Dr. Scat

[The 4 oz. size. Click for a larger bottle.]

I’ve had this bottle for a long time. I probably bought it at a going-out-of-business office-supply store, long after I stopped using a manual typewriter. I may have been channeling Charlie Brown: “I think it needs me.”

Dr. Scat Typewriter Platen Roll and Type Cleaner is powerful stuff. It is made of ten parts ool-ya-koo, five parts shoo-bitty-oww, and one part zot. Any more zot and the bottle would have exploded by now.

The company that produced this item is no longer known as the Dr. Scat Chemical Company. It’s now the Starkey Chemical Process Company, still in La Grange, Illinois. A page describing the company shows the Dr. Scat name on a brick wall and lists “Dr. Seat” as one of the company’s brands. Oops. Or better make that oopapada.

[This post is the fifteenth in an occasional series, “From the Museum of Supplies.” Supplies is my word, and has become my family’s word, for all manner of stationery items. The museum is imaginary. The supplies are real.]

Other Museum of Supplies exhibits
Dennison’s Gummed Labels No. 27 : Eagle Turquoise display case : Eagle Verithin display case : Faber-Castell Type Cleaner : Fineline erasers : Illinois Central Railroad Pencil : A Mad Men sort of man, sort of : Mongol No. 2 3/8 : Moore Metalhed Tacks : National’s “Fuse-Tex” Skytint : Pedigree Pencil : Real Thin Leads : Rite-Rite Long Leads : Stanley carpenter’s rule

Recently updated

Farewell, 45 West 53rd The American Folk Art Museum will be demolished after all.

Harvey Pekar on record collecting

“At first, and for a long time, it was a healthy thing to do”: Harvey Pekar on record collecting (YouTube). Art by R. Crumb.

Related reading
All Harvey Pekar posts (Pinboard)

[Found via Mosaic Records.]

Hog Bay Software iOS apps

An e-mail from Jesse Grosjean announces that Hog Bay Software will no longer develop its iOS apps. PlainText, TaskPaper, and WriteRoom for iOS are available this week and will then disappear. PlainText has always been free. TaskPaper and WriteRoom are now free too.

I like WriteRoom for Mac, a lot. It was $24.95 when I bought it, and worth the price. Now it’s $9.99.

From Verlyn Klinkenborg

Three short passages:

Most of the sentences you make will need to be killed.
The rest will need to be fixed.
This will be true for a long time.

*

Writing requires a high degree of inner alertness.
Especially when things are going wrong.

*

Finding flaws is how you learn to make better sentences.
Enjoy it.
You can’t prevent yourself from repeating a mistake you haven’t noticed.
You’ll have to read your work many, many times to find all the problems embedded in it.
Even experienced writers have to do this.
Some flaws do a wonderful job of hiding.

Verlyn Klinkenborg, Several Short Sentences About Writing (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2012).

I could do without the line breaks: they’re not needed, and in a book about writing prose, they seem a wrong choice. (Klinkenborg’s New York Times columns about writing are evidence that paragraphs suffice.) If there are to be line breaks, run-over lines should have indents, no?

Design aside, Several Short Sentences About Writing is one of the wisest and most humane books about writing I’ve read.

Mark Trail and frostbite

[Mark Trail, December 29, 1996.]

Mark Trail is helping the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration with tips on preventing and treating frostbite.

I don’t know who’s camping with Mark. Rusty (who became Mark’s adopted son) entered the strip in 1999. Whoever the unidentified companion is, I like his guarded enthusiasm: “sort of fun.” Shoveling snow is sort of fun too. It’s kind of fun, sort of, in a way.

Okay, it’s not really fun. It is not fun at all.

Good fortune to all who must shovel, including me.

Related reading
All Mark Trail posts (Pinboard)

Chris Chase (Irene Kane)

The actress Chris Chase, who starred in Stanley Kubrick’s Killer’s Kiss (1955), died last October. I don’t know how I missed that sad news. The New York Times published an obituary. As did The Hollywood Reporter. Neither obituary mentions the screen role that might have gained Chase more views than any other — as host of the public-television broadcasts of the 1972 Fischer-Spassky chess match. Chase introduced each broadcast, and her beauty and pizzazz made a wonderful contrast to the dorky all-male doings that followed.

Chase also appeared in two episodes of Naked City. As in Kubrick’s film, she was credited as Irene Kane.

Related posts
Naked City Mongol (Irene Kane and a pencil)
Scriptos in Times Square (from Killer’s Kiss)

Failure v. non-success

From the Naked City episode “A Succession of Heartbeats” (October 26, 1960), spoken by Andy Brent (played by Frank Overton):

“All my life I just missed. Always one step short of success. Not so much a failure as a non-success. You can learn to live with failure — most people do. It’s a lot rougher living with non-success.”

Nobody writes them like Stirling Silliphant.

Related reading
All Naked City posts (Pinboard)

In our little house on the prairie

How odd to be snowbound and find ourselves running low on — of all things — salt. It is like being stuck in a Laura Ingalls Wilder novel. And not just any Laura Ingalls Wilder novel: it is like being stuck in the one Laura Ingalls Wilder novel I’ve read. If the weather keeps up, I may have to burn its pages for fuel.

A related post
Snowbound (a very short play)

William Parker Quartet, Wood Flute Songs

[Wood Flute Songs: Anthology/Live 2006-2012. The William Parker Quartet: Lewis Barnes, trumpet; Rob Brown, alto saxophone; William Parker, bass, reeds; Hamid Drake, drums. Guests: AMR Ensemble; Billy Bang, violin; Bobby Bradford, cornet; Leena Conquest; vocals; Cooper-Moore, piano; James Spaulding, alto saxophone; Eri Yamamoto, piano. AUM Fidelity, 2013. AUM080–87.]

This eight-CD set is a bargain, but that’s not a good reason to buy it. A good reason is that Parker’s quartet, together for thirteen years, is a great band. It is one of the great groups in jazz. Its closest analogues, to my mind: Ornette Coleman’s 1960 quartet, Charles Mingus’s 1964 sextet, Miles Davis’s mid-’60s quintet. The empathy among the members of the Parker quartet is uncanny, and the music — fueled by endlessly inventive bass and drums — is consistently beautiful and exciting and inspiring. It all makes me wonder: how do these musicians stand it when they can’t be making music?

Here is a track listing. Here are one, two short videos. Here is a twenty-minute sampler. And here is a post that I wrote after hearing the quartet last fall.