Infinite Jest diagram

[Detail from “A diagram of nearly all the characters in David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, with connections and relations shown thereamong”: a PDF and poster by graphic designer Sam Potts.]

I did something similar by hand teaching Charles Dickens’s Bleak House last spring. I’m teaching Bleak House and Infinite Jest next spring, two big novels, two big diagrams mapping the relations among characters.

Infinite Jest: A Diagram (Sam Potts)

Some Infinite Jest posts
Attention : Description : “Don’t look!” : Loveliness : “Night-noises” : Romance : Sadness : Telephony : Television

A Depression psalm

The so-called 1932nd Psalm:

Depression is my shepherd; I am in want.

He maketh me to lie down on park benches; He leadeth me beside the still factories.

He restoreth the bread lines; He leadeth me in the paths of destruction for his Party’s sake.

Yea, though I walk through the Valley of Unemployment, I fear every evil; for thou art with me; the Politicians and Profiteers they frighten me.

Thou preparest a reduction in mine salary before me in the presence of mine creditors; Thou anointest mine income with taxes; my expenses runneth over mine income.

Surely unemployment and poverty will follow me all the days of the Republican administration; and I shall dwell in a mortgaged home forever.

Published in the Weatherford Democrat, June 10, 1932. Collected in Donald Whisenhunt’s Depression in Texas: The Hoover Years (New York: Garland, 1983).

Politicians who are willing to lead us in the paths of destruction for their party’s sake frighten me too. Mitch McConell (R-KY): “The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president.”

This psalm seems to have begun its life during Warren Harding’s administration:

[Amalgamated Sheet Metal Workers’ Journal, March 1922.]

[Locomotive Engineers Journal, June 1922.]

The Democrat is still publishing in Weatherford, Texas.

Each: singular, or plural?

I received an e-mail this morning from a reader asking about each: does it take a singular verb, or plural? Garner’s Modern English Usage has the answers. I’ll paraphrase:

1. Each usually takes a singular verb. A sample sentence from an earlier post: “Each of these issues becomes a non-issue with handwritten work.”

2. When each is not itself the subject and the subject is plural, the verb should be plural. Another sample from an earlier post: “‘We each have an opposable thumb,’ I said.”

[Reader, my e-mails to you bounced back. I hope you see what you’re looking for here. In the sentences you asked about, the verbs should be singular.]

A related post
If I were , if I was

Mississippi John Hurt

Guitarist and singer Mississippi John Hurt (1892–1966), listening closely. From an episode of Pete Seeger’s Rainbow Quest television series with Hurt, Paul Cadwell, and Hedy West, first broadcast on Monday, November 20, 1967. I still remember watching episodes of Rainbow Quest on New York’s Channel 13 (educational television). Hearing and seeing Seeger and company — I remember Reverend Gary Davis, Brownie McGhee and Sonny Terry, and Doc Watson — was like picking up audio and video transmissions from a distant planet, or at least a planet far from the suburbs of New Jersey. Little did I know that Rainbow Quest was taped on planet Newark.

My debt to John Hurt is great: like many other young guitarists, I learned to fingerpick by listening to his records.

There are one, two, three clips from this Rainbow Quest on YouKnowWhat. I found the broadcast date via the New York Times archives.

“Lights-On Map”

At Recovery.gov, an Edward Tufte-designed map and graph track moneys distributed through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. Points of light, indeed.

Steve Martin at the 92nd Street Y

Steve Martin talked about art — not the funny — at the 92nd Street Y. Audience members complained. So the Y offered refunds credit for an evening did not meet the usual “standard of excellence.”

Steve Martin on the Y’s “standard of excellence”: “it can’t be that high because this is the second time I’ve appeared there.”

Comedian Conversation Falls Flat at 92nd Street Y (New York Times)

Update, December 5: In the comments, a reader points to a first-hand account of the evening.

Update, December 6: Steve Martin comments in the New York Times.

Sentence for orange

A search for a single sentence: give me sentence for the word orange. Seeing as you asked politely:

Orange was the color of her dress, then blue silk.

If you want to hear the Charles Mingus composition whose title is that sentence, here’s one version.

[Context: ever since I posted a commentary on five sentences from Charles Dickens’s Bleak House, Internauts searching for sentences (that is, their homework) have been ending up at Orange Crate Art. Give me sentence for the word orange is the latest such search.]

Other sentence posts
Bleak House : The cat : Clothes : The driver : Life : Life on the moon : The past (1) : The past (2) : The ship : Smoking : The telephone

Other Mingus posts
Charles Mingus at Cornell
Charles Mingus defies bomb threat
I dream of Mingus

“It’s spitting”

It was snowing, barely, yesterday afternoon, and twice in two hours, I heard someone say “It’s spitting.” The word spitting was apt: snow was coming down in dribs and drabs — ptooey, ptooey, ptooey.

The Oxford English Dictionary gives this definition for the verb spit: “Of rain or snow: To fall in scattered drops or flakes. (Usually with it as subject.)” Here are the illustrative sentences that follow:

1778 [W. H. MARSHALL] Minutes Agric. Observ. 129 To sprinkle (or spit), to rain slow in largish drops. 1818 S. E. FERRIER Marriage vii, “And“ —putting her hand out at the window — “I think it’s spitting already.” 1836-7 DICKENS Sk. Boz, Tales vii, It had been “spitting” with rain for the last half-hour. 1860 TYNDALL Glac. I. xxv. 189 The fine snow . . . was caught by the wind and spit bitterly against us. 1887 SERVICE Life Dr. Duguid 171 Feeling that it was spittin’ through the win’, I quickened my step.

The OED entry for the participial adjective spitting has a phrase from Thomas Drant’s 1567 translation of Horace’s Epistles: “A linnine slop in spitting snow.” Or as Christopher Smart’s 1755 prose translation puts it, “thin drawers in snowy weather.”

[Slop: “An outer garment, as a loose jacket, tunic, cassock, mantle, gown, or smock-frock.” Thanks, OED.]

Related posts
“Ice and Snow Blues” (A blues lyric)
Inclement weather (John Milton and us)
“It is snowing.” (A Pierre Reverdy prose-poem)
Snow, dirt, paint (A photograph)
Snowbound (A one-act play)

“Order updated”

To: Alec, Alma, Bethany, Collin, Dario, Doug, Gail, Gilda, Grover, Harvey, Jake, Jeremy, Krystal, Larry, Leo, Lily, Lizzy, Mandy, Meredith, Nick, Nicol, Norberto, Ophelia, Queen, Richard, Sherlyn, Sonny, Suanne, Tod

From: A grateful customer

Thank you, all of you, for updating my recent order. Was that order crazy, or what? I just couldn’t make up my mind: color, quantity, shipping preference, style: too much to think about! But you guys came through, seriously. Every time I decided to change my order, you were right there with another e-mail: “Order updated.“ Sometimes even before I let you know! You guys! You kept things running smoothly at all times, even when dealing with a total scatter-brain. (Me!)

I have only one question: when can I expect to receive my order?

Related posts
Achilles and stochastic
English professor spam
The folks who live in the mail
Great names in spam
Introducing Rickey Antipasto
The poetry of spam
Spam names
Spam names

Fambly

In correspondence amongst ourselves (okay, e-mail), my family has come to rely upon the word fambly, drawn from the speech of the Joad family in John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath. Believe me, there’s nothing condescending or funny about our use of the word. Fambly reminds me of humbly. Fambly has no associations of ancestral glory. The word serves, at least in my imagination, as a reminder that a family is a small and fragile thing, making its way through life’s hazards.

Elaine and I were happy all the time to have our fambly together last week. What can one say about a daughter who knows how to use the word redux in a sentence and a son who can trade fours on “On the Sunny Side of the Street”? Simply that they’re wonderful people, in so many ways. As the Joads would say, I’m proud to know them.