Toshi Seeger (1922–2013)

“Mrs. Seeger helped produce thousands of her husband’s concerts. When he hosted Rainbow Quest, a television show devoted to folk music, in 1965 and 1966, she directed it — although her official credit was ‘Chief Cook and Bottle Washer’”: Toshi Seeger, Wife of Folk-Singing Legend, Dies (The New York Times).

Peppers and eggs

It’s called peppers and eggs, but as I prepare the dish, it might better be called eggs and peppers. Or eggs and pepper. Or eggs and pep. In other words, the pepper is a small part of the whole. It’s easy to make:

Cut half an Italian pepper into short, thin strips. If you cannot get an Italian pepper, use a green pepper. You must make do.

Beat two eggs in a bowl.

Add some olive oil to a pan. Cook peppers until they begin to brown. (Notice: pieces of a single pepper become peppers when they hit the pan.)

Add eggs and lower the heat after a bit. Cook until done.

Serve on two pieces of buttered bread. (I prefer Earth Balance to butter.) Add pepper to taste, and salt if you must.

The appropriate beverage to accompany peppers and eggs: chocolate milk. Really. That’s the way I did things as a kid (and still do). Back then: cow’s milk and Carnation Chocolate Malted Milk. Today: Silk and Hershey’s Syrup. The combination of peppers and eggs and chocolate milk is for me a powerful madeleine. Only liverwurst has greater Proustian power.

[Yesterday was Marcel Proust’s birthday.]

Joyeux anniversaire, M. Proust

Marcel Proust was born on July 10, 1871. From a 1913 interview:

“Style is not at all an embellishment as certain people think, it is not even a matter of technique, it is — like colour with painters — the quality of vision, the revelation of the private universe that each one of us can see and which others cannot see. The pleasure an artist affords us is to introduce us to one universe the more.”

“Swann Explained by Proust,” in Days of Reading, translated by John Sturrock (London: Penguin, 2008).

A similar passage from the last volume of À la recherche du temps perdu:

[S]tyle for a writer, like colour for a painter, is a question not of technique but of vision. It is the revelation, which would be impossible by direct or conscious means, of the qualitative difference in the ways we perceive the world, a difference which, if there were no art, would remain the eternal secret of each individual. It is only through art that we can escape from ourselves and know how another person sees a universe which is not the same as our own and whose landscapes would otherwise have remained as unknown as any there may be on the moon. Thanks to art, instead of seeing only a single world, our own, we see it multiplied, and have at our disposal as many worlds as there are original artists, all more different from one another than those which revolve in infinity and which, centuries after the fire from which their rays emanated has gone out, whether it was called Rembrandt or Vermeer, still send us their special light.

Finding Time Again, translated by Ian Patterson (London: Penguin, 2003).

Related reading
All Proust posts (Pinboard)

One of those who is or are

“Don’t be one of those people who mistakenly believe that the word believe earlier in this sentence should have been believes.” Bryan Garner clears up a tricky question of usage: “One of those who are” or “one of those who is”? (LawProse Blog).

“There’s a story if you want to hear it”

An antiques dealer hears a remarkable story:

When I opened a random drawer beside the kitchen sink, the contents startled me. Inside were hundreds of political buttons, and they were an odd mix. The oldest were mostly for Republican candidates, while the newer ones were Democrats.

The man overseeing the estate sale approached me as I sorted through them. Within moments I had bought the contents of the drawer.

“So what”s the story?” I asked. “He was a Republican, she was a Democrat? Not so Green Acres?”

“Not exactly,” my host replied. He appeared to be uneasy about something. “There’s a story if you want to hear it,” he said, pausing.

You probably do: Traces of a Man Who Disappeared (The New York Times).

VDP on the right to fail

Van Dyke Parks, talking in New York recently:

“Just as a personal aside, something that I think is very important to say: You must reserve the right to fail if you’re going to get anything done. You must continue aggressively to reserve the right to fail. You must keep learning from your failures. I see that — I see how shy I was, when I could afford to be shy, because I was a brunet, and I had time to be shy. But soon you’ll tire of being shy, if you are shy at all, if you’re that victimized by the degree of self-loathing coming from your last failure. But you must continue to forgive yourself, and reserve the right to fail.”

Related reading
All Van Dyke Parks posts (Pinboard)
John Holt on learning and difficulty
Learning, failure, and character

[Merriam-Webster: “spelled brunet when used of a boy or man and usually brunette when used of a girl or woman.”]

DFW book from Madras Press

Straight out of Newton, Massachusetts: Sumanth Prabhaker’s Madras Press has published a section of David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King as a five-inches-square book: The Awakening of My Interest in Advanced Tax. It’s a conversion narrative, the long first-person story of “Irrelevant” Chris Fogle, a drug-taking “wastoid” who walks into the wrong college classroom and finds his life changed by a lecture on the heroism of accountancy. The Fogle story may be the best thing in the The Pale King.

Madras Press books are available from select bookstores and by mail from the publisher. All proceeds go to charitable organizations. The beneficiary for this book is Granada House, where, in 1989, Wallace began living in sobriety. Take a look at the Granada House website: the first account on this page is by Wallace.

My visit to Granada House in 2010 (as a DFW reader wanting to make a donation) helped me understand one of the “exotic new facts” in the Infinite Jest catalogue of things one can learn in a halfway house: “That God — unless you’re Charlton Heston, or unhinged, or both — speaks and acts entirely through the vehicle of human beings, if there is a God.”

Thanks, Ben, for getting me a copy of this book.

Related reading
All David Foster Wallace posts (Pinboard)

[My link to “An Ex-Resident’s Story” is no revelation: Jason Kottke made the Wallace connection in 2008. I have borrowed most of the sentence describing Chris Fogle’s story from a review of The Pale King that I wrote for World Literature Today.]

W3 online

Webster’s Third New International Dictionary is now online. The price — $29.95 a year — seems a bargain. (A year’s subscription to the OED runs $295.)

Do I need the online W3? At home I work about eight paces from a 1986 copy of the real thing, always open on a dictionary stand. A first-edition compact OED is about four paces away. These dictionaries are not exactly of the moment. But there are several more recent dictionaries in the house, a dictionary app on my Mac, and (through my university’s library) the online OED. I think that I want is going to yield to common sense. Besides, the library might be getting W3 online.

A related post
Review: The Story of Ain’t (on W3)

Mimeograph duplicator

I found this beautiful ad for an A. B. Dick Mimeograph duplicator while looking for something else:


[Life, July 22, 1940. Click for a larger view.]

I found this beautiful ad for an A. B. Dick Mimeograph duplicator while looking for something else:

I found this beautiful ad for an A. B. Dick Mimeograph duplicator while looking for something else:

See how clean and sharp those copies look? You can barely distinguish them from the original sentence. That’s because I made them with my A. B. Dick Mimeograph duplicator.

The business model put forth in this advertisement would be welcome today: “Honest salesmen, selling honest quality in honest products, made in honest factories, marked at honest prices.” No junk: “One chair that lasts is worth a whole suite that peels and cracks and falls apart.” Yes. “The real economy of the superior,” not “the extravagance of the inferior.” I think about these matters every time I have to buy a tool or household item. It’s cheaper in the long run to buy what will last.

What better way to sell a duplicating machine than with a crisp line drawing of a duplicating machine? Look: the machine and the picture are being wheeled into your workplace as I type:


[You’re almost there, fellows. Push! Push hard!]

If, like me, you fondly recall the fragrant purple ink of schooldays, you’re thinking of the products of the spirit duplicator, not the mimeograph. The two-ply page used with a spirit duplicator was called a “spirit master.” What a strange and wonderful name.

[That dress- or keyhole-like shape in the bottom left corner? I have no idea.]

“Creatures of hope”

From J. L. Carr’s 1980 novella A Month in the Country :

By nature we are creatures of hope, always ready to be deceived again, caught by the marvel that might be wrapped in the grubbiest brown paper parcel.

The novella has been reissued by New York Review Books (2000).

Other NYRB finds of my acquaintance: William Lindsay Gresham’s Nightmare Alley, Georg Christoph Lichtenberg’s The Waste Books, James Schuyler’s Alfred and Guinevere. I’m not sure it’s possible to go wrong looking for NYRB spines in a bookstore.