01 January 2011

Thanksgiving debrief, 2010

Time: ~0800, the morning after Thanksgiving 2010
Place: The kitchen, Sergeantsville NJ
Members present (in order of appearance): BBly, Deborah S., Peter, Molly, Margaret aka "Banjo Meg", John W., Claire, DGBly.
MINUTES
Evelyn Evelyn = Cynthia's new book, out in March 2011, Text by musicians about conjoined twins, touring the world...

A Failure of Imagination. [notes for a rant]
  • Thanksgiving Gratitudes, 2008, 2010: John W. recalls Nemo's comparison of same moment in Nov 2004 & 2008.
  • CID = Crappy Interface Design;
  • the Curse of Knowledge
  • The Tree of Knowledge
  • Pay Attention; this time (when your kids are little, e.g.) goes so fast, as I told Nelly last Sunday, as everyone older says to the young parents, until the kids of the young parents have kids, & the older ones tell the younger ones. Everyone says it; no one believes it: a failure of imagination.
And then there's the hyperactive imagination, that sees the boogeyman everywhere, the gun nuts *and* the jihadists, throwing their freedom, their privacy, their very lives into the superstoked sacrificial fire of their fear...

Parliament of Foules across Rittenhouse Rd: crows in the trees, geese in the field — yelling.

"He's doing the puzzle in INK!" — Narration behind John & Debbie trying to watch Sideways in Doylestown. An old couple, the scene where Paul Giamatti was doing the crossword in LA traffic.

WHRB [Harvard Radio Broadcasting: superior for repertoire, as opposed to Greatest Hits on most classical stations]
Pandora.com — you send in something to play, they pick the rest of what you hear that day.

Greg Mortensen: 3 Cups of Tea
These guys who don't sleep and just do good — Margaret
Paul Farmer in Haiti
A Lesson Before Dying Ernest Gaines

17 pills this morning

Pete signed up for Harvard Institute for Learning in Retirement, then joined a Reading Gp made up of honors HS + honors college kids + over 65ers + local writers — now *there's* a promising ragout!

Let the Great World Spin: Philippe Petit walking between WTC Towers = iconic image; evocative portrait of NYC in the 1970s
Helene Hanff [author of 84 Charing Cross Road] also wrote a walking tour of NYC Apple of My Eye, which Claire likes better than Pete Hamill's Downtown
The old NYTimes Bldg: presses built under Times Square's new express subway stops

Deb working @ Saks in 1977: at sales meetings before the store opened, they were all encouraged to flog really ugly but expensive merchandise by saying, "However did they do it so cheaply?" e.g., ~ $290 for salmano ultrasuede jackets

ourDeb recommends: blog Letters of Note

Claire, re Peter's only 25-year-old suit: [the] 3 times when a man needs a suit:
  • hatchins
  • matchins
  • dispatchins

John recommends highly: Jonathan Franzen's Freedom

Proper tempo for CPR = BeeGees' "Stayin' Alive" — John(?)

Deb's request for her funeral music: Ms. Offenders' "Beautiful River"

Pete Seeger honorary degree from Rutgers — John's trying to talk him into it.
Played a festival all day, when he got offstage said, "You know I don't like music quite as much as I did this morning." — Tao Rodríguez-Seeger, Pete's grandson

Where does Rhetoric fit into "encoding makes meat"? — cooking?

"Insane Eyes": song title — John

BBly's in-progress conference paper: Text, meat, ghosts:
Written kisses don't reach their destination, rather they are drunk on the way by the ghosts. It is on this ample nourishment that they multiply so enormously. Humanity senses this and fights against it and in order to eliminate as far as possible the ghostly element between people and to create natural communication, the peace of souls, it has invented the railway, the motor car, the aeroplane. But it's no longer any help, these are evidently inventions being made at the moment of crashing. The opposing side is so much calmer and stronger; after the postal service it has invented the telegraph, the telephone, the wireless. The spirits won't starve, but we will perish.

— Franz Kafka to Milena Jesensk, epigraph to John Durham Peters's book Speaking into the Air.

Story in last Saturday's Times on history of "Kumbaya"

CT Gov Wilbur Cross's Thanksgiving Proclamation 1936 — Peter
[Newark] Star-Ledger editorial about the History of Thanksgiving as a National Holiday
Brendan Byrne re Chris Christy: Too big to fail.
Now all [NJ?] political jokes are attributed to him.
  • I want to be buried in Jersey City so I can stay active in politics
  • I knew I wasn't governor any more when I got into the back seat of a car and we didn't go anywhere.
  • Now people wave at me with all five fingers.
Eagleton Institute's website —>Governors—>Brendan Byrne—> his humor

Send Despair Inc. to Weingart-Spitalniks

Beppe [Gambetta] album w/ Carlo Aonzo & David Grisman — "Songs of our Fathers"

Incident at Stop sign

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