False drama

“We’re in the home stretch”: Brian Williams, on MSNBC just now. Meaning that in fifteen minutes, the Democratic presidential debate begins.

Nancy with string

[Nancy, February 4, 1955.]

Nancy marvels at the care that must have gone into making that ball of string. The Nancy -verse is a work of intelligent design. (The Creator: Ernie Bushmiller.)

You can read vintage Nancy strips online, six days a week.

Related reading
All OCA Nancy posts (Pinboard)

Filex

[“And the Style of Tip”?]

In 2014, while beginning to empty my office bit by bit of its, or my, accumulations, I rediscovered a file folder full of good stuff. The folder itself was a rediscovery as well. I have a dozen or so of these Filex Visible Name Folders, which I vaguely remember picking up in graduate-student days from a bookcase where faculty left odds and ends from their offices. (Think immersion heaters , sickly plants .) Each of my folders has “an all celluloid tab with face set at an angle of 45°, making names and index easily visible.” The tab, attached with four eyelets, can easily tear skin. This folder is not playing.

I thought that the Internets would make it easy to learn about Filex Visible Name Folders and Rand-Globe style. But no. Rand is an important name in the history of office equipment, as is Globe. But Filex? Nothing. Rand-Globe? I have no idea. But the Visible Name name makes me think that this folder must be a Rand product.


[From The Blue Book of Chicago Commerce (1922).]


[From Buffalo Live Wire (January 1916). Click for a larger view.]

Here is a page with photographs of employees assembling file folders in North Tonawanda. Do my folders date from the 1940s? I have no idea. But they’ve already outlasted countless cheap, disposable folders of my acquaintance.

From the folder full of stuff
Aglio e olio : The Art Ensemble of Chicago in Boston : Coppola/“Godfather” sauce : Jim Doyle on education : Mary Backstayge marigold seeds : A Meeting with Ludwig Wittgenstein : Seventeen ideas about interpretation : Tile-pilfering questionnaire

Orin Incandenza, shapeshifter

[David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest (Boston: Little, Brown, 1996).]

That’s a pickup line used by Orin Incandenza (as recalled by his onetime friend Marlon Bain). I think this line has great relevance to our present political discourse: if Orin were a political candidate, he could be a progressive or a moderate, whatever a voter prefers. Why not? But Orin attempts to appeal by acknowledging his artifice.

Related reading
All OCA DFW posts (Pinboard)

Bob Elliott (1923–2016)

Bob Elliott: as in Bob and Ray. I somehow caught on while still in high school, when Bob Elliott and Ray Goulding were doing an afternoon show on New York’s WOR. I remember my Spanish teacher telling me that they had mentioned my name on the air. I must have written to them, and my teacher must have listened while driving home. When I began my life as a college commuter, listening to Bob and Ray turned the late-afternoon crawl to the George Washington Bridge into a pleasure of sorts. Yes, I may have been stuck in traffic. But I was stuck in traffic while listening to Bob and Ray.

There are some scattered references to Bob and Ray in these pages. The one that a fan will appreciate is this one, with a letter from the Bob and Ray character Mary Backstayge. That such gentle lunacy flourished on the airwaves is a wonder.

The New York Times has an obituary.

A third police station

[Rusell Crowe as Officer Wendell “Bud” White. L.A. Confidential (dir. Curtis Hanson, 1997). Click for larger views.]

File cabinets in front of them, file cabinets in back of them. Files, files, everywhere. I must admit: during the fight scene between Office White and Detective Lieutenant Edmund “Ed” Exley (Guy Pearce), I was betting on the file cabinets.

We caught on to L.A. Confidential via Los Angeles Plays Itself (dir. Thom Andersen, 2003). Curtis Hanson’s film is funny, shocking, sleazy, violent, and full up on twists and turns — and file cabinets. Jeannine Oppewall received an Oscar nomination for Best Art Direction (a category now called Best Production Design).

This police-station-from-the-movies is the third in recent weeks to leave our household in awe.

Other films, other police stations
Niagara : East Side, West Side

Domestic comedy

[Re: Garrison Keillor .]

“He makes people happy.”

“Well, they may think they’re happy.”

Related reading
All OCA domestic comedy posts (Pinboard)

Overheard

[Out to eat .]

“. . . she read the straight average, not the weighted average . . .”

“. . . ”

“. . . so I filled out an evaluation just like anyone else. But there were no categories . . .”

“. . . ”

“. . . sixty thirty-second commercials . . .”

“. . . ”

“. . . and the other is one-oh-four-point-three . . .”

“. . . ”

“. . . does she do all of them, or just the specials?”

“. . . ”

It felt like David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King .

Related reading
All OCA “overheard” posts (Pinboard)
A post with more about the Wallace ellipsis

A joke in the traditional manner

Did you hear about the thieving produce-clerk?

No spoilers. The punchline is in the comments.

More jokes in the traditional manner
The Autobahn : Did you hear about the cow coloratura? : Elementary school : A Golden Retriever : How did Bela Lugosi know what to expect? : How did Samuel Clemens do all his long-distance traveling? : What did the doctor tell his forgetful patient to do? : What did the plumber do when embarrassed? : What happens when a senior citizen visits a podiatrist? : What is the favorite toy of philosophers’ children? : Which member of the orchestra was best at handling money? : Why did the doctor spend his time helping injured squirrels? : Why did Oliver Hardy attempt a solo career in movies? : Why did the ophthalmologist and his wife split up? : Why does Marie Kondo never win at poker? : Why was Santa Claus wandering the East Side of Manhattan?

[“In the traditional manner”: by or à la my dad. He gets credit for all but the cow coloratura, the toy, the squirrel-doctor, Marie Kondo, Santa Claus, and this one.]

NYT sanitizes DFW

In marking the twentieth anniversary of the publication of David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest (February 1, 1996), The New York Times has sanitized an often-quoted sentence from a Wallace interview. Here’s Wallace, speaking with Larry McCaffery in 1993:

Fiction’s about what it is to be a fucking human being.

And now Tom Bissell, writing in the Times :

In interviews, Wallace was explicit that art must have a higher purpose than mere entertainment: “Fiction’s about what it is to be a . . . human being.”

Bissell’s piece is excerpted from his foreword to a forthcoming twentieth-anniversary edition of Infinite Jest . The word explicit is odd here, as the Times — I assume it’s the Times, not Bissell — has chosen to be less than explicit.

The excision of fucking may be less deplorable than the outright rewriting a Philip Larkin poem in a 2012 review by Michiko Kakutani: “They mess you up, your mum and dad.” But the Times hasn’t only removed a word: the added ellipsis may too easily be read as an indication of a hesitation or pause in Wallace’s speaking, changing his blunt, inelegant remark into a moment of bathos: “a . . . human being.” It would be easy enough for the Times to suggest the full content without resorting to the ellipsis: “Fiction’s about what it is to be a [f---ing] human being,” or “Fiction’s about what it is to be a [****ing] human being.” They mess you up, The New York Times .

Related reading
All OCA DFW posts (Pinboard)