I

“Dem Sonnengott”

Wo bist du? trunken dämmert die Seele mir
   Von aller deiner Wonne; denn eben ists,
      Daß ich gesehn, wie, müde seiner
         Fahrt, der entzückende Götterjüngling

Die jungen Locken badet' im Goldgewölk;
   Und jetzt noch blickt mein Auge von selbst nach ihm;
      Doch fern ist er zu frommen Völkern,
         Die ihn noch ehren, hinweggegengen.

Dich lieb ich, Erde ! trauerst du doch mit mir !
   Und unsre Trauer wandelt, wie Kinderschmerz,
      In Schlummer sich, und wie die Winde
         Flattern und flüstern im Saitenspiele,

Bis ihm des Meisters Finger den schönern Ton
   Entlockt, so spielen Nebel und Träum um uns,
      Bis der Geliebte wiederkömmt und
         Leben und Geist sich in uns entzündet.

—By Friedrich Hölderlin

II

A.
When the somewhat chunky, tall, strawberry blonde, hippy chick took my ticket for Red Road Saturday evening I didn't at first recognize her, though she did blurt out an unexpected “I know you” or similar, and then the circuit closed for her and she realized the commonality was the co-op, where she worked as a cashier and I purchased things as a drone, but as an “owner” according to my membership card. She should have said the same thing to J&C, who shop there more often than I do.

I remembered this this afternoon as I walked in the late afternoon sun to the co-op for a couple six-packs of water and some gut-enlarging chocolate milk. Once there and roaming the produce islands (not aisles) I encountered K, a former colleague who defended a syntax dissertation a couple years ago and who returned to Madison after a less than satisfactory experience in Bolivia. Earlier in the day I went to Woodman's, where I got more dairy as well as some braunschweiger, but I won't open it until I either bake or buy some sandwich bread.

mmm ... Liver sausage.

I grew up loving liver and onions and eat too rarely at mom-and-pop diners to get any on a regular basis. None of my colleagues like liver ... I swear, they're from another planet.

B.
The term used to be “hole in the wall,” Tom explained, but under the influence of a new orthography and history impaired generation—context-challenged, he said, was the proper nomenclature—businesses like his, little one or two person freelance operations that still preferred a brick and mortar location over an out-of-mom's-basement setup, were called “hole in the mall.” “Some kids,” he continued, “think it's whole in the mall, or even whole in the wall, if they're from the country and don't know much about malls.” Or that malls were the open spaces, the gathering places, not the enclosures.
     You're either guild or wandering Jew, union or temp, company man or consultant. Tom was a hired gun until the business took off and to get health and a 401K he joined a startup that got itself purchased by a multi-layered east coast publishing firm. The job? Formatting.
     Tom thought his idea had been novel. “You buy paperbacks, and they're mass-market or trade, in the U.S. about 110mm by 178mm for the former and 135mm by 216mm for the latter. But the thickness varies, some are 200 pages, some are 700, but all in this narrowly defined height and width range. But what if the thickness were fixed, say 200 or 250 or 300 pages, and the height and width varied on a book by book basis, some taller, some squatter, you know?” When asked what niche this was filling or problem it was solving Tom had several answers immediately available. “Two things are killing the book market these days: uniformity and the increasing thickness of the books out there. How do you tell them apart when they all have the same height and width, the same cover artists and photoshop gurus doing the cover fonts? And these five, six, seven hundred page monstrosities? Book one of a ten part series? The casual reader at best doesn't care and at worst is terrified by having to read that many words, and you don't make money marketing to the minority, those cultish fans who buy Robert Jordan's latest.”
     For a while Tom worked alone, reformatting and publishing classics that had fallen into the public domain, and then he was awarded a few local government contracts for publishing city ordinances and public records. When he started to get noticed he hired his girlfriend's younger sister as an assistant and then, later, as a full partner. Within two years they had gone regional, and when he found others doing the same job in other parts of the country a number got together, gathered some capital, and founded a small outfit with offices in a dozen U.S. cities. In less than a year Tom's dream was realized when a traditional publishing house, looking to extend its line, bought Tom's company and kept him on. “I wasn't meant for management,” he tells me, “So I was happy when I got to get back to what I loved about this in the first place—formatting the texts.”
     The books for kids they keep to 100 pages. No words from the author are altered, so Tom has to play with font size and shape, line spacing, margins, and the spacing between paragraphs. He tells me of a recently discovered manuscript. “The text was fifty pages at most, and although it was peppered with illustrations, they were tiny, and I was moving to a larger format. That is, I was making the pages smaller but I needed the pictures bigger, but we no longer had the originals, you see. They would have been decades old, had been drawn by a Holocaust victim, the originals were lost in the war and might be kept in the Hermitage, but it will be centuries before we know.”
     I nodded.
     “And I didn't have the authorization to commission new drawings, but I could enlarge what we had, but no matter how I scanned and saved them they were blocky, and didn't even look good if you were staring at them from across the room. But then I fell into a bit of luck, when I remembered that the protagonist of the story was nearly blind, and most of the drawings were of elves and pixies, so I just told my boss that the look of images represented how Sally, the girl in the English translation—I think she was Dietmar in the Czech edition, on which our version is based, from the lost Yiddish original, in which she was Sarah, so we're told—, sees the world, and we were calling the effect pixielation.”
     About the same time Tom got into publishing his step-half-sister, Nicole worked her way into the film world and then television. “I remember when Star Trek episodes were 50 minutes,” Tom muses, “but now everything is about 40, if you've got a one hour slot.” Nicole's niche is analogous to Tom's but in a different medium: the formatting of older television and movies to the 40-minute television slot.
     When I reached her by phone Nicole explained how this current work differs from what we're used to seeing. “If you're like me,” she started, “you're used to pan-and-scan, used to scenes being cut or cut out, swear words beeped or overdubbed, things like that.” These are just cheats, she says, and require little skill. “We're keeping the entire source and formatting it for the time frame and visual frame, with no information lost, only transformed.” R and even some PG-13 films are a problem, but she reminds me that network TV is not the only target, with cable TV and the DVD collection being larger markets. Broadcasters need consistently sized content, and they like showing older shows during holiday marathons; a generation of DVD owners who watch their television shows via weekend, season-long marathons also want bite-sized chunks, a predictable 40 minutes per episode.
     Adapting an eight to ninety minute feature film to a forty minute television episode poses few problem, but the two hour originals can be difficult to condense, Nicole admits. “Voice-overs can be a blessing because if there is silence before and after I an re-synchronize the video and audio by speeding up the video and getting rid of the gaps. I can save 20 to 30 percent here.” Action films are the easiest, she explains, because the frequent slow-motion scenes can be played at normal speed, reducing playback by half or more, and in fact she got her start on John Woo's Mission: Impossible II. “A fire during post-production,” she tells me, “consumed most of the original footage, and the industry hadn't transitioned yet to keeping digital masters. The stars had moved on to their next projects, and John wasn't happy with the re-shoots with new actors, so our team was brought in to extend the remaining film material into a feature.” The theatrical runtime is 123 minutes, but Nicole and her bosses had only thirty available, as well as some second unit material and several scenes with multiple takes and angles. “Digital effects and extensive slow-motion saved our asses,” she tells me, “and test audiences prefer the 40-minute version over the theatrical, and even it [the 40-minute edition] is longer than the film footage we had to work with, you know?”
     Nicole continues by telling me that most viewers don't notice a speed up of 130% even without digital correction of voices to account for distortion, and with correction—assuming clear enough diction in the original—a playback at 180% is comfortable for most viewers and listeners.
     Nicole feels that she is ready to make a career move opposite to that which her brother made: start her own company. “The market is not saturated, and there is a lot of growth potential. So far the focus has been on reformatting feature films for network and cable broadcast, and older, 50-minute episodes for today's 40-minute slot. But the possibility of broadcasting 40-minute dramas in the 20-minute frame of a half-hour syndication slot? Not yet explored.”

C.
When fleece cited a Kellnerin post in which Kellnerin linked to an old K5 post my interest was piqued, and in the middle of reading that old, 2003 diary I thought to myself, “Self, this seems awfully familiar,” especially once I got to the “criteria for novels you hate.” And then I saw that I had, in fact, posted a comment in said diary, and for some reason 2003 didn't seem that long ago.

Speaking of Boston, The Phoenix has their annual list of the 100 unsexiest men up for perusal. The Donald wins, beating Karl Rove, Don Imus, and Ann Coulter, among many others. Dustin Diamond didn't even make the top ten, settling instead for 28.

Jane magazine has a guide (not quite SFW) to breast health that provides a slideshow of “perfect breasts.”

Seventy percent of women say they are unhappy with their breasts. That might be because we don't often get to see what natural breasts look like, and are instead bombarded with false images of “perfection” that leave us feeling bad about ourselves. That's unacceptable. So we found 23 women—of all shapes and sizes—to pose topless and show the world that we're all perfect (which doesn't require a boob job).

Salon.com's Broadsheet comments and critiques: “Jane's execution falls short. Most of the blurbs accompanying the boobs don't stray very far from the aforementioned ‘false images of “perfection” that leave us feeling bad about ourselves.’ For instance, Misty, 23, says, ‘A girl at summer camp told me my boobs wouldn't grow. Look at me now, sucker!’”

When “Vicks” writes, “Evolution of language will never change the basic rules of grammar!” all I can do is respond: “Bzzt! Try again.”

III

“To the Sun God”

Where are you? Drunk, my mind becomes
   Twilight after all your ecstasy. For I just saw
      How the enrapturing young god,
         Tired from his journey,

Bathed his youthful hair in the golden clouds.
   And now my eyes follow after him,
      But he is gone away to reverent
         Nations which still honor him.

I love the earth, which mourns with me.
   Like children when they are upset, our grief
      Changes to sleep. And as rustling winds
         Whisper over harp strings

Until the fingers of a master entice
   A prettier music, thus mist and dreams
      Play around us, until the beloved returns,
         And charges us with life and spirit.

—Translated by James Mitchell