A semicolon in the news

A semicolon on a New York City subway sign is in the news; read about it here:

Celebrating the Semicolon in a Most Unlikely Location (New York Times)

(Reading this article has made me realize that semicolon has no hyphen. I have been misspelling — or better, mispunctuating — this word for years.)

Related posts
France debates le point-virgule
Paul Collins on the semicolon

Dueling chin dimples

[Kirk Douglas (Whit Sterling) and Robert Mitchum (Jeff Markham), in Out of the Past, dir. Jacques Tourneur (1947).]

Reviewing Out of the Past in the New York Times (November 26, 1947), Bosley Crowther was lukewarm: "If only we had some way of knowing what's going on in the last half of the film, we might get more pleasure from it. As it is, the challenge is worth a try." It is, but there's a lot to be said for surrendering to ambience too.

Aristeia

The aristeia (from aristos, best) is a recurring element in Homer's Iliad. It's a warrior's moment of greatest glory in battle, the poem focusing on him alone as he kills victim after victim after victim.

The longest and bloodiest aristeia in the poem is that of Achilles, who seeks to make the Trojans pay for killing his beloved comrade Patroclus. What sets Achilles' aristeia apart from all others in the Iliad is that it is, at heart, a suicide mission: Achilles knows that if he kills the Trojan warrior Hector (who dealt the final blow to Patroclus), his own death will soon follow. He doesn't mind. When his horse Xanthus — magical, immortal, and gifted with prophetic speech — warns Achilles of his fate, he replies, "I don't need you to prophesy my death, / Xanthus. I know in my bones I will die here."

What follows is unrelenting in its horror. Spattered with blood and tissue, fire shooting from his head, Achilles is both animal and god. He has lost his humanity, killing and mutilating as he moves toward his own death. He fights not alongside his fellow Achaeans, but in a private war. The only community he can now acknowledge is a community of the dead, the one that holds Patroclus and which he soon will join.

I think that what we're seeing in a campus rampage is a version of Achilles' aristeia, the work of a person dissociated from his own humanity and from reality. Simone Weil called the Iliad the poem of force, force being that which turns a human being into a thing. In the fragile version of pastoral that is the open American campus, it seems terrifyingly easy for one who would wield that force to be able to do so.

[Iliad translation by Stanley Lombardo, 1997.]

LAUNDRY

John Holt on learning to read:

I remember the first time I discovered that a written word said something. The word was LAUNDRY. I was about four, perhaps a bit younger. Young enough so that nobody had yet started to teach me that words said things. We lived in New York City. In our walks through the streets, to the park or elsewhere, we passed many stores, with their signs. Most of these signs said nothing that would help a child know what they were saying; that is, the grocery signs were Gristede's, First National, A & P, the drugstore signs were Rexall's, Liggett's, and so on. But wherever there was a laundry, the sign over it said LAUNDRY. Ten, twenty, a hundred times, I must have seen that sign, and under it, in the window, the shirts and other clean clothing that told me that this was a place where things were washed. Then, one day, I realized that there was a connection between those letters over the store, and the shirts in the window, and what I knew the store was doing; that those letters over the store told me, and were there to tell me, that this place was a laundry, that they said "laundry."

That is all I can remember about teaching myself to read.

From How Children Learn (1967)

Related post
John Holt on learning and difficulty

Northern Illinois University

Here in Illinois, it's simply Northern. My heart goes out to Northern.

"Dowdy world" love story

Back when there were phone booths:

Janet and Nathan Polsky, both 84, were prom dates as high school sweethearts in 1941. He soon entered the military, and the two became involved in separate lives. He studied art at New York University. She, who had wanted to be an opera singer, joined the chorus of the original Broadway production of "Oklahoma!”

One afternoon after World War II, she was at the Museum of Modern Art and accidentally left her wallet in a phone booth. He called her the next day. He said: “This is Nat. Did you lose your wallet?” He had also been at MoMA, just happened to be the next person to go into the booth, and found it. Shortly afterward, they married.

Mrs. Polsky mused, “Talk about destiny.”

Mortals Amid the Immortals, Savoring the Romance of Art (New York Times)

All "dowdy world" posts (via Pinboard)

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.)