Shredded lunch

I took up Berit’s suggestion and made a Shredded lunch. I cut a Shredded Wheat biscuit along the seam and came away with two “nest-like fragile crackers,” just as Berit described them. I put three large pieces of avocado on each (about three-quarters of a large avocado) and added some salt, cracked pepper, and lemon juice, with a chunk of cheddar cheese on the side. Delicious! I plan to repeat this experiment, probably on Friday, by which time the next avocado will have ripened.

Thank you, Berit, for discovering New Directions in Shredded Wheat.

A related post
Shredded Wheat hack

[A truism of the Internets: no one cares what you had for lunch. Well, probably. But people do care about what they might want to make for their own next lunch.]

“How not to write”

Zachary Foster gives advice: “How not to write: 14 tips for aspiring humanities academics” (Times Higher Education). A sample:

The general rule of thumb is to complicate simple ideas. “Living together,” in the words of one scholar, “oscillates between the tone of practical serenity and tragic pathos, between philosophical wisdom and desperate anguish.” It is both “simple evidence and the promise of the inaccessible,” while it opens the possibility of a “unified self” and “synchronous time.” If only this were more widely known, so much domestic friction could be avoided.

Related posts (fake lit-crit)
“Metaphysics’ corrasable bond”
On Rebecca Black’s “Friday”

Not reading

Arthur Schopenhauer:

The art of not reading is a very important one. It consists in not taking an interest in whatever may be engaging the attention of the general public at any particular time. When some political or ecclesiastical pamphlet, or novel, or poem is making a great commotion, you should remember that he who writes for fools always finds a large public. A precondition for reading good books is not reading bad ones: for life is short.

Essays and Aphorisms (1851), trans. R. J. Hollingdale (1970).

[Bryan Garner tweeted a photograph of this passage. My best book of 2016: so far it’s Willa Cather’s The Song of the Lark (1915).]

Turbo Boost Switcher

[For Mac users.]

Rubén García Pérez’s Turbo Boost Switcher is a tiny app that enables or disables OS X’s Turbo Boost. Turbo Boost is the technology that increases CPU speed (and with it, fan speed and temperature). You know what it’s like when your Mac heats up and the fan goes at full blast? That’s Turbo Boost at work. Disabling Turbo Boost lengthens battery life and and allows a Mac to run at a significantly lower temperature. Turbo Boost Switcher is available in free and Pro versions.

Full disclosure: this blog post will get me a modest discount on the Pro version’s already modest price. Further disclosure: I’ve been planning to write a post about this app anyway, for many months now. I learned about Turbo Boost Switcher, more than a year ago, from Marco Arment’s blog, and have been using it ever since.

From Lucy Gayheart

Willa Cather, Lucy Gayheart (1935).

I became acquainted with trade-last , or TL , via an episode of Naked City . Seeing the word again is like receiving an odd and unexpected gift. What am I gonna do with it?

Oh, wait — I know.

Related reading
All OCA Cather posts (Pinboard)

Little world

Stefan Zweig, The Post-Office Girl , trans. Joel Rotenberg (New York: New York Review Books, 2008).

Lord Elkins, speaking of aristocrats sojourning at a hotel, has given us a perfect characterization of any petty elite, from a junior-high clique to a workplace’s players and plotters.

The Post-Office Girl is a terrific novel. I wish I had known it when I was teaching: it would have offered a great opportunity for students to think about matters of class and poverty, poverty of both means and spirit.

[I have come to think of the New York Review Books imprint as pretty much a guarantee that a book is worth my time: like the Criterion Collection for books. Wes Anderson cites this novel in particular and Zweig’s life and work more generally as inspiration for his film The Grand Budapest Hotel .]

From Lucy Gayheart

Willa Cather, Lucy Gayheart (1935).

Lucy Gayheart! I’m with you in Haverford.

More seriously: I think there are few writers who understand the claustrophobia of little towns as well as Willa Cather does. See for instance the chance meeting of Godfrey St. Peter and Horace Langtry in The Professor’s House .

Related reading
All OCA Cather posts (Pinboard)

[With apologies to Allen Ginsberg’s Howl .]

Shredded Wheat hack

[Advertisement from Life , March 27, 1944.]

For the past month or more, I’ve been a fool for Post Shredded Wheat. I’m sure there are eaters who place the “pillow-like biscuits” (as Wikipedia calls them) into their cereal bowls whole. Not me. I crush, which leads, always, to stray shreds on the tablecloth. But I have devised a hack:

Materials: two Shredded Wheat biscuits, one bowl, one one-gallon plastic bag, one free hand.

Directions: Place biscuits in bowl. Place bowl in bag. Crush biscuits. Remove bowl from bag. Store bag in cereal box for reuse.

Silk soymilk, a banana or blueberries (“other fruit,” as per the ad), and a teaspoon of sugar are useful accompaniments. Add after removing bowl from bag.

Related posts
Cereals in the hands of an angry blog
How to improve writing (no. 38) (fixing the Shredded Wheat box)

[Shredded Wheat has been a Post product since 1993.]

Joyeux anniversaire, M. Proust

Marcel Proust was born on July 10, 1871.

My novel is not a work of ratiocination; its least elements have been supplied by my sensibility; first I perceived them in my own depths without understanding them, and I had as much trouble converting them into something intelligible as if they had been as foreign to the sphere of the intelligence as a motif in music.

Marcel Proust, in a letter to Antoine Bibesco, November (?) 1912. From Letters of Marcel Proust, translated by Mina Curtiss (New York: Helen Marx Books / Books & Co,, 2006).

Related reading
All OCA Proust posts (Pinboard)

Adagio for Strings

Elaine posted it this morning. I want to post it too. The musician is Cremaine Booker, also known as That Cello Guy.

“Music is the healing force of the universe”: Albert Ayler.

[It’s YouTube: the ads seem to be unavoidable.]