“This marks a new dawn for the curvy cucumber and the knobbly carrot”

Ending regulations on the size and shape of 26 types of fruit and vegetables, the European authorities killed off restrictions that had become synonymous with bureaucratic meddling.
—NYT

Editor turned blogger

Et tu, Julia?! Personal Days editor Julia Cheiffetz, now at Harper Studio, is blogging at the imprint's The 26th Story.

Here she suggests five books for those fretting about the economy. (Heyyy...shouldn't people be curling up with Personal Days, too???)

Son of Table-Talk of P.G. for August 10, 2008

I. The NYT on the ukulele renaissance (Warren Buffett plays?):

The dawn of this third great ukulele era can be traced to 2006, aficionados say, with the appearance of a video on YouTube by Jake Shimabukuro, a Hawaiian-born ukulele player.

(But: no mention of Stephin Merritt?)

II. Dzyd Dennis on Azazel Jacobs (son of Ken), in the NYT:

Reaching for one of the many boxes against the wall, Mr. Jacobs — like Mikey in “Momma’s Man” — rummaged through a stash of yellowed juvenilia. He pulled out magazine clippings, class photos, a middle-school paper on the punk band the Clash (complete with his teacher’s incredulous notation “F — Are you kidding?”) and a few lovingly preserved “hate letters,” records of soured teenage romances, one of which gets a memorable cameo in the film.

III. For the 26 files, via Dzyd Hannah: Jad Fair and Yo La Tengo's "High School Shop Class Constructs Bicycle Built for 26." (I can't do mp3s on this site but drop me a line if you want me to send it!)

IV. And...two bits of weirdness: A talk on skull thievery at Machine Project (from L.G. Thomas) and the Fortsas hoax (from Levi).

Table-talk of Parkus Grammaticus for April 29, 2008

I.
"Even more frustrating for the farm is that the 26 sons and daughters who have made it to the track this year have become terrific racehorses, capturing six stakes races and putting their reluctant father near the top of Japan’s leading sire list." —NYT

(Via Jenny D.)

II.
Dream: I had the brilliant idea to write a nonfiction book in which I would go through the 20th century year by year and give a curious fact for each. First up was 1901; my section focused on a tavern owner and an insane patron who kept revealing secrets of McKinley's assassination. I found all this information in a book of letters, and then realized that published correspondence was a great source for nuggets like that. Subsequently I lost myself in a volume of Arnold Palmer's letters, a facsimile edition. His letters were exuberant, funny, and often scrawled on scraps of legal paper. The one letter that I can remember involved winning a year's supply of dog food and being very happy about it. This was well before he had found any fame as a golfer.

III.
Cinema Talk: "The only major blog hand-coded in HTML"! David Rees has two succinct movie reviews up (Forbidden Kingdom and Forgetting Sarah Marshall)...TDM (Team Dizzies Member) Rob on 99 River Street (check out the tag line!)...Shadowplay: "The detective sergeant has no name. He works for a superior known only as The Voice....How The Dead Live is sensational and I immediately wanted to film it. One problem — I wanted to film it with Stanley (PERFORMANCE) Meadows in 1965, twenty years before it was written, two years before I was born."

Table-talk of Parkus Grammaticus for March 31, 2008

1. Tomorrow: Dzyd Dennis in conversation with Wong Kar-wai (!!??) at the Apple Store in Soho!

2. Vocabulary builder: "Rubber tires like these will never touch regolith, the abrasive dust and rock that covers the moon."

Preview

—"Not a Mercury or Saturn, but It Goes Way off the Road," NYT, 3/30/2008

3. For the 26 files: Dzyd Kosiya sends us Stereolab's "Olv 26." (Dzyd Hannah has some other examples.)

4. In other music news, Driftwood Singers mentions the Psychic Envelopes song "Raleigh"—download your copy today!

5. On Harriet, Ada Limón hails Jennifer L. Knox's Drunk By Noon, which I highly recommend!
(Also: The Canarium cheekily offers reviews of individual poems from its own pages.)

Table-talk of Parkus Grammaticus for March 28

I.
In his Brainiac column*, Josh Glenn picks up the thread of the title commonplace "secret history," which I wrote about in the introduction of my review of Ekaterina Sedia's The Secret History of Moscow. He looks at the "secret" titles of today, as well as some from yesteryear:

During the 18th century, French and English writers cranked out dozens of tracts and treatises with boffo titles like "The Secret History of the Court and Reign of Charles the Second, by a member of his privy council"; "The Secret History of the White Staff, Being An Account of Affairs Under the Conduct of some Late Minister, And of what might probably have happen'd if Her Majesty had not Died"; and even "The Secret History of the Calves-Head Club, Complt. or, the Republican Unmask'd. Wherein is fully shewn, the Religion of the Calves-Head Heroes, in their Anniversary Thanksgiving-Songs on the Thirtieth of January, by them called Anthems; for the Years 1693, 1694, 1695, 1696, 1697, 1698, 1699, &c. With reflections thereupon. Now published to demonstrate the restless, implacable Spirit of a certain Party still among us, who are never to be satisfied 'till the present Establishment in Church and State is subverted."

II.
My original intro began: "After 'American,' the most overused but irresistible prefix for titles might be 'The Secret History of.'"

Which reminded me of...something I'd written. Hadn't I "riffed" on "American _____" before? Yes! In this PTSNBN review of a movie called American Chai!

"With this magic title of Paris, a play or review or book is always assured of success," noted Théophile Gautier of 19th-century entertainments. Today, with the simple adjective American, even the least inspired movie can cloak itself in way-we-live-now significance.

So "Paris" used to be the "American" of its time....(The T.G. quote is from The Arcades Project.)

III.
I haven't been registering all my "26" finds—but here's one: The blog for Yale's Beinecke Library.

IV.
Idea for best book title: The Secret History of 26.

V.
What about that movie Chapter 27?! Why 27????

VI. There goes Oulipian Simon:

Much of this album is 12-tone pop. Mr. Simon assigned himself to put every note of the chromatic scale into the melodies, and did it so suavely that the stunt goes unnoticed. –Jon Pareles, NYT


*Column titles are written with initial caps, no quotation marks!

Hey, Vav, Hey!

Dizzyhead Joshua writes:

26 is the Kabbalistic equivalent of the name of God. If you play the game of "gematria," that is, the assignation of numerical worth to Hebrew letters: Aleph equals 1, Bet equals 2, etc.

The name of God is YHWH: Yod, Hey, Vav, Hey.

Yod is the tenth letter of the alphabet, its numerical value is 10.
Hey is the fifth letter, for a value of 5.
Vav is the sixth letter, for a value of 6.
Hey, again, for 5.

10+5+6+5=26

Abraham Abulafia, 13th century mystic, wrote much about this.

Once you think about 26...

...you'll start seeing it everywhere. (You can thank me later.)

Levi found this in Donald E. Westlake's The Hot Rock:

"The number 26 lit over the door, and the elevator came to a stop."

* * *

And Dizzyhead Bill writes in:

Your request for 26 significa led me to the WikiPedia page for 26. The two highlights, for me:

Scoring 26, by hitting 20, 50, and 1, is a "joke throw" in darts that "usually results in sneers or laughter from the audience."

A Rubik's Cube can always be solved in 26 moves or less.

How numinous is that?

Table-talk of Parkus Grammaticus for February 14

I. Now that I've gotten everyone hooked on spotting Ourobori...what about occurrences of the number "26"?! The number of letters in the alphabet...mystical...powerful...yes......

I remember being on the verge of 26 and reading that there were 26 volumes to the Warren Commission Hearings on the Kennedy assassination...

Yesterday, reading the somewhat peculiar piece on the suitcase-bearing ladies of Deal or No Deal, I learned that there were 26 of those containers.

The models themselves dismiss the notion that they are little more than eye candy.

“I would be very upset if someone said that to me,” said Lindsay Clubine, bearer of suitcase No. 26. “The girls here are involved in a lot of different charities.”

II.
The Times loves The Slug Bearers of Kayrol Island, the collaboration between cartoonist Ben Katchor and Mark Mulcahy (ex–Miracle Legion), now at the Vineyard...Parkus Grammaticus similarly raved about the original production three years ago at the Kitchen. Go see it! Because I'm probably not going to! Alas! Duncan! Too young! Gotta stay home!