Steamboats Are Ruining Everything

Ol rait

So, it's the 1970s, and Elvis Presley is Italian, and he can play the harmonica like Bob Dylan, and he's in a music video directed by Leni Riefenstahl, singing in Esperanto. Except it isn't Esperanto; that isn't good enough. No, he's singing in a language that he made up himself. And he says that Prisencolinensinainciusol means "universal love," and the Italian Debbie Harry is singing backup, along with about a hundred others. You can watch Adriano Celentano here, and read along to the lyrics here. (Hat tip to Acknowledged Classic.) According to a Russian fansite, Celentano is also an actor, who has appeared in over forty films, including Fellini's La Dolce Vita, and according to his Wikipedia page, his daughter played Satan in Mel Gibson's Passion of the Christ.

Caveat scriptor

I'm late coming to it, but Michael Kinsley wrote an essay in Time on April 10 about the psychic fallout of switching his identity from that of an editor, who longanimously pampers his writers, to that of a writer, who longanimously suffers under his editors. (Hat tip.) His essay reminds me of a great line in Muriel Spark's novel Loitering with Intent: "I didn't know then, as I know now, that the traditional paranoia of authors is as nothing compared to the inalienable schizophrenia of publishers."

Barbara A. Terzian

Peter's mother, Barbara A. Terzian, née Mendoza, died on Saturday, 19 April 2008, at age seventy-seven. She was born in 1930 in Troy, New York, and she married Peter's father, Richard Terzian, in 1959. She worked as a case supervisor for the Rensselaer County Department of Public Welfare in the 1950s and 1960s. She was an avid reader, a devotee of the arts, a great fan of dogs, and an all-around generous, loving, accepting person. She is sorely missed.

There will be a wake at the Dufresne and Cavanaugh Funeral Home in Latham, New York, on Tuesday, April 22, from 5pm to 7pm, and a funeral mass at St. Ambrose Church on Wednesday, April 23, at 11am. If you'd like to make a donation in her name, please consider the Regional Food Bank of Northeastern New York.

Madness updated, or rather, backdated

Two years ago, I suggested that the first use of the phrase "mad—mad I tell you" was in 1879 but invited reply from discoverers of earlier usage. The brilliant and ever-resourceful Paul Collins has risen to the challenge, and has discovered the phrase in an 1855 novel, The Old Farm House by Caroline Hyde Butler Laing.

Notebook: "Move Closer, Please"

My review of "The Art of the American Snapshot, 1888–1978: From the Collection of Robert E. Jackson," a photo exhibit with a catalog, is in the 1 May 2008 issue of New York Review of Books (online subscription required). Since the article does have footnotes, I don't need to annotate my sources here, so I thought instead I would post a few snapshots from my own collection, and then throw in a few motley links.

The snaps of "Belle" (left), a child with a French bulldog (right), and an Edwardian picnic (below) are anonymous. I purchased them in Brooklyn sometime in the last half dozen years. I'm afraid I don't remember where. I find it very calming to imagine attending a picnic with fruit and thermoses anchoring the tablecloth. In white tie, of course.

The medical student dancing with the skeleton (below) is my maternal grandfather. As you can see, a complicated man.

And this fellow (left) grew up to be my boyfriend. Note the placid, almost beatific smile. Contrast it with the eerie human eye just barely visible, in a shadowy way, inside the fake eye of the bunny creature. Note, too, the fluffy, imprisoning hands of the bunny creature.

Now, as to links. Snapshots—or, to call them by their fancy mass-noun, vernacular photography—are very well suited to the Internet. You can lose yourself for days looking through all the virtual shoeboxes. Luc Sante's great blog, Pinakothek, often features found photos. Another blog, Swapatorium, has photos retrieved from flea markets and junk shops. A number of collectors have put their finds online, including Nicholas Osborn at Square America and John and Teenuh Foster at Accidental Mysteries. If you decide to start collecting yourself, there are images for sale at the Found Photo and at Project B.

A number of people have sent scans of their old photos to NYU's Collective Visions, along with prose-poetical annotations (it doesn't look as if it's been updated recently, though). When the Getty ran a snapshot exhibit several years ago, they hosted a similar volunteer, communal snapshot gallery on their website. Polanoid pools the Polaroids made and collected by the dying company's aficionados, though not all the images are snapshots. And then of course there's Flickr. Almost every historical archive with images has some vernacular photography in it, but at the risk of seeming arbitrary I'll single out the Charles Van Schaick collection in Wisconsin Historical Society, which has such treasures as this cake, and the Charles Weever Cushman photograph collection at Indiana University, the bequest of an amateur whose snaps sometimes call to mind the great color photos of the FSA/OWI held by the Library of Congress (which aren't snapshots, properly speaking, at all).

My boyfriend is bicoastal

It turns out that my boyfriend, who, out of his concern that Googlers will be unable to find him, I shall identify here by his full name, Peter Terzian, also has a review in the Los Angeles Times today, of Dean Wareham's memoir Black Postcards. He doesn't like it as much as Liz Phair does.

A Night Out with Liam Finn

Peter has a piece in the New York Times today describing his "Night Out with Liam Finn," whose music he loves. Close readers of the article may be curious to learn the etymology of "daggy," which did not make it into the final draft: it's literally a New Zealand word used to describe a sheep's rear with dung stuck to it.

While on the topic of Peter's discoveries in indie rock, he stumbled across a link a couple of days ago to the musician Phil Elverum's photos of every book in his house, which I was completely transfixed by.

A technical breakthrough

Over the weekend, with some administrative support from his owners, the puppy implemented a new paperless home-office system. Amazingly, it has nothing to do with the internet.

The problem of bookshelves

Over at Paper Cuts, Jennifer Schuessler has joined the inter-blog conversation about bookshelf etiquette by confessing that her collection is "heavily weighted toward the unread," stockpiled for the coming era of the Kindle-toting zombies. I already spoke my piece, by blogging about all the books I've been throwing out, but for those whom the topic continues to fascinate, I recommend two books that I've been reading by the photographer Moyra Davey, Long Life Cool White, just published by Yale University Press, and The Problem of Reading, which you have to email Davey herself to buy a copy of (see the link for instructions). Both books are filled not only with Davey's moody photos of bookshelves in various states of disarray and transition but also with her thoughts on the place of reading in a creative life, and the difficulty, in managing the habit, of striking the right balance between purpose and serendipity, and between work and pleasure. "'What to read?' is a recurring dilemma in my life," she admits in The Problem of Reading, which has, among other images, a great close-up of her mother's annotations of Swann's Way. Long Life Cool White focuses more specifically on the problem of reading about photography (and writing about it). At one point in that book, Davey, like Schuessler in her anticipation of zombies, considers her bookshelves as a storehouse, similar in function to her refrigerator, only more so:

A well-stocked fridge always triggers a certain atavistic, metabolic anxiety, like that of the Neanderthal after the kill, faced with the task of needing to ingest or preserve a massive abundance of food before spoilage sets in. . . . I feel a little towards my books as I do towards the fridge, that I have to manage these as well, prioritize, determine which book is likely to give me the thing I need most at a given moment. But unlike with the fridge, I like to be surrounded by an excess of books, and to not even have a clear idea of what I own, to feel as though there's a limitless store waiting to be tapped, and that I can be surprised by what I find.

Lhude sing cuccu

With a puppy in the house, I have had occasion lately to be reminded of the poem "Cuckoo Song," also known by its first line, "Sumer is icumen in," which is the first poem in both of the editions of the Oxford Book of English Verse that I happen to own. In particular, the second verse has seemed pertinent:

Awe bleteth after lomb,
Lhouth after calve cu;
Bulluc sterteth, bucke verteth,
Murie sing cuccu!

Or, to modernize it slightly, thereby ruining the rhymes:

Ewe bleats after lamb,
Cow lows after calf;
Bullock leaps, buck farts,
Merry sing cuckoo!

It's the verting of the bucke that makes the poem, in my opinion. It's so homely and unexpected—so unexpected that for a long time I've carried around in my head the notion that perhaps deer really do fart more in the early summer than at other times of the year. After all, ewes are more likely to have lambs then, and cows calves. I speculated that maybe in late spring deer start to eat grass and leaves in greater quantities, and maybe it takes their digestive systems a little while to adjust, and in thirteenth-century England, where deer and humans lived in gunpowder-free proximity, people noticed.

Maybe. But thanks to the internet, I see that a hunter in Texas heard a whitetail doe startle her fellow deer in January, and there are a couple of videos of farting deer available online, posted in October and November, so I'm guessing that deer fart year-round, not just in June, and that the poet intended for farting deer, like leaping bullocks, to signify a general, seasonless exuberance.

Recycling

On a number of recent occasions, I have fallen into déjà lu while reading blogs. A blogger presents a link to a news item that sounds very familiar. Hmm, phosphorescent foraminifera, I think. Didn't the Times already run an article on them just a few days ago? But the blogger advertises the link as new, or at least fails to apologize for linking late, and so I click through, thinking to myself, It's unusual for there to be such two articles in short order; maybe this is the week that phosphorescent foraminifera finally come into their own! . . . only to discover that in fact this is the same article on phosphorescent foraminifera that I read three or four days ago.

When it happened once, I passed on in silence. By the fourth or fifth instance, I developed a theory: It must be that these bloggers do not read the New York Times, not in print anyway, and do not expect their readers to. They read bloggers who read bloggers who read the New York Times, and when an article underplayed on the web but worth reading anyway trickles down to them three or four days after publication, they perceive it as a neglected gem that they must rescue from obscurity. Not as yesterday's news.

That was my theory: uncharitable, pessimistic, gloomy. But now I have a puppy, and all is right with the world, and now I understand. It isn't that these bloggers fail to read the New York Times for themselves. How silly! It's that they have puppies! Like me, four or five times a day, they find themselves opening a section of the Times that they don't usually open, for the sake of the kitchen floor, and happening upon articles they would have loved to read if they had been in the front section instead of in Escapes, such as "Where Greek Ideals Meet New England Charm," a lushly illustrated tour of shareholder libraries of nineteenth-century vintage, or in Business, such as "Book Lovers Ask, What's Seattle's Secret?", an analysis of Seattle's role as tastemaker in the literary ecosystem. And once you discover these interesting articles, you often find that your puppy too has noticed them, as it were, and the web edition of the Times, kept pristine by its lack of functionality in that department, really comes in handy.

New resident

Already growls at the television.