What a mystery looks like

I discovered salted seersucker in the frozen-food section of my favorite Asian market in January 2008. Yesterday, I thought to check if this mystery item was still there and took this photograph as a reminder — I did not dream it, did not make it up. The package says (in English) "seaweed." The store's owner suggested that the only explanation of "salted seersucker" is mistranslation.

Of what?

Orange Crate Art remains the only item returned by Google and Yahoo searches for "salted seersucker."

[Click on the image for a larger version of the mystery.]

[Update, 8:31 p.m.: The mystery is no more. A search for seaweed and seersucker reveals that seersucker is a variety of brown kelp, though what's depicted on the package is unmistakably green. Still no entry for the seaweedy sort of seersucker in the Oxford English Dictionary.]

Wordle

[del.icio.us tags for Orange Crate Art. Click for larger version.]

Jonathan Feinberg's Wordle makes a customizable word cloud from any text or any set of del.icio.us tags. Size indicates frequency. Way cool!

[Found via Lifehacker.]

Cereals in the hands of an angry blog

[The images in this post should appear in larger form when clicked. I’m not sure what happened. You’ll have to trust my transcriptions.]

Attention, shoppers: Post is marketing "Vintage Package Editions" of Grape-Nuts, Raisin Bran, and Spoon Size Shredded Wheat, three of its dowdier cereals. The boxes are pretty graceless objects, heavy on drab brown-yellow-pinks that recall the Formica surfaces found in mid-20th-century school lunchrooms. As far as I can tell, these boxes correspond to no Post designs of the past. But it's not the fake-vintage look that appalls me; it's the shoddy work on the backs of the Grape-Nuts and Spoon Size Shredded Wheat boxes. (Raisin Bran, for some reason, went its own way, free of error.)

Consider the back of the Grape-Nuts box:

The word its at the top right should be it's.

Two dates (!) are given for the invention of Grape-Nuts: 1897 and 1898.

The word man (in the 1978 sentence) takes us back to the language of an old textbook. The word is also oddly used: it's not the several-thousand-year-old "man" who made bread into a cereal but C.W. Post.

The word compliment (in the 1995 sentence) should be complement: "Grape-Nuts is a nutritious complement to a healthy lifestyle." The sentence needs work though in larger ways:

Approaching the millennium, the 90's were all about taking stock — and rediscovering that Grape-Nuts is a nutritious complement to a healthy lifestyle.

Approaching is a dangling participle, and a silly one: the decade wasn't approaching the millennium, no more than Saturday is approaching Sunday. It seems silly too to associate Grape-Nuts with a thousand-year mark on a calendar. The words "taking stock" and "healthy lifestyle" suggest that people were giving up their 1980s (no apostrophe) lives of excess (cocaine and Studio 54) for Grape-Nuts. And cereal is, logically, not a complement to a way of life but a part of it. Better:

In the 1990s, Grape-Nuts gained even greater popularity as a nutritious part of healthy living.

This box is further distinguished by typographical blunders and oddities. There is no discernible logic to the use of red and blue text. Grape-Nuts is sometimes red, sometimes blue, sometimes in italics, sometimes not. Why (in the 1955 sentence) is for energy in red and an explorer in blue-bold? Note too how clumsy the design is: the words in red often fall below the baseline, and their spacing is often off:

The back of the Spoon Size Shredded Wheat box is another mess:

The 1892 sentence is a wreck of punctuation and syntax:

Lawyer and inventor, Henry Drushel Perky's, experiments in Watertown, New York with business partner, William Henry Ford, prove fruitful when they finally succeed in making a machine that shreds whole wheat.

This sentence is cluttered and ungainly, and it carries the goofy implication that Perky was, err, experimenting with his partner. Note too that if one succeeds in making something, one has made it. Better:

In Watertown, New York, inventor Henry Drushel Perky and business partner William Henry Ford make a machine that shreds whole wheat.

In the 1928 sentence, aquires should be acquires. Sheesh!

The 1961 sentence is awkward:

The size of the Shredded Wheat Juniors biscuit is made even smaller and relaunched as Spoon Size Shredded Wheat cereal.

It's not the size that's relaunched. Better:

The Shredded Wheat Juniors biscuit is made smaller and relaunched as Spoon Size Shredded Wheat.

On this box too the design is a mess, with the words in red sometimes in bold, sometimes not. And here, the red text sometimes floats above the baseline.

Carelessness and lack of consistency in design reach a low point in the 1997 sentence:

[Red, black italic bold, black — all in the name of a single cereal.]

One can browse issues of Life and Time from the 1930s and 1940s and find text-heavy advertisements in impeccable prose, not a word misplaced. How many eyes looked upon these cereal-box designs and saw nothing wrong? These sorts of mistakes in the work of a major American corporation suggest that, yes, we're slipping.

[This post is no. 21 in a very occasional series, "How to improve writing," dedicated to improving stray bits of published prose. Title with apologies to Jonathan Edwards, who never tasted Post cereals.]

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At the World Trade Center and St. Paul's Chapel

On vacation earlier this week, Elaine and I went with friends into what New Jerseyans call "the city" to see the World Trade Center site. I had the chance to go to the site in the March 2002, when I made a short trip to New York to see an exhibit of Henry Darger's work and hear John Ashbery read from his Darger-inspired Girls on the Run. But in 2002, I chose not to go downtown. I had plenty of memories of staying up until two or three in the morning, watching the WTC site on television. Not going felt like an act of resolve: I didn't need to see what I knew had happened. But now going to the World Trade Center felt like a necessary trip. Our friends had been to the site not long after September 11, and they were willing to go again. So we drove into Manhattan on Father's Day morning, found a parking space just a block away, and walked over.

The area where the World Trade Center stood is fenced off, and much of the fencing is covered with tarp, to render the site unviewable in areas where pedestrians would impede the flow of traffic. We walked to the corner of Church Street and Vesey Street, where there is room for perhaps ten people at a time to stand and look through an open section of fencing. Whatever you already know that you know about September 11, 2001, it is difficult to understand the scale of destruction without seeing it. The hole in the ground, filled with movable roadways and heavy equipment, is massive. I looked down and then looked up, trying to grasp the size of the towers and the loss of life in what was, really, a city within a city. I imagine that this experience is a common one — looking down at what's there, looking up at what's not there, and turning away in grief.

We crossed Church Street to look at the graveyard of St. Paul's Chapel, the colonial gravestones worn, mostly, beyond legibility. The church was open, with people going in and out, and I thought of Philip Larkin's poem "Church Going" and the irony of a church — on Sunday morning — as a spot for tourists. But there was, to our surprise, a service underway. A sign near the doorway encouraged visitors to enter at any time, and a guard was beckoning people to come in. The small congregation (perhaps seventy people) sat in a circle, surrounding two celebrants at an altar. Exhibits documenting the aftermath of September 11 ran down the sides of the church: a cot used by those working in "the pit," a cross made of two pieces of metal recovered from the site, a gathering of memorial cards and photographs left at St. Paul's, words of sorrow and consolation in Chinese, English, French, Japanese, Portuguese, Spanish (and no doubt many other languages). There were letters and drawings for firefighters from New York schoolchildren: "Thank you for putting out the fire." Above, a banner, perhaps twenty feet long, filled with signatures: "TO NEW YORK CITY AND ALL THE RESCUERS: KEEP YOUR SPIRITS UP … OKLAHOMA LOVES YOU!!" The congregation stood to sing a closing hymn (accompanied by grand piano and hand drum), and the people who'd come in to look around stood and listened. Coffee and baked goods were available for anyone interested.

We crossed back and walked the rest of the perimeter of the World Trade Center site, on Church Street, then on Liberty Street, and then from inside Two World Financial Center, amid marble and palm trees, looking at the site through glass: all this splendor on one side of the window, all that tragedy on the other. When we went back to Vesey Street, a New York City policeman was taking a photograph for two beautiful and beautifully dressed young women, standing in front of the fence and smiling.

Art and frugal living

NPR had a story yesterday about older artists of modest means who manage still to live in New York City. Hank Virgona, 78, usually makes $25,000 to $30,000 a year. The last movie he saw was Fahrenheit 9/11:

"No one has ever heard me say, 'Well, listen, would you like to buy this?' I never do that. I talk about art. I talk about my love for it; I talk about what you can get from it, you know? That a walk down a quiet street, especially towards like dusk, is as good as going to Caracas or Venezuela or anywhere — you know what I mean? It's nourishing. That's what art — that's part of its purpose."

One more passage from Anne Thackeray Ritchie

Early life is like a chapter out of Dickens, I think — one sees people then: their tricks of expression, their vivid sayings, and their quaint humours and oddities do not surprise one; one accepts everything as a matter of course — no matter how unusual it may be. Later in life one grows more fastidious, more ambitious, more paradoxical: one begins to judge, or to make excuses, or to think about one's companions instead of merely staring at them. All these people we now saw for the first time, vivid but mysterious apparitions; we didn't know what they were feeling and thinking about, only we saw them, and very delightful they all were to look at.

Anne Thackeray Ritchie, Chapters from Some Memoirs (Leipzig: Bernhard Tauchnitz, 1895), 227–28

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"[A]thletes, philosophers, sex symbols"

On the need for variety in human ways and means:

So multifarious is existence that infinite varieties of attention are required to build a sustainable life within it. Those who particularly notice what is worrisome or anticipate — even to their detriment — what will be painful may be just those who notice nuances of life others might neglect. A species in which everyone was General Patton would not succeed, any more than would a race in which everyone was Vincent van Gogh. I prefer to think that the planet needs athletes, philosophers, sex symbols, painters, scientists; it needs the warmhearted, the hardhearted, the coldhearted, and the weakhearted. It needs those who can devote their lives to studying how many droplets of water are secreted by the salivary glands of dogs under which circumstances, and it needs those who can capture the passing impression of cherry blossoms in a fourteen-syllable poem or devote twenty-five pages to the dissection of a small boy's feelings as he lies in bed in the dark waiting for his mother to kiss him good night. It needs people who can design air conditioners, and it needs people who can inspire joy.

Allen Shawn, Wish I Could Be There: Notes from a Phobic Life (New York: Penguin, 2007), 249–50

The next-to-last sentence confirms that the seeming echo of Proust earlier in this book is indeed an echo.

Overheard

In Harvard Square, Cambridge, MA:

"Who knows? Maybe this one's not another hippie burnout who'll, like …"

A hope-filled beginning, a sentence that fizzles, incomplete: perhaps the pattern of human existence itself!

All "Overheard" posts (via Pinboard)

Bloomsday 2008

June 16, 1904: Mrs. Leopold (Marion, Molly) Bloom will soon embark on a concert tour. Later today she's meeting Blazes Boylan, the (ahem) "organiser" of the tour, to (ahem) rehearse. Mr. Bloom notices a letter in Boylan's handwriting:

A strip of torn envelope peeped from under the dimpled pillow. In the act of going he stayed to straighten the bedspread.

—Who was the letter from? he asked.

Bold hand. Marion.

—O, Boylan, she said. He's bringing the programme.

—What are you singing?

—La ci darem with J. C. Doyle, she said, and Love's Old Sweet Song.

In the Homeric schema of James Joyce's Ulysses (1922), Leopold Bloom is Odysseus; Molly Bloom, Penelope; Blazes Boylan, a suitor. "Love's Old Sweet Song" (1884, music by J.L. Molloy, words by G. Clifton Bingham) floats through the novel and suggests the crucial question of the Blooms' marriage: is Love's old song to be found only in memory, or might it (like Odysseus) yet return?

Once in the dear dead days beyond recall,
When on the world the mists began to fall,
Out of the dreams that rose in happy throng
Low to our hearts Love sang an old sweet song;
And in the dusk where fell the firelight gleam,
Softly it wove itself into our dream.

Just a song a twilight, when the lights are low,
And the flick'ring shadows softly come and go,
Tho' the heart be weary, sad the day and long,
Still to us at twilight comes Love's old song,
     comes Love's old sweet song.

Even today we hear Love's song of yore,
Deep in our hearts it dwells forevermore.
Footsteps may falter, weary grow the way,
Still we can hear it at the close of day.
So till the end, when life's dim shadows fall,
Love will be found the sweetest song of all.

Just a song a twilight, when the lights are low,
And the flick'ring shadows softly come and go,
Tho' the heart be weary, sad the day and long,
Still to us at twilight comes Love's old song,
     comes Love's old sweet song.

Related post
Bloomsday

A simile on Father's Day

[D]ealing with growing children is like being in a batting cage with ball after ball being thrown at you. You hit the balls you can. Amazingly, the score gets kept for a very long time.

Allen Shawn, Wish I Could Be There: Notes from a Phobic Life (New York: Penguin, 2007), 197

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