Inside General Pencil

The New York Times Magazine has a terrific feature on Jersey City’s General Pencil Company. With photographs by Christopher Payne, text by Sam Anderson:

In an era of infinite screens, the humble pencil feels revolutionarily direct: It does exactly what it does, when it does it, right in front of you. Pencils eschew digital jujitsu. They are pure analog, absolute presence.

They are also nice to write with. I so wanted to make this post with a pencil, a General Kimberly (2B).

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Margie King Barab (1932–2018)

Our dear friend Margie King Barab has died at the age of eighty-five. For years, Elaine and I visited Margie and her husband Seymour Barab every summer in New York. And after Seymour died, we visited Margie. Margie was a singer, a teacher, and a writer. She appeared on television in the early days of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood as Miss Margie Nebraska and later taught music to children in a Montessori school. One of my last memories of visiting Margie: it was around Thanksgiving, and we were walking with her to her ATM before we had to head off to the subway. It was cold and wet and windy. And somehow the three of us were singing “Tea for Two.”

After Alexander King, Margie’s first husband, died, Margie received a letter from Marianne Moore (November 16, 1966) that included this line: “What was, never ceases in the soul, does it?” I used to share that line (with Margie’s permission) when I taught Moore’s poetry. And I’m sharing it now.


[Our friends Seymour Barab and Margie King Barab, New York, May 2012. Photograph by Michael Leddy.]

GrandPerspective icon

For Mac users: it’s a replacement icon for GrandPerspective, an app that creates a visual display of disk contents. (Useful for finding and zapping humongous files.) The icon is the work of BlackVariant (Patrick). Stylish and orange — I’m in.

“In other news”

This headline sums it up: “In Other News, Your President Is Still Racist.”

“Pink protest hat”

[Hi and Lois, January 11, 2018.]

“Pink protest hat”: well, I wouldn’t expect Dot to say “pussyhat” either. The surprising thing is that Lois Flagston owns a pussyhat, which would strongly suggest that she participated in last January’s Women’s March. But you’d never know it from the strip itself: on January 21, 2017, the day of the march, Hi was taking Dot and Ditto out for pancakes. On January 22, a branch was scratching against a window. If Lois was marching, she was keeping quiet about it. Or relatively quiet: Dot knows about that hat.

And soon everyone else will know: the hat is for a snowwoman who holds a sign that reads equal rights. But Lois and Dot should know that the “pink protest hat” is no longer in favor.

Here is an explanation of what’s coming later this month, in life, not comics: “What You Need to Know About the 2018 Women’s March.”

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[“Can I borrow your pink protest hat?” would have been a great start for a John Ashbery poem.]

Recently updated

Failsonry ? Now with an explanation.

“That’s better”

We might still think of Wi-Fi as fracturing family life, with each member of the group off in front of a screen. Here’s an earlier story of improved technology and one family’s response. Ben Logan (1920–2014) recounts what happened when his father bought an Aladdin kerosene lamp for the dining-room table. “The new lamp gave more light,” Logan writes, “opening up the corners of the dining room, letting us scatter away from the little circle we’d always formed around the old Rayo.” And then one night Logan’s mother announced, “‘I’m not sure I like that new lamp’”:

Father was at his usual place at the table. “Why not? Burns less kerosene.”

“Look where everyone is.”

We were scattered. There was even enough light to read by on the far side of the stove.

“We’re all here,” Father said.

“Not like we used to be.”

Father looked at the empty chairs around the table. “Want to go back to the old lamp?”

“I don’t think it’s the lamp. I think it’s us. Does a new lamp have to change where we sit at night?”

Ben Logan, The Land Remembers: The Story of a Farm and Its People. 1975. (Minnetonka, MN: NorthWord Press, 1999).

“I don’t think it’s the lamp. I think it’s us”: exactly. As I’ve written more than once in these pages, technology makes it possible to do things, not necessary to do them. Logan describes what followed in his family’s farmhouse:

Father’s eyes found us, one by one. Then he made a little motion with his head. We came out of our corners and slid into our old places at the table, smiling at each other, a little embarrassed to be hearing this talk.

Mother sat down with us and nodded. “That’s better.”

[Thanks to Chris at Dreamers Rise for pointing me to The Land Remembers.]

“The man that hath no music in himself”

Not long after watching our president’s half-throated attempt to sing “The Star-Spangled Banner,” I turned to Nuccio Ordine’s book The Usefulness of the Useless (2017) and found these lines from The Merchant of Venice (5.1). Lorenzo speaks:

The man that hath no music in himself,
Nor is not moved with concord of sweet
    sounds,
Is fit for treasons, stratagems, and spoils;
The motions of his spirit are dull as night
And his affections dark as Erebus:
Let no such man be trusted. Mark the music.

Aye, mark.

Knowing the words to “The Star-Spangled” is of course not proof that one is “moved with concord of sweet sounds.” And one could have a deep feeling for music without knowing the words to this song. But “treasons, stratagems, and spoils” — I rest my case.

Maurice Peress (1930–2017)

The conductor Maurice Peress has died at the age of eighty-seven. The New York Times has an obituary. Peress was known especially for his work with Leonard Bernstein and Duke Ellington. In 2007 Elaine had the good fortune to play under Peress’s baton in an orchestra performing several of Ellington’s longer works. And I had the good fortune to be a member of the audience.

One Kafka sentence

Frieda is asking the schoolboy Hans Brunswick some questions:


Franz Kafka, The Castle, trans. Mark Harman (New York: Schocken, 1998).

In a preface to this translation, Mark Harman cites a passage from Kafka’s diaries:

Omission of the period. In general the spoken sentence starts off in a large capital letter with the speaker, bends out in its course as far as it can towards the listeners and with the period returns to the speaker. But if the period is omitted, then the sentence is no longer constrained and blows its entire breath at the listener.

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