NYT, sheesh

From The New York Times: “Unlike her boss, attention from the news media was never something she sought.”

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FKB pencil sharpener

[James Anderson (Robert Young) installs a necessary household tool. Click for a larger view.]

Face it: if father really knew best, there would have had a pencil sharpener up and running in season one, episode one. This sharpener didn’t make it onto the kitchen wall until the sixth and final season of Father Knows Best. In the episode “Bud, the Willing Worker” (December 7, 1959), Jim installs the sharpener without saying a word about it. Kathy sharpens a pencil in “Turn the Other Cheek” (December 14, 1959), after which the sharpener disappears from the wall where it so briefly had a home.

By the way, it’s National Pencil Day. Start your sharpeners.

Other FKB posts
“Betty’s Graduation” : Flowers knows best : “Margaret Disowns Her Family” : Scene-stealing card-file : “Your dinner jacket just arrived” : “A Woman in the House”

Domestic comedy

“It’s like Sex and the City , but without the sex and without the city.”

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[“It”: the television series Gidget, whose main character is also a narrator.]

Lost in the city

I was about to see a movie with my friend Luanne and two other people unknown to me. Right before going into the theater, I went out to buy a pack of cigarettes. I walked up to a counter: “A pack of cigarettes,” I said, like someone in a movie. No brand — I was out of practice. The clerk came back with Pall Malls in a white hull-and-slide package. The words “Made with Broham Strings” appeared below the brand name. “How much?” $6.53. I paid with a ten and got my change and two books of matches.

Then I was walking outside, on a campus, looking for a place to smoke and observing several unbranded fast-food joints with all-glass exteriors. A giant with a long white beard and a cape was walking the campus. Everyone stared at him and whispered. And then I was walking in a version of Manhattan, with empty narrow streets at once dark and brightly lit — something like the alley in On the Waterfront where Terry and Edie run from a truck. I knew I was on the Lower East Side, but the street layout was baffling — Avenue A was followed by Second Avenue A. Which way was uptown? Which way was west? I couldn’t tell.

Then I was in a carpeted hallway on the second or third floor of an empty building. A man was carrying furniture up the staircase. I asked if he knew which way was west, but he spoke only Italian. “¿Dónde oeste?” I tried. I got the man to walk with me to a streetcorner in the hope that he could orient me, but once there, he couldn’t.

And then I thought to text Luanne and tell her I’d be really late. “I went out to buy cigarettes and am now being baffled by the Lower East Side,” I wrote, or something like that. I began to walk and reached the intersection of Harvard Avenue, Harvard Street, and Mechanic Street. And there was Luanne, on the other side of one of these streets, about six lanes of traffic away. We needed to get the No. 83 bus, which was parked right there — but it took off and drove right past us. So we went into the theater, which was also a church, where the movie had already ended. It was a good one, Luanne said.

[Sources: Luanne and Jim’s recent trip to the opera. An article about 1950s and ’60s hangouts in my college town. The motto of one such place: “Drop in for Coke and smoke.” A 60 Minutes story about Giannis Antetokounmpo. A TCM showing of On the Waterfront. Thinking about the streets of my Allston, Massachusetts, grad student days. Above all, this passage from W.G. Sebald’s Austerlitz. And possibly the crackers and Mahón cheese I had before going to sleep.]

Lost in a city

Austerlitz is lost:


W.G. Sebald, Austerlitz, trans. Anthea Bell (New York: Modern Library, 2001).

The image of a language as a city comes from Ludwig Wittgenstein (whose eyes appear in a photograph earlier in the novel):

Our language can be seen as an ancient city: a maze of little streets and squares, of old and new houses, and of houses with additions from various periods; and this surrounded by a multitude of new boroughs with straight regular streets and uniform houses.

Philosophical Investigations , trans. G.E.M. Anscombe (New York: Macmillan, 1973).

Also from Austerlitz
Austerlitz on time : Marks on time

Marks on time

When his family’s house was requisitioned for use as a convalescent home during World War II, James Mallord Ashman hid the doors to the billiard room and nursery behind false walls. When the walls come down, Ashman enters the nursery for the first time in ten years:


W.G. Sebald, Austerlitz, trans. Anthea Bell (New York: Modern Library, 2001).

Also from Austerlitz
Austerlitz on time

[So many things in Austerlitz blur, purposefully so. The novel refers to both a nursery and nurseries. The walls comes down in “the autumn of 1951 or 1952,” when Austerlitz enters “the nursery” for this first time in ten years. Or nine? Or eleven?]

From Beware of Pity

So much depends upon “the so-called ‘chancery double,’” “a folded sheet of prescribed dimensions and format,” “perhaps the most indispensable requisite of the Austrian civil and military administration”:


Stefan Zweig, Beware of Pity, trans. Phyllis and Trevor Blewitt (New York: New York Review Books, 2006).

I would like to know what those “so-called ‘guides’” looked like. They likely bear little resemblance to the present-day shitajiki.

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NPR, sheesh

“. . . before expelling the same amount of British diplomats. . . .”

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C. & E.I. pencil

[From the Museum of Supplies.]

Great pencil!

Thanks. Your voice sounds familiar. As do your italics. I mean, your italics look familiar. Are you the same guy who interviewed me about my Illinois Central Railroad pencil?

Look — let me ask the questions, okay?

Okay.

So what can you tell me about this pencil?

Not much, really. It’s a gift from my friend and colleague John David Moore, who likes all things old. He’s an excellent pianist, and he and Elaine have been playing recitals together for years. He’s also an expert mycologist.

Shall we keep to the pencil?

Sure. John David —

The pencil?

— likes antiques stores and flea markets, so I suspect he found this pencil in one of them. C. & E.I. is the Chicago and Eastern Illinois Railroad, which ran from 1877 to 1976, from Chicago to St. Louis, southern Illinois, and Evansville, Indiana.

So you knew that all along and were holding out on me?

No, I had to look it up. But about the pencil. I like the sincerity of its motto: “Friendliness is a C. & E.I. tradition,” a motto that sharpens much better than, say, “Don’t use drugs.” And I like the numero sign before the numeral: № 1. And I like that it’s a № 1 pencil, a nice soft lead for the railroaders as they sit and drink coffee and write in their pocket notebooks.

What a cozy little scene. [Rolls eyes.] Sentimental fellow, aren’t you?

Yes and no. It’s really Elaine who’s the sentimentalist about train travel. You may wish to speak to her. Oh, and thanks, John David.

[This post is the eighteenth in a very 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. A bit of the dialogue in this post comes from Citizen Kane.]

Other Museum of Supplies exhibits
Dennison’s Gummed Labels No. 27 : Dr. Scat : Eagle Turquoise display case : Eagle Verithin display case : Esterbrook erasers : 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 : Pentel Quicker Clicker : Real Thin Leads : Rite-Rite Long Leads : Stanley carpenter’s rule

”Pencil by default”

From I, Daniel Blake (dir. Ken Loach, 2016). Blake (Dave Johns) is a Newcastle carpenter recovering from a heart attack and navigating a bureaucratic maze to attain his Employment and Support Allowance. A clerk tells Blake to complete the necessary paperwork online: “We’re digital by default.”

Blake’s reply: “Well, I'm pencil by default.”

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