From an essay by Suzanne Snider on the history of the legal pad:
Explaining the origins of the yellow legal pad is as difficult as explaining consumers' attraction to it. But the attraction does seem to be there: The yellow-to-white sales ratio can be as high as 2 to 1, as it is at University Stationery in New York City, near New York University and The New School University.Link: Old Yeller: The illustrious history of the yellow legal pad (via Armand Frasco's Notebookism)
Last week I discovered David Frauenfelder's blog Breakfast with Pandora ("For a Diet Rich in Myth and Logos," says the subtitle). One post that I found particularly engaging comments on a passage from Iliad 1 as translated by Stanley Lombardo and Robert Fagles. Achilles is promising Agamemnon generous compensation if he will return the captive woman Chryseis (whose father is a priest of Apollo and has asked that god to send a plague upon the Achaean forces). Here is the passage in Lombardo's translation:
All right, you give the girl back to the god. The armyAnd here's Frauenfelder's comment:
Will repay you three and four times over -- when and if
Zeus allows us to rip Troy down to its foundations.
Robert Fagles' translation was trumpeted when it came out in the early nineties, but it looks like a tricycle next to Lombardo's Ferrari.These paragraphs are a great example of how to characterize tone in a persuasive way: the clichéd loftiness of "massive ramparts" becomes instantly clear.
Fagles cannot resist retaining just a little of that formal diction that makes readers go cold. . . :
So return the girl to the god, at least for now.
We Achaeans will pay you back, three, four times
over,
if Zeus will grant us the gift, somehow, someday,
to raze Troy's massive ramparts to the ground.
By boiling down "raze Troy's massive ramparts to the ground" to "rip Troy down to its foundations," Lombardo saves only one word, but over the course of the poem these add up. Plus, who wants to read "raze" when "rip" will do just as well or better? And why would you put "massive ramparts" unless you wanted someone to read the translation in a Monty Pythonesque voice ("HUGE tracts o' land")?
I'm biased, yes. Maybe there are Fagles enthusiasts out there. I came from Richmond Lattimore's translation, which is very close to the Greek, but which, as my mentor used to say, always sounds better after you've gotten through the better part of a pitcher of beer.
From the BBC:
The distant world whose discovery prompted leading astronomers to demote Pluto from the rank of "planet" has now been given its own official name.Enchiladas, anyone?
Having caused so much consternation in the International Astronomical Union (IAU), the object has been called Eris, after the Greek goddess of discord.
Twelve stringed instruments made by John and Rudy Dopyera, along with two workbenches, are being offered are for sale as a collection. From the Elderly Instruments website:
The Dopyera brothers were born in what is now Slovakia, and came to the U.S. with the wave of Eastern European immigrants around the beginning of the 20th century. (In fact, the word "Dobro" is both a contraction of "DOpyera BROthers" and the word for "good" in their native tongue.) Engineers, tinkerers, businessmen, and accomplished musicians (their family had a history of violin making going back centuries, and Rudy was by many accounts an exceptionally talented and soulful Gypsy-style violinist), the two Dopyera brothers combined their Old World skills and traditions with the booming technology and futuristic tastes in art of pre-WWII America. Who else thought that spun aluminum might be a good material for sound projection? Who else engraved beautiful Art Deco designs on the bodies of their guitars? Only the Dopyeras.The instruments shown on the Elderly website are fantastic - i.e., "so extreme as to challenge belief" (Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary). Who could resist something called the Troika Resophonic Balalaika? Best of all: the Dopyera Resonator Violin, its body looking like a pair of metal colanders painted gold.
The unusual, experimental, and mostly one-of-a-kind instruments in this collection – John’s unusual (and spectacular sounding!) resophonic violin, Rudy’s balalaika-inspired Lullabyka, the Art Deco-influenced steel body uke and tenor guitar, even the actual workbench on which John perfected the fabled tri-cone resonator system – are uniquely American (and uniquely Dopyera) innovations.
Life is tragic simply because the earth turns and the sun inexorably rises and sets, and one day, for each of us, the sun will go down for the last, last time. Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, which is the only fact we have.James Baldwin, "Down at the Cross: Letter from a Region of My Mind," in The Fire Next Time (1963)
Seen on the side of a box of teabags (Lipton, I think):
Tea is not a substitute for fruits and vegetables.
Two years ago:
"If you're going to be this uptight and worried about it, you're not going to be a very happy blogger. Just say 'This is my new blog; I’m trying it out. Thanks to my son and daughter. I hope it works out.'"Orange Crate Art is two years old today. I will say thanks once again to Rachel and Ben for showing me that I could learn a little HTML. And I will say thanks to Elaine, who listens to posts in the making. I'm grateful, always, to Van Dyke Parks, whose beautiful song gave me "a place to start" and who was gracious and enthusiastic about my use of his title. (If you've never heard "Orange Crate Art," you can find it here and here.)
From Google:
Google Book Search is our effort to expand the universe of books you can discover, and this year we're joining libraries and bookstores across the country to celebrate the 25th anniversary of Banned Books Week – a nationwide initiative to help people learn about and explore banned books. You can start by browsing these 42 classics – books we couldn't be more pleased to highlight.The three American novels I'm teaching this semester - Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God, and John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath - are all on Google's list of 42 "challenged" books. You can see the list via the link.
