Archives for July 24, 2007

In case you’ve been on vacation:
All postings whose headlines are signed “CAAF” are the work of Carrie Frye, our guest blogger.
Read more about her here.

Here’s an idea for keeping customers, Netflix: The mail runs on Saturday, so should you.
Under the current model, Netflix processes movies Monday through Friday only. So if you mail a movie on Thursday or Friday, the company won’t mark it received until Monday, meaning you don’t get your next selection until Tuesday, sometimes Wednesday. Which makes Blockbuster’s offer to let subscribers return movies in the store seem extra attractive: Who wants to wait a week for a new movie?*
However, if Netflix processed on Saturdays, that lag time would get cut. Mail a movie Thursday and you might get a new one as soon as Monday.
I love you, Netflix — who else would consent to send me Staying Alive so many times without ever once passing a word of stony judgment? So keep your lousy dollar decrease and ship Saturdays.
* That said, with its new policies (no late fees! we’ll mail to you!), Blockbuster reminds me of nothing so much as the boyfriend/girlfriend who treated you terribly but now wants you back, so s/he is talking sweet, but if you go back, you can be sure that s/he’s going to treat you terribly all over again. Just replace “took money from your purse for hookers”/”drained your bank account to pay for a prescription drug habit” with “charged exorbitant late fees.” Which is why I stick mostly to Netflix/Rosebud Video.

“If I remember correctly writers usually find some excuse for their books, although why one should excuse oneself for having such a quiet and peaceful occupation I really don’t know. Military people never seem to apologize for killing each other yet novelists feel ashamed for writing some nice inert paper book that is not certain to be read by anybody.”
Leonora Carrington, The Hearing Trumpet

Terry wrote yesterday about the allure of handwritten letters. It’s a topic I’ve been thinking about lately whenever shuffling out for the mail. The ratio of bills & junk mail to actual items of interest is currently running about 100:1 at our house, and some days that seems like a bleak signpost of … something (mortgages, lightning).
So I think about sending more letters and how nice it would be to receive some in return, particularly if these letters were to arrive in packages with gin, smokes, and the new Oxford Univ. Press edition of Coleridge’s Faust translation tied up in string. But as my friends who’ve received cards from me with messages like “Congratulations on your baby — and congratulations on his high-school graduation!” know, these impulses usually dissipate on the walk back from the curb.
This cycle (wanting mail, never sending mail) reminded me about the letters that appear in Leonora Carrington’s The Hearing Trumpet, a book I take to the bed with about twice a year. The story features an incredibly old, bearded lady named Marian (a stand-in for Carrington) and her equally old best friend Carmella, who is bald and wears red wigs in a “queenly gesture to her long lost hair.” (Carmella is understood to be a stand-in for Carrington’s friend Remedios Varo.)
Here Carmella is introduced to the reader:

[Carmella] lives in a very small house with her niece who bakes cakes for a Swedish teashop although she is Spanish. Carmella has a very pleasant life and is really very intellectual. She reads books through an elegant lorgnette and hardly ever mumbles to herself as I do. She also knits very clever jumpers but her real pleasure in life is writing letters. Carmella writes letters all over the world to people she has never met and signs them with all sorts of romantic names, never her own. Carmella despises anonymous letters, and of course they would be impractical as who could answer a letter with no name at all signed at the end? These wonderful letters fly off, in a celestial way, by airmail, in Carmella’s delicate handwriting. No one ever replies. This is the really incomprehensible side of humanity, people never have time for anything.

Carmella’s letters are laced throughout the book, and she has a great flair. After the jump, one of her letters to strangers is described …
[Read more…]

Contentions, the group blog of Commentary, the magazine for which I write a monthly essay about music and the arts, has just gotten into the videoblogging business. I am, somewhat to my surprise, the point man. I’ll be appearing each month in a monthly on-camera interview during which I talk about…well, whatever I’m asked. This is an experiment–I’ve done a lot of radio, but comparatively little TV–so we’ll see how it goes from here.
The first interview, taped in the living room of my Manhattan apartment last week, was posted on the site earlier today. In it I discuss everything from my latest Commentary essay (which you can read by visiting the “TT in Commentary” module of the right-hand column) to one of the pieces in the Teachout Museum, John Marin’s “Downtown. The El,” about which I blogged on the day “About Last Night” went live in 2003.
To see the interview, go here.
UPDATE: My interview has also been crossposted on YouTube.

“By now, as has ever been the case with actors who find themselves stranded together in a strange town with a nightly call to their courage, we were slipping into each other’s beds. In this blur of sharp need and comradeship, with its tacit understanding that there would be no subsequent demands, we gave little thought to consequences.”
Michael Blakemore, Arguments with England: A Memoir