December 26, 2020
"As retro as a shelf of books might seem in an era of flat-panel screens, Books by the Foot has thrived through Democratic and Republican administrations..."
"... including that of the book-averse Donald Trump. And this year, the company has seen a twist: When the coronavirus pandemic arrived, Books by the Foot had to adapt to a downturn in office- and hotel-decor business—and an uptick in home-office Zoom backdrops for the talking-head class.... If an order were to come in for, say, 12 feet of books about politics, specifically with a progressive or liberal tilt... one of [the] more politics-savvy staffers to the enormous box labeled 'Politically Incorrect' (the name of Books by the Foot’s politics package) to select about 120 books by authors like Hillary Clinton, Bill Maher, Al Franken and Bob Woodward. The books would then be 'staged,' or arranged with the same care a florist might extend to a bouquet of flowers, on a library cart; double-checked by a second staffer; and then shipped off to the residence or commercial space where they would eventually be shelved and displayed (or shelved and taken down to read).... A lover of books who professes to never want to see them destroyed, [Wonder Book President Chuck Roberts said] 'Pretty much every book you see on Books by the Foot [is a book] whose only other option would be oblivion'...."
All those political books — you see that they are published, and you see that they are calling cards for their authors to go on talk shows, but are they ever read? At least they have one more purpose, sitting on a shelf, a shelf that will be seen, a constituent of an extra-thick wall. How much bigger would rooms be without these for-show books? One more foot wide for every bookcase you can scuttle. But here are people shipping books in, books they have no intention of reading.
Meanwhile, a lot of people are trying to declutter, and books are a whole category for "tidying up" within the Marie Kondo system (which only has 5 categories). That system requires you to pile all your books on the floor and one one by one subject them to a test that has a strong presumption against keeping any given book:
The criterion is, of course, whether or not it gives you a thrill of pleasure when you touch it. Remember, I said when you touch it. Make sure you don’t start reading it. Reading clouds your judgment. Instead of asking yourself what you feel, you’ll start asking whether you need that book or not. Imagine what it would be like to have a bookshelf filled only with books that you really love. Isn’t that image spellbinding?... [F]orget about whether you think you’ll read it again or whether you’ve mastered what’s inside. Instead, take each book in your hand and decide whether it moves you or not. Keep only those books that will make you happy just to see them on your shelves, the ones that you really love.... There’s no need to finish reading books that you only got halfway through. Their purpose was to be read halfway. So get rid of all those unread books....
Imagine touching a book "by authors like Hillary Clinton, Bill Maher, Al Franken and Bob Woodward" and feeling "a thrill of pleasure." I don't have to touch these books to know I would not be thrilled! I can't even imagine another person who could be thrilled. It's a difficult feat of imagination, and I cannot do it.
"All of a sudden, Ms. Duke, a vocal critic of 'mommy wine culture' and a member of the Sober Mom Squad, a virtual community created during the pandemic, was fielding questions..."
"... about alcohol from friends and acquaintances. Was two bottles of wine a night a bit over the top? How much was too much?... 'No one is talking about glasses of wine anymore,' said Ms. Duke, who works for a dog grooming app and lives in Manhattan with her two teenage sons. 'People are measuring by the bottle,' she continued. 'That scares me. I know too many women who went from one or two glasses to two bottles of wine to vodka in your coffee cup.'... 'Being inside all these months was extremely confining,' said [Natalie Silverstein, a marketing manager in media who lives in the East Village]. 'I needed something to relax. I looked forward to drinking because it broke the barrier.'
For her, a glass of wine signaled the end of the day. Anxious, tired and stressed, it helped her sleep. It also helped her socialize and connect.
'In New York, drinking was an activity. In isolation it helped us gather,' she said. 'My team would do Zoom happy hours, and everyone had wine or a cocktail. That became habitual. It felt like drinking was the one thing holding us up.'"
ADDED: The linked article was published yesterday, Christmas, in the New York Times. On the same day, in the same newspaper, there is also this: "8 Things We Hated About New York Until 2020 Happened/New Yorkers are world-famous kvetchers. But when we got something real to complain about, we changed our tune." The 8th thing is "Drinking at 5 p.m":
AND: Here are the poll results:
Hard-driving New Yorkers do not drink at an hour many consider the afternoon. Cocktails at 5 o’clock is for Cheever stories. In New York, the custom was to knock back later. If you were drinking at 5, it was probably at 5 in the morning, when you finished your shift. But the pandemic changed our sense of time, especially in the early days of winter and again now when the light fades so early.
How the word "how" has become the most deceptive word in the history of headlines.
I'm sure some "how" headlines sit atop articles that really explain how to do something, but I must cry out against the infestation of "how" in headlines.
I'm seeing headline after headline that would be more accurate if you just crossed out the "how," because the article isn't really going to tell you how X happened. It's only going to tell you that X happened.
I've been meaning to rail about this for quite some time. What pushed me over the edge this morning was this, in Rolling Stone: "How Leonard Cohen’s ‘Hallelujah’ Brilliantly Mingled Sex, Religion." No, you don't know how he did it! You only know that he did it. Or, at best, the manner in which he did — i.e., "brilliantly."
Just keep an eye out for "how" headlines. That's all I'm saying. Sometimes they are good, and I'm guilty of deploying "how" to lure readers, but as a reader, I am among the potential victims, and I'm trying to heighten my distaste for bait.
"At French Resorts, Skiing Has Become an Uphill Sport/The government closed ski lifts, fearing they might spread the coronavirus. The skiers came anyway."
The NYT reports.
“When you go out skiing in the cold, the first thing that happens is your nose starts to run,” said Miles Bright, an English mountain guide based in Chamonix. “And what do you do? You wipe your nose. So your gloves are covered in snot, you join in the lift queue, you touch things.”“I just can’t see how it can be hygienic, getting in and out of the ski lifts,” he added. “But for the nation’s health, I think it’s absolutely essential.”
Bright, like the rest of skiers on the mountain, was ski touring — ascending the mountain using skins attached to his skis, then detaching them to descend normally. He estimated it would take him four times as long to go up than to ski down.
Will you ever think about a ski lift the same way again?
"Every day these people would wake us up. At first, I was polite and asked them to please be quiet. Then after a few days I was shouting, and my husband was like: 'Stop it! You can’t do that.'"
Said Kyle Luker, whose window — on Manhattan's Upper West Side — is just above where people line up for an hours-long wait to get into Trader Joe’s. He's quoted in "Anything You Say in This Trader Joe’s Line May Be Used Against You/These neighbors’ signs respond to loud shoppers: 'We are so sorry your wife is leaving you,' one read. 'And we are SURE the "Everything but the Bagel" Seasoning will help.'" (NYT).
ADDED: I like the gender stereotype reversal with that couple in the cherry-picked sign. He's got the feeling — for produce — and she's got the thinking skill — checking the meat facts. He prioritizes the relationship — staying together — and she's coolly efficient — saving time, division of labor. And he cheerfully subordinates his preference and accepts the leadership she offers. He requests/expects a material reward for his deference.
I think Trader Joe's opens at 8 a.m., so what time were people talking right under his window? 6? 5? One solution is to become an early riser. You'd be better off anyway. Another is to get some noise-cancellation earbuds or extra-strong earplugs. But obviously, telling person after person to be quiet isn't going to work. You have to be awake already to do it, and there are new people arriving into your zone continually.
The adaptation Luker — close to "lurker" — used is to lean into the eavesdropping that life had imposed upon him and to make signs transcribing what he hears. The NYT calls it "a Covid-19 version of 'Stan Mack’s Real Life Funnies,' the beloved 1970s and ’80s column in the Village Voice." Oh! "Stan Mack’s Real Life Funnies" — I loved that. I am one of the sources of love that made that a beloved comic (or "column," as the NYT puts it).
Anyway, Luker hangs his signs from his first-floor brownstone window, and he also photographs the signs and posts the photos on Instagram. Go to that link to read them all. I'll just cherry-pick one:
"It would be nice if the wall-to-wall marathon showings of A Christmas Story on TBS and TNT led to a rediscovery of Jean Shepherd's other work..."
"... and even to a revival of the radio arts, but given that people have so many other things to occupy themselves nowadays, that it's unlikely."
From Wikipedia:
Said Lurker21, in the comments to the Christmas Café.
I've never seen "A Christmas Story," though I am one of Jean Shepherd's biggest fans. For years, in the 1960s, I used to get in bed in time to hear the "Call to Post" — which, today, sounds like something about blogging — on my radio tuned to WOR. And then...
Listening to those Jean Shepherd radio shows in the dark, night after night, was the pop culture highlight of lifetime. Of course, I heard him read "A Christmas Story" ever year. That was a tradition. But better than that was any random show on whatever he decided to talk about that night — another story of his childhood (back in Indiana) or some odd trail of musings.
Shepherd's oral narrative style was a precursor to that used by Spalding Gray and Garrison Keillor. Marshall McLuhan in Understanding Media wrote that Shepherd "regards radio as a new medium for a new kind of novel that he writes nightly." In the Seinfeld season-six DVD set, commenting on the episode titled "The Gymnast", Jerry Seinfeld said, "He really formed my entire comedic sensibility—I learned how to do comedy from Jean Shepherd."...
Shepherd was an influence on Bill Griffith's Zippy comic strip, as Griffith noted in his strip for January 9, 2000. Griffith explained, "The inspiration—just plucking random memories from my childhood, as I'm wont to do in my Sunday strip (also a way to expand beyond Zippy)—and Shep was a big part of them."
In an interview with New York magazine, Steely Dan's Donald Fagen says that the eponymous figure from his solo album The Nightfly was based on Jean Shepherd.
Though he primarily spent his radio career playing music, New York Top-40 DJ Dan Ingram has acknowledged Shepherd's style as an influence. An article he wrote for the March–April 1957 issue of MAD, "The Night People vs Creeping Meatballism", described the differences between what he considered to be "day people" (conformists) and "night people" (nonconformists).
A few days ago, in conversation on Facebook, I reconsidered my lifelong policy of averting my eyes from the film version of "A Christmas Story." Just to present my own comments:
I've never seen "A Christmas Story" because I am too devoted to Jean Shepherd and the original story as told over the radio....
I know [you hear Shepherd's voice-over narration in the film], but I don't want to see the ideal replaced by a literal acting-out of the story by human actors. The adult's voice creates the kid feeling. I don't want to see a real boy acting out the emotions for the camera. It's radio, the ultimate in radio, and not film...
I think I need to change my position. "A Christmas Story" is a deviation from Shepherd's usual show, because he was reading a story — not riffing in real time — that had been published in a book and a magazine (Playboy). So it wasn't the pure radio ideal that I'm so staunch about. It is not one of his stories about his own youth, because he says before reading the story that the boy is *not* him.
So did I finally watch the movie? No. Not yet, anyway. But I was motivated to listen to a random old show — something about midwestern drug stores. Nothing to do with Christmas, but I was listening on Christmas.
I don't think of Shepherd as Christmas-y, and it annoys me a bit that so many people do. The radio show should be much more important that that one film version of a story he used to read on the radio. Should be, and perhaps is, as its influence is deeply woven into many things we actively enjoy today. It's baked into this blog.
Here's the podcast where I found my random old show yesterday. Here's a webpage with a lot of the old shows.
December 25, 2020
At the Christmas Café...
... you can write about whatever you want. And I hope you got whatever you wanted.
ADDED: These are photographs that I originally blogged in 2006, in "Things made by children for Christmas long ago." The objects, which I still have, were made more than 60 years ago.
I see that in the comments here and back in 2006, someone asks if my name is really Jo Ann. No. Jo Ann was a doll's name — and I still remember which doll. The stockings — which are about the size of the image in the photograph — are doll's stockings. We made Christmas stockings and gifts for a family of dolls.
"Our vaunted capacity for abstract thought often gets us (or others) into trouble. We may be the only species to pursue scientific inquiry..."
"... but we’re also the only species that has consciously perpetrated genocides. Cats, unlike humans, don’t trick themselves into believing they are saviors, wreaking havoc in the process. 'When cats are not hunting or mating, eating or playing, they sleep,' Gray writes. 'There is no inner anguish that forces them into constant activity.'...We are human supremacists whose vanity and moralism and tortured ambivalence make us uniquely unhappy and destructive. 'While cats have nothing to learn from us,' he writes, 'we can learn from them how to lighten the load that comes with being human.'... Liberals like to think that empathy is a great virtue, he says, and that progress is not only possible but morally necessary, but people would be better off cultivating a catlike indifference.... He marvels that cats are 'arch-realists' who know when not to bother: 'Faced with human folly, they simply walk away.'"
From "Want the Good Life? This Philosopher Suggests Learning From Cats" by Jennifer Szalai, reviewing "Feline Philosophy/Cats and the Meaning of Life" by John Gray.
The neutrality of cats. I'll call it mewtrality. And, no, it's not cruel mewtrality. From the book:
Christmas TV.
ADDED: Speaking of British TV:Instead we are now watching the Twilight Zone where Art Carney is the drunk Santa.
— Ken Jennings (@KenJennings) December 25, 2020
My answer is always when it's British TV.Ok I’m deeply curious about this, how often do you use subtitles on your TV?
— caitie delaney (@caitiedelaney) December 25, 2020
Except most of those things we can't do right now, Bob....
A Christmas Message from Bob Dylan:
— HarryHew (@harryhew) December 24, 2020
"If you got the holiday blues, I feel for you. I know life is hard. But you don't need anyone to tell you how to feel better. ... What you gotta do is go out and help someone more unfortunate than you." pic.twitter.com/2szVpc147Y
Happy Christmas!
— #RingoStarr (@ringostarrmusic) December 25, 2020ADDED: From Craig Brown's "150 Glimpses of the Beatles":
Alone of all the Beatles, Ringo possessed no talent for composing. But one day, in a sudden flash of inspiration, the germs of a song entered his head, as if from nowhere. He worked on the song for three hours, and presented it to the other three the next day. After an awkward silence, they felt obliged to point out that it had already been written and recorded by Bob Dylan.
Brown doesn't say what Dylan song this was. But what song could it have been? It would have to have been something simple. But what? I try to think of a simple Bob Dylan song from the 1960s, and I think "I Want You," because that's a simple sentiment: "I want you/I want you/I want you/So bad."
I have somewhere else I want to go with this post, but writing out the chorus like that, I'm smacked in the head with the realization that a non-Ringo Beatle did in fact write — and record — that very song originally written by Bob Dylan, same title and all: "I Want You." Lyrics: "I want you, I want you so bad."
Did no one feel obliged to tell John Lennon that Bob Dylan had already written and recorded that song? No, obviously not. And it's not as if Lennon fleshed out the song. His "I Want You" hardly has any lyrics. It's just "I want you so bad/It's driving me mad" repeated.
Originally, I was going to say that Ringo couldn't possibly have believed he'd written "I Want You" because it has complicated Dylanesque lyrics: The guilty undertaker sighs/The lonesome organ grinder cries/The silver saxophones say I should refuse you... But Lennon's "I Want You" shows how Ringo might have done it. Just use the chorus. The chorus is perfectly simple.
December 24, 2020
"Now Ann has baited me into promiscuously spiking my anxiety stew with carnalized onions..."
Ha ha ha. My favorite kind of comment — taking an ingredient from an old post and adding it to the material in the post under discussion. It's fusion commenting, like fusion cooking... and the metaphor in the comment is cooking.
And I love that I've got a tag for "onions," though I see various posts with onions that did not get the tag, including posts with the tag "onion rings," onion rings being a special, niche topic here on the blog. Remember these carnalized onion rings? And of course, these ("I doubt if any blogger will disagree with my assertion that, coming from Bill Clinton, the 'O' of an onion ring is a vagina symbol").
Speaking of comments, I can see some of you are saying I'm not giving you the kind of post you like anymore. There are at least 4 reasons for that:
1. The world is locked down, so things don't just happen anymore, not the kind of things that delight and intrigue. The usual places still have their articles, but they're filling space. They're doing what they have to do, and I can smell the fakeness, the ennui. I have my standard, and I'll read until something crosses the line for me.
2. The standard on this blog is not big over small. I'm not here to repeat headlines about what the President just did. In fact, if the headline is big, I'd rather go small.
3. I'm not interested in throwing my weight onto one side or the other, and if I have nothing to add, there's no reason to write about these things. With Trump, I have distanced myself from the relentless haters, but I'm in no mood to encourage him either. I'm waiting for the next few weeks to pass, hunkering down. I could spring out and denounce him, but I don't join mobs.
4. It's Christmas Eve. Talk about keeping a distance. What can you see from a distance? "When he saw Jesus from a distance, he ran and fell on his knees in front of him. He shouted at the top of his voice, 'What do you want with me, Jesus, Son of the Most High God?'"
"I’ve honestly started wondering if this is just how men’s minds actually work in real life and now instead of being uncomfortable about passages like these, I’m uncomfortable about life."
A comment at the subreddit menwritingwomen.
The commenter is reacting in general to snippets of writing that have been posted in that group and specifically to this one:
Of course, the NYT "loves" this... if love includes loving the virality of something so clickable and sharable.
Click and reclick the image to read the full comment that begins "It all depends on your attitude."The New York Times loves this comment
— Joe Gabriel Simonson (@SaysSimonson) December 22, 2020
Now, Joe Gabriel Simonson withholds a link to the NYT, so he's onto their game and refusing to play... and he himself is using a woman's sex tale about her daughter to get links for himself... including this one from me. Reading the comments on his tweet, I see that no one believes the story, but they sure do find it hilarious.
I don't mind giving the NYT the link they deserve. Here's "The Joys of Frivolous Sex/The pandemic has brought out a nasty puritanism" by Megan Nolan.
Looking through the NYT-selected comments, I don't see the story that's in Simonson's screenshot. Maybe the woman — who used what might be her real name — took her comment down. If she really has a daughter, did she realize it was wrong — even if hilarious — to appropriate her daughter's identity for her own purposes?
The third-highest comment over there is "Read the whole thing again pretending it's written by a man." I'll be reading the column for the first time, and I don't need that prod. I always do the gender switcheroo when I read sex things.
Let's read:
In early lockdown, I spent most evenings in the front room of my mother’s house, drunk, staring at a computer, reeling at the prospect of my body being deprived indefinitely of touch.... Only weeks earlier, I was in New York for an extended visit, recently single and pleasantly crazy with the desire to date far and wide. My romantic and sexual value seemed higher then and there than it had ever been anywhere else.... [One man] looked fondly down at me in a hotel room and inexplicably exclaimed, “I love New York!” at the sight of my body.
Inexplicably.
And then in March came the shutdown. ... I was urgently trying to recast the concept of pleasure as something that could occur without other people.... I made the mistake in this period of suggesting in a Facebook post that single people, especially those living alone, could not be expected to go an unlimited amount of time without socializing or close contact. Some people reacted to this as though I had proposed an orgy on every street corner, pandemic be damned, but that wasn’t what I meant. What I meant was that human beings can’t be expected to endure the sudden and total loss of social comfort....
The coronavirus pandemic has brought out a nasty puritanism in some people.... One doesn’t even need to actually break a rule to earn their disgust, only to express dismay over things they consider unimportant or, worse, hedonistic. To even complain about what it feels like to live alone and not be able to date right now is regarded as unseemly, dismissed as trivial....
Most of society does not really believe that casual, nonmonogamous encounters can actually hold meaning, rather than simply serve as crude ways to blow off steam. I know that they can. Living as a purposefully single and promiscuous person was one way to know others, one way to find joy in the world, and it’s gone for now. Single people have lost something important, and should be allowed to bemoan it.
This is a very well-written and impressive statement of a point of view that should be part of the discussion! She's not saying her desire for physical love is more important than children going to school and elderly people staying alive. She's saying the interest in living real life is important too.
Now, Nolan invites attacks by calling other people names. Her antagonists are puritans — and nasty ones at that. And she makes their argument easier by using the word "promiscuous" to describe the interest she wants us to take seriously.
Back to the comments. I see this from Low-Notes-Liberate, who says he's a musician and thus "supposed to be wildly frivolous in general." But he prefers "long-term intimacy."
After the initial hide and seek of bodies is, for me, when the real adventure begins. Who is this person, who am I, who are we together. It is perhaps more a journey into the mind through the body. Not to say that love simmering like carnalized onions in an iron skillet, animal nature is incredibly sexy.
Carnalized onions!
But I like the journey taken over time. That said, I can easily relate to the horrifying ten months of deserted island sexuality many of us have endured. I was happy to see this article because it needs to be discussed and out in the open. What is a life of masturbation? Videos? Amazon brown boxes arriving with the hopes of a new variation on the same old theme?
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