Anne Thackeray Ritchie in Google Book Search

If you've liked the passages that I've posted from Anne Thackeray Ritchie's Chapters from Some Memoirs, you might like knowing that the book is available as a free .pdf download via Google Book Search. I'm not sure why I didn't think of looking there earlier. No, I am sure: it's because I still think of books as objects found on shelves. Google Book Search has several other books by ATR available as free downloads.

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Paul Collins on the semicolon

Perusing telegraph manuals reveals that Morse code is to the semicolon what weedkiller is to the dandelion. Punctuation was charged at the same rate as words, and their high price — trans-Atlantic cables originally cost a still-shocking $5 per word — meant that short, punchy lines with minimal punctuation were necessary among businessmen and journalists.

Read the rest:

Has Modern Life Killed the Semicolon? (Slate)

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Classic Arts Showcase background music

A Google search brought someone to Orange Crate Art yesterday looking for the names of the pieces played as background music during station breaks on the Classic Arts Showcase. So far as I can tell, this information is unavailable online. Until now! There are two excerpts:

One is from the overture to La gazza ladra (The Thieving Magpie, 1817) by Gioachino Rossini. You can watch and listen to a performance on YouTube. The Classic Arts Showcase excerpt is about seven minutes in.

The other excerpt is from the first movement (Allegro non troppo) of Béla Bartók's Divertimento for Strings, Sz. 113 (1939). There's no YouTube performance, but the iTunes sample of the Chicago Symphony's recording has most of the relevant passage.

The Bartók piece has a curious association for me: whenever I hear it, I think of staying up until two or three in the morning reinstalling Windows, when the only television programming worth having on for company was the Classic Arts Showcase.

[Thanks to Elaine, who knew the Bartók and gave me "Rossini overture" with which to go a-fishing.]

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Recommended reading: The Intuitionist

Colson Whitehead. The Intuitionist. New York. Anchor Books. 1999. $13.95 (paper).

The novel's setting is a mid-20th-century Manhattan-like metropolis, with finned cars and transistor radios. But something is off in Colson Whitehead's city: the newsstands are filled with not Life but Lift, a magazine of elevators. The plot focuses on the rivalry between two schools of elevator inspection — Empiricists, who inspect the machine's innards to judge its condition, and Intuitionists, who do their work by imaginatively grasping the machine's condition. The Intuitionist of the novel's title is Miss Lila Mae Watson, a graduate of the Institute for Vertical Transport and the first "colored woman" to work in the city's powerful, prestigious Department of Elevator Inspectors.

Like Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, The Intuitionist is an allegory about color in America. Like Ellison's narrator, Lila Mae is a young African-American struggling upward and set up (it seems) to fail. But there's more than color involved: the conflict between Empiricists and Intuitionists involves different ways of constructing the relation between subject and object (or subject and elevator). Thus the wondrous excerpts from the two-volume Theoretical Elevators by James Fulton, the godfather of Intuitionism, who puzzles over the "vertical imperative" and the "index of being": "where the elevator is when it is not in service."

The Intuitionist is most wonderful when Whitehead fuses these postmodern concerns with the stuff of detective fiction and film noir, notably in the search for the "black box," Fulton's plans for an elevator built on Intuitionist principles. The name suggests not only flight data recorders and objects whose workings cannot be seen but also the "black bird" of Dashiell Hammett's The Maltese Falcon, another object sought by rival factions.

Here's a sample passage. I think that if you like it, reader, you'll like the novel. It's from a conversation about the black box between Lila Mae and a teacher of Intuitionism:

"I don't see how that's possible," Lila Mae murmurs, twisting a button on her suit. "I mean from an engineering standpoint. At its core, Intuitionism is about communicating with the elevator on a nonmaterial basis. 'Separate the elevator from elevatorness,' right? Seems hard to build something of air out of steel."

Mr. Reed withdraws a cigarette from a silver case. "They're not as incompatible as you might think," he says. "That's what Volume One hinted at and Volume Two tried to express in its ellipses — a renegotiation of our relationship to objects. To start at the beginning."

"I don't get you," Lila Mae admits. Reluctantly.

"If we have decided that elevator studies — nuts and bolts Empiricism — imagined elevators from a human, and therefore inherently alien point of view, wouldn't the next logical step, after we've adopted the Intuitionist perspective, be to build an elevator the right way? With what we've learned?"

"Construct an elevator from the elevator's point of view."

"Wouldn't that be the perfect elevator? Wouldn't that be the black box?" Mr. Reed's left eyelid trembles.

I'm looking forward to reading everything else Colson Whitehead has written.

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Old house, new concept

I have just discovered that our circa-1959 house can be said to have an "open concept kitchen/dining/living area." The "open concept" concept is sure to make daily life and conversation in our household more exciting and more ambiguous.

"Where did you put the DVD?"

"In the open concept kitchen/dining/living area."

Things I learned on my summer vacation (2008)

Birds begin their warm-up exercises around 4:00 a.m.

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A determined beaver can cross an interstate highway with remarkable speed. (Thanks for that.)

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The Akron Brewing Company went about its business in a beautiful brick building.

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Dublin, Ohio, is a town with beautiful stone fences.

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Exit 303 from 80 East in Pennsylvania is the Gateway to Frustration. A roadsign advertises a seemingly non-existent Dunkin' Donuts. The McDonald's has no coffee. The re-entry to 80 East is marked by one small sign pointing the unfortunate traveler into the darkness. Minutes go by. So what does a prudent driver do? Give up and turn around to hunt for the missed re-entry, then realize that it's now necessary to turn around once more and press further into the darkness.

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"Compared to your other aftershaves, British Sterling is a lady."

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The Xlerator is an incredibly powerful hand dryer, so powerful that it moves the skin of your hand in waves. The men's room in the Wayne Public Library (New Jersey) has one. The women's room (I am told) does not.

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An anti-gravity device that could pull the moon from its orbit would be a real problem.

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Hazyblur is a small, spectacular Australian winery. (Thanks Jim and Luanne!)

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Quantum Leap is a great mostly-vegan restaurant in Greenwich Village: 226 Thompson Street, between Bleecker and Third.

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How to find a good (or great) vegan restaurant in Greenwich Village? Ask in a record store. The guy on duty is an omnivore, but "there's a girl who works here" who's vegan.

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DJ Phil Schaap's redundancies are stupefying: vibraphonist Milt Jackson got the nickname "Bags" because he was "baggy-eyed, under, of course, his eyeballs."

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Dark circles under the eyes are caused by blood leaking from capillaries and pulling down on the skin. (As stated in a radio commercial, 1010 WINS, New York.)

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India Pavilion (17 Central Square) is still going strong in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

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Poori (Indian bread) is more exciting than naan (another Indian bread).

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The viola d'amore has fourteen strings.

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The concert harp has forty-six or forty-seven strings.

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The dowdy world is alive and well on the airwaves of central New York. "I don't want my arms around you, no not much!" (The Four Lads.)

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Karl Bush still eats hoagies.

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There is no apostrophe in Tim Hortons.

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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.