Hog Bay Software iOS apps

An e-mail from Jesse Grosjean announces that Hog Bay Software will no longer develop its iOS apps. PlainText, TaskPaper, and WriteRoom for iOS are available this week and will then disappear. PlainText has always been free. TaskPaper and WriteRoom are now free too.

I like WriteRoom for Mac, a lot. It was $24.95 when I bought it, and worth the price. Now it’s $9.99.

From Verlyn Klinkenborg

Three short passages:

Most of the sentences you make will need to be killed.
The rest will need to be fixed.
This will be true for a long time.

*

Writing requires a high degree of inner alertness.
Especially when things are going wrong.

*

Finding flaws is how you learn to make better sentences.
Enjoy it.
You can’t prevent yourself from repeating a mistake you haven’t noticed.
You’ll have to read your work many, many times to find all the problems embedded in it.
Even experienced writers have to do this.
Some flaws do a wonderful job of hiding.

Verlyn Klinkenborg, Several Short Sentences About Writing (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2012).

I could do without the line breaks: they’re not needed, and in a book about writing prose, they seem a wrong choice. (Klinkenborg’s New York Times columns about writing are evidence that paragraphs suffice.) If there are to be line breaks, run-over lines should have indents, no?

Design aside, Several Short Sentences About Writing is one of the wisest and most humane books about writing I’ve read.

Mark Trail and frostbite

[Mark Trail, December 29, 1996.]

Mark Trail is helping the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration with tips on preventing and treating frostbite.

I don’t know who’s camping with Mark. Rusty (who became Mark’s adopted son) entered the strip in 1999. Whoever the unidentified companion is, I like his guarded enthusiasm: “sort of fun.” Shoveling snow is sort of fun too. It’s kind of fun, sort of, in a way.

Okay, it’s not really fun. It is not fun at all.

Good fortune to all who must shovel, including me.

Related reading
All Mark Trail posts (Pinboard)

Chris Chase (Irene Kane)

The actress Chris Chase, who starred in Stanley Kubrick’s Killer’s Kiss (1955), died last October. I don’t know how I missed that sad news. The New York Times published an obituary. As did The Hollywood Reporter. Neither obituary mentions the screen role that might have gained Chase more views than any other — as host of the public-television broadcasts of the 1972 Fischer-Spassky chess match. Chase introduced each broadcast, and her beauty and pizzazz made a wonderful contrast to the dorky all-male doings that followed.

Chase also appeared in two episodes of Naked City. As in Kubrick’s film, she was credited as Irene Kane.

Related posts
Naked City Mongol (Irene Kane and a pencil)
Scriptos in Times Square (from Killer’s Kiss)

Failure v. non-success

From the Naked City episode “A Succession of Heartbeats” (October 26, 1960), spoken by Andy Brent (played by Frank Overton):

“All my life I just missed. Always one step short of success. Not so much a failure as a non-success. You can learn to live with failure — most people do. It’s a lot rougher living with non-success.”

Nobody writes them like Stirling Silliphant.

Related reading
All Naked City posts (Pinboard)

In our little house on the prairie

How odd to be snowbound and find ourselves running low on — of all things — salt. It is like being stuck in a Laura Ingalls Wilder novel. And not just any Laura Ingalls Wilder novel: it is like being stuck in the one Laura Ingalls Wilder novel I’ve read. If the weather keeps up, I may have to burn its pages for fuel.

A related post
Snowbound (a very short play)

William Parker Quartet, Wood Flute Songs

[Wood Flute Songs: Anthology/Live 2006-2012. The William Parker Quartet: Lewis Barnes, trumpet; Rob Brown, alto saxophone; William Parker, bass, reeds; Hamid Drake, drums. Guests: AMR Ensemble; Billy Bang, violin; Bobby Bradford, cornet; Leena Conquest; vocals; Cooper-Moore, piano; James Spaulding, alto saxophone; Eri Yamamoto, piano. AUM Fidelity, 2013. AUM080–87.]

This eight-CD set is a bargain, but that’s not a good reason to buy it. A good reason is that Parker’s quartet, together for thirteen years, is a great band. It is one of the great groups in jazz. Its closest analogues, to my mind: Ornette Coleman’s 1960 quartet, Charles Mingus’s 1964 sextet, Miles Davis’s mid-’60s quintet. The empathy among the members of the Parker quartet is uncanny, and the music — fueled by endlessly inventive bass and drums — is consistently beautiful and exciting and inspiring. It all makes me wonder: how do these musicians stand it when they can’t be making music?

Here is a track listing. Here are one, two short videos. Here is a twenty-minute sampler. And here is a post that I wrote after hearing the quartet last fall.

Winter weather wisdom

Courtesy of CNN, copied right from the screen:

Dress in loose layers

Wear a hat

Cover most of your body

That’s television as a PowerPoint slide, a slide that whose last eight words seem suitable for an audience five or six or seven years old. And on MSNBC yesterday, a reporter standing in the cold advised viewers to Be Prepared. Which meant — I’m not making it up — a coat, a hat, and gloves or mittens.

Fresca’s blog today shows shows many cold-weather battlers wearing plaid. I find in these photographs strong support for my belief that plaid really is warmer. My revised CNN slide:

Dress in loose layers of plaid

Wear a hat of plaid

Cover most of your body in plaid

Or better yet, stay inside if you can, also in plaid.

A related post
A passage from Proust with plaid
Phil Silvers in plaid

Linus, nauseated

[Peanuts, January 8, 1967, reappearing as today’s strip. The pink background is well chosen.]

Lucy has made a piece of toast for her brother and has extracted from him ever more fulsome expressions of gratitude: “Thank you, dear sister.” “Thank you, dear sister . . greatest of all sisters.” “Thank you, dear sister, greatest of all sisters, without whom I’d never survive!” If anyone in the comics is going to observe a distinction between nauseated and nauseous, it would be Linus van Pelt.

I learned about this distinction — if it is one — from David Foster Wallace: “Nauseous for nauseated” is one entry in the page-long catalogue of bad usage that prefaces Wallace’s essay “Tense Present.” In Infinite Jest, Kate Gompert speaks of feeling nauseous. Her doctor refers to feeling nauseated. The novel’s third-person narrator also distinguishes between the words.

This distinction — if it is one — has a long history for snoots and sticklers. There’s no entry for it in the original Fowler’s. Nor is there one in the 1959 edition of The Elements of Style. But Theodore Bernstein’s The Careful Writer (1965) has it:

A thing is nauseous if it makes one sick to the stomach; the unfortunate victim of this malaise is nauseated. The common misuse of nauseous appears in this passage: “When he sits too long, turns his head too abruptly, or walks any distance, he gets dizzy, loses balance, and becomes nauseous.” He doesn’t become nauseous unless he turns other people’s stomachs; he becomes nauseated. A person who feel sick is no more nauseous than a person who has been poisoned is poisonous.

Wilson Follett’s Modern American Usage (1967) makes a brief mention:

When, for example, we have two adjectives, nauseous and nauseated, it should be clear that the first applies to the substance that causes the state named in the second. To call oneself nauseous except in self-depreciation is to ignore the point of view of the word.

I wonder: could the language of advertising have prompted attention to these words? Were people in mid-’60s Pepto-Bismol commercials proclaiming themselves to be nauseous? I have a vague memory of such commercials — “I . . . feel . . . nauseous.” Or was it “I . . . feel . . . awful”? Did such commercials precede these books? I don’t know.

E. B. White caught up in the third (1979) edition of The Elements of Style:

Nauseous. Nauseated. The first means “sickening to contemplate”; the second means “sick at the stomach.” Do not, therefore, say, “I feel nauseous,” unless you are sure you have that effect on others.

And Garner’s Modern American Usage (2009) says that the use of nauseous for nauseated

is becoming so common that to call it an error is to exaggerate. Even so, careful writers tend to be sickened by the slippage and to follow the traditional distinction in formal writing: what is nauseous makes one feel nauseated.

And examples of careful use follow, the first of which comes from — yes, from David Foster Wallace. In Bryan Garner’s Language-Change Index, nauseous for nauseated is at Stage 4, meaning that use is “virtually universal but is opposed on cogent grounds by a few linguistic stalwarts (die-hard snoots).”

The repeated if it is one in this post signals my skepticism about this distinction. There are many -ous words that can describe people (cantankerous, flirtatious, generous, outrageous); nauseous is easily at home among them. And we do have nauseating to describe whatever makes one nauseous.

The curious thing, which I find in no discussion of this distinction: the Oxford English Dictionary has this earliest (now obsolete) meaning for nauseous (1613): “Of a person, the stomach, etc.: inclined to sickness or nausea; squeamish.” Look at that: the word first described people. And according to the OED, nauseous in American usage has applied to people since 1885: “affected with nausea; having an unsettled stomach; (fig .) disgusted, affected with distaste or loathing.” That makes the nauseated/nauseous distinction — if it is one — look tenuous indeed. There are other matters of usage more deserving of attention. Some of them have me climbing the walls. Literally!

This post is an instance of what can happen when I read the comics.

[“Thank you, dear sister . . greatest of all sisters”: not a typo. Just as many a cartoon hand has only four fingers, a cartoon ellipsis may have only two dots. The first edition of the OED gives the earliest meaning of nauseous as “inclined to nausea; fastidious” and does not address American usage.]

Sentences and economics

A memorable, thought-provoking statement:

Sentences are attention economies.

Richard Lanham, Revising Prose (New York: Pearson Longman, 2007).