Zinzin

Observations (& Inspirations)

Observations (& Inspirations)

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Kerouac’s On the Road Scroll & Rauschenberg’s Automobile Tire Print

Jack Kerouac - On the Road manuscript scroll

Robert Rauschenberg - Automobile Tire Print

Two significant artifacts or two-lane blacktop events that came to mind immediately after posting our piece, Ruscha’s “Every Building on the Sunset Strip”: Plotting a motorized city, paper route style the other day was the similarity between Jack Kerouac’s (1951) 120-foot-long rant, Robert Rauschenberg’s (1953) 23-foot-long tire track, and Ed Ruscha’s (1966) 25-foot-long survey.

First a brief history of the Kerouac manuscript for On the Road. Kerouac produced the single-spaced text without commas or paragraph breaks on one massive continuous scroll in only three weeks. The 120-foot-long player-piano-like (Jelly) roll (Morton) was created by taping semi-translucent paper together and feeding it through his “That’s not writing, it’s typing” 1928 Underwood Portable typewriter. But oh what a typist he was; according to legend (or Allen Ginsberg), Kerouac was clocked at speeds approaching 110-120 words per minute on the straightaways and perhaps those speeds can be attributed to the “nearness” of Kerouac to the subject matter.

“His subject was himself and his method was to write as spontaneously as possible…What resulted he would later transcribe for forwarding to his publisher, but never revise, in principle he regarded revision as a form of lying.”
~The New York Times

“I’m just reading what I wrote all night. There are better things coming than what I wrote all night. Straight from the mind to the voice”.
~An excerpt from On The Road, Jack Kerouac Reads On the Road, Rykodisc (1999)

Straight from the mind to the voice. This desire or act of accepting /embracing things for what they are, flaws, flies in the ointment, warts and all, is a reoccurring aspect to Robert Rauschenberg’s work as well. Rauschenberg is perhaps best known for his late 1950s, early 1960s Combines. But for me Rauschenberg’s most significant work besides Erased de Kooning (1953), is his 1953 collaboration with his ‘printer and press’ John Cage entitled “Automobile Tire Print. This 23-foot-long “print” was executed with black house paint, twenty sheets of typewriter paper, and a Model A Ford one weekend on a semi-deserted street in in Lower Manhattan.

Unfortunately it rained. Fortunately it rained. Thankfully it rained. Just by chance it rained and everything was salvaged. Or as Rauschenberg explains in this wonderful 1999 interview at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art: ‘And I just poured the paint on the… it rained… and the paste didn’t really hold up too well… yeah I salvaged it all, but anyway it didn’t have to rain… and so I pored it in front and I told John to really… I poured it in front and I told John to drive just as straight as he could you know, be careful, keep going straight you know and John was fascinated by the fact we were doing this and he did a good job.’ Yes a lovely effort indeed.

Additional Video:

Unrolling the On The Road scroll:
“On the Road Again with Jack Kerouac and Robert Frank”
Indianapolis Museum of Art – IMA

Additional Audio:

Jack Kerouac’s Famous Scroll, ‘On the Road’ Again
National Public Radio: All Things Considered
by Andrea Shea
July 5, 2007

See also: “Tire,” by Roy Lichtenstein, which arrived in 1962, nine years after the Rauschenberg/Cage tire track print.

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Ruscha’s “Every Building on the Sunset Strip”: Plotting a motorized city, paper route style

Every Building on the Sunset Strip, Ed Ruscha

Click the image to enlarge. It is an excerpt from the 1966 Ed Ruscha book of photographs, Every Building on the Sunset Strip, a continuous folded print of exactly what the title says it is, over 296 inches long when unfolded (seen here in a slideshow).

From the Modernism 101 page for the book:

Starting in 1963, with the publication of Twentysix Gasoline Stations, Ruscha began a series of photographic art books that documented ordinary aspects of life in Los Angeles. For Every Building on the Sunset Strip, Ruscha mounted a motorized Nikon to the back of a pick-up truck and photographed every building he passed. The resulting book, with the pictures printed in order and labeled with their street numbers, achieved an effective non-judgemental and almost anthropological record of previously unexplored details and aspects of the urban experience. Ruscha exercised control over each step of the bookmaking process and with the use of inexpensive offset printing, standard paper, and simple, paperback bindings, he created a new genre of art book designed for commercial distributors rather than art galleries. Ruscha’s books, which became a staple of Conceptualism, were extremely influential to younger generations of artists.

… “The Sunset Strip satisfied one of Ruscha’s early ambitions: ‘In Oklahoma City, I delivered newspapers riding along on my bicycle with my dog. I dreamed about making a model of all the houses on that route, a tiny but detailed model that I could study like an architect standing over a table and plotting a city.’ As a result of his subsequent fascination with the Sunset Strip, this unrealized youthful idea resurfaced in a different form. Ruscha reportedly photographed the Sunset Strip with a motorized camera in a pickup truck in the time that it took to drive the two miles and back, but the piecing together of the photographs and the folding and gluing of the printed sheets by hand took more than nine months. Moreover, this was not a one-time photo shoot, for in 1979 Ruscha said that he had photographed all of the Sunset Strip in each of the previous five years. ‘I begin early on a Sunday morning when no one is around. I use a 250 Nikon, change the film real fast, and just go along and document [it].’ Indeed, the artist has continued to document the street to the present.”

Photographing an entire street from a pickup truck, using a motorized camera, also anticipates Google Street View, by forty-one years! Life imitates art imitates life. And Ruscha continues to re-photograph the Sunset Strip, as noted in an interview with the artist Richard Prince for the article, “Ed Ruscha: the original master of California cool has never been hotter,” in Interview magazine, July, 2005:

Richard Prince: “I hear you’re doing Every Building on the Sunset Strip again [published by Steidl as Then & Now]. What’s there right now?”

Ed Ruscha: “I photograph it every year or so. Anytime I get up to the Strip I’m confronted by two things: How many buildings still do exist, and how much things have changed. But they will soon be doing plenty of Rambo-Vegas-style projects that will span Sunset Boulevard with skywalk bridges and mirrored escalator malls that will be cruel to the eyes. It’s cancerous and ultimately fatal. I wish time would stand still.”

The art critic Dave Hickey writes in a January, 1997 ArtForum article about Ruscha’s earlier book, Twentysix Gasoline Stations, and the process of “reading” the book as analogous to reading a map or going on a journey, “speaking to us in some odd language of analogue and incarnation.” Hickey continues,

In that moment, I became an art critic – or, more precisely, an art dealer, since I bought all five books. Because it wasn’t just personal. Ruscha’s book nailed something that, for my generation, needed to be nailed: the Pop-Minimalist vision of the Road. Jack Kerouac had nailed the ecstatic, beatnik Road. Ken Kesey and Neal Cassady were, at that moment, nailing the acid-hippie Road, and now Ruscha had nailed the road through realms of absence – that exquisite, iterative progress through the domain of names and places, through vacant landscapes of windblown, ephemeral language.

Books by Ed Ruscha:

Twentysix Gasoline Stations, 1963
Various Small Fires, 1964
Some Los Angeles Apartments, 1965
Every Building on the Sunset Strip, 1966
Thirtyfour Parking Lots, 1967
Royal Road Test, 1967 (with Mason Williams and Patrick Blackwell)
Business Cards, 1968 (with Billy Al Bengston)
Nine Swimming Pools and a Broken Glass, 1968
Crackers, 1969 (with Mason Williams)
Real Estate Opportunities, 1970
Babycakes with Weights, 1970
A Few Palm Trees, 1971
Records, 1971
Dutch Details, 1971
Colored People, 1972
Hard Light, 1978 (with Lawrence Weiner)
Country Cityscapes, 2001
ME and THE, 2002
Ed Ruscha and Photography, 2004 (with Sylvia Wolf)
OH / NO, 2008
Dirty Baby, 2010 (with Nels Cline and David Breskin)

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On the Road with Garry Winogrand

As a follow-up to Sightseeing with Garry Winogrand, we uncovered an image of a late Winogrand contact sheet of Los Angeles photos (see below) on a 2007 blog post by a blogger named “J.T.”, who offers his own take on Winogrand’s late work. J.T. begins by ruminating on “Figments of the Real World, Winogrand’s massive, out of print 1988 MOMA monograph,” from which he quotes several passages, interspersed with his own commentary. The first thing he mentions from the catalog are more exact numbers for Winogrand’s unseen output near the end of his life: “At the time of his death, it was discovered that Winogrand had been sitting on 2,500 rolls of exposed, but undeveloped film, and an additional 6,500 rolls of developed, but unproofed, film. That’s 9,000 rolls of film that he shot but never bothered to look at.”

The thing we found most interesting, however, is that J.T. came to a similar conclusion as us, that Winogrand, in the end, had become more of a conceptual artist than the “street photographer” he had been and is known for: “Could it be possible that, through these tectonic shifts in methodology, Winogrand was undergoing an honest-to-god sea change in his approach to his medium (a change that privileged the act, not the results?) Is it an accident that the late contact sheets bear more than a passing resemblance to the medium-subverting projects of John Baldessari and Ed Ruscha? Was Garry Winogrand becoming–in his own stubborn, round-about, contrarian way–a conceptual artist?”

A change that privileged the act, not the results. Whether Winogrand “lost his mind” or “evolved his thinking” is a moot point. We have to take what he left the world and make of it what we will. And if most of the images are more interesting as part of a conceptual idea than as individual images, then so be it, because the idea is really interesting, a gift to the future from a dying artist who remains a force to be reckoned with.

Garry Winogrand contact sheet 1982-83
(Click image to enlarge)

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Let Me Be Your Teddy Bass

This is the first in a series of posts in which I will be exploring fictional characters names. For the foreseeable future I will be focusing these character studies on the bad guys, bosses, brutes, bullies, degenerates, despots, deviants, dirt bags, felons, gangsters good-for-nothings, goons, heavies, hoodlums, hooligans, intimidators, kingpins, knaves, louts, miscreants, oppressors, psychos, rapscallions, rascals, reprobates, rouges, ruffians scalawags, scoundrels, thugs, tough guys, troublemakers, tyrants, villains, wise guys, wrongdoers, and evil doers. Why? simply because villains tend to be colorful characters, and as Jay Chiat said “I’d rather be a pirate than be in the navy.”

Character Study No.1: Teddy Bass

The name of Ian McShane’s character, Teddy Bass, from the 2000 film Sexy Beast, sounds harmless enough at first blush, a metaphorical mashup of equal parts lingerie (teddy, a camisole top and panties), plush and cuddly stuffed animal (teddy bear), and extraneous boondoggling buffoon white elephant in the room, Big Mouth Billy Bass. Think Elvis playing his own hillbilly-strawberry-blond-wig-wearing cousin in the epic Kissin’ Cousins.

Baby let me be,
Your lovin teddy bear
Put a chain around my neck,
And lead me anywhere
Oh let me be
Your teddy bear.

(“(Let Me Be Your) Teddy Bear” by Kal Mann and Bernie Lowe and published in 1957 by Gladys Music.)

But make no mistake, Teddy Bass is a not your Teddy Bear, lovin’ or otherwise. He is what McShane describes as an “interpretation of the male macho and misogyny of all different kinds of male animals.” He is a monolithic black hole of pure evil incarnate, a hedonist, and a sociopath to-boot. He sails down the streets of London, leaving in his wake a bloody shambles of devastation. He is simply the scariest cat you are likely to have the misfortune of meeting.

Please allow me to introduce myself
I’m a man of wealth and taste
I’ve been around for a long, long year
Stole many a man’s soul and fate

Pleased to meet you
Hope you guess my name, oh yeah

Are you Teddy Pendergrass? No. Digression No.1: Teddy Pendergrass was a vocalist for Harold Melvin & the Blue Notes on the hit, “If You Don’t Know Me by Now.”

Are you one of The Teddy Bears? No. Digression No.2: The Teddy Bears was Phil Spector’s first vocal group. “To Know Him Is to Love Him” was a hit song that Spector wrote for The Teddy Bears, inspired by words on his father’s tombstone: “To Know Me Is To Love Me.”

Are you Teddy Roosevelt? No. Digression No. 3: “The name Teddy Bear comes from former United States President Theodore Roosevelt, whose nickname was ‘Teddy’. The name originated from an incident on a bear hunting trip in Mississippi in November 1902. A suite of Roosevelt’s attendants, led by Holt Collier, cornered, clubbed, and tied an American Black Bear to a willow tree after a long exhausting chase with hounds. They called Roosevelt to the site and suggested that he should shoot it. He refused to shoot the bear himself, deeming this unsportsmanlike, but instructed that the bear be killed to put it out of its misery, and it became the topic of a political cartoon by Clifford Berryman in The Washington Post on November 16, 1902. While the initial cartoon of an adult black bear lassoed by a handler and a disgusted Roosevelt had symbolic overtones, later issues of that and other Berryman cartoons made the bear smaller and cuter.”

But enough digressions, let’s get back to Mr. Bass. On paper or screen his surname could be read as either Bass (pronounced “base”) as in a low-pitched sound or tone, the tones in the lowest register of an instrument, a male singing voice of the lowest range, an instrument that sounds within this range, deep, low, resonant, sonorous, deep-tones. “Base” and treble? Bass and trouble? And this haunting tone is wonderfully evoked in Teddy’s theme, aptly titled “Teddy the Beast,” from the Sexy Beast soundtrack by Roque Baños (Edeltone 2001). One can almost hear the three Macbeth witches chanting “Double, double toil and trouble; Fire burn, and caldron bubble,” as a chorus to this creepy, eerie and utterly hypnotic theme, which by the way is embedded in the illustration for this article, above.

Sexy Beast. Most lingerie teddies, also referred to as camiknickers, are designed for maximum sex appeal. Our Teddy Bass is no exception, he is a very sexy garment indeed, and under closer examination bears a passing resemblance to the raciest black jaguar Brit of them all, Bryan Ferry.

Being evil is no picnic. “Teddy Bears’ Picnic” is a song consisting of a melody by American composer John Walter Bratton. It remains popular as a children’s song, having been recorded by numerous artists over the decades. “If you go down in the woods today / you’re sure of a big surprise….”

More unsportsmanlike conduct. Although the East-End accents in this film take about a half an hour to adjust to — and after seeing this film three times I still mistake the protagonist’s name, which is Gail, as Gal, rather than “Gale” — I believe Teddy’s last name is pronounced “Bass” as in any of various marine fishes of the family serranidae, such as the sea bass and the striped bass. Or does he originate from the black, largemouth or foulmouth Bass varieties? Either way it is safe to say Teddy’s adversaries sleep with the fishes or end up on the wrong end of a Super Bass-o-Matic ’76.

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Chance encounters: A history of the Frisco Railroad name and logo

Frisco logo and raccoon skin inspiration

Like many, we always assumed that “Frisco,” the nickname out-of-towner’s often use for our fair city of San Francisco, was derived from “Francisco.” We were wrong. Here is the great story of the origins of the Frisco Railroad name and logo, a railroad that operated in the Midwest and South Central U.S. from 1876 to 1980. It is taken from 100 Years of Service, a booklet produced by the railroad in 1960 on the occasion of its centennial (the precursors of the Frisco Railroad began operating in 1860):

Few employees of the Frisco Railroad are acquainted with the history of the Frisco emblem or insignia which appears on timetables, advertising material, annual reports, calendars, etc., and is used by Employee Clubs on the railroad in making up their yearbooks.

Several years ago a pageant was given at Springfield, Mo., which told the history of that city on Frisco Lines, and after much research the story of how the Frisco emblem came into being, was uncovered. The story is authentic, and was compiled by Miss Eula Mae Stratton, employed in the Springfield General Office.

Before the turn of the century, so the old timers say, Mr. G.H. Nettleton, then Vice-President of the railroad (which was then known as the old KCM&B) was making an inspection tour of the system. The train pulled into the station of Neosho, Mo., (some old timers say it was Carthage, but most historians say it was Neosho), with the private car stopping in view of the west end of the depot building on which was tacked a coon hide to dry.

When Mr. Nettleton saw the coon hide, he immediately summoned the agent (Sam Albright, so the story goes)…to the business car.

“What’s that thing tacked onto the depot?” roared the Vice-President…”and just why are we using company property for tanning hides?”

We are told that Sam, not a soft-spoken man anyway, and a very busy railroader, told the Vice-President that it was hard to support a family on the $1.25 per ten hour day railroading, and that he was catching, tanning and selling coon hides to supplement his salary.

“Don’t you know railroading comes first?” said the Vice-President, and then to Sam’s surprise the Vice-President grinned and said…”Well, having a hobby is OK. How much will you take for that coon skin?”

The story goes that Sam was so startled that he blurted out…”Two bucks.”

And the deal was closed, leaving Sam in wonderment as to what on earth the official wanted with the pelt.

But it was not long afterward until an ink outline of the tightly stretched coon hide began to appear on Frisco drawing boards in the General Office Drafting Room in St. Louis, but instead of hanging up-and-down, the hide was turned horizontally.

Since the St. Louis-San Francisco Railway is made up of a number of smaller roads, some of which were — the old Southwest Branch, the Pacific Railroad, the KCM&B and others, with General Offices in St. Louis (and at one time before the Civil War the Frisco and Santa Fe operated jointly into San Francisco, Calif) it was only logical to combine the “F R” from Francisco,…the “I S” from the latter part of St. Louis, and the “C O” for Company, which produced…

F R I S C O

[which was] inserted inside the coon skin outline.

Early in 1900 many documents carried the emblem and in 1904, the time cards came out with the now well known cut.

The emblem is the pride of all Frisco employees, as it stands for service to shippers and passengers in the nine state territory.

(The original coon skin from which the emblem was visualized, is now in a frame in the General Office Building in St. Louis, Mo.)

We were amazed to discover how an iconic logo shape was derived from a stretched raccoon skin discovered by chance on, naturally, a railroad journey. It’s a great example of how you never know exactly when and where inspiration will strike, and how something that might appear to be a “throwaway” or even actively marring your brand presentation just might possibly lead you to something very important. And like all great brands, this one keeps on giving, long after its “death.”

October 31, 1929, just days after the start of the stock market slide that triggered the Great Depression, the early country music duo Darby and Tarlton released a record called, “Lonesome Frisco Line,” presented here via YouTube (crank it up loud):

And while the Railroad itself may be gone, the name and logo live on in the town of Frisco, Texas, a rapidly growing suburb of Dallas, named after the railroad that birthed it long ago:

When the Dallas area was being settled by American pioneers, many of the settlers traveled by wagon trains along the old Shawnee Trail. This trail was also used for cattle drives north from Austin. This trail later became the Preston Trail, and later, Preston Road. Preston Road is one of the oldest North South Roads in all of Texas. With all of this activity, the community of Lebanon was founded along this trail and granted a U.S. post office in 1860. In 1902, a line of the St. Louis-San Francisco Railway was being built through the area, and periodic watering holes were needed along the rails for the steam engines. The current settlement of Lebanon was on the Preston Ridge and was thus too high in elevation, so the watering hole was placed about four miles (6 km) to the west on lower ground. A community grew around this train stop. Residents of Lebanon actually moved their houses to the new community on logs. The new town was originally named Emerson, but that name was rejected by the U.S. Postal Service as being too similar to another town in Texas. In 1904, the residents chose Frisco City in honor of the St. Louis-San Francisco Railway on which the town was founded, later shortened to its present name.

Frisco Texas water tower

And now for something completely different. Digging deeper into “Frisco” via the Oxford English Dictionary, we discovered that it is also a great, old, obsolete English word meaning, “A brisk movement in dancing; a caper.” Here are the only usage examples given by the OED:

1520(?): J. Rastell Nature .iiii. Elem. — That shall both daunce & spryng‥with fryscas & with gambawdis round.

1566: J. Partridge Worthie Hystorie Plasidas — With fetching frischoes here and there.

1598: R. Barckley Disc. Felicitie of Man — He fetched at the last such a frisco, that he fell downe and brake his necke.

1608: R. Armin Nest of Ninnies — Shee longed to heare his friscoes morrallised, and his gambals set downe.

1675: H. Teonge Diary  — Having taken their frisco, returnd as they cam.

That last one brings us full circle: Having taken our FRISCO, we returned as we came. This train across time is still chugging along, “thinking of those rocky hills ahead,” but it’s time for us to get off.

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Henry Miller’s Eleven Commandments (and naming)

Henry Miller times three

Lists of Note has posted the great writer Henry Miller’s list of 11 commandments, which he wrote for himself to follow. I have annotated Miller’s list (in bold, below) with my observations about how each of his commandments can be applied to various aspects of the naming process.

The Eleven Commandments

  1. Work on one thing at a time until finished. Keep your attention focused on the task at hand. Set aside time and space free from the distractions of the Internet, social media and telephones to concentrate on your naming project. In the words of Buckminster Fuller, “Thinking is a momentary dismissal of irrelevancies.”
  2. Start no more new books, add no more new material to “Black Spring.” Recognize when a project is finished, and be prepared to move on.
  3. Don’t be nervous. Work calmly, joyously, recklessly on whatever is in hand. As we’ve said in our Manifesto, naming should be fun and you have to set a positive tone.
  4. Work according to Program and not according to mood. Stop at the appointed time! Another way to say this is to keep the project as objective as possible by staying focused on the brand positioning, not on subjective reactions to names.
  5. When you can’t create you can work. Don’t wait for “inspiration.” If you don’t feel as if any good, creative names are resulting from your process at any given time, don’t force it or stress out. Do some other related work to feed your fires: reading, research, making lists. Henry is right: you can’t always create, but you can always work. And don’t underestimate the value of hard work. To quote the late, great Cy Twombly: “When I work, I work very fast, but preparing to work can take any length of time.”
  6. Cement a little every day, rather than add new fertilizers. Diligence and perseverance. Try to make some kind of progress every day, or at least increase your understanding of the process.
  7. Keep human! See people, go places, drink if you feel like it. Allow life and real world experience to inspire and inform your naming process. Don’t get stuck in abstractions and ruts. Burn your thesaurus (don’t worry, it’ll still be there for you online when you really need it.)
  8. Don’t be a draught-horse! Work with pleasure only. See number three, above.
  9. Discard the Program when you feel like it—but go back to it next day. Concentrate. Narrow down. Exclude. Give yourself flexibility to grow and adapt, but keep bringing the focus back to the project and the brand positioning (see number four, above). As the project progresses, it should become ever more focused.
  10. Forget the books you want to write. Think only of the book you are writing. Don’t force all the great names in your head into the current project. Think only of the specific positioning of the current project, and make sure all names under consideration map strongly to that positioning.
  11. Write first and always. Painting, music, friends, cinema, all these come afterwards. Naming comes first. After that, the rest is gravy, icing, spice, and all other food metaphors.

(Source: Henry Miller on Writing, via Lists of Note.)

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Fallen Flags

A Fallen Flag is a rather poetic term that refers to a railroad company that is no longer in existence due to bankruptcy or merger. Since the late 1950s the North American railroad industry has undergone an epic brand consolidation. In fact, presently only four Class I railroads still exist under their original names. The surviving brands are the Canadian National Railway, Canadian Pacific Railway, Kansas City Southern Railway, and Union Pacific Railroad. Why is this important? I am not sure, but I came across this logo of a Fallen Flag while on a recent stroll and did a little research. Yes I read cereal boxes as well.

Southern Pacific railroad

1959: Southern Pacific moved more ton-miles of freight than any other US railroad.

1965: Southern Pacific’s bid for control of the Western Pacific is rejected by the ICC.

1967: SP opens the longest stretch of new railroad construction in a quarter century as the first trains roll over the Palmdale Cutoff through Cajon Pass.

May 1, 1971: Amtrak takes over long-distance passenger operations in the United States; the only SP revenue passenger trains thereafter were the commutes between San Francisco and San Jose.

1980: Now owning a 98.34% control of the Cotton Belt.

1984: The Southern Pacific Company merges into Santa Fe Industries parent of the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway, to form Santa Fe Southern Pacific Corporation.

1985: New Caltrain locomotives and rolling stock replace SP equipment on the Peninsula Commute, marking the end of Southern Pacific passenger service with SP equipment.

October 13, 1988: Rio Grande Industries, parent of the Rio Grande Railroad, takes control of the Southern Pacific Railroad. The merged company retains the name “Southern Pacific” for all railroad operations.

1989: Southern Pacific acquires 223 miles of former Alton trackage between St. Louis and Joliet from the Chicago, Missouri & Western. This marks the first time that the Southern Pacific has served the Chicago area on its own rails.

March 17, 1991: The Southern Pacific changes its corporate image, replacing the century-old Roman Lettering with the Rio Grande-inspired Speed Lettering.

1992: Northwestern Pacific is merged into SP, ending NWP’s existence as a corporate subsidiary of SP and leaving the Cotton Belt as SP’s only remaining major railroad subsidiary. Of interesting note, the Northwestern Pacific’s south end would be sold off by UP, and turned into a “new” Northwestern Pacific.

1996: The Union Pacific Railroad finishes the acquisition that was effectively begun almost a century before with the purchase of the Southern Pacific by UP in 1901, until divestiture was ordered in 1913. Ironically, although Union Pacific was the dominant company, taking complete control of SP, its corporate structure was merged into Southern Pacific, which on paper became the “surviving company”; which then changed its name to Union Pacific.

1996: The merged company retains the name “Union Pacific” for all railroad operations.

See also: Fallen Flag: Ouabache / Wabash

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Don DeLillo on writing, words and language

Don DeLillo with feline friendDon DeLillo is arguably the greatest American novelist alive. I can’t think of another who is simultaneously as intelligent, risky, and willing to explore new and different material in nearly every book. I just discovered a great 1993 Paris Review interview with Don DeLillo by Adam Begley, which, in Paris Review author interview tradition, is very deep and well-constructed.

Everyone interested in writing, thinking, and recent American culture and history (Americana!) should read this interview, regardless of whether you are a fan of DeLillo’s novels or not. It’s as relevant today, perhaps even more so, as it was in 1993, in the fading light of the 20th century.

Just go read the whole interview, right now. But if you want a teaser, here are some moments that especially struck me:

Writing is a concentrated form of thinking. I don’t know what I think about certain subjects, even today, until I sit down and try to write about them.

…and it was through Joyce that I learned to see something in language that carried a radiance, something that made me feel the beauty and fervor of words, the sense that a word has a life and a history.

…A writer takes earnest measures to secure his solitude and then finds endless ways to squander it.

…I used to find ways to save a paragraph or a sentence, maybe by relocating it. Now I look for ways to discard things. If I discard a sentence I like, it’s almost as satisfying as keeping a sentence I like.

…There’s a zone I aspire to. Finding it is another question. It’s a state of automatic writing, and it represents the paradox that’s at the center of a writer’s consciousness—this writer’s anyway. First you look for discipline and control. You want to exercise your will, bend the language your way, bend the world your way. You want to control the flow of impulses, images, words, faces, ideas. But there’s a higher place, a secret aspiration. You want to let go. You want to lose yourself in language, become a carrier or messenger. The best moments involve a loss of control. It’s a kind of rapture, and it can happen with words and phrases fairly often—completely surprising combinations that make a higher kind of sense, that come to you out of nowhere. But rarely for extended periods, for paragraphs and pages—I think poets must have more access to this state than novelists do.

…When my head is in the typewriter the last thing on my mind is some imaginary reader. I don’t have an audience; I have a set of standards.

…But the basic work is built around the sentence. This is what I mean when I call myself a writer. I construct sentences. There’s a rhythm I hear that drives me through a sentence. And the words typed on the white page have a sculptural quality. They form odd correspondences. They match up not just through meaning but through sound and look…. I’m completely willing to let language press meaning upon me. Watching the way in which words match up, keeping the balance in a sentence—these are sensuous pleasures.

That last paragraph is also a great description of the act of creating names for companies and products. But let’s continue our stroll through this interview:

…The novel’s not dead, it’s not even seriously injured, but I do think we’re working in the margins, working in the shadows of the novel’s greatness and influence…. Everything in the culture argues against the novel, particularly the novel that tries to be equal to the complexities and excesses of the culture…. But sometimes it’s a literature too ready to be neutralized, to be incorporated into the ambient noise. This is why we need the writer in opposition, the novelist who writes against power, who writes against the corporation or the state or the whole apparatus of assimilation. We’re all one beat away from becoming elevator music.

…I want to give pleasure through language, through the architecture of a book or a sentence and through characters who may be funny, nasty, violent, or all of these.

…Who wins the struggle for the imagination of the world? There was a time when the inner world of the novelist—Kafka’s private vision and maybe Beckett’s—eventually folded into the three-dimensional world we were all living in. These men wrote a kind of world narrative. And so did Joyce in another sense. Joyce turned the book into a world with Ulysses and Finnegans Wake…. World news is the novel people want to read. It carries the tragic narrative that used to belong to the novel.

…Film allows us to examine ourselves in ways earlier societies could not—examine ourselves, imitate ourselves, extend ourselves, reshape our reality. It permeates our lives, this double vision, and also detaches us, turns some of us into actors doing walk-throughs. In my work, film and television are often linked with disaster. Because this is one of the energies that charges the culture. TV has a sort of panting lust for bad news and calamity as long as it is visual. We’ve reached the point where things exist so they can be filmed and played and replayed…. Think about the images most often repeated. The Rodney King videotape or the Challenger disaster or Ruby shooting Oswald. These are the images that connect us the way Betty Grable used to connect us in her white swimsuit, looking back at us over her shoulder in the famous pinup. And they play the tape again and again and again and again. This is the world narrative, so they play it until everyone in the world has seen it.

…The important thing about the paranoia in my characters is that it operates as a form of religious awe.

There you have some nutshells, but go read the full interview for the nuts. Or as DeLillo wrote in a note to the interviewer when he returned the final, edited manuscript, “This is not only the meat but the potatoes.”

As someone who names things for a living, I aspire “to lose [my]self in language, become a carrier or messenger.” And since this post has come back around to naming, here’s one last excerpt, because it relates very specifically to naming and branding and the hallucinatory aspects of this business, from a discussion of the amazing novel White Noise:

INTERVIEWER: Could you tell me about the passage in White Noise in which Jack listens to his daughter Steffie talking in her sleep, and she is repeating the words Toyota Celica?

DeLILLO: There’s something nearly mystical about certain words and phrases that float through our lives. It’s computer mysticism. Words that are computer generated to be used on products that might be sold anywhere from Japan to Denmark—words devised to be pronounceable in a hundred languages. And when you detach one of these words from the product it was designed to serve, the word acquires a chantlike quality. Years ago somebody decided—I don’t know how this conclusion was reached—that the most beautiful phrase in the English language was cellar door. If you concentrate on the sound, if you disassociate the words from the object they denote, and if you say the words over and over, they become a sort of higher Esperanto. This is how Toyota Celica began its life. It was pure chant at the beginning. Then they had to find an object to accommodate the words.

I couldn’t think of a better description of what it means to be a namer: looking to find an object to accommodate the words. For our clients, of course, they are just looking for the words to accommodate their product (“object”). But I see things in reverse. The words are here, waiting be be born as names — it’s the job of our clients to bring the objects to be named. Toyota Celica, cellar door.