Weather

Nobody does anything about the weather, but everybody talks about it. They talk behind its back, in terms unflattering and, I’m sorry to say, even coarse.

Today’s March weather looks no different from yesterday’s February — “the dirty month of February,” Jane Austen called it. The calendar shows the same muddy page.

[Insert imprecations here.]

The Pale King excerpt

“Every whole person has ambitions, objectives, initiatives, goals. This one particular boy’s goal was to be able to press his lips to every square inch of his own body”: so begins an excerpt from David Foster Wallace’s unfinished novel The Pale King, online at the New Yorker.

The Infinite Jest sign

David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest is divided into twenty-eight unnumbered sections, the shortest just a little more than a page, the longest nearly two-hundred pages. This moon-like sign marks each section’s start. My Mac calls this sign “shadowed white circle,” which sounds like the beginning of a bad haiku.

Later this morning, a few bold souls and I will begin to make our way through Infinite Jest. We will be living under this moon for the next two months. Wish us way more than luck.

WTF

[Click for a larger view.]

About the URL generated by my first attempt to add the image in the previous post: you’d think that Blogger would have an algorithm to prevent that sort of thing.

Thornton Dial in Indianapolis

Don’t Matter How Raggly the Flag, It Still Got to Tie Us Together. 2003. 71 × 114 × 8 inches. Collection of the Indianapolis Museum of Art. Click for a larger view.

At the Indianapolis Museum of Art: “Hard Truths: The Art of Thornton Dial.” Elaine and I went to Indianapolis yesterday just to spend an afternoon at a museum. We ended up spending an afternoon looking at Thornton Dial’s work and almost nothing else. Dial is an extraordinary self-taught artist whose drawings, paintings, and sculpture combine abstraction and allegory and all manner of found materials. This seventy-piece first retrospective of his work will travel to New Orleans, Charlotte, and Atlanta.

Hard Truths: The Art of Thornton Dial (IMA)
Letting His Life’s Work Do the Talking (New York Times)

We Are Wisconsin

We Are Wisconsin, by Finn Ryan and David Nevala. I think we are all Wisconsinites now.

[The Firefox extension Flashblock will prevent this film from playing. Add player.vimeo.com and vimeo.com to your whitelist.]

Howard Armstrong on staying young

[In Daley Plaza, Chicago.]

Wisdom from mandolinist, violinist, singer, storyteller, and visual artist Howard Armstrong (aka Louie Bluie):

“I’m not ashamed to tell anybody my age: I am seventy-five years — not old, but seventy-five years young, because I have most of the attributes that young men should have. I have interest in life, and full of energy, full of pep. Most of all, I’m full of curiosity, because that is one thing that keeps you young.”

Louie Bluie (dir. Terry Zwigoff, 1985) is a portrait of a brilliant musician and remarkable man. Armstrong’s not much for modern art though. Says he about the untitled Picasso work behind him: “If you’re gonna be an artist, paint something that looks like something at least you can relate to. That — I don’t know. It’s just like something that jumped out of The Twilight Zone.”

Louie Bluie is available on DVD from The Criterion Collection. A short clip with the Picasso scene is there for the watching.

[Full of pep: there’s a dowdy expression I’d like to revive.]

Misheard

Waiting at my dentist’s (Look, Mom, no cavities!), I misheard a radio pitch for fast food — a hamburger with bacon and blue cheese, “served on a plastic bun.” Oops — it was a classic bun. I think I know why I misheard: I find it difficult to imagine the inflationary classic as applying to a hamburger bun. A classic bun is a bun.

More misheard
“Buttered crap” : “Her clothes?” : “The Tao”

The plural of Prius, continued

Thinking about Prii prompted me to look at what Garner’s Modern American Usage has to say about the plural forms of borrowed words. From a longer discussion:

Many writers who try to be sophisticated in their use of language make mistakes such as *ignorami and *octopi — unaware that neither is a Latin noun that, when inflected as a plural, becomes -i. The proper plural of the Greek word octopus is octopodes; the proper English plural is octopuses.

Those who affect this sort of sophistication may face embarrassing stumbles — e.g., “A ‘big city’ paper with an editor as eminently qualified as I’m sure you are should know that the plural of campus is *campi (not campuses). Just like the plural of virus is *viri (not viruses), and the plural of stadium is *stadia (not stadiums).” Letter to the Editor, Dallas Morning News, 22 Sept. 2002, at J3 (name withheld for obvious reasons).

Garner’s guideline: “if in doubt, use the native-English plural ending in -s.”

One complication with the Toyota Prius: unlike, say, campus, prius is a Latin adjective and adverb, not a noun. And Prius is not a Latin word; it’s the name of a car. Priuses makes better sense to the eye and ear, at least to my eye and ear. And to my other eye and ear.

My least-favorite sophisticated plural might be fora for forums. Yours?

[The Garner asterisk: “Invariably inferior words and phrases are marked with an asterisk.”]

The plural of Prius

Toyota has announced that the plural of Prius is Prii.