Lear cover-up

Though it will still feature the eye-gouging of Gloucester, the poisoning of Regan and other assorted tragic fates that befall its characters, the PBS broadcast of "King Lear" will avoid offense to delicate sensibilities by hiding the nudity in a scene with Ian McKellen, who plays the title role.

Every Inch a King, But No Nudity in PBS's "Lear" (New York Times)

The writer, Dave Itzkoff, means for that sentence (and the headline) to amuse the reader, no?

1984 Macintosh review

Remember that $2,495 buys you only the box, the keyboard and the mouse. You'll need a printer ($595) and software. I strongly suspect you'll also need a second disk drive ($495), because the built-in 3 1/2-inch Sony drive holds only 400K of memory, much of which is taken up by operating software. And you really ought to have a modem (yet another $495). That puts the price up to $4,000 without software. At that, though, the Macintosh is competitive with the IBM PC, and it's a lot more powerful. If you can accept the price, you'll see what performance mean[s] to the computer pros.

From Clifford Barney, "Not a Toy but the Real Thing," a 1984 review of "Apple Computer's new Macintosh," available from the archives of The Whole Earth Catalog, now online.

[$595 for a printer? I remember paying about that much for an Apple ImageWriter II in 1985.]

Blagojevich and "Ulysses"

Rod Blagojevich today:

"And so I'll leave you with this poem by Tennyson, which goes like this:

                                                          tho'
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we
     are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield."

Somehow I don't think that these lines, from Alfred Lord Tennyson's "Ulysses," are meant to suggest that Blagojevich is ceding power to Telemachus and departing Ithaca. Drat. What must appeal to the gov in these lines is not the idea of setting out, once more, with diminished powers, but that final not to yield (i.e., resign) — thus turning the political life of our beautiful state into what promises to be a long-running farce.

Odysseus/Ulysses is in some ways a good model for Blagojevich: reckless, thieving, vain. Think too of Ulysses Everett McGill in O Brother, Where Art Thou?: "My hair!"



[I've quoted a transcript of Blagojevich's remarks that botches Tennyson's lines. I haven't heard the governor's statement and don't know if the botches are his. I've presented the lines accurately above.]

[Update: Blagojevich's botches: "the strength," "by fate." Watch here.]

"Writing in the Age of Distraction"

Cory Doctorow has six suggestions for writing amid the distractions of our time. I especially like this one:

Researching isn't writing and vice-versa. When you come to a factual matter that you could google in a matter of seconds, don't. . . . Instead, do what journalists do: type "TK" where your fact should go, as in "The Brooklyn bridge, all TK feet of it, sailed into the air like a kite." "TK" appears in very few English words (the one I get tripped up on is "Atkins") so a quick search through your document for "TK" will tell you whether you have any fact-checking to do afterwards.

Read it all:

Writing in the Age of Distraction (Locus Online, via Boing Boing)

Involuntary memory in Mayberry

Aunt Bee is distraught. What gives?

Andy Taylor explains it to Opie: women are more emotional, see. The slightest thing can set them off. A song might remind them of a ride in a canoe with a nice fella. Or a certain smell. Or, or —

Opie: "I bet it's the liver. She looked at the liver and got reminded of when we had liver last week."

Liver, a Mayberry madeleine.

What's a campus?

I have the word campus on my mind, as I will soon be "on campus," several days a week.

It's odd that a word so familiar can suddenly look strange. Campus is the Latin word for field. The Oxford English Dictionary traces its history in English to Princeton University, 1774, citing John Freylinghusen Hageman's History of Princeton and Its Institutions (1879). Hageman quotes a January 1774 letter by Charles C. Beatty (class of '75):

Tea parties! Effigies! The kids today!

[Image courtesy of Google Book Search.]

Parlando italiano a Brooklyn

At a senior center in Borough Park (my old neighborhood):

Iole Mazzaro, 68, who traveled to New York from Sicily as a tourist in 1968, met her husband here and never went back, recalled how prevalent Italian used to be on the streets of southwest Brooklyn. "Just as much as you hear Spanish today," she said.

"On my first week here, my aunt asked me to go to the bakery to buy some bread. I walked there repeating to myself, 'bread, bread, bread,'" Mrs. Mazzaro said. "But then I get to the bakery and the man was Italian. We had a big laugh."

She sighed, lowered her gaze and added, "That wouldn't happen anymore."

For Italians in Brooklyn, Voices on Streets Have Changed (New York Times)

"It must be a strange state"

It must be a strange state to be like Jo! To shuffle through the streets, unfamiliar with the shapes, and in utter darkness as to the meaning, of those mysterious symbols, so abundant over the shops, and at the corners of streets, and on the doors, and in the windows! To see people read, and to see people write, and to see the postmen deliver letters, and not to have the least idea of all that language — to be, to every scrap of it, stone blind and dumb!

Charles Dickens, Bleak House (1853)

What irony?

As legislators weigh impeaching Gov. Rod Blagojevich and federal prosecutors prepare to indict him on corruption charges, his acting chief of staff and a deputy governor will be keynote speakers Wednesday at an "Ethics in the Workplace" seminar for some 200 state employees. . . .

But is it wrong for any members of the Blagojevich administration to instruct state workers on ethics?

"That's a real tough question, but . . . I don't see the irony really," said Rev. Tim Fiala, executive director of University of Illinois at Chicago's Integritas Institute, an ethics forum.

Gov. Rod Blagojevich's staffers to speak at ethics lecture for state workers (Chicago Tribune)

At Peffer and Snagsby's

Mr Snagsby is a law-stationer:

In the shade of Cook's Court, at most times a shady place, Mr Snagsby has dealt in all sorts of blank forms of legal process; in skins and rolls of parchment; in paper — foolscap, brief, draft, brown, white, whitey-brown, and blotting; in stamps; in office-quills, pens, ink, India-rubber, pounce, pins, pencils, sealing-wax, and wafers; in red tape, and green ferret; in pocket-books, almanacks, diaries, and law lists; in string boxes, rulers, inkstands — glass and leaden, penknives, scissors, bodkins, and other small office-cutlery; in short, in articles too numerous to mention; ever since he was out of his time and went into partnership with Peffer.

Charles Dickens, Bleak House (1853)

What a wonderful sentence, a catalogue of the materials of "legal process," put together with eleven ins and one out. Some of what's in Peffer and Snagsby's is still familiar to the present-day stationery addict. The Oxford English Dictionary can help with the less familiar:

It's easy to think of parchment as crinkly, old paper, the kind of stuff kids make with tea — or with a candle, if they're daring and unsupervised. But parchment isn't paper. The OED: "A piece of animal skin, esp. from a sheep or goat, dressed and prepared as a surface for writing; a scroll or roll of this material; a manuscript or document written on this."

I somehow think of foolscap as cheap paper, the sort of stuff I was given in elementary school (the paper with huge splinters in it that Bill Cosby once joked about). But foolscap is simply "A long folio writing- or printing-paper, varying in size." The fool's cap or dunce cap was once used as a watermark.

Brief is brief-paper, used for writing you-know-whats. The OED quotes a 1923 Dictionary of Stationery: "A legal pattern of ruled or watermarked foolscap comprising 36 or 42 feint lines and a marginal line."

Brown paper: "A coarse stout kind of paper made of unbleached materials; chiefly used for wrapping." (See also Rodgers and Hammerstein, "My Favorite Things.")

The OED has no entry for whitey-brown, but it does include whity-brown: "Of a brown colour inclining to white; whitish brown; pale brown: most commonly of paper. As n. (properly two words) a whitish brown; ellipt. = whity-brown paper."

A pen, in Dickens's time, is what we would now call a nib, or a nib and its holder. Or as the OED puts it, "the complete contrivance of pen-holder and nib," also known as a dip pen (not to be mistaken for the later fountain pen).

Pounce: What a swell noun. The OED: "A fine powder, made from pulverized sandarac or cuttle shell, used to prevent ink from spreading (esp. when writing on unsized paper) or to prepare the surface of parchment to receive writing."

Wafer: "A small disk of flour mixed with gum and non-poisonous colouring matter, or of gelatine or the like similarly coloured, which when moistened is used for sealing letters, attaching papers, or receiving the impression of a seal." My guess is wafers took the place of sealing wax with less important documents.

Red tape: "Tape of a red colour such as is commonly used in securing legal and official documents." That's where the metaphor comes from.

Green ferret: "A stout tape most commonly made of cotton, but also of silk; then known as Italian ferret. green-ferret, fig. of officialism (cf. red-tape)." It's easy to understand why green ferret lost out to red tape as metaphor.

Pocket-book: As I thought, a pocket-notebook.

The OED includes law-list in a list of compound-words made with law-, without a definition. But Webster's Third New International has one: "A publication compiling the names and addresses of those engaged in the practice of law and information of interest to the legal profession often including the courts, court calendars, lawyers engaged in specialized fields (as admiralty or patent law), public officers, stenographers, handwriting experts, private investigators, or abstracts of law." Law lists (still known as such) can now be found online.

String box: As I thought, a case "containing string."

But what is a bodkin? "A short pointed weapon; a dagger, poniard, stiletto, lancet," or "A small pointed instrument, of bone, ivory, or steel, used for piercing holes in cloth, etc."? Dickens includes bodkins as examples of "office-cutlery," so I suppose the first definition applies. One would need a bodkin to cut through all that green ferret! (Or to one's quietus make.)

The rather unsatisfactory notes to the Penguin edition of Bleak House gloss "out of his time": "Had served his time as an apprentice and junior." The notes — which also touch lightly on paper, pounce, red tape, and green ferret — are prefaced by a warning: "New readers are advised that the Notes make details of the plot explicit." In other words, the notes — I mean, the Notes — give away elements of the story. Thanks a lot, Notes. I'm reading the Notes very selectively, which is to say, almost not at all.

[I stand corrected on bodkin: check the comments.]