"One day, he is a man who loves his wife and has just bought a terrifically expensive mattress for their bed."

"The next he tells her, his eyes narrowing into a shape she had never seen before: 'I thought I was happy but I’m not. I thought I wanted our life but I don’t.' He tells her she can have everything, including custody of the children. 'I don’t want it,' he says. 'I don’t want any of it.'"

From "Her Life Was an Old-Money Dream. It Collapsed in a Moment. Born into exceptional privilege, Belle Burden had it all: love, money, family. Then her marriage fell apart" (NYT).

Now, I clicked on that link because the headline bugged me. I keep seeing these sudden-collapse headlines. Articles are always offering to pinpoint the moment when things changed. There's one on the front page of The London Times right now: "The moment Landman’s teenage blonde changed American TV." It's annoying me. They think we're manipulable by our belief in the magic moment.

But I'm blogging because of the mattress, the "terrifically expensive mattress." I think I've blogged about that mattress: "[T]he most preposterously priced mattress, a king-size Grande Vivius, costs $539,000...." I've made a new tag, "mattress," and added it retrospectively, which is a much bigger task than you might think. There are so many posts about someone known as "mattress girl" and I've repeatedly blogged about the line "it balances on your head just like a mattress balances on a bottle of wine."

But really, if you were the stay-at-home wife to a rich man, would the purchase of a terrifically expensive mattress make you think he is more likely to stay or less likely to stay? He might want to cushion your fall, to pacify and lull you. What is the meaning of a mattress?

AND: Maybe the mattress was the tipping point. That mattress was exactly what made him see that the life they'd formed together was her vision of the good, and he couldn't relate to it at all. She wanted grand material things and he didn't want any of it. You don't need me, you have the mattress. 

10 things I've asked Grok in the last 2 or 3 days.

1. Is it honest for me to say: I have no idea whether Trump has any idea whether Mitch McConnell had polio?

2. What poet had a beard, round glasses and wore a "poet’s hat"?

3. What is the origin of the phrase "take up the mantle"?

4. What have smart people had to say about the tendency to see images in words, including things that are not really relevant to the etymology of the word? For example, one might imagine that "ostracize" is connected to "ostrich" or "marginalize" relates to "margarine."

5. What is the argument that the crows in "Dumbo" are not a racist stereotype?

6. Does RFK Jr. speak of himself in terms of "Camelot"?

7. What is that famous saying about remaining silent because I was not X, Y, etc.?

8. Why do some people say you shouldn't use "impact" as a verb?

9. What is the episode of "Leave it to Beaver" where June and Ward Cleaver are turning over a mattress and Ward asks if it's mattress-turning day?

10. What if you had to argue that "The fog comes /on little cat feet" is actually very depressing and pessimistic?

"There’s almost nothing I like more than a laughing fit. It is a non-brain response, like an orgasm or a sneeze."

"I wish I could say that only the comedies of Aristophanes make me laugh, but then my pants would catch on fire. I have cracked up at bons mots, but also at dirty jokes, dumb pets, and all sorts of things I 'shouldn’t' laugh at. Someone recently told me a joke that involved the pun 'a frayed knot,' and I laughed like a lunatic. I don’t know why, and I don’t care. Laughing is laughing."

Writes Roz Chast in "Roz Chast on George Booth’s Cartoons/Every object is lovingly drawn, in a way that only Booth could draw them. Every detail enhances the scene" (The New Yorker).

That reminds me, I recently laughed hysterically — way way too much — at the tiniest little non-joke on the old TV show that Meade puts on sometimes, "Leave It to Beaver." Somehow, the father (Ward) saw fit to ask his wife (June), "What is it, mattress-turning day?" It is a non-brain response, like an orgasm....

"As the search continued, rescuers pulled a five-year-old boy from the rubble, who had survived because he was protected by a mattress."

"In a video of the rescue posted by a local fire department, Azka, who had been trapped for two days, appeared conscious and calm as he was lifted to safety. '[Azka] is fine now, not wounded,' his relative Salman Alfarisi, 22, said.... 'The doctor said he’s only weak because he’s hungry.'"

 From "Five-year-old boy pulled from Indonesia earthquake rubble after two days/Azka, whose mother died in disaster, probably survived due to being protected by a mattress, while 40 people remain missing in Cianjur" (Guardian).

Rescuers remain hopeful that more survivors will be pulled from the rubble, but they are “running against the clock”, according to Deni Kurniawan, a rescue team leader for the Jakarta-based NGO Human Initiative.

“We hope we will [have] more miracles,” he said. “Yesterday we were told that a pregnant woman was inside her house. Our team found her, but we lost them both, her and the baby. It’s a really distressing situation. “The earthquake happened in the day time when mothers and children were at home, and the fathers were working in the rice fields. Most of the casualties are mothers and children.”...

While the magnitude would typically be expected to cause light damage to buildings and other structures, experts say proximity to fault lines, the shallowness of the quake and inadequate infrastructure that cannot withstand earthquakes all contributed to the damage....

[Karlo Purba, the Indonesia programme director of the Adventist Development and Relief Agency (ADRA) said] “[T]he problem is poor construction. Earthquakes don’t kill, poor buildings kill.”

"[W]e are like monkeys at a tea party. All of us. What’s more, we are in denial. We finesse and accessorize our self-image..."

"... but those very accessories (in Arbus’s world they may be leopard-skin pillbox hats, strings of pearls, Halloween masks, tight jeans, tattoos, tidy bourgeois interiors, boaters, bow ties or even brazen, dare-you-to-object nakedness) are continually giving away the game. Bob Dylan once mockingly sang that a leopard-skin pillbox hat 'balances on your head just like a mattress balances on a bottle of wine.' But to Arbus, who began as a fashion photographer, the various forms our denial takes were not contemptible. They were strange, riveting, poignant. Arbus was as averse to sentimentality as she was free from disgust or contempt. Her insight was not in itself original. Nonetheless it deepened in her hands in unique ways. That she was a photographer and not a painter or sculptor was crucial to her expression of the 'we’re-all-monkeys-at-a-tea-party' idea."

So writes Sebastian Smee, in "Diane Arbus was accused of exploiting ‘freaks.’ We misunderstood her art. Fifty years on, Arbus’s photographs look very different in this ingenious gallery exhibition" (WaPo). 

A gallery in NYC is recreating the Museum of Modern Art show — "the posthumous retrospective that established the Arbus legend" — that was immensely well attended 50 years ago. I attended. And I, like many others, bought the book of photographs. But I'm not going to quibble with Smee's idea that "we misunderstood" at the time. There was plenty of varied opinion then, and it's patronizing to hear someone who was a newborn baby at the time characterize what we were all saying and thinking back then.

The reason I'm not going to barrel down that conversational highway is I'm getting off at the exit marked "Bob Dylan."

The line "You know it balances on your head/Just like a mattress balances/On a bottle of wine" has been a favorite of mine for well over 50 years. Such a great image, and the funniest part is that it's impossible to picture. You have to picture 2 things — the hat on the head and the mattress on the bottle of wine. It's easy to picture a hat on a head, but just as you begin to do that, you're challenged to picture a balancing that cannot happen — a soft flexible expanse atop a narrow, hollow column (which distracts you into thinking about sex (in a way that you can't really see)) — and then to go back to the hat and try to visualize it balancing like... what? From anyone but Bob, this would be an annoying failure to craft a simile. From Bob... genius!

So, quick aside: Don't try to take your own "Diane Arbus" pictures.

Back to Bob: "Bob Dylan once mockingly sang that a leopard-skin pillbox hat 'balances on your head just like a mattress balances on a bottle of wine.'" Was Bob mocking the "you" in her hat? Read the lyrics. He's crazy about the hat. He's having some problems with the lady, but he's quite enthusiastic about her and even more in love with the hat. Not mocking, I'd say, but being funny, sexually excited, and a bit angry.

Smee suggests that Dylan was expressing contempt for the hat: "But to Arbus, who began as a fashion photographer, the various forms our denial takes were not contemptible." Contempt and denial — denial that we are the monkeys at a tea party that we are. Smee says "Arbus was as averse to sentimentality as she was free from disgust or contempt." But Bob Dylan was averse to sentimentality and free from disgust and... sometimes even from contempt. I don't think Smee meant to take a sideswipe at Bob Dylan, but that was careless. Smee forgot to close the garage door.

"[T]he most preposterously priced mattress, a king-size Grande Vivius, costs $539,000...."

"When Drake bought one, in 2020, it was merely $400,000. For non-Grammy winners, there’s a waiting list. Handcrafted by a team of artisans in Sweden, each mattress takes up to six hundred hours to assemble and stitch and is wrapped in checked cotton ticking....  Gwyneth Paltrow partnered with Avocado on the Goop x Avocado mattress... which starts at $24,000 and is available on demand.... While I waited for the couple chilling out on the Eco Organic model to move on, I asked a sales associate named Desi (long hair, leggings) if customers ever fall asleep. 'All the time,' she said. 'The longest was four and a half hours. He was so embarrassed that he bought the mattress.'... The Casper Nova Hybrid ($2,295) is awfully cozy, and I also like the Casper Original, both the all-foam ($1,295) and the hybrid foam with springs ($1,695). Staring at the ceiling in Bloomingdale’s, listening to the Four Seasons sing 'Oh, what a night' over the sound system, I wanted to answer 'Both' to the salesperson’s question: Which is more comfortable? Some of this confusion is deliberate....  Amid all the shadiness and hyped marketing, how to choose?"

 
From "How to Buy a New Mattress Without a Ph.D. in Chemistry/The disrupter economy has set its sights on your bedroom, offering gel capsules, ice fabric, green-tea memory foam, and copper-infused toppers. Will they help you get a better night’s sleep?" by Patricia Marx (The New Yorker).

"They don't know I'm in a New York Times article."

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by t <3 (@life.is.not.a.soup)

 

I found that via a New York Times article, "Text Memes Are Taking Over Instagram/Fueled by Gen Z, text-heavy meme posts, often paired with nonsensically unrelated pictures, are turning the photo and video app into a destination for written expression." 

“You just post your thoughts,” said Mia Morongell, 20, a creator of the @lifes.a.bender Instagram account, which has amassed over 134,000 followers. “It’s like Twitter, but for Instagram. It’s like a blog where you’re airing personal thoughts and feelings.”...

In one recent post, Tanisha Chetty, 15, who runs the Instagram page @life.is.not.a.soup, posted an image of a mattress in a graffiti-covered room. Overlaid on it was a message, in chunky black-and-white text, which read: “We should care less about mental help. Girl, go insane! You are valid.”

"'Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat' is definitely one of my favorite Dylan songs right now. It’s the perfect blend of ridicule and empathy."

"'You know it balances on your head just like a mattress balances on a bottle of wine' is genius. He’s calling her out for doing something that doesn’t make any sense, but he’s not acting like he doesn’t understand. We’re all performing, predictably, all the time, and in the most obvious ways. There’s not really an air of superiority in his commentary here, in my opinion. He’s just gifting us with an opportunity to recognize our own culpability and laugh at ourselves."

Says Samia, quoted in "80 Artists Pick Their Favorite Bob Dylan Song For Bob Dylan’s 80th Birthday" (Stereogum).

I've called "Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat" my favorite Bob Dylan song at least twice on this blog: 

December 17, 2006: "That's kind of been my favorite Bob Dylan song for more than two decades. It's surely my favorite Bob Dylan simile. I know when I think about balance, that's the image in my head."

November 1, 2009: "[T]he night after we saw Bob Dylan in Chicago, he opened with 'Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat' — my all time favorite Bob Dylan song (which contains my all time favorite Bob Dylan simile)."

Is that really my favorite Bob Dylan song these days? No, not that I want to go picking a new favorite at this late hour. I thought the 80 artists had some good things to say, picked out some interesting choices — "Tears of Rage," "To Ramona," "Visions of Johanna," "Tangled Up In Blue." You might want to read that.

Emma Sulkowicz ("mattress girl") is back — back from a "political journey," back from listening to "centrists, conservatives, libertarians, and whatever Jordan Peterson is — various and sundry souls that Jezebel has canceled, whose names chill dinner conversation across progressive New York."

The Cut reports.

The journey started when...

Swiping through Tinder, a man she found “distasteful” super-liked her.... They began messaging, and she found him witty. “He was actually way more fun to talk to than any other person I matched with.”

Eventually, Sulkowicz stalked him on Twitter and realized that he was conservative — “like, very conservative.”... [S]he asked him to recommend one book to help her understand him, and he picked Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind. It’s a book that explains, in evolutionary terms, the human tendency toward political tribalism and the importance, in light of that, of learning from one another’s beliefs. She calls the book “mind-opening.” Its resonance with her new friendship did not escape her. 

Shortly after, Sulkowicz attended a book talk of Haidt’s. This was for The Coddling of the American Mind, which diagnoses the campus left with the kinds of cognitive distortions that addle the chronically anxious and depressed: a tendency to blow everyday problems out of proportion, or to believe that one’s negative feelings reflect reality....

“For many years,” she explains, “I wasn’t interested in listening to other points of view. I was very emotional and making performance-art pieces that were very reactionary and fiery.” Without disowning them, she describes these artworks as something she “got out of her system.”

Having found the art world humorless, narrow-minded, and grotesquely competitive, Sulkowicz says she stopped making art about a year ago.... She has been working on a memoir that draws on her diaries from Mattress Performance, and last month, she started a full-time, four-year master’s program in traditional Chinese medicine. There, she’ll learn skills from acupuncture to herbalism, which have been her “personal healing modality” for years. Sulkowicz has parried assumptions that this is performance art, too. It grates on her. “I’m a human and humans can change,” she says, insistently. “I’m telling you that I don’t want to make art anymore.”...

[A]fter becoming a public figure... [p]erfect strangers debated her private life and integrity... “The more the internet seemed to hate me,” she says, “the more of a bad person I became. I was very angry and I always had a chip on my shoulder. I had trouble being happy.” Outsized expectations inflamed her misery: artists, activists, and critics alike celebrated Mattress Performance and, after she graduated, Sulkowicz felt constant pressure to create something just as electric. She fell into a pattern of “increasingly soulless activities,” taking on art show after art show, “because I thought I was supposed to become an artist — as if I wasn’t one already.”...

“As I became more and more feminist,” she recalls, “I think I got to a point where I was literally just straight up hating men. I just hated men, I wished all men would die.” But embarking on her political journey made her want to understand them...

Okay, thanks for the update! The interviewer is Sylvie McNamara, and I like that she had the same reaction I had to the "traditional Chinese medicine" — sounds like more performance art. Also, I think it's smart for Sulkiwicz to shift into understanding the minds of the people she's been averse to. She's working on a memoir, and this is the sort of material that could make the writing worthwhile. If you read the article, you'll see she's become friends with Jonathan Haidt (and also with Nick Gillespie (of Reason)). She's identifying with libertarian politics. She's trying to understand men. Whether this is deep-down sincere or promotion for the forthcoming book, I don't know. But good luck with the writing project. I'd like to hear a lot more about the people who supported her during the "mattress performance." She experienced hate, but she also experienced a lot of love, and I suspect that there were negative aspects to that love. Did she turn away from the people who wanted so badly to embrace her and squeeze more mattress-like stuffing out her?

"Inmates [on suicide watch] are often placed naked in suicide cells, which are usually bare concrete, often without bedding (to prevent hanging by using bedsheets)..."

"... and under frequent or continuous observation by guards. Unsanitary conditions are also common since toilet paper, underwear and tampons (all potential means of choking) are restricted. Being exposed without any way of covering oneself, coupled with being under constant observation, can aggravate mental distress, particularly if the inmate has been a victim of sexual abuse. These harsh conditions came to light in 1998 when Elizabeth B., an inmate of Framingham prison in Massachusetts, USA, called a radio talk show to describe how she had been treated while on suicide watch: 'I was ... put on eyeball status, stripped of belongings, clothing, placed naked in a room with nothing but a plastic mattress on the floor. Watched 24 hours a day by a man or woman. I was on my period but because of my status not allowed to have tampons or underwear. I was very humiliated, degraded. Being on eyeball status with male officers, my depression intensified. I didn't want to be violated any more than I already was, so I put the mattress up against the window. When I did that I was in violation because they couldn't see me. The door was forced open, I was physically restrained in four-point restraints - arms, legs spreadeagled, tied to the floor, naked, helmet on head, men and women in the room.'"

From the Wikipedia article "Suicide watch," which I'm reading this morning because I saw on Twitter that some people had been aggressively editing the page inserting references to Jeffrey Epstein. If you look at the revision history for the page, you'll see that a huge number of back-and-forth edits were made yesterday until the "protection level" of the page was raised.

I copied the text you see above because it may help understand why Jeffrey Epstein was not kept on suicide watch, even though he had (apparently) attempted suicide last month. The treatment is so severe that to continue it might be cruel and unusual punishment. It could be used to deliberately torment a prisoner.

The Oxford English Dictionary "Word of the Day" is "Dylanesque."

The (unlinkable) OED defines "Dylanesque":

Resembling or reminiscent of Bob Dylan or his work, esp. his songs or records, which are characterized by poetic, often enigmatic, lyrics, a distinctive, abrasive vocal delivery, and music rooted in traditional American styles, such as folk, blues, and country; (sometimes) spec. typical or redolent of the folk music of his early records, which combined lyrics of social protest with acoustic guitar and harmonica playing.

I read that definition out loud to Meade and — saying I thought "poetic, often enigmatic, lyrics" got to the heart of it — asked him to dredge up a "Dylanesque" line from the junkpile of his memories. He said:

And she buttoned her boot
And straightened her suit
Then she said, “Don’t get cute”

That's "Fourth Time Around."

I said the first thing that came to my mind was:

Darkness at the break of noon
Shadows even the silver spoon

But I knew I only thought that because I remember Bob on "60 Minutes" saying:

I don’t know how I got to write those songs.... All those early songs were almost magically written. Ah… “Darkness at the break of noon, shadows even the silver spoon, a handmade blade, the child’s balloon…” Well, try to sit down and write something like that.

If I'd really consulted the junkpile of my memories, I'd have said:

You know it balances on your head
Just like a mattress balances
On a bottle of wine

So you can see how Meade and I go together — he's got the suit getting straightened and I've got the leopard-skin pillbox hat balancing on the head. There is order over chaos in the midst of the poetic, often enigmatic.

By the way, I'm working on writing up my post for the 1964 entry in my "imaginary music project," and by chance it contains a ridiculous Dylan lyric:

Now the beach is deserted except for some kelp...
You always responded when I needed your help

Is that Dylanesque? It's not enigmatic. It's just a very ordinary statement about a relationship —  "You always responded when I needed your help" — and daring to put the least possible effort into finding a rhyme for "help."

The best advice re song lyrics and "help" — which only has 2 other rhymes ("whelp" and "yelp") — is don't put it at the end of a line. When The Beatles wrote a whole song "Help," they kept it at the beginning of lines, and made the words at the ends of lines all easy to rhyme ("down," "way," "ways," "insecure").

Do The Beatles have their own entry in the Oxford English Dictionary? Yes, but it's just "Beatle" — "Applied attributively to the hair-style or other characteristics of ‘The Beatles’ or of their imitators." The examples — all from the mid-60s — are about things other than poetry: "the Beatle cut," "Beatle fans," "Beatle wallpapers," "Beatle wigs."

And that sends me back to the enigmatic junkpile of Dylan lyrics. Dylan has 5 song lyrics with "wig" (and if you can name all 5 you get a Bob Dylan merit badge):

1 & 2 (the same line is in 2 different songs): "... they’re beatin’ the devil out of a guy/Who’s wearing a powder-blue wig..."

3. "... Jezebel the nun she violently knits/A bald wig for Jack the Ripper..."

4. "I can write you poems, make a strong man lose his mind/I’m no pig without a wig/I hope you treat me kind..."

5. "She took off her wheel, took off her bell/Took off her wig, said, 'How do I smell?'"

I wish I knew, but I've got this anosmia/I wish I could wake up and smell the cosmea...

IN THE COMMENTS: khematite remembers a 6th Bob Dylan "wig" lyric (which was obscured from my search because it's "wig-hat" (and I've always found that a funny expression, because a wig is a kind of hat, isn't it?))?

I sat with my high-heeled sneakers on
Waiting to play tennis in the noonday sun
I had my white shorts rolled up past my waist
And my wig-hat was falling in my face
But they wouldn’t let me on the tennis court

Hey! Man in shorts! Bob Dylan in shorts. Has that ever even happened?

I'm going to say no.

"Whether you’ve checked into a luxury resort, a modest motel, or an Airbnb apartment, spend a few minutes inspecting the beds and surrounding areas for signs of bedbugs."

"Pull back the sheets and look closely at the surface, sides, and seams of the mattress near the headboard. 'That tends to be the hottest area of the bed' for bug activity, said Dr. Potter. Dr. Miller suggested running a sticky lint roller over the areas you’re checking, so you can pick up any potential evidence. Pack a small, strong flashlight to help you see into crevices and behind the headboard if possible....  'We know in hotels that bedbugs like to get behind the headboard. The reason for that is it’s the least disturbed area,' Dr. Miller said. Though small, bedbugs and their fecal spots are visible to the naked eye, so if you don’t find anything after a cursory inspection, you can rest easy. 'I’m not going to yank the whole bed apart, flip the mattress,' Dr. Potter said. Dr. Miller agreed: 'If you don’t see anything, nothing’s there.'"

From "How to Keep Bedbugs From Coming Home With You/Bedbugs peak in the summer, just in time for vacation. Here’s how to check your hotel bed for bloodsuckers — and what to do if you find them" (NYT).

There you have it: Pack your lint roller and strong flashlight. Don't yank the whole bed apart, but you have to pull back the bedding and look at the seams of the mattress up at the top, "the hottest area" (that is, where your head will be).

"Infants should always sleep on their back, on a separate, flat and firm sleep surface without any bumpers or bedding."

Said Rachel Moon, who heads the American Academy of Pediatrics's Task Force on SIDS.

Quoted in "Parents dread life ‘without a Rock n Play’: Fisher-Price recall triggers shock and frustration."

Last week’s recall of nearly 5 million Rock 'n Plays hit close to home for sleep-deprived parents who have turned to the Fisher-Price product for a moment of reprieve -- or a night’s sleep -- since it was introduced a decade ago. The cloth-covered cradle, which vibrates, plays music and positions the baby at an incline....

It's called "Rock n Play," which suggests baby and parents are all awake, but that's not how it was being used.

Original reports had said that 10 babies, all older than 3 months, had died when they rolled over while unrestrained in the cradle. But last week, a Consumer Reports investigation found that at least 32 children had died, including some younger than 3 months, who had died from asphyxia when they were unable to breathe in the cloth-covered cradle....

Jilly Blankenship, a pediatric nurse and baby sleep consultant in San Francisco.... said she has been telling parents for years that the device does not meet standards for safe sleep, but parents often turn to the Rock 'n Play as a last resort, when their babies have trouble staying asleep in a crib or bassinet.

“They’re often desperate and saying, ‘What do we do now if our baby won’t sleep anywhere else?’" she said....

“Every single parent I know uses a Rock 'n Play -- literally everybody[," said one young woman. "] It was the number one recommended item at my baby shower."

Apparently, millions of babies have been trained to fall asleep with continual vibration inside an enclosed cushiony cocoon, and suddenly they're all being required to sleep of an inert flat firm surface.

ADDED: The 3 most highly rated comments at WaPo: "Parents 'dread' being without this item. Come on. Millions of us over many, many years never had one of these. It wasn't invented/available way back when," 2. "I had three kids and never used this. I was a stickler for Safe Sleep, no exceptions. My babies didn't always sleep great, but that's how babies are...," and 3. "What will I do without a Rock n Play? Actually take care of your child, that's what you'll do."

AND: There must be a "separate, flat and firm sleep surface" that vibrates. I remember the "Magic Fingers" beds in motels in the 1960s.

ALSO: Maybe you, like me, have a Frank Zappa song playing in your head at the mention of Magic Fingers. From the Wikipedia article for John Houghtaling:

John Joseph Houghtaling (pronounced HUFF-tay-ling; November 14, 1916 – June 17, 2009) was an American entrepreneur and inventor who in 1958 invented the Magic Fingers Vibrating Bed, a common feature in mid-priced hotels and motels from the 1960s to the early 1980s....

In the 1950s, Houghtaling was still working as a salesman, this time selling vibrating beds in which the vibrating motor and bed were sold as a single unit that was clumsy, expensive, and prone to failure. At a service call for a broken unit, Houghtaling realized that the vibrating motor was the essential component, not the bed, and that a unit could be developed that would attach to any bed, not just the combination vibrating bed units he was selling.

Okay, first of all, this is the answer for the Rock n Playless parents. Just put a vibrator and put it under the baby's separate flat and firm sleep surface. Here's one designed to go under a baby's mattress. Now, back to the story of John Houghtaling:

Houghtaling worked in the basement of his Glen Rock, New Jersey, home and tested hundreds of motors before finding one that weighed relatively little, could be attached to the box springs of an existing bed, and would provide the right level of vibration. Once a quarter was inserted into the attached coin meter, the motor would vibrate the bed for 15 minutes....

By the last half of the 1970s... [t]he devices started to seem out of date and somewhat sleazy, because of the bed's association with seedy motels....

The vibrating bed was frequently featured in 1960s–1980s movies and TV shows. "Magic fingers" is a song by Frank Zappa in the film 200 Motels. It was mentioned by name in songwriter Steve Goodman's "This Hotel Room", sung by Jimmy Buffett, which included the line "Put in a quarter / Turn out the light / Magic Fingers makes you feel all right" and is also mentioned in Buck Owens's "World Famous Paradise Inn." Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five also referred to Houghtaling's Magic Fingers; the protagonist Billy Pilgrim used the vibrating bed to help him fall asleep. Magic Fingers was also seen in the 1997 film Lolita, the 1998 Clay Pigeons, and the episode of CSI Vegas "Assume Nothing" (season 4, episode 1). In the classic 1983 National Lampoon film Vacation, Clark and Ellen Griswold can be seen relaxing on a Magic Fingers bed that goes rogue, vibrating excessively and forcing them onto the floor. In the X-Files episode Bad Blood (Season 5, episode 12) Dana Scully used one in a Texas motel, before being interrupted by Mulder, telling her that she had to go perform an autopsy at that moment. She complained "but I just put money in the Magic Fingers." It has been referenced twice in The Simpsons, once as a couch gag and once in the episode "The Cartridge Family" in which Marge takes the kids to the Sleep Eazy (the neon sign is partially burned out to read "Sleazy") Hotel; Bart and Lisa turn on the Magic Fingers and race their vibrating beds across the hotel room. It was also featured several times in the TV show Supernatural. Dean is very fond of the magic fingers as seen in season 2 ep 13.

Man, that is a lot of pop culture referencing. Can any product match that?



Love the Ringo-as-Frank bit, but actually, that's not the Mothers of Invention Magic Fingers song that plays in my head. I hear "What Kind of Girl Do You Think We Are?":

Ever been to a Holiday Inn?
Magic Fingers in the bed (Picture it!)
Wall-mounted TV screen
Coffee Host plugged into the bathroom wall
Formica's really keen!

The answer to a very old question is: 9.

In the comments to the previous post — "Things to do with cigarettes," which looked at some fabulous vintage ads for a long forgotten cigarette brand, Murad — Laslo Spatula was inspired to rewrite some of the sentences that were part of my old "Gatsby" project (where I'd take a sentence from "The Great Gatsby" and we'd talk about it out of context).

So Laslo was posting things like:

"A tray of cocktails floated at us through the twilight, and we sat down at a table with the two girls in yellow and three men, each one smoking a Murad."

Here's the old post from "Gatsby" project, where you see the original sentence from the novel was: "A tray of cocktails floated at us through the twilight, and we sat down at a table with the two girls in yellow and three men, each one introduced to us as Mr. Mumble."

The first commenter on that post asks "How many times does the word 'yellow' come up in a search of 'The Great Gatsby'?"

Within the half hour, I give him my answer: 24. And that makes me want to count the rest of the colors. Is yellow the dominant "Gatsby" color? What's most likely to beat it? The other primary colors. Using the search function in Kindle, I found 22 appearances of "blue," but...

Red can't be counted via Kindle, which includes the letters "red" within other words, like "declared," "considered," and "incredulously."

I proceeded to the rest of the colors:

Purple: 0
Orange: 4
Brown: 7
Black: only 13 (very surprising)
White: 50 (the book is racist!)
Green: 19
Pink: 6
Lavender: 6

Seeing that old post today, I wondered if the Kindle software had changed since then (January 2013). And yes, it had! I got my answer. 9!

Only 9 for "red." Surprisingly low considering 24 for "yellow" and 22 for blue. Was F. Scott Fitzgerald aversive to red for some reason? There are 19 "red"s in "The Last Tycoon" and 25 in "Tender Is the Night," so the avoidance of red seems to be "Gatsby" specific.

There are only 9, so I will quote them all for you, and let's think about how "red" was used and why it was used sparingly:

1. "I bought a dozen volumes on banking and credit and investment securities, and they stood on my shelf in red and gold like new money from the mint, promising to unfold the shining secrets that only Midas and Morgan and Mæcenas knew."

2. "Their house was even more elaborate than I expected, a cheerful red-and-white Georgian Colonial mansion, overlooking the bay."

3. "Already it was deep summer on roadhouse roofs and in front of wayside garages, where new red gas-pumps sat out in pools of light, and when I reached my estate at West Egg I ran the car under its shed and sat for a while on an abandoned grass roller in the yard."

4. "The sister, Catherine, was a slender, worldly girl of about thirty, with a solid, sticky bob of red hair, and a complexion powdered milky white."

5. "One of the girls in yellow was playing the piano, and beside her stood a tall, red-haired young lady from a famous chorus, engaged in song."

6. "We passed Port Roosevelt, where there was a glimpse of red-belted ocean-going ships, and sped along a cobbled slum lined with the dark, undeserted saloons of the faded-gilt nineteen-hundreds."

7. "I had on a new plaid skirt also that blew a little in the wind, and whenever this happened the red, white, and blue banners in front of all the houses stretched out stiff and said tut-tut-tut-tut, in a disapproving way."

8. "She asked me if I was going to the Red Cross and make bandages."

9. "There was a faint, barely perceptible movement of the water as the fresh flow from one end urged its way toward the drain at the other. With little ripples that were hardly the shadows of waves, the laden mattress moved irregularly down the pool. A small gust of wind that scarcely corrugated the surface was enough to disturb its accidental course with its accidental burden. The touch of a cluster of leaves revolved it slowly, tracing, like the leg of transit, a thin red circle in the water."

We see red in various objects in ##1 (money), 2 (a mansion), 3 (gas pumps), 6 (ships), 7 (the American flag) and twice — ##4 and 5 — in women's hair. #8, as part of a proper name, might deserve little attention, but it is about blood and points to #9, the really important one, which really is blood, though the word "blood" doesn't appear.

Spoiler alert... it's Gatsby's blood. He's shot dead in the swimming pool. The "mattress" is the flotation device he's lying on, and we learn of his death in that 9th appearance of "red" — "a thin red circle in the water." It's just color and geometry. You figure out that it's blood.

That distancing contrasts with the one appearance of the word "blood" in "The Great Gatsby":

The other car, the one going toward New York, came to rest a hundred yards beyond, and its driver hurried back to where Myrtle Wilson, her life violently extinguished, knelt in the road and mingled her thick dark blood with the dust. 

No use of the tightly hoarded word "red" is expended on Myrtle. Her blood is "dark blood" — as it mixes not with water but with dust.

Such are the colors of "Gatsby," and a long-unfinished count is completed. The answer is: 9.

I imagine the first commenter cranking me up again and asking "How many times does the word 'nine' come up in a search of 'The Great Gatsby'?"

The answer is 6, and every single one is the time of day.

Emma Sulkowicz (of "Mattress Performance" fame) has a new gallery show that inquires into Asian-Amercan identity.

The "Mattress Performance" was so much about female identity that perhaps you did not even notice Sulkowicz's ethnic performance... or maybe you thought it would seem anti-Semitic to notice, because you think of Sulkowicz as Jewish. But you were wrong! From HuffPo:

“I realized so many things were related to being an Asian woman. I didn’t report it all because I’m Asian and told not to have emotions and just be successful,” they told HuffPost. “Now I’m having my first show that explores where race really intersects with feminism.”

Asian! It turns out Sulkowicz's mother is half Japanese and half Chinese.

One of the more commanding pieces of their exhibit showcases a banana sliced with a knife, a subversive statement on both gender and race, Sulkowicz explains. The piece is dedicated to their sister and contains a video of her cutting the banana and designating it a phallic symbol. The banana also represents the Asian-American experience.

“Banana is a term for Asians who are too Americanized. That’s a source of vulnerability,” Sulkowicz said, explaining that the knife cutting through the banana comes from a place of anger as well.

“We identify ourselves as angry Asians,” they added.

I had to stop and think about the pronouns. Did that "we" go with "they" and refer only to Sulkowicz, or is Sulkowicz speaking for Asians in general, expressing their anger via penis-cutting? I think it's the latter, because in the first quote, above, Sulkowicz uses "I" repeatedly.

Sulkowicz’s parents are represented in the exhibit, too. A suspended tea ceremony represents their mother, who is half Chinese, half Japanese.... An orb containing a bagel, fixings and iced coffee represents Sulkowicz’s Jewish father’s longstanding Sunday tradition....

Awfully stereotypical objects — tea for Chinese/Japanese and bagel for Jewish.

Sulkowicz describes a bowl containing Cheetos and chopsticks as being inspired their friend, Mae, who is half Chinese and half Japanese. “Mae eats Cheetos with chopsticks. That’s such a boiled-down example of growing up mixed-race Asian in New York. You’re eating American trash but with an Asian tool. It’s a moment I wanted to capture.”

Or Mae doesn't like getting that orange dust on her fingers. Quite sensible to eat Cheetos with chopsticks. Reminds me of how I eat a banana with a knife and fork. And I want to stress that I do that because I like to keep my hands clean, not because I'm expressing hostility toward genders and ethnicities that some people think of when they see a banana.

“It’s hard to be taken seriously as Asian woman in art world,” they said. “I feel highly sexualized. I’m so sick of men who come up to me after a performance and say, ‘Do you think anyone would care about your artwork if you weren’t pretty?’ When will you leave any room for my artwork to speak for itself?”

Sulkowicz tells us what men tell Sulkowicz,  that Sulkowicz is pretty. Why didn't Sulkowicz leave us any room to judge for ourselves — whether Sulkowicz is pretty and whether we should direct our attention to the question whether Sulkowicz is pretty? But I won't take the bait. I'll do what I would have done without being criticized for failing to do, let the artwork speak for itself. It seems to be a collection of obvious stereotypes and heavy-handed symbols that don't really say anything about the large group of individuals that are being aggressively clustered into a set called "Asians."

"Sulkowicz wants to change behavior, too, but thinks that punishment is more efficacious than tweaks to campus life."

"When Columbia settled the lawsuit filed by the man Sulkowicz accused of rape, it put out a statement, noting that his 'remaining time at Columbia became very difficult for him and not what Columbia would want any of its students to experience.' But Sulkowicz believes that what he went through had a salutary effect. 'He’s been scared shitless,' they said.*... 'It’s about finding a way to make your institution, and the people who run it, more human.'"

From "Is There a Smarter Way to Think About Sexual Assault on Campus?/A team of researchers at Columbia believes that small changes to college life could make campuses safer" by Jia Tolentino in The New Yorker.

I'm interested in the enthusiasm for harsh punishment and for deterring bad behavior by scaring people shitless. That's the common stereotype of a right-wing mindset. Most of that New Yorker article is about understanding the behavior of college students and tracking them away from bad sex, that is, looking for root causes, which is the classic mindset of the liberal. Torentino asked Sulkowicz about that approach (which led to a program at Columbia called "SHIFT"):

Sulkowicz had not heard about SHIFT before, and was politely resistant to the idea: “My view in this whole thing is that, the more that Columbia can retreat behind ‘Here’s a program, here’s a study, here’s a process,’ the less that any human that finds themselves in this machine will ever be incentivized to act based on their moral compass.”

What if, I asked, the idea behind the study was tinkering with the machine, figuring out how to reorient that moral compass?

“That makes me think of asking someone to wash the dishes, and they tell you, ‘I’ll try,’” Sulkowicz said. “I think that’s the difference between spending two million dollars to try to understand the conditions that create a community that’s conducive to sexual assault versus just doing the right thing—expelling people who sexually assault other students.”

 That's an attitude I've always heard called right-wing.**
_________________

* I was confused at "they said," even though I'd read, earlier in the article (and had not forgotten) that Sulkowicz "identifies as non-binary, and uses the gender-neutral pronouns 'they' and 'them,'" and I had already struggled with confusion when I read "in the midst of sex, the student anally penetrated and choked them while they struggled and told him to stop" and "carrying a fifty-pound, twin XL mattress around campus... was a performance project: they would stop carrying it, they said, when the student who had raped them was expelled."

** The new thing is to care passionately and be right-wing.

Why I'm reading the Wikipedia article, "History of poison."

1. Here's the article. Excerpt: "Grooves for storing or holding poisons such as tubocurarine have been plainly found in [ancient] hunting weapons and tools.... Once the use and danger of poison was realized, it became apparent that something had to be done. Mithridates VI, King of Pontus (an ancient Hellenistic state of northern Anatolia), from around 114–63 BC, ... was paranoid to the point that he administered daily amounts of poisons in an attempt to make himself immune to as many poisons as he could.... Pliny the Elder describes over 7000 different poisons. One he describes as 'The blood of a duck found in a certain district of Pontus, which was supposed to live on poisonous food, and the blood of this duck was afterwards used in the preparation of the Mithridatum, because it fed on poisonous plants and suffered no harm.'"

2. What made me look up the history of poison was a passage in "The Tricky Art of Co-Existing: How to Behave Decently No Matter What Life Throws Your Way" by Sandi Toksvig:

3. That quote about tasting food for poison just happened to come up on the same page as the phrase I was googling, "the size of a baby's head," which I remember being much more common years ago. Whatever happened to that comic trope? I was thinking about it because I read the phrase used to describe an apple fritter eaten by Bill Clinton in 1994, in the 1994 NYT piece, "Did Clinton Slip on Astroturf?"

4. That piece about Bill Clinton was dredged up looking for this: "Ever since he spoke last week of his fond recollections of his El Camino pickup, his audience at a Louisiana truck plant and those who watched his comments replayed on television have been left in titillated confusion. Mr. Clinton confided that he had lined the truck bed with Astroturf, adding with a sly grin, 'You don't want to know why, but I did.' On a New York talk radio program this morning, Mr. Clinton jokingly tried to put the speculation to rest. 'It wasn't for what everybody thought it was for when I made the comment, I'll tell you that,' he protested. 'I'm guilty of a lot of things, but I didn't ever do that.'"

5. I was interested in Bill Clinton's El Camino with astroturf because somebody I know on Facebook said that if he had $40,000 to spend on a bed it would be a $500 mattress in the back of a new Chevy pickup truck.

6. The subject of a $40,000 mattress came up because I'd written (on Facebook): "How much would you pay for a new mattress? I found what I wanted, but there was no price tag attached. I was saying things like 'I could see paying $4,000, but not 10,000.' Later, deeply into the explanation of horsetail hair and hand-crafting, I kept a straight face at the number $40,000 and proceeded to compare buying a bed to buying a car. $40,000 is what I paid for my Audi TT 12 years ago. But I wasn't even joking about a bed as expensive as the most expensive car I ever bought. I was seriously thinking about the argument that going for high quality in a bed makes more sense than paying extra for a more comfortable, beautiful car."

"Columbia is now a safer institution because of Jane Doe’s courage. Jane Doe can proceed in life knowing she made a material difference..."

"... in one of the premier institutions of higher education and meaningfully participated in a cultural moment of significance for all Americans."

Said the lawyer for a woman who sued Columbia University and a professor. There is now a settlement of the case, the NYT reports in "Columbia Professor Retires in Settlement of Sexual Harassment Lawsuit." Notice the highlighting of the claim against the professor.

[A]n anonymous graduate student filed a lawsuit against [Dr. William V. Harris, a renowned Greco-Roman historian and longtime professor at Columbia University,] alleging that he had kissed and groped her repeatedly while he was her academic mentor, and then disparaged her to colleagues when she rebuffed his advances. 

But I'm more interested in the claim against the university "for what she called its 'deliberate indifference' to her complaints about him." The professor is gone now. Columbia University remains. It's relatively easy to de-activate the individual predator, but the institution lives on, replacing the de-activated predator with new potential predators, and what has changed? What was even wrong in the first place?

Professor Harris is 79 years old. Who knows what he's admitted he did and whether he considers it wrong? Moving him into retirement isn't much of a change, but enough was done to appease "Jane Doe," apparently. And the NYT presents the case in terms of the old man's retirement. But if you read to the end, you can see some coverage of the dissatisfaction among graduate students. One student observes that retirement isn't much of a consequence for Harris — "He shouldn’t get to retire... He should be fired." And:

"[I]t’s not enough and it certainly doesn’t change the culture that allowed him to thrive and continue to abuse his graduate students over the course of decades... There is a fervent desire to view this as an isolated instance rather than symptomatic of a culture that deprecates women and doesn’t take the concerns seriously.”

I absolutely agree with that. What has Columbia changed about itself? From an earlier NYT article about this lawsuit:

Columbia’s handling of sexual misconduct accusations has come under fire before, most prominently after an undergraduate student carried a mattress around campus for a year in protest after the university cleared a man she said had raped her. In July, Columbia settled a lawsuit that the man, Paul Nungesser, had filed over the university’s treatment of him; Columbia said it would review its policies.

It's not easy to figure out what the policies should be, as the case of the 2 students —  Paul Nungesser and Emma Sulkowicz — showed. You can't just pick a side and lean heavily in that direction. The answer should have something to do with paying attention to the evidence and figuring out a fair resolution. But what happened in one particular student interaction is a very different problem from a professor who goes on for years and years exerting power over students. I'd like to see a lot more from Columbia than that it's reviewing its policies.

"Many of those songs were recorded in his bedroom when he was living on Los Angeles’s Skid Row."

"The months of making that music were, he said in an interview with The New York Times in April, an 'absolute blur,' a stretch when he took to the microphone 'when I was high enough to hear something and get inspired.' When he toured earlier this year, he recreated that bedroom on stage, using the actual mattress...."

From "Lil Peep, Rapper Who Blended Hip-Hop and Emo, Is Dead at 21" (NYT).

We're told his mother wants us to know she is "very, very proud of him and everything he was able to achieve in his short life."

"Companies now fight 'presenteeism,' a neologism that describes the lackluster performance of foggy-brained, sleep-deprived employees..."

"... with sleep programs like Sleepio, an online sleep coach, and sleep fairs, like the one hosted last month in Manhattan by Nancy H. Rothstein, director of Circadian Corporate Sleep Programs and otherwise known as the Sleep Ambassador, for LinkedIn. For the last few years, Ms. Rothstein has been designing sleep education and training programs for a number of Fortune 500 companies. At the LinkedIn sleep fair, she taught attendees how to make a bed (use hospital corners, please) and gave out analog alarm clocks.... Sleep entrepreneurs from Silicon Valley and beyond have poured into the sleep space, as branders like to say — a $32 billion market in 2012 — formerly inhabited by old-style mattress and pharmaceutical companies.... [T]he best sleep I’ve had in weeks cost $22, and lasted 33 minutes. It was a Deep Rest 'class”' at Inscape, a meditation studio in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan designed by Winka Dubbeldam, the sought-after Dutch architect, to evoke the temple at Burning Man, and other esoteric spaces, and created by Khajak Keledjian, a founder, with his brother, Haro, of Intermix, which they sold to the Gap for $130 million in 2013."

From "Sleep Is the New Status Symbol" in the "Fashion & Style" section of the NYT.

I didn't realize there was so much commercial marketing of sleep. You could almost call it — like "Big Pharma" — "Big Sleep."

But "the big sleep" is death:

Good thing there aren't death entrepreneurs flooding the market with products to help us on our way.

But maybe there are, and they're just doing such a subtle selling job, overcoming our resistance.