Edible complexes

"Properly sung, khoomei sounds as though the singer has ingested a set of bagpipes, with a low drone and a high melody issuing simultaneously from the same mouth." —NYT

"There’s an alchemy at work at ABC Cocina, the kind that can turn the last thing you’d want to order into the first thing you’ll ask for next time around. For me, it was the vegetables with brown rice, which I expected would taste like a tea made by steeping the yellowed pages of the 'Moosewood Cookbook' in warm kombucha and straining it through Pigpen’s bandanna." —NYT

Sentence of the day

"The table is German and walnut and 35 feet long." —NYT

Career opportunities

On a visit to his hometown in 1937, he was walking down a street without an umbrella when a torrential rain forced him to step into the lobby of a building he was passing. It was the Genco company. A receptionist asked if he was looking for a job.

“I had never seen a pin game before in my life,” Mr. Kordek told The Chicago Tribune in 2009. For 45 cents an hour, he was soon doing soldering on the company’s production line. He studied at the Coyne Electric School at night and began working his way up through the Genco engineering department. —"Steve Kordek, a Pinnball Innovator, Dies at 100," NYT

*

Rudi landed at Kennedy International Airport on July 4, 2007, to live her parents’ American dream. Nadia, who arrived a year later, gave modeling a try, and graduated from flight school before she discovered she was afraid of heights. —"To Be Black at Stuyvesant High," NYT

Margin call

Barrett’s connection to the old papers was becoming more than simply technical. It was emotional. He detected life in them. He once found the imprint of a person’s thumb on a page in a Renaissance book. “Maybe the papermaker was rushing to fill an order, and grabbed the corner of the sheet too firmly,” he said. “To me, that fingerprint marked the sheet with the humanity of the person who made it. I could feel his presence.” — "Cellulose Hero," Mark Levine, NYT Magazine, 2/19/12

*

From the time I came to the palace as a child, each morning and evening I exchanged letters of greeting with my parents, and many of those letters should have remained with my family. However, upon my departure, my father cautioned me, “It is not right that letters from the outside should be scattered about the palace. Nor would it be proper for you to write of anything at length aside from simple words of greeting. It would be best if, after reading the news from home, you wrote us on the same sheet of paper.” As he instructed, I wrote to them on the top margin of the letters that Mother faithfully sent twice each day. Father’s letters, as well as those of my brothers and sister, were answered in the same way. Father also cautioned my family not to strew the letters from the palace about the house. Thus my family gathered all my letters and, at regular intervals, washed away all that was written.* Hence, none of those writing remained in my family’s possession.

—The Memoir of 1795, The Memoirs of Lady Hyegyong (transl. JaHyun Kim Haboush)

*Washing away the ink with water was the standard way of obliterating what was written. Paper was then reused.

Species of spaces

“We can look at ducks, and afterwards, we can look at the pictures and talk about ducks.”

—"Screen Time Higher Than Ever for Children," NYT, 10/25/11

*

The creature periodically erects barriers inside its shell as it grows, leaving a series of unoccupied spaces behind. —"Loving the Chambered Nautilus to Death," NYT, 10/25/11

What is this a metaphor for?

The late show

ON a rainy afternoon last month, Elizabeth Olsen apologized profusely for pushing back by more than an hour a luncheon interview at a restaurant in the Gramercy Park neighborhood of Manhattan. “I’m so sorry,” she said. “I really hate being late.”—"An Olsen Sister Finds a Spotlight All Her Own," NYT, Arts & Leisure, 10/15/11

*

Chris Martin, the lead singer of Coldplay, is one of the world’s biggest rock stars, a species for whom tardiness is all but a right. Yet he was full of apologies when he popped through the door of a Midtown Manhattan restaurant, no entourage in sight, for a recent interview.
“I’m sorry I’m late,” he blurted, wearing a slightly stained “Don’t Mess With Texas” T-shirt and loudly colored sneakers, though he had no sunglasses, hat or any other means of celebrity disguise.
But Mr. Martin was actually five minutes early....—"Chris Martin of Coldplay Asks: What Would Bruce Do? ," NYT, Arts & Leisure, 10/15/11

Sentence of the day

"Nobody becomes a sponger without their mother being a sponger, but not all daughters becomes spongers." —NYT

Oh Kei

He has made some friends in New York, but not many, he said. In the five years he has maintained an online diary, he has rarely mentioned another person. The only photo on his personal blog is a picture of himself, jogging alone. —Bill Pennington, "Kei Igawa: The Lost Yankee," NYT

Midnight confessions

I learned a lot about the Grass Roots from yesterday's obit for Rob Grill, the singer. (One thing I learned is the name of the Grass Roots' singer.) I think I thought they were Canadian before.

This was "wow":

The Grass Roots began life as a phantom. In the mid-1960s, two Los Angeles songwriters, Steve Barri and P. F. Sloan, were asked by their label, Dunhill Records, for songs that would capitalize on the growing appetite for folk-rock.

They wrote “Where Were You When I Needed You” and, as the Grass Roots, recorded a demo. When the song had some success on the radio, they cast about for an existing band to become the Grass Roots.

They enlisted a San Francisco group named the Bedouins, who recorded the first Grass Roots album, also titled “Where Were You When I Needed You.”

In 1967, after the Bedouins decamped, Mr. Barri and Mr. Sloan recruited the 13th Floor, a Los Angeles band comprising Creed Bratton, Rick Coonce, Warren Entner and Kenny Fukomoto. (Mr. Bratton, the lead guitarist, later worked as an actor; he is known for playing the eccentric quality assurance director — also named Creed Bratton — on the American sitcom “The Office.”)

Is that common knowledge? That Creed from The Office was in the Grass Roots? (And for the Asian-Americanists: Who was Kenny Fukomoto?)

*

Several years ago—let's say 10—I was walking along one of the streets in the East 60s, an ordinary day, and suddenly from the basement (?) of a high school on the block came a live-rehearsal brass-band rendition of "Midnight Confessions." It put a spring in my step!

*

Do you remember the Blake Babies' cover of "Temptation Eyes"? Do you remember the Blake Babies? Did their name have to do with William Blake? (How terrible/great/funny!)



(I've never seen this video before.)

The Teachings of Parkus Grammaticus — Stray Thoughtz™

From yesterday's lesson:

Donald Keene: “I grew interested in the Orient and one day I bought a translation of the Japanese story ‘Tale of Genji’ in the Hotel Astor bookstore in Times Square, only because it was so cheap — two volumes for 49 cents. And that’s how I got hooked on Japanese literature.”

From my groundbreaking piece "Minor Poets, Major Works":

Thought: Maybe it’s the remainder tables that secretly move the culture forward. Up-and-coming writers, strapped for cash and dismissive of the books that are being published and getting noticed, gravitate toward these steam tables of overlooked lit, these shallow arks of the minor. I used to work in an office near St. Mark’s Bookshop in New York, and would drop in at least once a week. Cheaper than the new releases, even than most of the literary journals, were the remainders on the table in the back, which is where I first discovered John Ashbery and James Schuyler’s A Nest of Ninnies.

Ladies and gentlemen of the jury—I rest my case.

*

Stray thought: The Sabres lost the other night to the Flyers at...the Wells Fargo Center! Not the Spectrum! The change happened in 1996, so obviously I haven't been following hockey, really, but...still...

Anyway, this morning I read that Oakland Stadium is going to be called...OVERSTOCK.COM COLISEUM. (More here.)

Disambiguations™ for the evening of April 13, 2011

I. In the NYT, about a restaurant-in-progress called Brushstroke:

“What we are doing is Kyoto-style, seasonal; there are 20 seasons in Kyoto."


II. Books do furnish a room (from the same piece):

The walls of the bar and lounge area are covered with stacks of old paperback books, more than 20,000 of them, with their page ends, not their spines, showing, making them look like slabs of wood.

III. First dialogue exchange in upcoming highly praised thriller:

"I've heard you're very skilled in the treatment of acute trauma," says Linna.
"Yes," says Erik.

(NO..., says Ed.)

The connections, vol. XXVI

At "Weekend Update," he said he was "doing a specific experiment, where I was trying to strip all cleverness from the joke and try to make it as blunt as possible." He added, "I always told everybody the perfect joke would be where the setup and punchline were identical."

—Norm Macdonald in the New York Times today

When I was younger, the main struggle was to be a “good writer.” Now I more or less take my writing abilities for granted, although this doesn’t mean I always write well. And, by a wide margin, I’ve never felt less self- consciously preoccupied with language than I did when I was writing Freedom. Over and over again, as I was producing chapters, I said to myself, “This feels nothing like the writing I did for twenty years—this just feels transparent.” … I was admittedly somewhat conscious that this was a good sign—that it might mean that I was doing something different, pressing language more completely into the service of providing transparent access to the stories I was telling and to the characters in those stories. But it still felt like a leap into the void.

—Jonathan Franzen in The Paris Review

Yellowfront Manor

Click for significance:

—McNally Jackson

—NYT

Aide memoirs

Addendum to this post:

One of the guys who stepped forward is now peddling a memoir.
Attention and money all come into play. I don’t plan on reading it. I don’t have time to read fiction.

Career opportunities

“I think my whole life has been leading up to this,” said Eileen, a 31-year-old schoolteacher from Alexandria, Va. “I walked around my college campus as a crash test dummy telling people not to drink and drive; I’ve been the Chick-fil-A cow and my school’s panther mascot. As the cow, I got my tail pulled a lot but knew exactly how to deal with it. I’m so ready for this.”—"Nationals' Racing Presidents Tryout No Laughing Matter," NYT

Disambiguations™ for February 20, 2011

I. "There are books up there that I can’t even remember whether I’ve read or not."
—Joshua Foer, "Secrets of a Mind Gamer," NYT Magazine

II. The hotel had all kinds of innovations and idiosyncrasies: Turkish baths, a squash court, boot and gun rooms, a bowling alley and billiard parlor. Thomas Edison installed the electricity and a stock ticker wired directly to Wall Street. The Italian workers, meanwhile, imparted their own old-world superstitions. The number of steps to the floors, for example, were varied — 33 to the second floor from the main registration area but only 31 steps in the south tower staircase. Why? To confuse ghosts." —Chris Colin, "In New Hampshire, Can Bretton Woods Get Gnarly?," NYT

Something more than silence

Around his plant-strewn work cubicle, low whirring air sounds emanated from speakers in the floor, meant to mimic the whoosh of conventional heating and air-conditioning systems, neither of which his 222,000-square-foot office building has, or needs, even here at 5,300 feet elevation. The generic white noise of pretend ductwork is purely for background and workplace psychology— managers found that workers needed something more than silence.
—"Soaking Up the Sun to Squeeze, NYT

Disambiguation—Melanie Griffith edition

Stephen M. Clement III, who heads the all-boys Browning School on the East Side, said that “many of the early childhood programs are getting much more academic,” and as a result, “our curriculum has probably increased in its pace as well.”

“You meet the boys where they are,” he said.

But other schools hold fast to their slow approach. Melanie Griffith said her daughter Emma was reading chapter books at 4, but when she entered Calhoun, she was restricted to sing-alongs and teacher-led story time.

At times Ms. Griffith, a fitness instructor, said she and her husband wondered, “Are we doing her a disservice because she is so capable, by not putting her in a situation where they are challenging her more?” —NYT

The actual sequence

I. Sam Tanenhaus on Daniel Bell:

In this sense Bell was heir to the vanishing tradition of systematizers or master builders — Hegel and Marx, Durkheim and Weber, Freud and Nietzsche, Dewey and Veblen. All were required reading for the mid-20th-­century intellectual. But Bell seemed to regard them as rivals. He had digested even their most obscure writings and was not afraid to anatomize and correct them, fussily at times. His footnotes betray a hint of George Eliot’s pedant Casaubon: “Quotations have been transposed to compress and strengthen Schumpeter’s description. The actual sequence of quotations is: pp. 137, 147, 151, 147, 145, 154.” —NYT Book Review

II. This hair-raising story had a primo "Dizzies" moment:

The breakthrough occurred about 8:30 a.m., when two witnesses reported seeing Mr. Gelman on a southbound No. 1 train between 137th and 96th Streets in Manhattan. One called 911. The other, a woman, was reading a newspaper when a man, apparently Mr. Gelman, moved close.

Mr. Kelly related, “He knocks the paper out of her hand and says, ‘Do you believe what they’re writing about me?’ ” —NYT

III. I went to hear Nicholson Baker speak at Columbia last Thursday; among the many gems was this bit, on Dick Francis, which I then related to Jenny (the only Franciscan I know).

IV. At Desert Island in Brooklyn: a window display by Jing Wei:

On language — January 2011 edition

I. From the glossary to Maxwell Bodenheim's novel Naked on Roller Skates:

acecray outcray: putting the ace on the bottom of the deck, where the dealer can abstract it

bah-bah: negligible object

cake-slashing: assault and mayhem

century: hundred dollars

chippy: dissolute girl

chivvy: unpleasant odor

clip your tongue: be silent

cram the paper: cheat at cards

cut your chops: mind your own business

(As discovered by Louis Phillips at The Chiseler; Bodenheim also has a cameo in Jason Boog's Believer piece from Sept. 2010.)

II.

Mr. Ai has come to see his escalating conflict with government officials over the Communist Party’s authoritarian rule as performance art. In November, he spread the word that he was throwing a river crab feast at the studio to protest the destruction order. The word for river crab, hexie, sounds nearly identical to the word for harmony, which the Communist Party claims to promote; the party’s critics like to say censors are “harmonizing” the Internet and other forms of media.—NYT

III.

Children pick up about 10 new words a day until, by the time they leave high school, they know around 60,000 words. Chaser [a border collie] learned words more slowly but faced a harder task: Each sound was new and she had nothing to relate it to, whereas children learn words in a context that makes them easier to remember. For example, knives, forks and spoons are found together.

Dr. Pilley does not know how large a vocabulary Chaser could have mastered. When she reached 1,000 items, he grew tired of teaching words and moved to more interesting topics like grammar. —NYT

(Via Jane)