sitting at desk with pencil in hand.” Photograph by Marie Hansen. United States, 1945. From the Life Photo Archive. Click for a larger view.]

At Contrapuntalism, Sean has been posting about the Mongol pencil (my favorite pencil), which prompted me to post, finally, this photograph. I think that’s a Mongol in Truman’s hand. Brand Name Pencils has photographs of two WWII-era Mongols that make me fairly confident about naming Truman’s pencil.

Related reading
All Mongol posts (Pinboard)

[I like photographs of people writing with plain old pencils while their desk sets go unused.]

Espresso machine on board

“They travel in two buses, with an espresso machine on board to supply Cuban coffee as they drive to engagements in Kansas City, Buffalo and Ames, Iowa”: from a report on the National Symphony Orchestra of Cuba, now on its first American tour. Elaine and I heard them last month. If they come your way: go.

[Thanks, Elaine.]

To the next!

The cryptic CAPTCHAs that Google provides for Blogger frustrate a good number of readers who would like to leave comments on posts. CAPTCHAs sometimes frustrate me too when I want to leave a comment on someone else’s Blogger blog. I’ve gone back and forth about CAPTCHAs here at Orange Crate Art, turning them off and getting inundated with junk (despite comment-moderation, which prevents that junk from getting online), then giving up and turning them back on. CAPTCHAs are off now, and I’m deleting dozens of junk comments a day. I can deal.

The only pleasant thing about wading through the junk is noticing the great variety of aberrant efforts to feign cheery gratitude for the content of posts. A recent favorite, from an alleged person who liked How to e-mail a professor and thinks that I “need to write more about this subject”:

To the next! Many thanks!!

I guess this post is “the next.” You’re welcome.

*

November 11, 2012: Deleting spam comments has become not impossible but deeply dispiriting — dozens and dozens and dozens of comments a day. So I’ve made a compromise: the CAPTCHAs are still off, but I’ve removed the option for anonymous comments. If you would like to comment and lack an account (Google or another) with which to do so, feel free to e-mail me.

I am happy to see that StatCounter registers no visits from spammers, who mask their IP addresses. I would hate to think that spammers were being counted as genuine readers.

Related reading
All “canned precooked meat product” posts (Pinboard)

Note-taking at Harvard

From Harvard University’s museums and libraries, a virtual exhibition about note-taking. My favorites: pages from George Lyman Kittredge’s commonplace book (such handwriting) and two readers’ annotations of a page from Rollo May.

Seeing the name Harvard and the word note-taking reminds me that my professor Jim Doyle once told a story of discovering in Widener Library a volume of Sir James Frazer’s The Golden Bough with handwritten notes by T. S. Eliot. Ever dutiful, Jim sought out a librarian, who took the book away at once. End of story.

A related post
From the Doyle edition (a page of T. S. Eliot, with notes)

[Found via Notebook Stories.]

About those canned goods

They’re not helpful.

Brach’s Halloween Candies

[Life, October 17, 1960.]

In the 2012 edition of David Ng and Ben Cohen’s Candy Hierarchy, the bottom tier includes “anything from Brach’s,” right between black licorice and hard candy.