Abe's Shades

"Thanks for the picture, Dad. It's great! Do you mind if I put it on my blog?"

"Not at all."

"Should it have a title?"

"Abe's Shades."

My dad sent this portrait of a hipster Lincoln along with a letter this week.

[Pen and ink by James Leddy, 2007.]

More by James Leddy: Happy holidays, Boo!, Hardy mums

Apostrophes and corn

I sometimes like to write letters to companies whose products I use and admire. In August 2005, I wrote a letter to the Morris Reisman, president of Pro Sales Industries, manufacturer of some well-made, handy kitchen tools:

Dear Mr. Reisman:

I write as a happy user of your vegetable and corn brushes. It's a pleasure to use products such as yours, which work as advertised, are designed to last, and are made in the United States.

I have one small suggestion for improvement. The back of the corn brush package reads "That's when your corn is at it's peak of freshness." The word it's (meaning "it is") in that sentence should be its (possessive pronoun). The mistake is a small blemish on an otherwise great package. When the time comes to print a new batch, I hope that you can make this change.

In closing, I wish you continued success with your products.

Sincerely,

Michael Leddy

Yesterday a package arrived in the mail bearing a mysterious mark: RATTLE OK. Inside I found a letter of thanks from Morris Reisman and some sample products: a Rinse-No-More Mushroom Brush, a Scrub n' Wash Fruit & Vegetable Brush, a Silk Away Corn-on-the-Cob Brush, and a Nature's Way Banana Keeper. Cool!



And the text on the back of the Silk Away package has been revised:



Its, not it's: the best gift of all. Thanks, Mr. Reisman!

Apostrophes aside, these brushes really are wonderful -- the ones that I bought in August 2005 are still good as new.

[Morris Reisman died on November 17, 2009, at the age of seventy-six.]

Overheard

In a hallway:

"The nineties? What's that?"

"That's ancient history."

Previous "Overheard" posts

Paris and Niles Crane

In Iliad 13, the Trojan prince Hector, who has been leading an assault on the Greek ships, finds his brother Paris off to the side of battle. Hector, furious, begins berating Paris, and ends his short speech in despair:

                                             "Troy is doomed.
The whole towering city is as good as gone."

And then, for one strange and hilarious moment, Paris sounds remarkably like Niles Crane:

"I see you're in a testy mood, Hector.
I may have held back from battle before,
But not now. My mother didn't raise
A total weakling."

(Translated by Stanley Lombardo)

Related posts
Homer's Rumsfeld
Paris, pretty-boy

Patients like Philoctetes

"We have created a subclass of patients like Philoctetes with modern medicine. They are abandoned on their islands to live long, but have we risen to the challenge of taking emotional care of them?"

Pediatrician Lyuba Konopasek and classicist Bryan Doerries (his words above) find in Sophocles' Philoctetes a way to help medical students understand the needs of patients receiving long-term care.

The Difficult Patient, a Problem Old as History (or Older) (New York Times)

Somme diary

From the Telegraph:

A British soldier's pocket diary of life in the trenches during the early days of the Battle of the Somme have been made public for the first time. Pte Walter Hutchinson was a young shop manager when he enlisted in the 10th Battalion, York and Lancaster Regiment. His poignant record of the battle, in 1916, includes a moving account of the first day during which more than 62,000 comrades died. Pte Hutchinson's handwritten account gives a graphic story of his own survival as wave after wave of soldiers went "over the top" only to be cut down by German fire.

The battle of the Somme (July 1-November 13, 1916) stands as one of the most horrific battles in history, with more than a million casualties. (Note: The figure given in the article seems to be an estimate of first-day British casualties, not of soldiers killed.)

The diary is being offered for sale at an auction in London tomorrow.

Forgotten diary captures horror of the Somme (telegraph.co.uk, via notebookism)

Excerpts: Diary from the Somme (telegraph.co.uk)

Battle of the Somme (Wikipedia)

Update:

The diary of a First World War soldier who fought in the Battle of the Somme has been sold for £7,000.

Written by Walter Hutchinson, the diary went for almost ten times its original guide price at an auction in London.

Somme diary sold for £7k (UKTV)

April 16, 2015: Save for the Wikipedia article, the links are gone.

Dine?

I wonder:

Does anyone out there "dine"?

I, for one, don't. I "eat."

It's lunchtime.

Navel-gazing with the Greeks

From Anu Garg's A.Word.A.Day:

omphaloskepsis (om-fuh-lo-SKEP-sis) noun

Contemplation of one's navel

From Greek omphalos (navel) + skepsis (act of looking, examination). Ultimately from the Indo-European root spek- (to observe) which is also the ancestor of suspect, spectrum, bishop (literally, overseer), despise, espionage, telescope, spectator, and spectacles.

I've liked the word omphalos -- so strange, so sonorous -- from my first acquaintance with it in James Joyce's Ulysses. In "Telemachus," Buck Mulligan calls the Martello tower where he and Stephen Dedalus live "the omphalos." The word reappears in Stephen's consciousness in "Proteus":

The cords of all link back, strandentwining cable of all flesh. That is why mystic monks. Will you be as gods? Gaze in your omphalos. Hello! Kinch here. Put me on to Edenville. Aleph, alpha: nought, nought, one.

I later learned (yes, bass-ackwards) about the part the word plays in Homer's Odyssey. The island of Ogygia, where Calypso keeps Odysseus as her love-slave, is said to be near the sea's omphalos, suggesting a center point, as far away from any mainland as possible. Ogygia is the middle of nowhere.

The passage from Ulysses is taken from an online edition:

Ulysses A hypertextual, self-referential edition

Watching SparkNotes

I'm always curious about the Google searches that bring people to Orange Crate Art. Many are right on the money -- e-mail to professor, for instance. Some are interestingly wrong: how to make a cootie cather comes up again and again, because of a reference to trumpeter Cootie Williams and a sidebar link for Willa Cather. (It's catcher, catcher, I want to tell these seekers.) A rather sad Google search that I noticed this afternoon:

sparknotes for movies

Sheesh.

Derrida's archives

The Los Angeles Times reports that philosopher Jacques Derrida sought to use his archives as a bargaining chip to quash a sexual harassment charge against a vampire expert:

When a vampire expert allegedly seduced a tipsy [University of California at] Irvine student four years ago, he inadvertently set off a chain of events that now jeopardizes the school's control of a dead philosopher's prized archives. The story came to light after UCI announced last week that it would drop a lawsuit against the widow and sons of philosopher Jacques Derrida. . . .

Buried in the news that UCI would resume negotiations with Derrida's family was a mysterious footnote: The feud over his archives was sparked by a letter Derrida sent to UCI shortly before his death.

According to multiple sources, Derrida wanted UCI to halt its investigation of a Russian studies professor, Dragan Kujundzic, who was accused of sexually harassing a 25-year-old female doctoral student. So he tried to use his archives as leverage to derail the case, they said.

What I find most striking in this account is Avital Ronell's comment on Derrida:

"Toward the end of his life, he enjoyed the same status as Aristotle among the ancients, and every perception of injustice was routed to his desk," said Avital Ronell, a Derrida protege who teaches at New York University. "Even as he was crawling with fatigue, he put himself in the service of those seeking his help and needing the strength of his prestigious signature."

Injustice in this situation would seem to me to be the use of academic power and prestige to influence the resolution of a harassment charge. Ronell's characterization should look ironic to anyone who knows (or in my case, remembers) Derrida's Limited Inc, which is, among other things, a deconstructive inquiry into the power and prestige of signatures.

All of the LA Times article is worth reading, including details from court records of opera music, photographs of Moscow, and Transylvanian wine.

A philosophical view of sex (Los Angeles Times)

More info: The LA Times article draws no connection between Derrida and Kujundzic and leaves the impression that news of Kujundzic's situation somehow made it to Derrida's desk. Kujundzic has in fact written about Derrida and curated a UC Irvine exhibit of his work. A 2002 publication of the UC Irvine Libraries characterizes Kujundzic as a friend and colleague of Derrida's for "many years."

UC Irvine Libraries Newsletter (2002)

*

June 27, 2018: Very strange: by 2009, Avital Ronell’s comment, which lives on at several websites, had disappeared from the online article.

In a 2007 Chronicle article (behind the paywall), Ronell describes Derrida’s friend and colleague in less than noble terms: “‘This guy had nothing better to do than to ask Jacques for help.’”

A related post
Prestigious signatures