Colgate Optic White

I find it impossible to decide what’s more plausible: that the name Colgate Optic White is the work of a snarky creative type who’s read Ralph Ellison’s novel Invisible Man (1952), or that this new toothpaste just happens to share its name with one of that novel’s most important tropes of color and invisibility. Either way, I’m buying a tube as soon as possible to remember this odd intersection of art and commerce.

In Ellison’s novel, Optic White is the signature product of Liberty Paints, where the narrator, adrift in New York City, has gone to see about a job. Optic White suggests a range of matters: appearances (color as what meets the eye), invisibility (Lucius Brockway, an African-American genius of paint, mixes Optic White in the factory basement), masks (Optic White will cover anything, even a chunk of coal), the melting pot (a black liquid stirred into the paint leaves a grey tinge), whiteness as what’s officially American (Optic White is used on government buildings), and xenophobia (“Keep America Pure with Liberty Paints” is one company slogan). Brockway had a hand in another slogan: “If It’s Optic White, It’s the Right White.”¹ Gosh, that’d make a great toothpaste slogan too, wouldn’t it?

¹ The slogan reminds the novel’s anonymous narrator of “a childhood jingle”: “If you’re white, you’re right.” Ellison in a 1954 Paris Review interview:

Q: Can you give us an example of the use of folklore in your own novel?

A: Well, there are certain themes, symbols, and images which are based on folk material. For example, there is the old saying among Negroes: If you’re black, stay back; if you’re brown, stick around; if you’re white, you’re right.

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Barack Obama and Ralph Ellison
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Invitation to a dance (A passage from Invisible Man)
Three inaugural moments (“when white will embrace what is right”)

Allen Mandelbaum (1926–2011)

The translator Allen Mandelbaum has died at the age of eighty-five. From the New York Times obituary:

Mr. Mandelbaum was well known for his translations of the modern Italian poets Giuseppe Ungaretti and Salvatore Quasimodo, and for his Aeneid, which won the National Book Award in 1973. His verse translation of The Divine Comedy was published in three volumes by the University of California Press in the early 1980s and was later brought out by Bantam in an inexpensive paperback edition that is still used widely in college courses.

I like his Dante and Metamorphoses. Looking at Inferno this morning, I thought this last line of Canto I a fitting tribute to Mandelbaum’s work:

Then he set out, and I moved on behind him.

That’s Dante of course, speaking of Virgil. Like Virgil, the translator too is a guide to what might otherwise remain inaccessible.

Sam Fink (1916–2011)

The artist and calligrapher Sam Fink has died at the age of ninety-five. From the New York Times obituary:

A grandson of Jewish immigrants to the United States from Russia and Poland, Mr. Fink dedicated the last four decades of his life (after retiring as an advertising art director) to hand-lettering, illustrating and commenting on the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the Gettysburg Address and the Book of Exodus.

In 2009 Mr. Fink was the subject of a lovely Wall Street Journal article by his cousin Bob Davis: Through Letters, a Family History Unveiled.

“Incompatible with real democracy”

Paul Krugman:

But why does this growing concentration of income and wealth in a few hands matter? Part of the answer is that rising inequality has meant a nation in which most families don’t share fully in economic growth. Another part of the answer is that once you realize just how much richer the rich have become, the argument that higher taxes on high incomes should be part of any long-run budget deal becomes a lot more compelling.

The larger answer, however, is that extreme concentration of income is incompatible with real democracy.

Oligarchy, American Style (New York Times)

Apple thanks

I called Apple support recently to solve a minor paperwork problem (first call in four years). Apple then sent me a link to an online form asking for my feedback. I filled out the form and found this image at the end. Nice.

I bet my friend Norman can identify every language here with no peeking. Let’s see.

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.

Related posts
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)