Searching for a simile

This Google search brought a seeker to these pages: homeric simile about assholes.

Sorry. Homer don’t play that.

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[When a user is signed in to a Google account, the content of a Google search is hidden from all eyes but Google’s. Whoever was searching for similes was not signed in: that’s how I was able to see the search in my blog stats. If there were a Homeric simile about assholes, it would have to be about Agamemnon. But to call Agamemnon an asshole is to engage in metonymy or synecdoche, or both.]

-wise, usagewise

Bryan Garner’s Usage Tip of the Day today addresses the suffix -wise. That suffix was an occasion of cultural angst in the late ’50s and early ’60s. The suffix even showed up in comic form in Leave It To Beaver. In real life, I heard it used not long ago in a startling way.

Garner recommends avoiding -wise generally, though he points to taxwise as a recent, plausible word of choice. And he adds that “some writers use the suffix playfully” — as did Billy Wilder and I. A. L. Diamond (The Apartment), as did the writers of Leave It to Beaver. And as did I, when I asked a friend, now our houseguest, what we should have on hand foodwise and drinkwise.

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[Orange Crate Art is a Garner-friendly zone. You can subscribe to Usage Tip of the Day at Bryan Garner’s LawProse. Scroll down and look to the right.]

Joyeux anniversaire, M. Proust

Marcel Proust was born on July 10, 1871. From a 1912 letter:

Du côté de chez Swann is the fragment of a novel, which will have as a general title A la recherche du temps perdu. I should have liked to have published it as a single whole, but it would have been too long. They no longer publish works in several volumes. There are novelists, on the other hand, who envisage a brief plot with few characters. That is not my conception of the novel. There is a plane geometry and a geometry of space. And so for me the novel is not only plane psychology but psychology in space and time. That invisible substance, time, I try to isolate. But in order to do this it was essential that the experience be continuous. I hope that by the end of my book what I have tried to do will be understandable; some unimportant little event will show that time has passed and it will take on that beauty certain pictures have, enhanced by the passage of the years.

Marcel Proust, in a letter to Antoine Bibesco, November ?, 1912. From Letters of Marcel Proust, translated by Mina Curtiss (New York: Helen Marx Books / Books & Co., 2006).

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Recently updated

Seymour Barab (1921–2014) With a link to a New York Times obituary.

VDP talks, plays, sings

At dublab (“a non-profit web radio collective devoted to the growth of positive music, art and culture”), Carlos Niño interviews Van Dyke Parks. I would say that Van Dyke is in fine fettle, but doing so would require that I first look up fettle. So I will say instead that he is in rare form — expansive, generous, funny, wise. A sample: “I worked very hard to be anonymous. And I finally achieved that goal.” Maybe. But Van Dyke has many irons in the fire and still more waiting on deck.

I just mixed metaphors.

Post-interview, Van Dyke plays and sings “The Silver Swan” (Orlando Gibbons), “Home in Pasadena” (Harry Warren, Grant Clark, Edgar Leslie), and his own “The All Golden” and “Orange Crate Art.” You might recognize the final little phrase from the theme music for PBS’s This Old House : it’s a bit of “Louisiana Fairy Tale” (Mitchell Parish, Haven Gillespie, and Fred Coots). Eclectic? It’s all music, and it’s all good.

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“Orphaned photographs”

“[P]eople die childless or separated from their families, children have their own lives to lead and can't be bothered, any number of things can sever the thread. Things drift off and go their own ways.” At Dreamers Rise, Chris Kearin looks at what he calls “orphaned photographs.”

Grammar brawl

“He said the fight began over a disagreement over grammar as well as their views on sports teams”: Grammar dispute becomes brawl (Beaver Dam Daily Citizen).

One of the BDDC ’s commenters might benefit from reading this post. If the brawl concerned the use of the subjunctive, the brawlers might benefit from reading it too.

*

October 4: The alleged brawler has pleaded not guilty.

*

February 5, 2015: The brawler has been — no pun intended — sentenced.

[Garner’s Modern American Usage: “pleaded is the predominant form in both AmE and BrE and always the best choice.”]

Naked City mystery guest

[From the Naked City episode “Howard Running Bear Is a Turtle,” April 3, 1963. Click for a larger view.]

She’s making her third appearance in television. Do you recognize her? Your best guesses are welcome in the comments.

*

3:31 p.m.: The answer’s now in the comments.

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Another Naked City mystery guest : Yet another, sort of : And still another : And another (Scroll down to see him) : And two more

Overheard

“Did you know, Mother, that the sun shines practically every day in Los Angeles?”

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Things to do in Los Angeles (2012 edition)
Things to do in Los Angeles (2014 edition)

[It was months and months ago. The television was on for “warmth.” I wrote down this bit of dialogue on scrap paper. Just found it.]

“Paper wraps stone”

Without paper, we are nothing. We are born, and issued with a birth certificate. We collect more of these certificates at school, and yet another when we marry, and another when we divorce, and buy a house, and when we die. We are born human, but are forever becoming paper, as paper becomes us, our artificial skin. Everything we are is paper: it is the ground of activity, the partner to all our enterprises, the key to our understanding of the past. How do we know the past? Only through paper and all it records — and through architecture, of course, though architecture, as we shall see, rather depends on paper. So. Paper wraps stone.

Ian Samsom, Paper: An Elegy (New York: William Morrow, 2012).

Lively writing, yes; I especially admire the wit at the end of this passage. But here and elsewhere, Sansom makes absolute claims and large generalizations that defy plausibility. Is it really the case that we know the past “only through paper and all it records”? Archaeologists and anthropologists and cosmologists and geologists and paleontologists would be surprised to hear that. Assyriologists too would be surprised.

Reading Paper: An Elegy reminded me of an experience I had many years ago: a tour with a guide who did not stop talking. It was an eight-hour tour. Paper: An Elegy is often entertaining, but the book ranges so broadly and digresses so freely that it feels, finally, haphazard and a little exhausting. Best borrowed from a library.

[A book about paper that says almost nothing about diaries and notebooks and letters: kinda haphazard.]