USA Arts

From WNET, NYC's Channel 13, streaming episodes of USA Arts: Willem de Kooning! Martha Graham! Vladimir Nabokov! Charles Olson! And many more.

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April 8, 2014: Gone, gone. Now there’s only a trailer-like compilation.

A metaphor for painting

Barnett Newman, interviewed by Frank O'Hara for the public television show Art New York (1964):

Newman: I'm not in any way really involved in color as a love act. To me, color is an innate material, and I feel that it's — the proper description would be to call them colors, that anybody can buy and squeeze them out of tubes. And in that sense, it's my job to turn them into color. And I suppose my feeling towards colors is, well, it's more or less like the feeling that a baker has towards his material. I feel that it's like wheat, and my job is to turn the wheat into bread. If I don't have wheat, which might be blue, I use red, which is like rye.

O'Hara [laughing]: What about dough? It's white.

Well, you know, well, if you don't have rye, you use barley. But then of course, you — I suppose you can't make bread with barley, so I make whiskey. [Laughs.]

You can find the interview on the video page at frankohara.org.

Ginsbergs, Ginsburgs

A correction in the New York Times:

An article in some editions on Wednesday about Fordham University's plan to give an ethics prize to Supreme Court Justice Stephen G. Breyer misspelled the surname of another Supreme Court justice who received the award in 2001. She is Ruth Bader Ginsburg, not Ginsberg. The Times has misspelled her name at least two dozen times since 1980; this is the first correction the paper has published.

The Times has often misspelled Allen Ginsberg's last name too.

BOOBOOBOOBOOBOOBOO

Happy Halloween! Thumbtack holes and all.

[Purple marker, by Ben Leddy, from the family archives. Used with permission.]

Teachers, students, humanity

From an essay by Liberal Studies professor Lynn Crosbie on teachers and students:

I realized that students were potentially terrifying, and potentially terrified — that one of the largest obstacles between teachers and students is a failure to recognize each others' humanity.

Reminding me of what I sometimes find myself saying in my classes: "I'm just trying to be a person."

Your first assignment: Read this (GlobeCampus Report)

"Collage"

For reals? It seems so.

Cambridge University parking sign has spelling error (Telegraph)

People, it's bad (Hi and Lois)

People, it's bad. The economy, yes, of course. But also today's Hi and Lois. You'll have to follow the link for this one — I won't have it here.

Is Hi working on a train? That would account for the changing cityscape behind him. The window changes position from panel to panel, true, but his desk may be on wheels.

In the first two panels, Hi's chair seems to be at about the height of a baby's high chair, but that makes a sort of sense if Hi is speaking to Trixie. The baby vibe might also explain why Hi becomes smaller in the second panel.

But there's no reasonable (or far-fetched) explanation for Hi's missing collar, or the missing piece of paper, or that telephone — or that "telephone." Here, from the family archives, is how to draw a telephone:

[Pencil and stick-on letters, by Ben Leddy or Rachel Leddy. Used with permission.]

Related reading
All Hi and Lois posts

Invisible-ink cigarette card

Reading Ask H&FJ recently, I was reminded of the browser's paradise that is the New York Public Library Digital Gallery (which I first looked into when it debuted in 2005). Here's one small item:

[Cigarette card, W.A. & A.C. Churchman, c. 1903–1907.]

The verso reads:

Invisible Ink for Writing Despatches.

Most scouts will be glad to know of a method of ensuring secrecy in the event of despatches falling into the enemy's hands. If the message is written in the juice of an onion and allowed to dry, it is then invisible to all unacquainted with the secret. When the despatch is warmed over a fire the writing stands out quite clearly.

I like the idea of writing with a metaphorical inkwell in hand. Yes, that's an onion in the scout's non-writing hand, and a penknife and piece of onion on the ground.

In kidhood, under the influence of Clifford Hicks' novel Alvin's Secret Code, I wrote several despatches with lemon juice and toothpicks. HTML makes invisible writing even simpler — and there's no onion smell! See?

Block that transition

"These are tough times not only for orangutans but for humans."

Public Radio International's The World this afternoon, segueing from endangered orangutans to AC/DC's new album, a "veritable banana for you if you're starving for good news."

. [dot]

Would you like a book about the dot? Would I? I plan to find out (but via the library!):

Despite the humble origins of its name (Anglo Saxon for "the speck at the head of a boil"), the dot has been one of the most versatile players in the history of written communication, to the point that it has become virtually indispensable. Now, in On the Dot, Alexander and Nicholas Humez offer a wide ranging, entertaining account of this much overlooked and minuscule linguistic sign.

The Humez brothers shed light on the dot in all its various forms. As a mark of punctuation, they show, it plays many roles — as sentence stopper, a constituent of the colon (a clause stopper), and the ellipsis (dot dot dot). In musical notation, it denotes "and a half." In computerese, it has several different functions (as in dot com, the marker between a file name and its extension, and in some slightly more arcane uses in programming languages). The dot also plays a number of roles in mathematics, including the notation of world currency (such as dollars dot cents), in Morse code (dots and dashes), and in the raised dots of Braille. And as the authors connect all these dots, they take readers on an engaging tour of the highways and byways of language, ranging from the history of the question mark and its lesser known offshoots the point d'ironie and the interrobang, to acronyms and backronyms, power point bullets and asterisks, emoticons and the "at-sign."

If you're wondering, Wikipedia explains the irony mark, the interrobang, and backronyms.