“A big white moon”

Steven Millhauser, “Revenge,” in The King in the Tree: Three Novellas (2003).

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In a Mellotron

“Conceived as a parlor instrument, it made its way into countless formative hits that continue to define classic rock stations today and laid the groundwork for some of our most common studio tools.” From JSTOR Daily, “Tape Heads,” a look at the Mellotron in rock.

And speaking of a parlor instrument, in 2008 I made a short post about a 1965 demo that presents the Mellotron as just that. When I looked up the demo this morning, without even thinking about that post, I noticed the same slightly crazed look on the keyboardist’s face at 2:41. But this time I also noticed an only slightly less crazed look on the demonstrator’s face at 2:11. The host and demonstator are conductor Eric Robinson and magician David Nixon, who together created the Mellotronics company to sell the Mellotron. The keyboardist is Geoff Unwin, an early Mellotron user.

Here’s Paul McCartney demonstrating the instrument.

[Post title with apologies to Duke Ellington.]

From The Pencil

From Henry Petroski’s The Pencil: A History of Design and Circumstance (1990):

Pencils can be as important as toys, and they often have been used as toys. We once wrinkled our faces to hold mustache pencils between the upper lip and the nose, and we scribbled pencil mustaches on posters in the days of erasable graffiti. Young boys made pencil tusks hang from their nostrils, and older girls put pencils under their breasts to test if they needed a bra. We twirled, chewed, tapped, doodled, and sometimes even took notes with pencils during classes, as we would later during meetings.

We use pencils to stir paint, prop up windows, open stubborn plastic bags, dial telephones, and punch holes in aluminum beer cans whose ring openers have come off in our fingers. As calculator buttons grew smaller we used, in an ironic twist, the eraser end of a pencil to tap out our sums. Still later, as parents, we showed our small children how to fit the pencil eraser into the holes left by the broken buttons on a Speak & Spell, and now our children show us how to use a pencil to remove tapes from a videocassette recorder whose eject button has fallen inside. It works because a pencil lead conducts electricity.

Some of us, before our arthritis got too bad, tried to experience the sensation known to the medical profession as Aristotle’s anomaly: “When the first and second fingers are crossed and a small object such as a pencil is placed between them the false impression is gained that there are two objects.” Apparently, for some people at least, when the pencil touches two parts of the skin that are not ordinarily touched simultaneously by a single object, the one pencil is perceived as two. As our arthritis got worse, our doctors prescribed medicine in containers designed to be opened with a pencil acting as a lever.

The pencil is always an extension of the fingers. With a pencil we can count beyond our ten digits, usually striking out every four marks with a fifth — four vertical fingers made into a hand by a diagonal thumb. We can turn the pages of slick magazines and catalogues more quickly with the dry eraser than the licked finger. We can dial or press telephones that our nails are too long or our fingers too fat to work. We can hold more places in books by sticking pencils where our fingers were. We can point to details that our fingers would obscure. We can exaggerate our gestures. We can make visible what our fingers can only trace in air. We can vote not by raising our hands but by marking our secret ballots.

A related post
Henry Petroski (1942–2023)

Henry Petroski (1942–2023)

Henry Petroski, engineer, teacher, and writer, has died at the age of eighty-one. The New York Times has an obituary. And there’s one from Duke University.

I’ve read and own several of Henry Petroski’s books. The one closest to my heart: The Pencil: A History of Design and Circumstance (1990). I wrote Professor Petroski a fan letter after reading that book, and for a while we had a correspondence. His letters, always, were in pencil.

“Look! The lead!”

“Look! The lead! It shoots onto the paper as clear and pure as if it’s been chiseled with a laser ray”: “Real-Life Science Fiction Premise Plays Out As Man Employs So-Called Mechanical Pencil.”

Sardines on the screen

A beautiful short film: Inside Portugal’s tinned-fish industry. I can vouch for the Nuri brand — they’re wonderful sardines.

Thanks to Stephen at Pencil Talk for sending news of this film my way.

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“Some rocks,” some boid

[Nancy, June 21, 1950. Click for a larger view.]

In today’s yesterday’s Nancy, Sluggo has proposed that he and Nancy wade in th’ lake. Nancy thinks the water may be too deep. “Don’t be silly,” says Sluggo. “Look at dat li’l boid.” Indeed there is a boid standing in the water. Or there was.

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[“Some rocks” is an abiding preoccupation of these pages.]

Misheard

“QAnon is a proud supporter of public television.”

No: Cunard, as in cruises.

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[In my defense: I was at some distance from the television and not looking at the screen.]

Attics

Steven Millhauser, “Revenge,” in The King in the Tree: Three Novellas (2003).

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Little libraries

In Santa Barbara, California, the artist Douglas Lochner has created six little libraries in the shape of punctuation marks and typographical symbols. I especially like the inverted exclamation point, an acknowledgement of the Spanish language.

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