Fresca improved a paragraph by Adam Gopnik. Boy did she ever.
Slywy found an abandoned general store, and its history.
Friday, April 7, 2023
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Michael Leddy“Orange Crate Art” is a song by Van Dyke Parks and the title of a 1995 album by Van Dyke Parks and Brian Wilson. “Orange Crate Art” is for me one of the great American songs: “Orange crate art was a place to start.”
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Nancy, October 19, 1950.
“‘Meticulous,’ ‘commendable,’ ‘intricate’”
Michael Leddy
Don’t look for premiums or
coupons, as the cost of
the thoughts blended in
ORANGE CRATE ART pro-
hibits the use of them.
Comments are welcome, appended to posts or by e-mail.
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Words to live by
Life is to be lived, not controlled; and humanity is won by continuing to play in the face of certain defeat.
Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man
*
Νέος ἐφ’ ἡμέρῃ ἥλιος. [The sun is new every day.]
Heraclitus
*
Every day is a new deal.
Harvey Pekar, “Alice Quinn”
*
Nos plus grandes craintes, comme nos plus grandes espérances, ne sont pas au-dessus de nos forces, et nous pouvons finir par dominer les unes et réaliser les autres. [Our worst fears, like our greatest hopes, are not outside our powers, and we can come in the end to triumph over the former and to achieve the latter.]
Marcel Proust, Finding Time Again
*
Surely, in the light of history, it is more intelligent to hope rather than to fear, to try rather than not to try.
Eleanor Roosevelt, You Learn by Living
*
I don’t really deeply feel that anyone needs an airtight reason for quoting from the works of writers he loves, but it’s always nice, I’ll grant you, if he has one.
J.D. Salinger, Seymour: An Introduction
*
L’attention est la forme la plus rare et la plus pure de la générosité. [Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.]
Simone Weil, in a letter
Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man
*
Νέος ἐφ’ ἡμέρῃ ἥλιος. [The sun is new every day.]
Heraclitus
*
Every day is a new deal.
Harvey Pekar, “Alice Quinn”
*
Nos plus grandes craintes, comme nos plus grandes espérances, ne sont pas au-dessus de nos forces, et nous pouvons finir par dominer les unes et réaliser les autres. [Our worst fears, like our greatest hopes, are not outside our powers, and we can come in the end to triumph over the former and to achieve the latter.]
Marcel Proust, Finding Time Again
*
Surely, in the light of history, it is more intelligent to hope rather than to fear, to try rather than not to try.
Eleanor Roosevelt, You Learn by Living
*
I don’t really deeply feel that anyone needs an airtight reason for quoting from the works of writers he loves, but it’s always nice, I’ll grant you, if he has one.
J.D. Salinger, Seymour: An Introduction
*
L’attention est la forme la plus rare et la plus pure de la générosité. [Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.]
Simone Weil, in a letter
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comments: 12
I’m not too sure about changing Gopnik’s “humming self-confidence” to just plain “self-confidence”. This seems to be something from the kill all adverbs and adjectives school. Not all self-confidences are the same: quiet, humming, unexpected, et cetera.
Here’s a thought: is “I heart ❤️ it” some sort of tautology or wrong wording as ❤️ is a substitute for “love” (at least in the original “I ❤️ NY” advertising campaign)?
Here’s another thought: how many examples of “Muphry’s Law” [sic] have I committed in this comment?
Steven
I don’t use heart in that way, but Merriam-Webster does have it as a verb. Do you mean using both the emoji and the word, one after the other? I’m not sure why someone would do that.
The things that most struck me in Gopnik’s paragraph: the use of is in sentence after sentence and the pile of prepositional phrases. A perfect candidate for Richard Lanham’s paramedic method for revising prose. Since everything in that passage is about steady, ongoing well-being, humming seems a little affected to me. Maybe Fresca (who has comments turned off) will weigh in here on the word.
I believe that the whole “I heart…” pattern and dictionary inclusion as a verb stems from the release of the movie "I ♥ Huckabees” (2004). Theatres marquees (remmeber marquees?) and print sources that lacked the heart character (emojis weren’t that common) needed a way to represent the titular ♥ so they went for the literal “heart” giving “I Heart Huckabees". I guess that there were enough people who didn’t remember the 1977 NY ad campaign so they didn’t use “Love".
My observation was that “I heart ♥ it” could be read as “I heart heart it”. But, it should be read as “I heart love it”.
Ah, now I get it. I think it’s odd to use the heart and the word both. Maybe the emoji is supposed to be for clarity?
Oh, yeah—I cut “humming” because it’s specific, too specific in this case.
I mean, did Gopnik really mean to say that embellishments reflect onlyhumming self-confidence? Seems unlikely, and weird if he did mean that.
I got in the habit of using both an emoji and the related word (❤️ and “love” or “heart”)
because on low-tech devices like flip phones (a dear friend has a flip phone),
emojis don’t always show up as themselves—sometimes they’re just a square or something.
I figure people can figure out what I mean if both the word and the emoji.
PS Michael, you might know— what’s the name of the empty/broken box that appears when your tech doesn’t support an emoji?
I went looking for a name and found “tofu”. I guess the blank box looks like a block of plain tofu!
I like it—it expresses an emotional blank as well:
I’ve been frustrated when a writer counts on me seeing their emoji to understand their mood,
and I get tofu instead.
PPS I used the heart emoji because I was thinking of “ I ❤️NY”, designed, as you know, by Glaser,the subject of Gopnik’s article. I don’t usually use emojis in a blog post, but I use them a lot in texts (which is why I’m aware they don’t always show up).
And finally—thanks for asking, shallnot and Michael. Fun question!
Aha — so it is for clarity. Thank you, Fresca.
I’ve had a number of fails using emoji in texts to non-iOS users. But I've never seen an empty box on my end, and I didn’t know that it was called tofu. I now see that there’s an app called Tofu Destroyer for displaying emoji properly on Android devices.
Yes, you were right, Michael—the ❤️/heart was for clarity.
And one more note from me, to say I enjoyed seeing Slywy's post about the abandoned general store---thanks for the roundup, Michael!
You’re most welcome, Fresca.
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