One of those who is or are

“Don’t be one of those people who mistakenly believe that the word believe earlier in this sentence should have been believes.” Bryan Garner clears up a tricky question of usage: “One of those who are” or “one of those who is”? (LawProse Blog).

“There’s a story if you want to hear it”

An antiques dealer hears a remarkable story:

When I opened a random drawer beside the kitchen sink, the contents startled me. Inside were hundreds of political buttons, and they were an odd mix. The oldest were mostly for Republican candidates, while the newer ones were Democrats.

The man overseeing the estate sale approached me as I sorted through them. Within moments I had bought the contents of the drawer.

“So what”s the story?” I asked. “He was a Republican, she was a Democrat? Not so Green Acres?”

“Not exactly,” my host replied. He appeared to be uneasy about something. “There’s a story if you want to hear it,” he said, pausing.

You probably do: Traces of a Man Who Disappeared (The New York Times).

VDP on the right to fail

Van Dyke Parks, talking in New York recently:

“Just as a personal aside, something that I think is very important to say: You must reserve the right to fail if you’re going to get anything done. You must continue aggressively to reserve the right to fail. You must keep learning from your failures. I see that — I see how shy I was, when I could afford to be shy, because I was a brunet, and I had time to be shy. But soon you’ll tire of being shy, if you are shy at all, if you’re that victimized by the degree of self-loathing coming from your last failure. But you must continue to forgive yourself, and reserve the right to fail.”

Related reading
All Van Dyke Parks posts (Pinboard)
John Holt on learning and difficulty
Learning, failure, and character

[Merriam-Webster: “spelled brunet when used of a boy or man and usually brunette when used of a girl or woman.”]

DFW book from Madras Press

Straight out of Newton, Massachusetts: Sumanth Prabhaker’s Madras Press has published a section of David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King as a five-inches-square book: The Awakening of My Interest in Advanced Tax. It’s a conversion narrative, the long first-person story of “Irrelevant” Chris Fogle, a drug-taking “wastoid” who walks into the wrong college classroom and finds his life changed by a lecture on the heroism of accountancy. The Fogle story may be the best thing in the The Pale King.

Madras Press books are available from select bookstores and by mail from the publisher. All proceeds go to charitable organizations. The beneficiary for this book is Granada House, where, in 1989, Wallace began living in sobriety. Take a look at the Granada House website: the first account on this page is by Wallace.

My visit to Granada House in 2010 (as a DFW reader wanting to make a donation) helped me understand one of the “exotic new facts” in the Infinite Jest catalogue of things one can learn in a halfway house: “That God — unless you’re Charlton Heston, or unhinged, or both — speaks and acts entirely through the vehicle of human beings, if there is a God.”

Thanks, Ben, for getting me a copy of this book.

Related reading
All David Foster Wallace posts (Pinboard)

[My link to “An Ex-Resident’s Story” is no revelation: Jason Kottke made the Wallace connection in 2008. I have borrowed most of the sentence describing Chris Fogle’s story from a review of The Pale King that I wrote for World Literature Today.]

W3 online

Webster’s Third New International Dictionary is now online. The price — $29.95 a year — seems a bargain. (A year’s subscription to the OED runs $295.)

Do I need the online W3? At home I work about eight paces from a 1986 copy of the real thing, always open on a dictionary stand. A first-edition compact OED is about four paces away. These dictionaries are not exactly of the moment. But there are several more recent dictionaries in the house, a dictionary app on my Mac, and (through my university’s library) the online OED. I think that I want is going to yield to common sense. Besides, the library might be getting W3 online.

A related post
Review: The Story of Ain’t (on W3)

Mimeograph duplicator

I found this beautiful ad for an A. B. Dick Mimeograph duplicator while looking for something else:


[Life, July 22, 1940. Click for a larger view.]

I found this beautiful ad for an A. B. Dick Mimeograph duplicator while looking for something else:

I found this beautiful ad for an A. B. Dick Mimeograph duplicator while looking for something else:

See how clean and sharp those copies look? You can barely distinguish them from the original sentence. That’s because I made them with my A. B. Dick Mimeograph duplicator.

The business model put forth in this advertisement would be welcome today: “Honest salesmen, selling honest quality in honest products, made in honest factories, marked at honest prices.” No junk: “One chair that lasts is worth a whole suite that peels and cracks and falls apart.” Yes. “The real economy of the superior,” not “the extravagance of the inferior.” I think about these matters every time I have to buy a tool or household item. It’s cheaper in the long run to buy what will last.

What better way to sell a duplicating machine than with a crisp line drawing of a duplicating machine? Look: the machine and the picture are being wheeled into your workplace as I type:


[You’re almost there, fellows. Push! Push hard!]

If, like me, you fondly recall the fragrant purple ink of schooldays, you’re thinking of the products of the spirit duplicator, not the mimeograph. The two-ply page used with a spirit duplicator was called a “spirit master.” What a strange and wonderful name.

[That dress- or keyhole-like shape in the bottom left corner? I have no idea.]

“Creatures of hope”

From J. L. Carr’s 1980 novella A Month in the Country :

By nature we are creatures of hope, always ready to be deceived again, caught by the marvel that might be wrapped in the grubbiest brown paper parcel.

The novella has been reissued by New York Review Books (2000).

Other NYRB finds of my acquaintance: William Lindsay Gresham’s Nightmare Alley, Georg Christoph Lichtenberg’s The Waste Books, James Schuyler’s Alfred and Guinevere. I’m not sure it’s possible to go wrong looking for NYRB spines in a bookstore.

Mermaids of Weeki Wachee Springs

From The New York Times, a report on the mermaids of Weeki Wachee Springs. Elaine and I saw bit of their show not long ago in the very strange Route 66 episode “The Cruelest Sea of All” (aired April 5, 1963). Very little seems to have changed in fifty years.

“Poindexter barbat”

[Zippy, July 6, 2013.]

“Poindexter barbat”? The linguist Arnold Zwicky has a plausible explanation.

Related reading
All Zippy posts (Pinboard)

[Does anyone else remember this guy?]

An otter failure

[Mark Trail, July 6, 2013.]

“Them”: a couple of otters. Rusty spoke to “them” just yesterday. I quote:

“You two can play in the yard while I go inside and have lunch. But don't wander off — I’ll be back in a few minutes!”

And yet, as Rusty is about to discover, they have wandered — “into the wilderness,” “back to their river home.”

I am troubled to think that the adopted son of the great outdoorsman Mark Trail thinks that otters will follow directions given in English. Everybody knows or else should know that one must speak to otters in Otterman.

Related reading
All Mark Trail posts (Pinboard)