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Hi and Lois watch: Things are back to normal on the Hi-Lo production line.

An ism

What my friend Sara calls an “ism”:

Learning is the process of realizing you did not create the world.

It’s hers, and it’s one smart ism.

Hi and Lois watch

[Hi and Lois, January 10, 2012.]

[Hi and Lois, January 16, 2012.]

Though its characters haven’t aged in years, the Hi and Lois world is ever in flux. Furniture disappears and windows change shape in the interstices; a neighbor changes his hair color and no one says a thing. I like the contrast between the speech balloons above: first Hi’s risqué suggestion, then the twins’ cheerful cure for Lois’s seasonal affective disorder.¹ I notice too that the windows have again changed shape.

But there’s a more fundamental difference (as Professor Gingrich might say) between the above panels. Notice how the art has changed: as of January 15, every character, every object, every speech balloon is enclosed by a thick Sharpie-like line. I’ve read that eight people “animate” the strip: it looks as if they’re taking turns.

Update, January 22: Things are back to normal on the Hi-Lo production line. (But that shadow?)

[Hi and Lois, January 22, 2012.]

¹ Re: seasonal affective disorder: that’s what Lois thinks is wrong. I suspect though that it has something to do with Hi’s clumsy attempt to “turn up the heat.”

Related reading
All Hi and Lois posts (via Pinboard)

Time Inc. notebook

[“Notebook of Time Inc. co-founder Briton Hadden with suggestions and ideas for new magazines.” Photographer unknown. 1929. From the Life Photo Archive. Click for a larger view.]

I like the idea of a “letter mag” (right under “secy mag”) — I’d like to think that meant a magazine devoted to letters as in stamps and stationery, not letters as in literature.

[I’ve written two letters this year. How about you?]

Definitive Jest

Jarett Myskiw’s Definitive Jest: “a vocabulary-building and SNOOT-approved word-of-the-day blog centered around David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest.”

Related reading
All David Foster Wallace posts (via Pinboard)

[In the essay “Authority and American Usage,” Wallace glosses SNOOT as his “nuclear family’s nickname for a really extreme usage fanatic.” The acronym stands for “Sprachgefühl Necessitates Our Ongoing Tendance” or “Syntax Nudniks Of Our Time.“ “Authority and American Usage” appears in Consider the Lobster and Other Essays (New York: Little, Brown, 2005). The essay first appeared in Harper’s as “Tense Present: Democracy, English, and the Wars over Usage.”]

Bands and punctuation

Some of what’s here is diacritics, not punctuation. But it would be pedantic to point that out: A Brief Guide to Band Name Punctuation.

[Don’t forget Tony! Toni! Toné!]

PHONE SCAM

I had to laugh when I saw the ID for this incoming call: was it the result of some new truth-in-dialing law? No. It’s the phone company doing its work. Do a search for 567-248-4400 and you’ll find endless reports of nuisance calls about lowering credit-card rates. Bravo, phone company.

Illegibility and shopping

On the list:

plague rinse

sympathy carol

nuanced garlic

basmati nice

Yes, that was my own handwriting staring back at me. And National Handwriting Day is just days away. I better get in shape.

Jessica Mitford on the Famous Writers School

From the July 1970 Atlantic, Jessica Mitford’s Let Us Now Appraise Famous Writers. Go, read!

[Correspondence schools: the original “distance learning.”]

Writing about writing

If you’re going to write about writing, write well. Someone at the Huffington Post didn’t:

“Twitter, with it’s unavoidable limitations . . . .”

[When is it its? When it’s not it is. When is it it’s? When it is it is.]

“”The logical steps your reader has to navigate to find the meaning of your sentence is more difficult if you use the passive voice.”

[Well, sometimes, sort of. But we don’t navigate steps in reading a sentence; we navigate the sentence. And we don’t “find the meaning” of a sentence; we understand a sentence (or don’t). Things are also more difficult when your subjects and verbs don’t agree.]

“Adverbs are inherently weakening.”

[I wondered whether the writer is joking about inherently, but nothing else in his presentation makes me think that he is. At any rate, this claim about adverbs is absurd: if I say I slept fitfully, the adverb is crucial to my meaning.]

[“When is it its?” is from Jessica Mitford’s Poison Penmanship: The Gentle Art of Muckraking (1979). Does anyone still read — or listen to — Jessica Mitford? I was Huffington Post-free for weeks till (not ’til) a Google Alert pulled me back in, dammit.]

A related post
Its and it’s