Auden and Ashbery

Jascha Kessler fires; John Ashbery fires back: two letters to the Times Literary Supplement concerning Ashbery, W.H. Auden, and the Yale Younger Poets Series. Scroll down for the letters.

(Kessler's real, not a Nabokov character.)

Good advice from Kenneth Koch

I like these lines from Kenneth Koch — the funny generalities ("something," "it"), the figurative railroads ("Internal tracks"), the sudden lapse into philosophy ("contemplated entities"), the simile joining Tristram Shandy and a church, and the shift (at what is the poem's end) from the sound of a kind, wise elder to a more ominous tone and a reminder of "what was" — and is? —"already there."

A sign in Kenya — One Train May Hide Another — inspired this poem. Flickr has photographs of such signs in French. You can hear Koch read the poem at PennSound.

Citation styles (PDFs)

Really useful for students at the end of a semester: three guides to citation styles, PDFs courtesy of the University of California at Berkeley Library:

APA Style Guide
Chicago-Turabian Style Guide
MLA Style Guide

Missing though are explanations of what do with multiple works by one author.

APA: If the works are from the same year, use a letter: (2008a), (2008b).

Chicago: Use a 3-em dash for the author's name: ———.

MLA: Use three hyphens for the author's name: ---.

These are the best guides in PDF form I've found. If anyone can recommend better ones, please do.

Thumb-notches and a ghost

There's something going on wrong (as we say in the blues) in today's Hi and Lois. Or lots of things: the shifting blackboard, the shrinking eraser, the swelling blackboard sill, the creeping W on Hi's jacket (or is that an upside-down M?), and the metamorphosing teacher. And in the second panel, on the far right: a ghost!

But it's good to see that the dictionary's three thumb-notches are where they ought to be. Perhaps this dictionary is a Teacher's Edition, made for use, not display.

Related reading
All Hi and Lois posts

Diane Arbus meets the Platters

Watching The Girl Can't Help It (dir. Frank Tashlin, 1956), I thought of an exchange from Ghost World (dir. Terry Zwigoff, 2001). Rebecca Doppelganger and Enid Coleslaw are attending a high-school graduation party:

Rebecca: This is so bad it's almost good.

Enid: This is so bad it's gone past good and back to bad again.

Those two descriptions cover most of the ninety-seven minutes of The Girl Can't Help It. But there are several minutes in the film that are plainly good — among them, those of a beautiful lip-synced performance by the Platters. As the group pretends to sings "You'll Never Know," there are two brief crowd shots of Diane Arbus-like strangeness:




[Click for larger views.]

These shots were no doubt meant for laughs. In my house, we screamed, "went back" (can't say rewind anymore), hit Pause, and screamed again. Aiee!

Here's a portfolio of Arbus' photographs (browse at your risk).

Another Word of the Year

The editors of Webster's New World College Dictionary have announced their Word of the Year, overshare: "to divulge excessive personal information, as in a blog or broadcast interview, prompting reactions ranging from alarmed discomfort to approval."

My suggestion for the word of the year? Change. What's yours?

Related post
Merriam-Webster's Word of the Year

Autosave for Mac

Two new freeware programs add "autosave" to Mac:

EverSave (Mac OS X 10.5.5 or later)
SaveCircle (Mac OS X 10.4 or later)

I can't vouch for EverSave, but SaveCircle works as advertised.

Autosave is one feature of Microsoft Office that I miss in Apple's iWork. It's great to have — at last — a reliable autosave add-on.

[The English localization for SaveCircle seems a bit wobbly. To edit, control-click or right-click on the application, choose Show Package Contents/Contents/Resources/en.lproj folder, and open Localizable.strings in a text-editor.]

The Simpsons and Apple

The Simpsons razz Apple:

"Oh, such beautiful packaging! I never thought a company could be my soulmate."

[Update: the above link no longer works. Search YouTube for apple or mapple and simpsons and you might be able to find another fugitive appearance. Look for the 6:49 version.]

Orange train art

I like this sort of downhome surrealism, which I found while looking for photographs of locations from Alfred Hitchcock's Shadow of a Doubt.

I'm not a postcard collector, so I can't comment on CardCow's selection and prices. But I'm impressed that CardCow allows today's Internet user to send, from the company's website, links to any of its postcards (along with personalized messages). That seems like a smart way to build good will and keep the casual visitor coming back.

So what are you waiting for? Amaze your friends and loved ones! Send them links to old postcards today!

CardCow.com ("Vintage Postcards and Collectibles")

Merriam-Webster's Word of the Year

It's bailout. Runners-up: vet, socialism, maverick, bipartisan, trepidation, precipice, rogue, misogyny, turmoil.

Merriam-Webster's Word of the Year 2008

Related post
Another Word of the Year