Living in the Middle Ages

Wally (Wallace Shawn), in My Dinner with André (dir. Louis Malle, 1981):

“In the Middle Ages, before the arrival of scientific thinking as we know it today, well, people could believe anything. Anything could be true: the statue of the Virgin Mary could speak or bleed, or whatever it was. But the wonderful thing that happened was that then in the development of science in the western world, well, certain things did come slowly to be known and understood. I mean, you know, obviously, all ideas in science are constantly being revised; I mean, that's the whole point. But we do at least know that the universe has some shape and order and that, you know, trees do not turn into people or goddesses. And there are very good reasons why they don't, and you can't just believe absolutely anything.”

I think that Todd Akin is living in the Middle Ages.

*

August 22: Todd Akin’s theorizing about rape and pregnancy dates back at least to the late thirteenth century.

DFW, thesaurus entries

At davemadden.org, a brief guide to David Foster Wallace’s contributions to the Oxford American Writer’s Thesaurus . Wallace contributed a couple of dozen notes on usage to the OAWT, at least some of which are available in the Mac’s version of the thesaurus.

Now I’m wondering if Wallace might have had something to do with a very strange sample sentence in the OAWT : “I observed this wheelchair dude in the vestibule waiting for me.” Infinite Jest is filled with men, dangerous men, in wheelchairs. I’m thinking in particular of a scene in the novel in which Rémy Marathe, posing as a survey-taker, sits in a hotel hallway and knocks on a door. The only vestibules in IJ though are found at the Enfield Tennis Academy. Is this “wheelchair dude” waiting for Hal Incandenza?

The “wheelchair dude” has disappeared from the Mac’s OAWT but lives on in this 2010 post.

Related reading
All David Foster Wallace posts (via Pinboard)

&QuA?

[Frontispiece to Sheridan Baker’s The Practical Stylist (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1962).]

Sheridan Baker’s The Practical Stylist is a much-acclaimed, long-lived textbook for college writing classes. The above frontispiece comes from the tenth printing (1967), whose cover design and typography are credited to Guy Fleming. Perhaps the frontispiece appears in earlier printings too. Bravo to the publisher who thought it fitting to give a lovely bouquet of letters and punctuation marks to a textbook.

Who was Guy Fleming? The New York Times has a 1956 wedding announcement for a Guy Fleming and a Ruth Foster. The Guy Fleming in question was then attending the Yale School of Graphic Arts. I think he must be our man. A 1961 Times review of James Joyce’s Scribbledehobble: The Ur-Workbook for Finnegans Wake, says that “Guy Fleming, who designed the book, is the only person to emerge from the enterprise with enhanced reputation.” A comment on a 2008 post about Fleming’s work says that Fleming died “about four years ago.”

Here are six sources for more of Fleming’s work:

Guy Fleming jackets (Dreamers Rise)
More Fleming jackets (Julian Montague Projects)
One more Fleming jacket (Bennington College)
Another jacket (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
Still another (Robotspaceshiptank)
One more (The Ward-O-Matic)

*

September 20, 2013: I was delighted to receive an e-mail from Guy Fleming’s daughter Faith Fleming. Guy Fleming (1931–2001) did indeed study at Yale (bachelor’s in Art History, 1953; master’s in design, 1955). Faith describes her father as “a book designer, jacket designer, typographer, cartographer, illustrator, painter, and wood carver.” An excerpt from her e-mail (used here with permission):

My memories are a bit sketchy about the publishers he worked with but the list included a number of the major trade publishers of the time: Knopf, Harper & Row, Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, etc. After a few years he and my mother moved to Eastern Long Island (where my mother’s family had a potato farm) and he began working from home with weekly trips to the city. At some point, he went freelance and worked by mailing his designs and mechanicals to the publishers. In the early 1960s we moved to Maine where he would work as a freelance designer until he had to retire due to poor eyesight.

I remember when he worked on the jackets for Gabriel García Márquez. I would visit his studio daily after school and loved watching him work and talking with him. His studio was unheated except for a massive woodstove, usually included a sleeping dog and or cats, a radio playing a classical radio station, and a lot of cigarette smoke. He read a majority of the books he designed and all of the ones he did jackets or illustrations for. He was extremely well read, witty and passionate about his work.

Good news for anyone who admires Guy Fleming: Faith plans to share photographs of her father’s work online.

Sheaffer cartridge pens, 1959

[Life, August 17, 1959.]

[An old coot turns the pages of Life and finds this ad.]

“The kids today . . . what with their hula hoops and rocket ships. And cartridge pens! A pen should fill from a bottle!”

Be cool, imaginary coot. I like the picture of things this ad presents: high schoolers and college students thinking about their writing instruments. If you click on the ad, you’ll get a larger view with readable text. Let me prove it. Here’s what Sally Cunningham, a junior at Birmingham (Michigan) High School has to say:

“By carrying Skrip cartridges in your pocket or purse, you can fill your Skripsert pen right during a class or exam! And quickly!”

Very practical, Sally! No embarrassing ink spills for you!

Mike Redman, Yale freshman, says:

“In addition to my Skripsert fountain pen, I’m taking a matching pencil back to school! After all, whoever heard of going through a year of solid trigonometry without an eraser?”

Smart choice, Mike! Your enthusiasm — and your sense of humor — are contagious!

What makes this ad especially great is the appearance of Ann Marget Olsson (last name misspelled as Olson). Yes, Ann-Margret. Yes, Ann-Margret, who indeed attended Northwestern.




I’m so stuck on fountain pens that at first I didn’t realize what should be immediately clear to any reader of this ad: Sheaffer is trying to keep the kids away from b-ll-p--nts. Shh.

[All kidding and coots aside, bottled ink is a better choice for fountain pens: far less expensive. The fountain-pen cartridge is the precursor of the inkjet-printer cartridge.]

“No job is overwhelming if”

Good advice from Helen and Scott Nearing:

No job is overwhelming if you have a general idea of what you are about, break the project into manageable units, put through these units one at a time and have the thrill of fitting them into the over-all pattern.

Living the Good Life: How to Live Sanely and Simply in a Troubled World (New York: Schocken Books, 1970).

A related post
Granularity

Frankfurt on bullshit

When an honest man speaks, he says only what he believes to be true; and for the liar, it is correspondingly indispensable that he considers his statements to be false. For the bullshitter, however, all these bets are off: he is neither on the side of the true nor on the side of the false. His eye is not on the facts at all, as the eyes of the honest man and of the liar are, except insofar as they may be pertinent to his interest in getting away with what he says. He does not care whether the things he says describe reality correctly. He just picks them out, or makes them up, to suit his purpose.

Harry G. Frankfurt, On Bullshit (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005).

Sex and the Office

From the New York Times obituary for Helen Gurley Brown:

Ms. Brown routinely described herself as a feminist, but whether her work helped or hindered the cause of women’s liberation has been publicly debated for decades. It will doubtless be debated long after her death.

Reading about Brown’s life and work, I remembered that I had — where? — a copy of Sex and the Office (1965), the lesser-known sequel to Sex and the Single Girl (1962). So I looked, and looked, and there it was, on a shelf in, no joke, my office, with several passages marked. I must have used these passages when teaching. Here are two passages that I marked. Do they help or hinder the cause of women’s freedom?

It's okay to butter up anybody . . . boss, clients, visitors, brass, workers, even people who are a little creepy.

I can see your mouth corners turning down . . . being nice to people you hate is phony. All right, Miss Pure Motives, have it your way — but in my opinion, a business office is not the place to discriminate between the worthy and unworthy recipients of charm. You can draw the line in your personal life if you wish, although I never do. (I positively slather over the milkman to get certified raw skim milk delivered to my door, and he looks more like a tugboat than a dreamboat.)

Send the congratulatory wire. Take the vice-president’s wife to tea. Carry on over a new crew-cut. Carry on and carry on. No matter what your motives are, you’ll make people feel nice and that’s always good.

*

Listening, babying, flirting (except when it would embarrass the object of your attention) are all things you should do with impunity . . . and a little style. And there just may be room at the top for you to cheer a Chairman.

You have to make up your own mind about sleeping with people to get ahead, but there’s nothing wrong with talking to a man. Long, probing, business-friendship talks are delicious, whether they improve your perch or not.

I could name ten corporation executives whose real business confidante is a woman — not a secretary, in these cases, but some girl who has a terrific grasp of executive problems.

“Some girl”? Some feminism! I think I must have used this book when teaching Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll House. Nora too was engaged in a pleasing and manipulative performance.

I also marked a passage that suggests buying books to spiff up an office:

Books look marvelous and say good things about you. (Anybody who owns books can’t be all dumbbell.) Five dollars should buy ten to fifteen books in a second-hand store. (It’s better if they are books you’ve really read and liked.) Paperbacks look nice too.

[All ellipses are Brown’s.]

Michiko Kakutani, messy watch

From a February 2011 post:

New York Times book-reviewer Michiko Kakutani is known for her frequent (some might say too frequent) use of the verb limn. Nearly as frequent is her use of the adjective messy.

I made my case by collecting appearances of messy and mess, from 1979 to the then present.

The first mess of 2012 appeared in Kakutani’s tactless paraphrase of a line from Philip Larkin’s “This Be the Verse”: “They mess you up” for “They fuck you up.” This past Sunday’s Times has the first messy of 2012. It appears in a review of Nicholson Baker’s The Way the World Works, a book of essays Kakutani calls a “hodge-podgy collection”:

He even gives himself little rules concerning his annotation of books: no messy underlining or highlighting in yellow or pink, just a discreet little dot in the margin next to something he approves of — dots so discreet that they “could almost be a dark fleck in the paper” — and, also, no more than 10 or 15 dots per book.

Look at “Narrow Ruled,” the essay in question, and you’ll see that “messy underlining” reflects Kakutani’s sensibility, not Baker’s. Yes, Baker prefers making dots to underlining, but what he says about “the dot method,” as he calls it, is that it is “unobtrusive.” And making dots is not a matter of “little rules”: it’s just the way he likes to mark passages in his reading for later hand-copying. That’s why “it’s best” (Baker’s words) to make ten to fifteen dots: there’s no rule involved, aside from the narrow-ruled notebooks into which Baker copies.

This review seems to mark the first appearance of hodge-podgy in Kakutani’s prose. Hodge-podge though has appeared often.

Related posts
Michiko Kakutani, messy
First messy of 2011
“They mess you up”

Jacques Barzun on publishing

Jacques Barzun examines a truism of higher education:

Defenders of the system as it is often say that good teaching is inseparable from research and that the man who ceases studying at twenty-five is a dried-out and dull teacher ten years later. These are two statements that only seem to be the same. Of course the teacher must keep reading and thinking abreast of his time, but this does not mean that he must write and publish. The confusion hides a further absurd assumption, which is that when a man writes a scholarly book that reaches a dozen specialists he adds immeasurably to the world’s knowledge; whereas if he imparts his thoughts and his reading to one hundred and fifty students every year, he is wasting his time and leaving the world in darkness. One is tempted to ask what blinkered pedant ever launched the notion that students in coming to college secede from the human race and may therefore be safely left out when knowledge is being broadcast.

Jacques Barzun, Teacher in America (Boston: Little, Brown, 1945).

Broadcast, as Van Dyke Parks likes to point out, takes us back to agriculture.

Related reading
All Jacques Barzun posts

[Irony: Barzun of course has published as much as any forty or fifty everyday academics.]

Mark Trail, remember?

[Mark Trail, August 8 and 15, 2012.]

The art has suffered, or the hair stylist has gone on break. But a memory card has replaced the “chip,” and that’s a good thing. If there were a report card, I’d be torn between Needs Improvement and Shows Improvement. But not yet Satisfactory.

“Remember, we took the memory card out”: remember, the memory card? Like Mitt Romney, I live for laughter. Hahaha.

Related reading
Earlier Mark Trail posts