December 14, 2012

On August 5, 2012, I wrote the following words:

About two weeks ago, in the aftermath of the Aurora, Colorado, shootings, various voices in media and politics said that it was inappropriate to be discussing gun-ownership rights — not the right time, too early. In the aftermath of today’s shootings in Oak Creek, Wisconsin, it seems that once again it will be too early for such a discussion.

White House Press Secretary Jay Carney sounded the refrain earlier today:

“There is, I’m sure — will be, rather, a day for discussion of the usual Washington policy debates, but I don’t think today is that day.”

As violent event follows violent event, the logic here defies logic. Carney is of course right to say that today is not the day to discuss a piece of legislation. But his language is the language of procrastination, of endless deferral. It suggests to me J. Alfred Prufrock: “There will be time, there will be time.” And the reference to “the usual Washington policy debates” suggests a lack of conviction that anything much is going to change. But have gun-ownership rights even been a “usual” subject of debate in Washington? Not much, not lately.

President Obama was more to the point:

“As a country, we have been through this too many times. Whether it’s an elementary school in Newtown, or a shopping mall in Oregon, or a temple in Wisconsin, or a movie theater in Aurora, or a street corner in Chicago, these neighborhoods are our neighborhoods, and these children are our children. We’re going to have to come together and take meaningful action to prevent more tragedies like this, regardless of the politics."

And now, the president needs to lead.

Related reading
Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence

[My transcriptions, from clips available at CBS News.]

Hi and Lois watch

[Hi and Lois, December 14, 2012.]

Dot Flagston, look again: there is one door on the side of your family’s station wagon.

It was a car-safety problem that turned me into a close reader of Hi and Lois. The fun never ends. Everything about cars seems to be a challenge for those who assemble the strip.

The two-door station wagon seems hilariously improbable: the spaciousness of a wagon, the awkwardness of . . . a compact? (Especially improbable with baby Trixie on board.) But as I just found out, two-door station wagons did exist, years ago. Perhaps there’s some inside joke inside this strip.

Related reading
All Hi and Lois posts (Pinboard)

Domestic comedy

“I’ve never seen Jaws — only bits and pieces.”

Related reading
All domestic comedy posts (Pinboard)

Edward Tufte’s signage

“Using the format of diamond signs that provide alerts and warnings about the road ahead, this series of works on canvas shows philosophical alerts, imperatives, and thoughts about the path past and future”: Edward Tufte’s Philosophical Diamond Signs.

Variety language

Learn the language of Variety: here and here. Most famously: STICKS NIX HICK PIX.

Turabian, fourth edition

[Click for larger views.]

The fourth edition of the University of Chicago Press’s A Manual for Writers of Research Papers, Theses, and Dissertations appeared in 1973. This copy (thirteenth printing) is from 1979. Writers of the era used the tools depicted on the book’s front and back covers to create written documents by making marks on thin sheets of a material called “paper” and fastening the sheets together.

Notice the use of tightly spaced Helvetica. In a comment on a 2011 post about Arthur Plotnik’s The Elements of Editing, Daughter Number Three pointed out that such spacing was once popular. Notice too the Parker T-Ball Jotter and the typeballs. The small object at the bottom left of the front cover is a typewriter key. The one above it: no idea.

The covers are what have made me hold on to this book through the years.

Related posts
A Manual for Writers of Dissertations
Parker T-Ball Jotter, 1963

A Manual for Writers of Dissertations

[Title page. Click for a larger view.]

Who was Kate Turabian? The University of Chicago Press can answer that question. I found this pamphlet yesterday, discarded. It’s a 1949 reprint of a 1937 publication, free to Chicago advanced-degree candidates (“50 cents,” says the inside front cover). This sixty-one-page manual is the predecessor of A Manual for Writers of Research Papers, Theses, and Dissertations, now in its seventh edition.

I can admire a typewriter as machine art, but reading the details of document preparation in this manual reminds me of how little glamour I find in the idea of using a manual typewriter. Been there, done that. No thanks.


[“4. Typewriter ribbon.--A black ribbon, medium- or clean-inked rather than heavy-inked, should be used. A sufficient number of ribbons should be used to ensure a relatively even blackness throughout the thesis. it is recommended that the total number required for a job of typing be in hand before the work is begun and that the ribbons be used in rotation. That is, use ribbon one for, say, twenty-five pages, then ribbon two for the next twenty-five pages, and so on until each of the ribbons has been used for the same number of pages, repeating the sequence as many times as necessary to complete the typing job.” And by the way, the Dissertation Secretary has a list of “competent thesis typists.” Click for a larger view.]

Can anyone identify the typeface used on the title page? The usual online resources can’t.

1:30 p.m.: Daughter Number Three identified the typeface in a comment: it’s Bernhard Gothic. Thanks.

Related reading
All typewriter posts (Pinboard)

[“Sixty-one-pages”? Yes. As the Manual says, “In isolated cases in ordinary text matter every number of less than three digits should be spelled out.”]

Levenger chess set

As a once-serious chess player, I cannot look away when a catalogue depicts a game in progress. The first thing I check: whether the board is properly positioned, with a white square at h1.¹ Next: whether the position shown is at all plausible. The latest Levenger catalogue has a pretty startling game in progess, also available online. This is your chess set on drugs:



The board is properly positioned, but even a beginner should be able to recognize that this game is a mess. The position is, I suspect, an impossible one: I cannot see how White’s bishop could have made it to its present square, nor can I see how White’s missing bishop went missing. But there’s more. Here’s an aerial view of the damage:



Yes, the person responsible for setting up this board has confused kings and queens. But straightening out that problem does nothing to make the position more plausible:



Hey, Levenger catalogue: it’s enough to show a board with all thirty-two pieces nicely lined up for play. Or if you must show a game in progress, choose a recognizable position from a standard opening. Chess players will like that. Keep it simple, or you run the risk of creating something ridiculous. Imagine a photograph of a notebook whose pages are filled with fugiad diughiuwr (that is, gibberish). That’s what this chess game looks like.

*

3:56 p.m.: The position on the corrected board can be achieved, though the moves required are a comedy of errors: 1. e3 d5 2. Bd3 c6 3. b3 Bg4 4. c3 e5 5. f4 Nd7 6. Nf3 f5 7. fxe5 Nxe5 8. Bxf5 Bh5 9. Kf2 Nf6 10. Rg1 Bd6 11. d3 Qb6 12. Ba3 Kf7 13. g3 Rhe8 14. Nxe5 Bxe5 15. Qd2 Bd6 16. Qc2 Bxa3 17. Qd2 Bd6. I used no drugs in working out these moves.

Related posts
From the Levenger catalogue
Levenger Pocket Briefcase, revised
Tools for serious readers?

¹ That’s algebraic notation. The square is also known as KR1.

[I used the Apronus Online Interactive Chessboard to make the diagrams.]

Ravi Shankar (1920–2012)

From the New York Times obituary:

Mr. Shankar, a soft-spoken, eloquent man whose performance style embodied a virtuosity that transcended musical languages, was trained in both Eastern and Western musical traditions. Although Western audiences were often mystified by the odd sounds and shapes of the instruments when he began touring in Europe and the United States in the early 1950s, Mr. Shankar and his ensemble gradually built a large following for Indian music.

Shankar’s 1967 Monterey Pop Festival performance of “Dhun (Dadra and Fast Teental)” with Alla Rakha and Kamala Chakravarty must be one of the most exciting moments of music on film, preserved in Monterey Pop (dir. D. A. Pennebaker, 1968).

Frank O’Hara, Yeats, and others

From the short film USA: Poetry: Frank O’Hara:

John [Ashbery] and Kenneth [Koch] and I, and a number of other people later, found that the only people who were interested in our poetry were painters, or sculptors. You know, they were enthusiastic about different ideas, and they were more inquisitive. They had no — being non-literary, they had no parti pris about academic standards, attitudes, and so on. So that you could say “I don’t like Yeats,” and they would say “I know how just how you feel. I hate Picasso too.” [Laughs.]

In the poem “Fresh Air,” Koch refers to “Yeats of the baleful influence.” T. S. Eliot and William Butler Yeats still ruled when I was an English major in the late 1970s. To not like Yeats, to express reservations about, say, his loftiness, his mythiness, his self-regard, would have meant exile from the hall of poetry, or at least from the hallways of the buildings in which I took classes.

I like what the poet David Schubert wrote in 1938, in a letter to a friend: “I’m going to buy my edition of Yeats tomorrow, for he does belong to the ages although he knows it too well.”

Related posts
Breakfast with William B. and Edna St. V.
David Schubert, TR5-3718
Six lines from Auden

[Parti pris: “a preconceived view; a bias,” from the French “side taken” (New Oxford American Dictionary). The Schubert letter appears in David Schubert: Works and Days, the 1983 Quarterly Review of Literature volume devoted to his work.]