E-mailing professors

The New York Times reports on college students’ reluctance to use their school e-mail accounts. Says University of Iowa student Brittney Carver,

“I never know what to say in the subject line and how to address the person. Is it mister or professor and comma and return, and do I have to capitalize and use full sentences? By the time I do all that I could have an answer by text if I could text them.”

But you can’t, at least not for the most part.

You can, however, read the guidelines that all the cool kids are reading: How to e-mail a professor. They will answer all your questions. By they I mean the guidelines. The cool kids are too busy to answer any questions.

Thanks to Matt Thomas’s Submitted for Your Perusal, which again and again points me to Times articles I would otherwise miss.

Henry’s Magic Song Restorer

[Henry, September, 2013. Click for a larger view.]

I know that Henry now appears in reruns. But just how old are these strips? Magic Song Restorer goes pretty far back. Here is a page with Charles Bremer’s beautiful photograph of a tin (bottom left). And here, from Katherine C. Grier’s Pets in America: A History (2006) are two pages from the 1930s publication How to Take Care of Your Canary:


[Click for a larger view.]

Grier writes that How to Take Care of Your Canary includes “An Imprisoned’s Bird’s Daily Prayer.” It begins:

“Oh Captor, consider that I am your little prisoner, give me my daily food, consisting of pure and wholesome rape and canary seed, and pray do not omit to give me a small separate dish of MAGIC SONG RESTORER and GENERAL HEALTH FOOD.”

Related reading
All Henry posts (Pinboard)

Snoopy ceramic tile

[Peanuts, September 30, 1966.]

Snoopy’s doghouse (or should that just be house?) has burned down. Lucy tells him that it is because he sinned: “That’s the way these things always work!” To which Snoopy replies, “BLEAH!” Yes, it’s like the Book of Job. Which makes Charlie Brown — God?

Tile is my reason for posting this panel. My father Jim (Leddy Ceramic Tile) did work in the houses of many well-known people — Julia Barr, Hank Jones, Debbi Morgan, Gene Shalit, McCoy Tyner are those who immediately come to mind — but he missed out on this house. He trusts though that the contractor used American Olean tile.

A handful of other Peanuts posts
Clothespins and milk bottles
Linus in the fall
“The Love Song of J. Alfred Brown”
Schroeder’s Beethoven

[The September 30, 1966 Peanuts ran this past Friday, September 27.]

Happy anniversary

Elaine and I were married twenty-nine years ago today. We looked like this, only taller and three-dimensional. It doesn’t seem possible that so much time has gone by.

I remember our first date, January 17, 1984: my glasses fogged up when I walked into the Boston Thai restaurant The King and I. They have been fogged up ever since. I am an exceedingly fortunate guy. Elaine will have to speak for herself.

Happy anniversary, Elaine.

Word of the day: lucubration

Merriam-Webster’s Word of the Day is lucubration:

noun : laborious or intensive study; also : the product of such study — usually used in plural

The word comes with a helpful explanation:

Imagine someone studying through the night by the light of a dim candle or lamp. That image demonstrates perfectly the most literal sense of “lucubration.” Our English word derives from the Latin verb “lucubrare,” meaning “to work by lamplight.” (Yes, that Latin root is related to “lux,” the Latin word for “light.”) In its earliest known English uses in the late 1500s and early 1600s, “lucubration” named both nocturnal study itself and a written product thereof.

I immediately think of lines from John Milton’s Il Penseroso: “Or let my Lamp at midnight hour, / Be seen in som high lonely Towr.” That was grad school: up late, reading, writing, typing by the light of a desk lamp.

“Your Best Buy’s Mongol” (and other buys)

[Life, March 19, 1956. Click for a larger, even better buy.]

A full-page advertisement for my favorite pencil. I lIke the claim: “writers say it actually stimulates flow of thoughts.” So I am here to say, Yes, the Mongol actually stimulates flow of thoughts. Yes I say yes it does Yes.

The Mongol ad appears on page 64 in Life. Across from it:


[Life, March 19, 1956. Click for a larger view.]

Not all rubber bands are full of life. But these are. I will use one of them to secure a Mongol to my thinking cap. Flow, thoughts, flow!

And now that thoughts are flowing, I would like to say that I have never dabbled in psychedelics (I have trouble even spelling the word), but I’m sure that if I were so to dabble, I would see Pink Pearl erasers sprout little hands and feet and run with glee.



My attention to these matters is prompted by news of an illustrated history of Faber-Castell, as reported by Contrapuntalism and Lexikaliker. The Mongol ad is reproduced in the book, as I learned while Looking Inside at amazon.de. Thanks to Sean at Contrapuntalism for providing that link.

Other Mongol posts: Harry Truman with pencil : Jimmy Hoffa’s Mongol : Molly Dodd, Mongol user : Mongol No. 2 3/8 : Naked City Mongol : “Sound-testing a MONGOL” : Stolen Mongols

[Some years ago, I wrote (briefly) about the Mongol ad in a piece for Pencil Revolution.]

Whither Wheaties?

Suddenly, neither of the two “real” (not store-brand) supermarkets in my town sells Wheaties. Not only are there no Wheaties: there is no slot on the shelf for Wheaties. And now I see this news:

If brands get too small, retailers may drop them from the store shelves. So General Mills has good reason to devote attention to what it calls “brands that we haven’t supported as much over the recent past” — such as Wheaties, which enlisted Vikings running back Adrian Peterson to appear on the cover.

Cover? That would be the front of the box, no? Maybe in the cereal biz it’s called the cover. Either way, I want my Wheaties — or yours.

Other cereal posts
“Fancy-pants cereal” : Rewriting a Grape-Nuts box : Rewriting a Shredded Wheat box

Obviating elaboration

Claire Kehrwald Cook:

Long sentences aren’t necessarily wordy, not if every word counts. As good writers know, leisurely sentences have their purposes — to contrast with short ones, say, or to establish a desired tone. A sentence can be too tight. Sometimes you need a clause instead of a phrase, a phrase instead of a word. What you’re after is a supple style; you don’t want to compact your language, trading looseness for density. But you’re not likely to run that risk unless you’re a compulsive polisher. Condensing to a fault is so rare a failing that it needs only passing mention. Of course, if you'd like to change the last sentence to The rarity of overtightness obviates elaboration, you have something to worry about.

Line by Line: How to Improve Your Own Writing (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1985)

A 2005 New York Times death notice describes Claire Kehrwald Cook as “A brilliant editor and teacher whose devotion to clear thinking and clear writing inspired everyone who was lucky enough to work with her.” I believe it. Line by Line is smart, witty, and likely to prove enormously helpful to a reader with the patience to follow along as Cook sorts out tangled sentence after tangled sentence. (It’s hard work.) The book is still in print, now subtitled How to Edit Your Own Writing.

Fitzgerald, Lombardo, Mitchell

In the September 23 New Yorker : an excerpt from Stephen Mitchell’s forthcoming Odyssey, a passage from book 17 with the title “The Death of Argos.” The passage is a celebrated moment from the poem, as Odysseus’s long-suffering hunting dog hears His Master’s Voice and dies an easy death.

A translation of a poem as vast as the Odyssey rises or falls not in its treatment of great, memorable lines — such as those that describe Argos, lying neglected and bug-ridden on a pile of dung — but in its treatment of what might be called ordinary lines, those that go by in a way that invites no special attention from a reader. Someone walks into town; someone offers a greeting; someone serves a meal: the translator must attend to it all. Three lines from Mitchell got me making comparisons to my favorite translations of the Odyssey, those of Robert Fitzgerald (1961) and Stanley Lombardo (2000).

The scene: Odysseus, returned to Ithaca and disguised as an itinerant beggar, has been staying out in the country with the swineherd Eumaeus. Eumaeus is one of the most appealing characters in the poem; Homer even addresses him directly as a mark of affection. Eumaeus is something of an avatar of Odysseus himself: the swineherd is the son of a king and queen, a displaced person who lost his noble home in childhood. He was raised by Laertes and Anticleia alongside Odysseus’s sister and and has lived as a slave in Ithaca for many years. In book 16, Eumaeus welcomes Telemachus (who has returned from searching for news of Odysseus) in what looks like a father-son reunion (Telemachus even calls Eumaeus atta, father). Eumaeus is pious, loyal, righteously indignant, and stealthy (in 16 he speaks quietly to Penelope about her son’s return). And like Odysseus, Eumaeus is a figure of great versatility: though he seems never to have fought before, he will soon join Odysseus, Telemachus, and the cowherd Philoetius in a Special Forces unit to deal out doom to the suitors.

As our scene begins, Odysseus and Eumaeus stand before Odysseus’s palace. Odysseus has commented on the palace at length, praising its design and construction, and noting from smell (roasting meat) and sound (a lyre) that men are inside feasting. Eumaeus compliments Odysseus on his perceptiveness and, for a brief moment, shapes the story by posing the question of who should enter the palace first. Eumaeus is in distinguished company: Athena, Odysseus, Penelope, and Telemachus all work on the story, giving another character a role to play or setting up the course of events.

Here is Fitzgerald’s Eumaeus:



Numbskull is a wonderful touch, and it’s not twentieth-century slang either: the Oxford English Dictionary dates the word to 1697. “This action” is military in its sound, fitting in light of what is to come.

Here is Lombardo’s Eumaeus:



The rhetorical question is a good touch: the beggar’s intelligence is no surprise to Eumaeus. In 14, Odysseus told a story so as to finagle a cloak from Eumaeus: Eumaeus figured out what Odysseus was up to and was happy to oblige him.

And here are the lines from Mitchell’s Eumaeus that got me making comparisons:



I cannot hear Eumaeus’s voice — or anyone’s voice — in these lines, which sound to me like the translationese of bad subtitles. I’m sticking with Fitzgerald and Lombardo.

Some related posts
Gilgamesh in translation (Stephen Mitchell and N.K. Sandars)
Whose Homer? (the Big Four: Richmond Lattimore, Robert Fitzgerald, Robert Fagles, Stanley Lombardo)
Translators at work and play (another line by the Big Four)
Three Virgils (Fitzgerald, Lombardo, Fagles)
Translations, mules, briars (Guy Davenport on Lattimore)
New from Homer (Mitchell’s Iliad)

[Does Mitchell know Homeric Greek? It seems a reasonable question. He has said that he never read the Iliad before translating it because he could never get through book 1 in a translation. Did Mitchell thus learn Homeric Greek to translate a poem he had never read? It’s all very puzzling. See the discussion beginning here.]

Domestic comedy

“‘Gadding about’?”

“Yes,‘gadding about.’”

Related reading
All domestic comedy posts (Pinboard)