Willfully and lewdly printing indecent writings.

 

Screen grab:

"'Teaching,' for figures of her calibre, is often a word that means giving scripted lectures and then fleeing into the wings, or charging mega-dollars for a sun-drenched guru experience at a resort."

"Glück is a classroom teacher, at home in a small group, around a table. Dozens of great books, winners of awards, were shaped by her vigilant editing in the classroom, which often continues in her apartment and garden in Cambridge. This is part of why so many people seemed to feel that their own lives had somehow been recognized by the announcement of the Nobel. When I was growing up in Vermont, a few mountains over from her, Glück’s work was everywhere; she still feels to me like a seventies figure, something in the key of Joni Mitchell, because of all the bookshelves and coffee tables of that era where her books were found. She was 'our' poet. Now I think of all the waiters and cheesemongers and cabbies and neighborhood people in Cambridge who know her, and think of her as 'their' poet.... When I told her how a friend was courting his new, young wife by reading aloud poems from her book 'The Wild Iris,' she laughed and said something like 'that book is very useful for people who prefer to view their carnal needs in spiritual terms.'"

Writes Dan Chiasson, in "How Louise Glück, Nobel Laureate, Became Our Poet For decades, she has taught us the contours of our own inner lives" (The New Yorker).

The way Chiasson talks about the 70s, I thought he should be approximately my age, but he was born in 1971, 20 years after me, so "something in the key of Joni Mitchell" doesn't mean that period of young adulthood that I lived through, but — perhaps — that place out there where other people had the advantage of adulthood. I'm thinking the way he feels about 1970s Joni Mitchel — ladies of the canyon? — is about how I felt about beatniks... 

"Beat Generation" sold books, sold black turtleneck sweaters and bongos, berets and dark glasses, sold a way of life that seemed like dangerous fun—thus to be either condemned or imitated. Suburban couples could have beatnik parties on Saturday nights and drink too much and fondle each other's wives....

Which reminds me — here, you can buy "Wild Iris," if you'd like to view your carnal needs in spiritual terms.

Hey, man, did you notice Dylan edited out the "man" interjection from Captain Ahab's speech?

You'd think Dylan more than Ahab would drop "man" into a sentence. I hear it as beatnik style.

But Bob said — in a part of his Nobel speech I didn't talk about in my lengthy analysis yesterday — as he was going on and on about Herman Melville's "Moby Dick":

Ahab, too, is a poet of eloquence. He says, "The path to my fixed purpose is laid with iron rails whereon my soul is grooved to run." Or these lines, "All visible objects are but pasteboard masks." Quotable poetic phrases that can't be beat.

I wanted to know more about that "visible objects are but pasteboard masks" business, so I looked it up, and I see that Melville wrote:

"All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks."

There's that seemingly beatnik "man" popping up in Ahab's speech. I have to strain to hear it as some kind of 19th century bombast, sermonish.

Dylan also left out the "as" and thus turned a simile into a metaphor. He's praising Melville's poetry and saying it "can't be beat," and he changes the words. It's so "quotable," he misquotes it. Well, he's a poet too. He knows it — "Hope I don't blow it" — and his phrases are quotable and unbeatable too. I know I quote him. A lot more than I quote Melville (who didn't put his words into songs that I played a hundred times).

What did Melville's Ahab mean by "All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks"? He continues:

But in each event—in the living act, the undoubted deed—there, some unknown but still reasoning thing puts forth the mouldings of its features from behind the unreasoning mask. If man will strike, strike through the mask! How can the prisoner reach outside except by thrusting through the wall? To me, the white whale is that wall, shoved near to me. Sometimes I think there's naught beyond. But 'tis enough. He tasks me; he heaps me; I see in him outrageous strength, with an inscrutable malice sinewing it. That inscrutable thing is chiefly what I hate; and be the white whale agent, or be the white whale principal, I will wreak that hate upon him. Talk not to me of blasphemy, man; I'd strike the sun if it insulted me. For could the sun do that, then could I do the other; since there is ever a sort of fair play herein, jealousy presiding over all creations. But not my master, man, is even that fair play. Who's over me?

"Standoff in Boulder, Colo.: Prairie dogs hold Buddhist college at bay."

Headline in the L.A. Times.

"If you replaced the 'dog' in prairie dog with 'rat,' would they elicit the same emotion?...I wonder," asked Bill Rigler, spokesman for Naropa University, in what the L.A. Times suggests is sort of kind of a Zen koan.

For years, Naropa has battled some 150 persistent prairie dogs over 2.5 acres of prime real estate on its Nalanda campus.... The struggle is especially poignant in this famously liberal college town, where Buddhists and prairie dogs occupy exalted positions within the local ecosystem....

"We bought this land in 2004 to expand on and the first prairie dogs showed up two years later," Rigler said.

The Buddhists got there first, and — on Buddhist principles — did nothing. The doing of nothing was a nice ecosystem for the "dogs" (which I originally typo'd "gods"):

The industrious rodents swiftly built a prairie dog town of some 200 burrows extending from the campus parking lot to busy Arapahoe Avenue to almost the front door. Plans to expand classroom space stalled, and in 2011, Naropa began searching for ways to relocate the animals.

Four years and $100,000 later, little has changed. Trapping and moving the rodents is easy enough; finding someone who wants them is not. 

I think a lot of people who set "have a heart" traps would be surprised to know that it's illegal to move the animals elsewhere and just set them free, without permission. (And I hope you won't hate me — have a heart! — for burdening you with the knowledge of which you were once free. Who can free you from the trap that is knowledge? Even with the door left open — you're free to seek to believe what is not true — you find it hard to scamper out and run wild in the landscape/parking lot that's just inches away.)

The Buddhists seemed to have decided to kill the "dogs" — I typo'd "gods" again! — inciting protest. On Facebook: "Mommy, I heard that Naropa University is going to have all of us killed" and:



As Rigler put it, quoted in the above-linked L.A. Times article:

"All of sudden it was, 'The Buddhists want to kill the prairie dogs,' but we had no intention of killing them," said Rigler, who isn't a Buddhist. "The very act of applying for a [lethal control] permit triggers an open comment period, which gives everyone the opportunity to say, 'I have a site for relocation,' or put forward other ideas."

This sounds like the doctrine of double effect. Your desire or intention is not to kill the animals... but they may end up dead as you pursue what you do want and intend. The college wants to relocate the prairie dogs and the threat of killing them is a way to get somebody to step up and accept them onto their property. Another way to think of it is like this:



It's a threat. Let us use your land or we'll kill these "dogs."

Soshoku danshi — "grass-eating men" — "a heterosexual man for whom relationships and sex are unimportant."

"The phenomenon emerged a few years ago with the airing of a Japanese manga-turned-TV show. The lead character in Otomen ('Girly Men') was a tall martial arts champion, the king of tough-guy cool. Secretly, he loved baking cakes, collecting 'pink sparkly things' and knitting clothes for his stuffed animals. To the tooth-sucking horror of Japan's corporate elders, the show struck a powerful chord with the generation they spawned."

This comes from the article "Why have young people in Japan stopped having sex?," which I linked to earlier today for some different purposes. I wanted to break this out separately. I may not be understanding the Japanese phenomenon accurately, but I'm interested in the way a television show can begin with a character who is supposed to be laughed at but who ends up inspiring some viewers, who legitimates and activates feelings that they have about themselves, and shows them new ways to behave, openly and without shame.

The example that occurs to me in American culture is Maynard G. Krebs, the best friend of the main character on the old Dobie Gillis show (which was on from 1959 to 1963). It was assumed that viewers would identify with Dobie. That's why he was the main character. He dressed and acted like a conventional teenaged boy of that time. He wanted girlfriends, and he had struggles with his parents and teachers, but he mostly tried to satisfy them even as he pursued his overarching goal: relationships with females.

The Maynard character wasn't supposed to call American teenagers into another way of living. Maynard (played by Bob Denver) was less good-looking, dressed grubbily, wore a goatee, was dumb about or uninterested in a lot of typical teenager things. He wasn't interested in girls. He rejected work and other conventions of middle class American life. His only interest was jazz, and he was — we were expected to understand — a beatnik. But we didn't fulfill the expectation that we would read this character as a clown. We got the idea: We could live in a new way.

Blah blah blah... we became hippies.

Listening to Oliver.

Do you remember Oliver?

His clean-cut good looks and soaring tenor voice were the perfect vehicle for the uptempo single entitled "Good Morning Starshine" from the pop/rock musical "Hair," which reached #3 on the Billboard Hot 100 in July 1969, sold over one million copies, and was awarded a gold disc by the R.I.A.A. a month later. Later that fall, a softer, ballad single entitled "Jean" (the theme from the Oscar-winning film The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie) bested his previous effort by one, reaching #2 on the Hot 100 and #1 on the Billboard Easy Listening chart. Written by longtime beatnik poet Rod McKuen, "Jean" also sold over one million copies, garnering Oliver his second gold disc in as many months.

This kind of recording is the kind of thing that I rejected at the time as commercial/mainstream/square/cornball, but I'd recently rediscovered "Good Morning Starshine" and found it quite beautiful, enough to look him up in Wikipedia just now and enough to make me add "Jean" alongside "Good Morning Starshine" in my iTunes.

And remember Rod McKuen? Remember when people loved him and then the cultural elite delivered the message that you're supposed to hate him?

Frank W. Hoffmann, in Arts and Entertainment Fads, described McKuen's poetry as "tailor-made for the 1960s [...] poetry with a verse that drawled in country cadences from one shapeless line to the next, carrying the rusticated innocence of a Carl Sandburg thickened by the treacle of a man who preferred to prettify the world before he described it."

Philosopher and social critic Robert C. Solomon described McKuen's poetry as "sweet kitsch," and, at the height of his popularity in 1969, Newsweek magazine called him "the King of Kitsch."

Writer and literary critic Nora Ephron said, "[F]or the most part, McKuen's poems are superficial and platitudinous and frequently silly." Pulitzer Prize-winning US Poet Laureate Karl Shapiro said, "It is irrelevant to speak of McKuen as a poet."

Wow! Listen to the hate.

"'Listen to the Warm,' remember that?" I ask Meade, as I look for an Amazon link that I thought would go amusingly on the words "Listen to the hate," above. "You can't even buy that now." But I remember high school kids who clutched that book and felt lucky to have it. What other poetry books — in our lifetime — have experienced that kind of young love?

Meade says, "There was an audio," and you can still buy that.  And you can buy endless other works of poetry in audio form, albeit with music (or something approaching music) supporting the poetic verbiage so you don't have to think "poetry."

We're reveling this morning in "Good Morning Starshine"...

My love and me as we sing our
Early morning singin' song

And "Jean"...

Jean, Jean, roses are red
All the leaves have gone green
And the clouds are so low
You can touch them, and so
Come out to the meadow, Jean
Jean, Jean, you're young and alive
Come out of your half-dreamed dream
And run, if you will, to the top of the hill
Open your arms, bonnie Jean
Till the sheep in the valley come home my way

Meade says, "What'd he say? Till the sheep come home? Why not till the cows come home?"

I say that old Rod avoids clichés, at which point the first line of the song repeats, "Jean, Jean, roses are red," and we laugh.

And all of the leaves have gone green
While the hills are ablaze with the moon's yellow haze
Come into my arms, bonnie Jean
Jean, you're young and alive!!

If you're listening to the Oliver recording, you won't question those 2 exclamation points.

Come out of your half-dreamed dream
And run, if you will to the top of the hill
Come into my arms, bonnie Jean

Superficial and platitudinous and frequently silly....

"What's that line," Meade asks "'Come out of your half dream...'?" I'm reciting the lyrics and Meade has free-associated, via "dream," to "Time passes slowly when you’re lost in a dream...." All neural pathways lead to Dylan (chez Meadhouse). I see I did put that CD into iTunes, and Meade sings along:

Ain’t no reason to go in a wagon to town
Ain’t no reason to go to the fair
Ain’t no reason to go up, ain’t no reason to go down
Ain’t no reason to go anywhere

"See that's your argument against travel," Meade says. There's no reason to go anywhere, and when you stay where you are — lost in a dream — time passes slowly. It's as close as we can get to immortality.

What Van Dyke Parks found "so oxygenating about the Beat era."

"When I walked into a coffeehouse, eclecticism was not a big word. It was good to be interested in a whole bunch of stuff."

Audiences embraced it. Audiences were jolted by it. They did not resent it. They didn’t need to be told what to think. I’m not prepared to tell people what to think. I may leave more questions than answers. I believe that anything worth its salt in the arts must create a wobble. We are not polestars We are here struggling in the dynamics of justice, between the absolutism of faith and reasonable doubt.

Parks, who worked years ago with The Mothers of Invention and The Beach Boys,  has a new album called "Songs Cycled." 

ADDED: I'm not sure that quote says anything. I just liked the idea of finding beatniks oxygenating. I started a beatnik tag and went back and added it to old posts, so click for all my beatnik-related postings.

What emotion does your youth culture valorize and what social form does it envision?

William Deresiewicz takes inventory.

For the hippies, the emotion was love: love-ins, free love, the Summer of Love, all you need is love. The social form was utopia, understood in collective terms: the commune, the music festival, the liberation movement.

The beatniks aimed at ecstasy, embodied as a social form in individual transcendence. Theirs was a culture of jazz, with its spontaneity; of marijuana, arresting time and flooding the soul with pleasure (this was before the substance became the background drug of every youth culture); of flight, on the road, to the West; of the quest for the perfect moment.

The punks were all about rage, their social program nihilistic anarchy. “Get pissed,” Johnny Rotten sang. “Destroy.” Hip-hop, punk’s younger brother, was all about rage and nihilism, too, at least until it turned to a vision of individual aggrandizement.

As for the slackers of the late ’80s and early ’90s (Generation X, grunge music, the fiction of David Foster Wallace), their affect ran to apathy and angst, a sense of aimlessness and pointlessness. Whatever. That they had no social vision was precisely what their social vision was: a defensive withdrawal from all commitment as inherently phony.

And what of these kids today? Are we going to call them the "hipsters?" Deresiewicz prefers "millennials." He diagnoses the emotion as niceness, which doesn't seem hip at all. (Not that hippies were hip.) Is niceness an emotion? Deresiewicz toys with "post-emotional," then comes up with "the affect of the salesman." And that's not very nice at all. What "social form" do these little jerks get? Deresiewicz assigns them: small business. 

Our culture hero is not the artist or reformer, not the saint or scientist, but the entrepreneur. (Think of Steve Jobs, our new deity.) Autonomy, adventure, imagination: entrepreneurship comprehends all this and more for us. The characteristic art form of our age may be the business plan.

See how that goes with "the affect of the salesman"?

Today’s polite, pleasant personality is, above all, a commercial personality. It is the salesman’s smile and hearty handshake, because the customer is always right and you should always keep the customer happy. If you want to get ahead, said Benjamin Franklin, the original business guru, make yourself pleasing to others.

This is not meant as a compliment. Deresiewicz is not a fan of "the bland, inoffensive, smile-and-a-shoeshine personality — the stay-positive, other-directed, I’ll-be-whoever-you-want-me-to-be personality — that everybody has today."

ADDED: I like Deresiewicz's writing style and he has a lot of nice observations, but something's obviously missing — something expressed by the "these kids today" tag I just added. In every generation, there's a mix of conventional and rebellious type individuals. The millennials he describes sound very similar to the people beatniks, hippies, and slackers rebelled against. There are rebels among the millennial generation too. Look at all the protests these days! Look at all the young people who are looking to the government to deal with the joblessness. How cheerfully entrepreneurial are they?

"I assume there are dragons and griffins and werewolves and homosexual Frankensteins throughout these novels..."

"...but I honestly don't give a shit if my assumption is true or false."

Chuck Klosterman is not reading the Harry Potter novels.

I find it astounding that the unifying cultural currency for modern teenagers are five-hundred-page literary works about a wizard. We are all collectively underestimating how unusual this is. Right now, there is no rock guitarist or film starlet as popular as J. K. Rowling. Over time, these novels (and whatever ideas lie within them) will come to represent the mainstream ethos of our future popular culture. Harry Potter will be the only triviality that most of that coming culture will unilaterally share.

And I have no interest in any of it.

And I wonder how much of a problem this is going to become.

If it's the only shared thing, that means, in the future you won't get any of the references.

... I will not grasp the fundamental lingua franca of the 2025 hipster. I will not only be old but old for my age. I will be the pterodactyl, and I will be slain. It is only a matter of time.

ADDED: The word "hipster" is vastly overused these days. Anyone with a tinge of youth and a shred of knowledge of fashion and pop culture trends seems to be a hipster — at least to people who notice they're aging and don't want to bother with the trends. Hipster — the category should be more elite. Or it seems completely absurd.

We could try to think deeply about the word "hip." For example, why aren't hipsters and hippies the same thing? What is the -ster relationship to "hip" that is different from the -ie relationship? To me, -ster seems to make you more of a knowledgeable proponent or an obsessive devotee, and -ie suggests you're having fun with it. Other -ster words that come to mind: mobster, roadster. Is a mobster's relationship to the mob and a roadster's relationship to the road the same as a hipster's relationship to hip?

Other -ie words I think of easily: foodie, groupie. See? More fun.

AND: A little musical accompaniment to this postscript: here. In the comments, Trooper York brought up The Orlons, but then he didn't quote "South Street." The first time I ever heard the word "hippie," it was in that great early 60s song. Let's check out the etymology:

During the jive era of the late 1930s and early 1940s, African-Americans began to use the term hip to mean "sophisticated, fashionable and fully up-to-date". The term hipster was coined by Harry Gibson in 1940, and was used during the 1940s and 1950s to describe jazz performers. The word evolved to describe Bohemian counterculture. Like the word hipster, the word hippie is jazz slang from the 1940s, and one of the first recorded usages of the word hippie was in a radio show on November 13, 1945, in which Stan Kenton called Harry Gibson "Hippie". This use was likely playing off Gibson's nickname, "Harry the Hipster."

In Greenwich Village, New York City, young counterculture advocates were named hips because they were considered "in the know" or "cool", as opposed to being square. Reminiscing about late 1940s Harlem in his 1964 autobiography, Malcolm X referred to the word hippy as a term African Americans used to describe a specific type of white man who "acted more Negro than Negroes."

In a 1961 essay, Kenneth Rexroth used the term to refer to young people participating in African American or Beatnik nightlife.

In 1963, the Orlons, an African-American singing group from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania released the soul dance song "South Street", which included the lyrics "Where do all the hippies meet? South Street, South Street...The hippest street in town".[9][10]....

The more contemporary sense of the word "hippie" first appeared in print on September 5, 1965. In an article entitled "A New Haven for Beatniks," San Francisco journalist Michael Fallon wrote about the Blue Unicorn coffeehouse, using the term hippie to refer to the new generation of beatniks who had moved from North Beach into the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco. Fallon reportedly came up with the name by condensing Norman Mailer's use of the word hipster into hippie. Use of the term hippie did not catch on in the mass media until early 1967, after San Francisco Chronicle columnist Herb Caen began referring to hippies in his daily columns.

Nothing there about the more recent transition to "hipster," though there is a section about the pejorative use of the word "hippie." Basically, "hippie" ended up meaning not hip at all. That's certainly the way I use it (almost always in self-deprecation).

"Beatnik" is a cool word, but I think it's solidly anchored in the 1950s... or to refer to Maynard G. Krebs, the Bob Denver character in my all-time favorite TV show "Dobie Gillis." He also did his beatnik role in a cool movie called "Surf's Up," which came out the same year as "Hard Day's Night." What a contrast between those two movies. I must confess that I saw them in a double feature at the time... and much preferred "Surf's Up." I found this hilarious:



CORRECTION: The movie title is actually "For Those Who Think Young." I went through a long period of thinking it was pathetic of me to have liked this movie more than "Hard Day's Night," but now, much as I know "Hard Day's Night" is better, I think it's perfectly acceptable to enjoy an old surf movie. Look at the cast:

James Darren ... Gardner 'Ding' Pruitt III
Pamela Tiffin ... Sandy Palmer
Paul Lynde ... Uncle Sid
Tina Louise ... Topaz McQueen
Bob Denver ... Kelp
Robert Middleton ... Burford Sanford 'Nifty' Cronin
Nancy Sinatra ... Karen Cross

POSTSCRIPT: If we called monsters "monnies," would we be less afraid?

"You know what he wants... you don't show any response."

I know I've been spending too much time at Starbucks. Here's something Melvin Jules Bukiet says in that anti-Brooklyn thing I just linked to:

Brooklyn’s always been the overlooked sibling among the boroughs. Founded several years before New York, it was swiftly relegated to a role as Manhattan’s unglamorous adjunct. First farms and then factories provided its economic basis. Now back-office space does the same. Until recently, Brooklyn was strictly second choice for residence. Beatniks who couldn’t afford Greenwich Village crossed the river in the ’60s, and yuppies who couldn’t afford Soho moved to Park Slope in the ’80s. Now hipsters who can’t afford the East Village have filled every cranny between soon-to-be evicted bodegas and auto-repair shops with cafés sporting lava lamps on the tables and old record albums tacked to the walls. Inside, a horde of latte-swilling sensitives sit in mismatched chairs and tap at laptops and can’t imagine why they’d ever want to cross the river again. They interpret their migration born of economic necessity as a hegira of moral virtue. Self-righteous sour grapes define their attitude to Gotham.

In short, they’re young.

I'm not young, but I was one of those yuppies who couldn’t afford Soho and moved to Park Slope in the ’80s. I'm back in Brooklyn, now, unyoung yet in need of coffee and WiFi. This Bukiet character has apparently never been to Madison. I'm starved here in Brooklyn for the indie cafés I live at back home. I'm forced to patronize Starbucks and I had to shell out for the T-Mobile connection. It's irksome.

These days, I mark my time at Starbucks by the inevitable reappearance in the music rotation of the Bob Dylan song "Jokerman." Why "Jokerman"? I've never much thought about "Jokerman," but really, look at the lyrics: "Jokerman dance to the nightingale tune. Oh, oh, oh, Jokerman." Is it possible to sing that line a few more times? Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, it's getting painful.

"When I Was Cool." I had to drive from Chicago back home to Madison today, and I was glad to turn on the car radio to find the very beginning of a Fresh Air interview with Sam Kashner about his book "When I Was Cool," which I've been reading--along with a bunch of other things--for the past month. The interview got me half the way home and was just great, with Kashner telling the story of being enamoured of the beatniks, going to study at the Jack Kerouac School for Disembodied Poetics, and then finding them all old men, somewhat addled and shambling, and himself not quite so much a student as an apprentice.



Ah! Too bad there weren't video cameras everywhere, because that could be the perfect reality show, combining The Apprentice and The Osbournes!

You can listen to the show here today, and click on the archive after today. Memorable revelations from the interview:

1. William Burroughs said he would never have been a heroin addict if he had realized how badly constipated it would make him when he got to be an old man.

2. Allen Ginsberg made a pass at Kashner and, after Kashner declined, started to find Kashner's poetry terrible. Kashner is still angry ... about the poetry critiques.

3. Ginsberg's guru ordered him to shave off his beard because he was too attached to it--and he did!

4. Kashner's first assignment was to finish one of Ginsberg's poems and when it turned out to be a poem about having sex with Neal Cassady, Kashner went to the Boulder Public Library to ask for information!

5. It was Kashner's job to do Ginsberg's laundry, and the method he used was to ship the dirty laundry in a box home to his mother. She did the laundry and shipped it back!

Oh, listen to the interview. And read the book.

Unrelated observations to get the blog started this morning:

1. The NYT Book Review leads off with a nice review of the book I've been reading this week, Sam Kashner's "When I Was Cool." The review includes some funny stuff (about Sam and the Beatniks).

2. My favorite old, old TV show, which I wish they'd release on DVD, especially since they haven't run it on cable in years as far as I can tell, is "Dobie Gillis." (Wait, that is related. Ignore this post ... unless you're in the DVD business.)

3. As you can see from the last post from yesterday, I've decided to start capitalizing the V in TiVo. It was hypocritical of me not to, because I love TiVo and because I've complained about people who are lazy about using the shift key. Also, it really does look better capitalized that way, because the V reaches over, above the i and nearly touches the T, making TV quite visible.

4. Even though I took a swipe at The White Stripes the other day, I've got nothing against them. They remind me of some things in the 70s that I liked a lot, and my favorite TV fictional character, Joan Girardi, seems to like them as well, judging from this week's episode, which I finally got around to watching yesterday.

5. Speaking of Joan of Arcadia, and going un-random again, I note that Friday's episode would be of interest to those who are following the Tennessee v. Lane case in the Supreme Court: a character who uses a wheelchair is faced with a broken elevator just as he has his first date with his beautiful co-worker who lives on the second floor. She's with him at the time and the two of them work out a way to get up the stairs. The actress is Sidney Poitier's daughter (Sydney Tamia Poitier), by the way, and the actor is John Ritter's son (Jason Ritter).

6. When I was making my link for White Stripes above, I typo'd "white strips." I wonder if The White Stripes are annoyed about Whitestrips, though I note that if you Google "white strips"--with the space in the middle--you actually do get The White Stripes, so actually it should be Crest annoyed with The White Stripes, not the other way around.

7. Why do people say "I was thinking to myself"? Is there some way of thinking to someone other than yourself?

8. Now, I've got to finish reading the Sunday NYT, which I left on the dining room table half an hour ago to go online to find out when Border's opens. I want to get to Border's early, because I want to get a table in the cafe. I've got to isolate myself from household temptations so I can get through checking the edit on my law review article. I'm quite happy with the job they did on it though so I'm no longer in the dread phase described here.