For example, you might stumble across an October 1978 issue of Seventeen magazine with a 13-year old Brooke Shields on the cover . . .
I was thinking about selling it on ebay (along with the other issues in the stack) but you know, I might need to hang onto it a little while, first.
At least until I’ve read “Teen Pregnancy: Whose fault-boy or girl?”
Edgy teen market journalism, 70s style — can’t resist!
UPDATE: The artist of the P.O. mural pictured below is Mordi Gassner. The title is “Family Reunion on Clark Island, Spring 1791.” Tempura, 1941.
With the Post Office in a world of financial hurt, it’s no surprise that it is starting to sell off buildings.
Some of those buildings however house public art. From the WSJ:
Between 1934 and 1943, hundreds of U.S. post offices were adorned with murals and sculptures produced under the Treasury Department’s Section of Painting and Sculpture, later called the Section of Fine Arts. Unlike other federally funded arts programs at the time, this initiative was not meant to provide jobs but “was intended to help boost the morale of people suffering the effects of the Great Depression” through art, according to postal officials.
Yeah, those murals. Like the one in the P.O. in Oxford, New York, where I grew up.
It made a very vivid impression on me as a kid. I can remember waiting while my mom or dad mailed letters or bought stamps and staring at that picture. It was so big, so dark; I thought it was magnificent but also a little creepy.
A few years ago I took some pictures of it, and I’m glad I did . . . here they are.
Mural from the Oxford, New York Post Office.
Pioneers greeting and shaking hands: the central tableau of the mural. Those pioneer women sure were muscular ;-)
The thing that most fascinated me about the mural when I was a kid was the white ox’s eye. I thought it looked human. What I notice now is that the man with the oxen and barge is entering the scene . . .
. . . while the Native Americans on the far left hand side of the mural paddle away.
I would love to know who painted it . . . have posted the pics to my Facebook page as well, so maybe somebody there will chip in with some more information.
What’s most important about my beagle lab rescue dog is not where she ranks in the pack, but her mellow temperament.
If you’ve paid any attention, over the past decade or so, to dog training theory, you know that tossing labels like “alpha” and “beta” around is a dangerous thing.
We don’t just do it with dogs, of course. We also do it with humans — see for example Dr. Helen’s observations about a recent Science study. She ties the media reports on the study to a trend to paint alpha males as “dysfunctional.” I happen to be in accordance with her on that point. “Alpha traits” are critically important to human society, culture, and survival. We need them. We need to admire people who exhibit them.
But there’s another problem with the media’s regurgitation of this science. The issue at hand is that being an alpha is stressful — meaning, being alpha is associated literally with high levels of stress hormones. The question then becomes: is it healthier to be a beta?
Here’s the thing. If you’ve known more than one or two dogs in your life, you know that their “aptitude” (for lack of a better word) for a given rank in the social hierarchy is to some extent inborn. I’m not saying here that individual dogs are Destined for a particular social rank. But from puppyhood, it’s obvious that some dogs have what it takes to be alpha and some will inevitably default to somewhere lower in the pack.
Yes, social rank is also predicated on behavior as well. Dogs can acquire the skills they need to climb up. They can also sink in rank. (As can baboons, the subject of the Science study.)
The challenge is to tease out the why’s.
I’ve blogged here before about my dogs. My current dog is a Beagle-Lab mix. My last dog was a purebred Corgi. Both dogs exhibit(ed) a ton of “submissive” behavior — things like rolling over on their backs etc. when I approach them. But my Corgi was also a bundle of very unhappy nerves, whereas Tessa is extremely, extremely mellow (and incidentally a lot nicer to be around).
And guess what. They were each “born that way.”
No doubt if you’d drawn blood from the Corgi and tested it, you would have found high levels of cortisol. They wouldn’t be there because she was an alpha. They’d be there because she was born with a tendency to be excitable and anxious. (Incidentally, I suspect this unfortunately sets up a kind of biological feedback loop. Trainers have noted for instance that dogs sometimes appear to excite themselves by their own barking. So excitable=barking=more excited . . .)
This is one of several reasons why we need to throw out the “alpha” and “dominant” and “submissive” labels when we adopt companion dogs — because when we use those labels, we miss looking for what’s really important about dogs’ temperaments.
My hunch is that we have to be careful with these labels when it comes to people, too. My hunch is that if we looked, we’d find “alpha males” with very low levels of stress hormones, and “beta males” who are as crazy unhappy as my poor little Corgi was.
Assigning moral values to such labels only makes it that much harder for us to understand what’s going on with our bodies, let alone what makes for a stable, high-functioning society.
Out there in The Long Tail you’ll find some mighty fine brewskies. P.S. Southern Tier, please bring Iniquity back. Thank you.
Only imagine: MSNBC has a story up about beer sales, and lo and behold, they’re plummeting — for mainstay brands like Bud, Old Milwaukee, and Michelob. [UPDATE: sadly, story no longer there…]
Of the 23 “largest selling beer products” in the U.S., “eight . . . have lost a staggering 30 percent or more of their sales between 2005 and 2010.”
Yikes.
But here’s what strikes me. For years, we’ve been hearing that “digital” is killing the publishing industry. Digital is killing newspapers. Digital is killing music.
And the focus for the most part has been on the medium. You’ve probably heard “kill the medium!” arguments along these lines:
But here’s the thing. With beer, you take the medium out of the equation. People can’t buy or sell beer in digital form. It’s an analog world experience still, thank doG.
So beer becomes a control case.
Right?
You have your traditional, old school industry — all those gargantuan beer brands that our grandfathers used to drink — and you have this nascent (well, still sort of nascent) decentralized craft brew movement with its funny labels and quirky flavors.
And what happens?
We learn that when people have a choice, lo and behold, they will abandon “safe,” boring, insipid products and seek out interesting, imaginative, vibrant alternatives. In proverbial droves.
This also suggests IMO that “brand” — which you may have noticed has been elevated in the past couple decades to near-mystical status in the marketing lexicon — is actually not enough to carry a product. On the contrary, “brand” has some mighty heavy clay feet.
Anyway, a prediction. Bud, and Old Milwaukee, and Michelob (which btw is in my WP spellcheck. Really? My spellcheck doesn’t recognize the word “spellcheck” but it generates its red squiggle if I type Michalob or Michelobe? Really????) are already working furiously behind the scenes to launch a stunning new menu of “craft-style” beers.
Second prediction. Book publishers will engage in a parallel activity, if they’re not already. And they’ll figure out which self-pubbed products sell well (possible examples: shorter novels; serials) and start assembly-lining e-books into those niches with a vengeance.
But without offering author advances ;-)
So this has been something of a revelation.
I’ve come across the term “trigger point” more times than I could hope to count, over the years. I’ve had massage therapists mention them. I’ve read about them on websites. I’ve noticed them in my muscles — spots where even a little bit of pressure is hugely painful.
I never looked into them very much.
The fact is, there is so much alt-health information out there, and 95 percent of it is either garbage or irrelevant. It’s hard to sort through it all. It takes time.
But in the past few years my hands have been giving me trouble. My fingers seemed stiff a lot. My knuckles have been sore. I’ve noticed that my forearms have developed numerous tender spots as well.
This started a year or so after I took up golf — but golfing itself never hurt or seemed to tire my hands, and resting from golf didn’t seem to have an effect.
That puzzled me.
My fear, of course, was that it might be arthritis, but none of the alt-health things I tried for that seemed to help. (My doctor concurred it could be arthritis, and suggested I use Ibuprofen. Fine for alleviating symptoms, of course, but I wanted a cure.)
Then a week ago I ordered a copy of The Trigger Point Therapy Workbook: Your Self-Treatment Guide for Pain Relief, Second Edition
It turned out to be an eye-opener.
First of all, I had no idea how much science there is behind the trigger point-based pain model.
I also didn’t realize that the right kind of massage can get rid of trigger points. I thought massaging trigger points was itself a way to alleviate symptoms. I didn’t realize that you can heal trigger points, and by so doing eliminate referred pain at its source.
Anyway, for the last few days I’ve been attacking some of my most troublesome trigger points, and I’m amazed at the results.
Most notably, the pain and stiffness in my hands has resolved probably about 90 percent — and I’m only getting started.
I also have a strong hunch that I finally — FINALLY — have a way to get rid of my headaches.
And I’m gaining a new understanding of the source of specific little aches and pains. For years, I’ve had a problem, on and off, with a dull ache under my right shoulder blade. Who could have known that the source was a muscle in the front of my neck? Yet when I massage the right trigger point, it hurts in that spot inside my shoulder — the exact same kind of hurt, in the exact spot.
I bought the book hoping to make my hands feel better.
I entertain larger ambitions now!
I’m not only going fix my hands. I’m going to get rid of my tendency to headaches. And I’m to systematically hunt down and extinguish trigger points in ever muscle in my body.
Wish me luck — I’ll post updates here as I go.
Cover of a World Trade Center brochure, “The World Trade Center: A building project like no other.” Publication date May 1970. Interior is photos and text about the Towers construction.
A couple of years ago I was going through a box of stuff — a.k.a. junk — that I’d schlepped from my parents’ attic to my house, and came across some World Trade Center brochures.
I had no memory of them at all, at first. But something has since seeped back in. I think I was doing some sort of project for school. A research paper, maybe. I wrote to someone (The Port Authority? I think that might be it) for some information and received the brochures in the mail as the response.
I never visited the Towers. I didn’t realize that I’d never have a chance.
I took 9/11 personally, like many of us did — and for many reasons. But one of them, for me, was the destruction of the buildings themselves. I felt connected to them; I felt like they were “mine” in a way, and their destruction therefore felt — still feels — like a theft . . .
This brochure, “HQ For International Business,” has a business card stapled to the inside from a One World Trade Center observation deck manager. I wonder if possibly he’s the person who mailed the packet to me . . . he also enclose a reprint of a New York Times article from 1972, “New York’s View From the Top,” by Paul J.C. Friedlander.
This brochure, “Now — a world of data on world trade,” pitched businesses on the advantages of locating in the WTC. Electronic Yellow Pages, Hot Line to all WTC tenants, and Personal Data Stations . . .
This brochure publicized the WTC concourse. The interior is a map showing all the concourse shops.
It’s easy enough to assert that books “make a difference” — now Alain de Botton has gone a step further to explain how:
One effect of writing . . . is that, once readers have put the book down and resumed their own lives, they may attend to precisely the things that the author would have responded to had he or she been in their company.
Thanks to a book, their minds will be like a radar newly attuned to pick up certain objects floating through consciousness. The effect will be like bringing a radio into a room that we had thought silent, only to realize that the silence existed at a particular frequency and we, in fact, shared the room all along with waves of sound coming in from a Ukrainian station or the nighttime chatter of a minicab firm.
Have you ever experienced this by reading a novel?
What novel, and how did it affect you?
So this cracks me up.
One of my characters in Can Job
Mind you, the book is not really political, unless you count poking fun at politicians as “political.” The particular pol that figures in this scene is Bo Valgus, whose biggest mistake was not his position no the issue necessarily but that he wasn’t quick enough to voice support for it during a local radio interview. This being fiction, I also couldn’t miss a chance to take a dig at a certain former state governor :-)
The DJ had asked his opinion about same-sex marriage and he’d answered “I haven’t had a chance to think about it, to tell the truth.” The idiot. Everyone knew that a same sex marriage would have come to the floor if ex-Governor Eminent Flipzer’s ungovernable hetero sex drives hadn’t led him to disgrace and ruin. Well, if not ruin, then a brief time-out to think about what a bad boy he’d been.
Overnight, the legislature had become suddenly paranoid about any issue associated with the letters s-e-x.
And so here they were, to express their chagrin with Bo Valgus.
Anyway, I’m laughing today because only a couple months after self-pubbing the novel, a same-sex marriage bill has now passed in our state.
My book is already dated!
lol
But I really couldn’t be more pleased :-)
As one of my FB friends posted, it’s a great day to be a New York Stater.
In today’s Wall Street Journal, Fergus Bordewich reviews Mightier Than the Sword by David S. Reynolds: a book about Harriet Beecher Stowe’s 1852 novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin.
Bordewich quotes from the book that in the first year after its release, Uncle Tom’s Cabin
sold 310,000 copies in the United States, triple the number of its nearest rivals.
It would eventually sell a million copies in Great Britain alone.
The book “opened the way for a widespread acceptance in the North of antislavery arguments that had long been ignored or dismissed.”
It helped pave the way for Lincoln’s efforts to “convert countless apathetic Yankees into men willing to fight for the emancipation of slaves.”
I read the book many many years ago, as a pre-teen — it was one of the novels I found as I worked my way through my hometown’s little library. Even then I recognized it was not only dated but propaganda; I recognized that the writing was in service of a Cause rather than an esthetic.
But what a cause, and what an accomplishment for a writer to almost single-handedly turn an entire country away from its acceptance of slavery . . .
An author ought to consider himself, not as a gentleman who gives a private or eleemosynary treat, but rather as one who keeps a public ordinary, at which all persons are welcome for their money.
— opening sentence in the novel “The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling,” by Henry Fielding, 1749
Shakespeare relied upon the audience and, with such devices as the soliloquy, extended the play towards it; the drama did not comprehend a completely independent world, but needed to be authenticated by the various responses of the crowd.
I’ve broken a rule in my latest self-pubbed novel
There are a ton of stories about it floating around on the web. Half of them are baloney. The other half—baloney and cheese.
The woman is a biologist. A trained scientist. Meaning: for her, things either stack up to the measure of the five senses or you brush them aside.
So forget what you’ve read.
Forget what you’ve read from people who say she’s some kind of New Age Messiah.
And while you’re at it, forget the stuff that denounces her as a cynical fraud.
Here’s what really happened.
The book, not by coincidence, is about a woman who discovers she can see fairies. This makes it a fairy tale, and I’ve begun it with my own little twist of Once Upon a Time.
Which makes me, of course, a Bad Writer.
I wouldn’t have been judged so harshly a couple centuries ago. There was a time when authorial intrusion was not only accepted, but expected. Not today. Today, if you were to pester an agent or editor with a novel that opens like mine, your book would go straight to the reject pile.
Now I’m not saying this new novel I’ve pubbed is good. On the contrary. A) It’s not my place to say whether it’s good. And B) the experience of attempting fiction is a humbling one. Writing a good novel is extraordinarily difficult. And having finished four, I am still only a rank beginner.
It would be presumptive of me to suggest I’ve managed to produce anything that might be objectively described as “good.”
So my thoughts on authorial intrusion, or any other stylistic convention, don’t carry any particular authority. But hell. This is the Internet, and I have an opinion ;-)
It goes something like this.
Before the emergence of a literate middle class, stories were told, not read, and the teller — the author — was therefore a part of the experience. It doesn’t take much imagination to put yourself in a village square in the 12th century, somewhere in Europe, where a small crowd has gathered around someone telling a story — relating an account of some battle, perhaps, or the death of a monarch, or a shipwreck, or pirate raid. A person gifted with a sense of timing, and an expressive vocabulary, a sense of how to play the audience’s emotions, would hold their interest longer. People would ask the speaker to repeat the story. The story teller would gain a reputation, would become sought-after.
And then there were the tales that were repeated orally, the epic poems and fairy tales. Why are there so often multiple versions of these stories? Because some of the people who got their hands on these stories changed things, edited things, added embellishments. These were the storytellers who knew how to juice the plot, how to better engage listeners.
When Fielding begins the tale of Tom Jones, he does so by inviting the reader to come into a public house, put down a bit of money, and have a listen. Fielding is there, in the room, not self-consciously but because it’s assumed he should be there. It’s Fielding, telling the story; reading his novel is simply a way of inviting him into your drawing room. There’s no 20th Century conceit that he be invisible, that the story is somehow “a completely independent world.”
So what happened?
I’m no lit scholar, but I can hazard a guess. As more and more people fancied themselves novelists, the pool of second- and third-rate novelists grew. And many of these writers handled authorial intrusion clumsily.
You’ve probably come across an example, if you’ve ever picked up a badly written 19th century novel in a thrift store. It can be extremely off-putting to find yourself lectured by some long-winded boor in the middle of what is supposed to be a novel.
But our fiction taste-setters haven’t decided that authorial intrusion is taboo only if it’s badly done. They’ve made it taboo entirely. The reason for this (they say) is that authorial intrusion breaks the spell. Even the phrase itself suggests a despoiling: something intrudes on that “completely independent world;” the author has become an interloper, a violator.
But how strange that in, say, television dramas or comedies, the Fourth Wall is no longer off-limits, but in fiction it’s assumed the reader must be continually immersed in an alternative world; that the experience will be ruined if the author calls attention to the fact that the work is fiction, the characters are fiction — that you’re reading an invented tale spun by another human being.
Perhaps we’ve lost the ability, as novel readers, to switch back and forth from “suspension of disbelief” to an awareness that that novels are actually a collusion between reader and writer.
But I don’t think that’s the case.
And as a result, writers haven’t had the option of experimenting with authorial intrusion. We don’t know when it works, or doesn’t work, because it’s a tool that’s been locked away.
And that’s too bad.
Christopher Hitchens has a new piece up on Vanity Fair that you’ve maybe come across. [UPDATE: link sadly no longer works…] Hitchens’ cancer has now progressed to the point where it is destroying his vocal cords. The piece is about the interconnectedness of self/personality, writing, and voice. “To a great degree, in public and private,” he writes, “I ‘was’ my voice.”
And now that he’s losing his voice, he appreciates how much the quality of writing depends on the quality of one’s speaking.
In some ways, I tell myself, I could hobble along by communicating only in writing. But this is really only because of my age. If I had been robbed of my voice earlier, I doubt that I could ever have achieved much on the page.
He closes the piece with advice for writers, starting with this:
To my writing classes I used later to open by saying that anybody who could talk could also write. Having cheered them up with this easy-to-grasp ladder, I then replaced it with a huge and loathsome snake: “How many people in this class, would you say, can talk? I mean really talk?”
Now in the oral tradition, speakers used literary devices to invite their listeners into a fictional world. But it’s silly to assume that once you were past the “once upon a time” gate, the story teller never again “intruded.”
Of course they did. “Once upon a time” the spinner of tales was an active participant in the experience, casting a spell, then withholding it, teasing, making promises and then pretending to back off of them — like the grandfather reading the story in Princess Bride, interrupting a scene to tell his grandson not to worry, Buttercup doesn’t get eaten by eels. Yet.
Not only that, but it added to the listener’s pleasure — just as Fielding’s greeting adds to the pleasure of reading Tom Jones.
So yeah. It’s a shame we’ve thrown out this particular baby on account of some stinky Victorian bathwater. But maybe now that indie authors are retaking the industry, we’ll see some authorial winking and nudging inserted here and there.
And maybe readers will actually enjoy it.
Maybe writers will begin to understand that the notion of a “completely independent world” is itself a conceit, and in some respects an increasingly tiresome one.
Maybe we’ll start to realize that authors don’t need to always be invisible.
Maybe we’ll welcome our story tellers back into the room with us, pull up our chairs and start to listen . . .
