“A big white moon”
From “Revenge.”
Orange Crate Art
In a Mellotron
From JSTOR Daily, “Tape Heads,” a look at the Mellotron in rock.
From The Pencil
”The pencil is always an extension of the fingers. With a pencil we can count beyond our ten digits, usually striking out every four marks with a fifth — four vertical fingers made into a hand by a diagonal thumb. We can turn the pages of slick magazines and catalogues more quickly with the dry eraser than the licked finger. We can dial or press telephones that our nails are too long or our fingers too fat to work. We can hold more places in books by sticking pencils where our fingers were. We can point to details that our fingers would obscure. We can exaggerate our gestures. We can make visible what our fingers can only trace in air. We can vote not by raising our hands but by marking our secret ballots.”
Henry Petroski (1942–2023)
Author of The Pencil: A History of Design and Circumstance.
“Look! The lead!”
“Real-Life Science Fiction Premise Plays Out As Man Employs So-Called Mechanical Pencil.”
Sardines on the screen
A beautiful short film: Inside Portugal’s tinned-fish industry.
“Some rocks,” some boid
A Nancy panel.
Misheard
“QAnon is a proud supporter of public television.”
Attics
From The King in the Tree: Three Novellas.
Little libraries
In Santa Barbara, California, the artist Douglas Lochner has created six little libraries in the shape of punctuation marks and typographical symbols.
Steven Millhauser and K-pop
The group is Billlie; the song is “Enchanted Night,” which shares its title with Steven Millhauser’s 1999 novella. You can see a member of the group holding the paperback in the video. Readers of the novella will notice a clear connection.
“She has seen this one before”
From Enchanted Night.
They’ve got an awful lot of Outback in Brazil
A Washington Post reporter investigates the popularity of Outback Steakhouse in Brazil.
Old magazines
In The New York Times, Brian Dillon recommends reading old magazines as “cheap time machines.”
Juneteenth Manzarene
To mark Juneteenth, Dust-to-Digital is offering a free download of the 76-page book that accompanied its 2016 release Washington Phillips and His Manzarene Dreams.
“Under the rays of moonlight”
From Enchanted Night.
Juneteenth
From the Library of Congress: Voices Remembering Slavery: Freed People Tell Their Stories, recordings from 1932, 1933, 1940, 1941, and 1949.
Father’s Day
A dream.
Five-and-ten, five-and-dime
Usage.
“Ghost Town” on Soul Music
An episode about a Specials song.
Today’s Saturday Stumper
“Does as well as others.”
A chart, not especially helpful
The New York Times has created an ingenious scrolling chart (gift link) to sort out congressional Republican responses to the second indictment. The only problem: an ingenious scrolling chart is not especially helpful for anyone who wants to check on a particular member of Congress.
Small Protest
Miniature protestors in Russia.
“Kraahraark!” (Bloomsday)
It’s June 16, 1904, and Leopold Bloom is, as he often is, inventing.
Analog trends
The Washington Post reports on six analog trends: print books, film cameras, letters and postcards, pens and stationery, vinyl, and “collecting” (e.g., matchbooks).
“Real pretty, real professional”
From Steven Millhauser’s Enchanted Night.
Top of the muffin
An unexpected pleasant moment in the day.
Robert Gottlieb (1931-2023)
“I would read three to four books a day after school, and could read for 16 hours at a time,” he told the Times in 1980. “Mind you, that’s all I did. I belonged to three lending libraries and the public library.”
First!
Illinois bans book bans.
Zippy as Percy
In today’s Zippy, Zippy is in Los Angeles, 1947, thinking about Edmond O’Brien, Barbara Stanwyck, and Lizabeth Scott. And Percy Helton.