Teresa Wright, Teresa Wright

[As May in Roseland (dir. James Ivory, 1977).]

[As Peggy Stephenson in The Best Years of Our Lives (dir. William Wyler, 1946). With Dana Andrews as Fred Derry.]

Teresa Wright is one of my favorite actresses. That facial expression in Roseland struck me as something straight out of The Best Years of Our Lives or Shadow of a Doubt (dir. Alfred HItchcock, 1943). I have tried my best to find an equivalent.

Filmed in New York’s Roseland Ballroom, Roseland is a strange and beautiful film, made of three vignettes of love and loss: “The Waltz,” “The Hustle,” and “The Peabody.” It’s a Merchant Ivory film, screenplay by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, but as Elaine suggested, Roseland feels more like something by Fellini.

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Teresa Wright (1918–2005)
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[An unexpected benefit of seeing Roseland: learning from my dad that his parents met at the Roseland Ballroom. Whose band would have been playing?]

String-bag hack

Elaine Fine (Mrs. Orange Crate Art) has figured out a nifty way to keep string bags from getting tangled up inside her shoulder bag.

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String bags FTW

Bad handwriting and job security

A look at life at the U.S. Postal Service’s Remote Encoding Center, “a room where hundreds of clerks sit in silence, day and night, staring at America's worst-addressed envelopes”:

Poor Penmanship Spells Job Security for Post Office's Scribble Specialists (Wall Street Journal)

[I’m reminded of The Pale King: David Foster Wallace might have made a great novel about boredom, attention, and these postal workers.]

Fake speeding ticket

A new direction in spam, or new at least to me. This ticket came with a no-doubt lethal attachment. Strangely enough, twenty-four other people (e-mail addresses all visible) are getting the same ticket. The Bcc: option would add at least a smidge of greater realism, as would a city name and zip code.

Other spam 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 again

Charles Simic on writing by hand

[A] scrap of paper and a stub of a pencil are more preferable for philosophizing than typing the same words down, since writing a word out, letter by letter, is a more self-conscious process and one more likely to inspire further revisions and elaborations of that thought.

Take Care of Your Little Notebook (New York Review of Books)

Debit-card fee canceled

It’s difficult not to think that the Occupy movement has something to do with this decision: In Retreat, Bank of America Cancels Debit Card Fee (New York Times). See also: Are big banks feeling pressure from Occupy Wall Street? (Washington Post). But the decision doesn’t seem to have made much difference at Zuccotti Park: Occupy shrugs off bank’s debit-card move (MarketWatch).

-wise-wise

In a recent post, I mentioned that in 1960 the suffix -wise “was very much in the air”: the object of lighthearted yet firm rebuke in Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style (1959), and a running joke in Billy Wilder’s The Apartment (1960). Looking back at David Skinner’s 2009 article on Webster’s Third New International Dictionary has reminded me that -wise was very much in the air in 1961 too, the year of that dictionary’s publication. As Skinner notes, Life magazine “singled out the ending -wise for condemnation” in its editorial comment on the new dictionary. Google Books has the passage:

[“A Non-Word Deluge.” Life, October 27, 1961.]

Skinner notes that the Third New International labels irregardless as nonstandard and distinguishes enormity from enormousness. He also points out that concretize, finalize, and -wise “were all established enough to have appeared without warning labels in W2 [the second edition of the New International], the very dictionary Life’s editors claimed to know and trust so well.”

A weekly magazine editorializing (even if mistakenly) about an unabridged dictionary: those were heady times.

The American Heritage Dictionary, fifth edition

The fifth edition of The American Heritage Dictionary is out today, in print and as an app, and with a free website of limited usefulness. (Compare, say, the treatment of irregardless in the online American Heritage and the online Merriam-Webster.)

I would like to go out and buy this dictionary today. O reason not the need, King Lear said. But with the Oxford English Dictionary, Webster’s Third New International, and at least a dozen other dictionaries in the house, and the OED online, and dictionaries on my Mac and iPad, I think I’m full up dictionary-wise (at least if I plan on buying the Fourth New International, whenever it appears).

*

June 24, 2012: The online AHD now has a lengthy usage note for irregardless. Hmm.

Michael Bierut's notebooks

“For the past three decades, [the design firm] Pentagram’s Michael Bierut has kept a numbered series of notebooks — plain composition books, filled with rough sketches, notes taken in client meetings, doodles and design ideas — that cumulatively provide a record of his working life.” The notebooks are the stuff of an exhibit at the College of Saint Rose (Albany, New York): 30 Years 90 Notebooks (via Notebook Stories).

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Angelo Bucco’s composition book

An Iliad

“In their one-man adaptation An Iliad, Lisa Peterson and Denis O’Hare (TV’s True Blood) return Homer’s epic poem to the voice of the lone poet as he recounts a story of human loss and folly that resonates across three millennia of war and bloodshed.” An Iliad runs at Chicago’s Court Theatre, November 10 to December 11.

[Thanks to Music Clip of the Day for the news.]