Happy Valentine's Day

Yes, it's for you.

Photograph by James Kimberlin (valart2008), via Flickr, licensed under a Creative Commons License.

Tag
What was he thinking?

Proust in Love, on sale

Attention, Proustian shoppers: William C. Carter's Proust in Love is on sale at Amazon. Really, really on sale. Hardcover list price: $26. Sale price: $7.62.

All Proust posts (Pinboard)

CNN and mixed metaphors

It's a race. It's a gun battle. It's a prizefight. From CNN's front page tonight:

Democratic presidential hopeful Barack Obama, moving into front-runner status following a week of eight straight wins, is facing a new rival, exchanging fire with John McCain, the presumptive GOP nominee. In what could be a preview of the general election, the two exchanged jabs over Iraq and the economy, sure to be key issues in November.

Related posts
The Elements of Style
Mixed metaphors
Myth and mixed metaphors

How to make a "recent posts" feed

Since switching to new Blogger, I've missed old Blogger's "recent posts" bit in the sidebar. I realized yesterday that one can recreate "recent posts" via a page element with a blog's feed. But Blogger limits a feed to a maximum of five posts.

A better solution: a bit of JavaScript courtesy of Alan Levine that creates a feed with as many posts as you like: Feed2JS. I chose ten. Seems like old times.

(Thanks, Alan! And thanks to Modevia Web Services, home of the server that runs Feed2JS.)

SparkNotes and Homer

The man for wisdom's various arts renown'd,
Long exercised in woes, O Muse! resound;
Who, when his arms had wrought the destined fall
Of sacred Troy, and razed her heaven-built wall,
Wandering from clime to clime, observant stray'd,
Their manners noted, and their states survey'd,
On stormy seas unnumber'd toils he bore,
Safe with his friends to gain his natal shore:
Vain toils!

Say what?

Students who think that SparkNotes make life easier have another think coming when it comes to Homer's Odyssey. Here's what Spark offers as a reading text to accompany its plot summaries: Alexander Pope's translation in heroic couplets. Vain toils indeed!

All Homer posts (Pinboard)

The car as oikos

Chrysler chairman Robert L. Nardelli, in a New York Times article on the trend to outfit cars with elaborate entertainment technology:

"I think a vehicle today has to be your most favorite room under your roof. It has to bring you gratification; it has to be tranquil. It's incidental that it gets you from Point A to Point B, right?"

Thus the car as oikos. Note that those who are to dwell in this house of the future are deemed incapable of finding gratification in low-tech endeavors: reading, drawing, singing, talking, telling stories, playing "I spy," looking at scenery. All pleasure must be mediated — and, as the Times article details, dangerously distracting to the driver.

More High-Tech Invitations to Take Your Mind Off Road (New York Times)

Like hope, but different

A parody of will.i.am's "Yes, We Can" song, short and to the point:

john.he.is (YouTube)

Bafangool!

Part of what makes Orange Crate Art exciting for me is the chance to share what I learn and to learn, in turn, from readers. Manicule? Who knew? George and Lesle's comments on that post point to further beautiful curiosities in the language of type: dingbat, pilcrow.

Something I just learned: the meaning of bafangool, via a piece in the New Yorker on Beppe Grillo, a comedian fighting political corruption in Italy. Reading about the word vaffanculo, I realized that here was the word I heard kids saying in Brooklynese Italian forty years or so ago: Bafangool! I never knew what it meant, only that it was "bad."

As you may know or suspect, this post has come to focus on an Italian curse. Click at your own risk:

Beppe's Inferno (New Yorker)
Bafangool (WordReference.com)
Vaffanculo (WordReference.com)
Va Fangul! . . . And Have a Nice Day (Time)

And one more, risk-free:

You Say Prosciutto, I Say Pro-SHOOT (New York Times)

"I ain't talkin' Greek"

I just taught Langston Hughes' "The Cat and the Saxophone (2 A.M.)," a poem that incorporates the first lines of Jack Palmer and Spencer Williams' 1924 song "Everybody Loves My Baby (But My Baby Don't Love Nobody But Me)." And now I'm wondering about these lines from the song (which don't appear in the poem):

She's got a form like Venus, honest,
I ain't talkin' Greek.

I don't know about the lady's form, but it's true that the singer ain't talkin' (or singin') Greek. If he were, he'd be speaking of mighty Ἀφροδίτη (Aphrodite). Venus of course is her Roman equivalent.

But is there a Greco-Roman joke there that the listener is meant to get? That indeed, the singer ain't talkin' Greek, because the name he invokes is Roman? Or is the lyric just a bit careless, the point being that the lady is beautiful, like a goddess? (Greek goddess? Roman goddess? Who cares!)

Wit or a mistake: it'd be nice to have a name for this kind of uncertainty. I began thinking about it when I saw a T-shirt with the name Helvetica printed in a serif font. That was wit, not a mistake. I also thought about it in relation to a T-shirt that alters the standard sequence of Beatle first names. I'm still not sure about that one.

If your computer can play RealPlayer files, you can forget about all these questions by listening to "Everybody Loves My Baby" right now, by Fats Waller and His Rhythm (John Hamilton, trumpet; Gene Sedric, clarinet; Al Casey, guitar; Cedric Wallace, bass; Slick Jones, drums), from November 6, 1940:

Everybody Loves My Baby (Jazz Old Time on line)

A sentence beginning with "My mom"

Re: Chelsea Clinton, from today's New York Daily News:

"She's the only person in the world who can start a sentence about Hillary Clinton with 'my mom,' . . . said Philippe Reines, a Clinton aide who travels with Chelsea Clinton.

Not so: My mom voted for Barack Obama, not Hillary Clinton. My dad too.

(Hi Mom and Dad!)