Words of the year

The Economist rounds up the words of the year: culture, exposure, vape, #blacklivesmatter.

National Send a Handwritten Letter Day (?)

January 17th — and every 17th this year — is (supposedly) National Send a Handwritten Letter Day. Having written three letters in the last six days, I will probably take the day off.

Coming just six days before National Handwriting Day, NSHLD seems oddly placed. Does it have an official sponsor? Is that sponsor trying to steal NHD’s thunder? If thunder thunders and no one hears it, does it make a sound?

In 2015 there’s something decidedly artificial about keeping in touch by letter. I don’t mind: I like writing and receiving letters. One of the great friendships of my life — with my pal Aldo Carrasco — got started in letters.

Related reading
All OCA letter posts (Pinboard)

[National Send a Handwritten Letter Day is such an ungainly name. How about Handwritten Letter Day?)

Goodbye and good riddance, Glass

BBC News reports that Google is ending sales of Google Glass:

The company insists it is still committed to launching the smart glasses as a consumer product, but will stop producing Glass in its present form.

Instead it will focus on “future versions of Glass” with work carried out by a different division to before.

Rory Cellan-Jones of the BBC describes his life with the hideous eyewear:

As I found when I spent a couple of months wearing Glass, it has a number of really useful aspects — in particular the camera. There is however one huge disadvantage — it makes its users look daft, and that meant that it was never going to appeal to a wide audience.

Perhaps Google Glass, like Odysseus, will someday return. But I can’t imagine many people pining away in the interim.

[Did you notice the British “different to”? The Glass website and the Google blog carry no news of Glass’s imminent disappearance.]

The German Doctor

[Florencia Bado as Lilith. Click for a larger view.]

The German Doctor (original title: Wakolda, dir. Lucía Puenzo, 2013) is a quietly terrifying film. The premise: in 1960, Helmut Gregor (Àlex Brendemühl), a German émigré doctor, takes a room in an Argentine family’s hotel. The family’s twelve-year-old daughter Lilith (Florencia Bado) finds the doctor fascinating. Indeed, with his dark mustache and perfect hair, he looks like a young girl’s idea of a movie star. The doctor begins to devote greater and greater attention to this family. He is concerned about Lilith’s short stature. He is concerned about her mother Eva (Natalia Oreiro), who is pregnant with twins. And he arranges to mass-produce the dolls that Lilith’s father Enzo (Diego Peretti) makes by hand. They have wind-up beating hearts.

The German Doctor reminds me of Victor Erice’s El espíritu de la colmena (1973) and Alfred Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt (1943). A secret childhood world, an increasingly close relationship between a family and a magical benefactor who is not what he appears to be: these are the ingredients of a deeply disturbing story.

Like so many trailers, the trailer for this film is misleading: The Good Doctor is quietly terrifying. The slow pace and a preference for implication to statement make the film all the more powerful. In Spanish and German, with English subtitles.

[Wakolda: the name of Lilith’s doll. The film is adapted from Puenzo’s novel of that name.]

W4

A long look at revising Webster’s Third: Stefan Fatsis, The Definition of a Dictionary (Slate).

Related reading
All OCA dictionary posts (Pinboard)

Orange batik art

Cooper Hewitt’s Object of the [yester]Day is Judith Kngwarreye’s Tharrakarre . That’s a mere smidgen of it to the left.

Other posts with orange
Crate art, orange : Orange art, no crate : Orange bookmark art : Orange car art : Orange crate art : Orange crate art (Encyclopedia Brown) : Orange dress art : Orange flag art : Orange manual art : Orange mug art : Orange newspaper art : Orange notebook art : Orange notecard art : Orange peel art : Orange pencil art : Orange soda art : Orange soda-label art : Orange stem art : Orange telephone art : Orange timer art : Orange toothbrush art : Orange train art : Orange tree art : Orange tree art : Orange tree art : Orange Tweed art

A house is not a home

I winced this morning to hear the newsreader at our NPR member-station refer to our new governor Bruce Rauner’s “nine homes.” Properties, yes: condos, houses, a penthouse, ranches, a farm. Homes, no.

Garner’s Modern American Usage makes the point nicely: its entry for home reads, in its entirety, “See house.” And that entry explains: “In the best usage, the structure is always called a house. . . . The word home connotes familial ties.”

One cannot have nine “homes” without a very complicated (messy) private life. I am not accusing the governor of that.

Alive Inside

The documentary Alive Inside (dir. Michael Rossato-Bennett, 2014) follows social worker Dan Cohen’s efforts to bring music (via iPod) to people with dementia. Again and again in this film, people quicken — come alive — as they listen to their favorite music. (Oliver Sacks, who appears briefly, cites Kant’s characterization of music as the “quickening art.”) My only complaint: like so many recent documentaries, Alive Inside suffers from a minimalist, soporific musical score. Its’s an incongruous element in a film about the power of music to enliven the listener.

Watching Alive Inside made me think of our fambly’s experiences playing music for nursing-home residents. Albert Ayler was right: music is the healing force of the universe.

I learned about this film from l’astronave.

[What Kant wrote: “Nun ist nichts die Sinne belebender, als die Musik.” In translation: “Nothing is more enlivening to the senses than music.” If I should ever be incapable of choosing music for myself, the composers and musicians listed in my Blogger profile would make an enlivening start.]

Ellsworth Kelly, drawing

In The New York Times, short interviews with “old masters a the top of their game.” From an interview with the painter Ellsworth Kelly (ninety-one):

What are your days like now?

I’m in the studio everyday. I draw a lot. . . . I chose plants because I knew I could draw plants forever. I want to work like nature works. I want to understand the growth of plants and the dead leaves falling. Oh, how I connect with that!

Our words, our selves

Barbara Wallraff:

With our words — particularly our written words, or words that we have written down before we say them — we can be our best selves, and even selves better than our actual best. Our words, outside ourselves, can be objects for us to reflect on, objects to perfect, evidence for us to study if we want to know whether we’re as kind or as clever as we like to think we are — and then they can be tools to help us be that kind or clever if we can just use them skillfully and patiently.

Word Court (New York: Harcourt, 2000).

[From 1983 to 2009, Wallraff was an editor and columnist for The Atlantic.]