Thompson’s General Store

Elaine and I finally got around to visiting a store we heard about some years ago: Thompson’s General Store, in Camargo, Illinois. It’s a small store, with main staples, some household goods, beer and wine, and a meat counter. We went for the meat, having heard that it is good. It is really, really good. Jack Thompson weighed out hamburger (which he grinds himself), pork chops, a ham hock (one of us makes soup), and a few slices of liverwurst. Meat-eaters within driving distance would do well to visit Thompson’s General Store.

From 2011, here is one fortunate traveler’s photo tour of the store. And here is my photograph of a vanishing reality:


[Liverwurst, sliced to order. I cannot remember when I last got to see someone write a price on butcher paper. Bliss.]

Recently updated

Grammar brawl The brawler has been — no pun intended — sentenced.

Ceci n’est pas une caissière

Elaine and I were checking out at our local multinational retail corporation. We always skip self-checkout for the company of a fellow human being.

This fellow human being handed our string bags back to us. “It’ll be faster if you do this,” she said. Elaine and I looked at each other and started bagging. Very puzzling. I asked Elaine, “Is there some reason we’re doing this?” I thought I might have missed something while checking my phone. Elaine didn’t know what was going on either.

I had to say something: “I’m a little puzzled,” said I. “No one cashiering has ever asked us to bag our own stuff.”

“I’m not a cashier,” the cashier replied. Slightly icy. And then I noticed her badge, which read

        SUZY Q
SALES ASSOCIATE

I couldn’t tell if she had noticed that I had noticed.

“Well, you look like a cashier!” said I. I was friendly about it. No response from Ms. Q. No Have a Nice Day. No nothing.

In my college years I worked in retail as a stock clerk, and I sometimes cashiered. Punching in prices, hitting Subtotal and Total, making change: that’s cashiering. When I was cashiering, I was a cashier.

As Elaine observed, this brief encounter felt like something from Curb Your Enthusiasm.

Roger Angell FTW

Roger Angell’s essay “This Old Man” has won a National Magazine Award for The New Yorker in the category of Essays and Criticism.

I read much of “This Old Man” again last night. It’s a great essay.

“Comprised of”

Sounds like something from The Onion: Man’s Wikipedia Edits Mostly Consist of Deleting “Comprised Of.”

Word of the day: quotidian

Merriam-Webster’s Word of the Day is quotidian (it’s a word in the previous post).

I like the word quotidian. The word dailiness too. I associate both words with the poetry of the (so-called) New York School. “It is 12:20 in New York a Friday / three days after Bastille day, yes.”

A page-ninety test

The page-ninety test, applied to Joanna Rakoff’s My Salinger Year (New York: Knopf, 2014). The book is about Rakoff’s year working as an assistant at the dowdy literary agency that represented J. D. Salinger, identified only as “the Agency” (in truth, Harold Ober Associates):

And yet my boss — and all the older agents — still regarded me as something akin to a piece of furniture, perhaps even more so than when I’d first started. Parked in front of my desk, Carolyn and my boss could while away an hour discussing the quotidian details of their lives: the roasted chicken at such and such restaurant; Carolyn’s attempts to quit smoking by putting her cigarettes in the freezer so they wouldn’t taste as good; the rerouting of the bus that ran through their neighborhood; the perennial troubles of Daniel, who was still adjusting to some new medication. One day in the middle of May — I turned twenty-four the week before with little fanfare — as I typed and typed, Carolyn began talking about friends of hers named Joan and John, and their daughter, who had an odd name, an odd name that sounded oddly familiar to me. I’d heard her discuss Joan and John before, but now I realized, with a jolt, that she was talking about Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne. These were Carolyn’s intimates, the people whose pedestrian travails — bathroom renovations and missed flights — she chattered about. “Who is she?” I asked James the next day. “What’s her story?”

This first paragraph of page ninety at least has the virtue of being about life at the Agency. (The first paragraphs of ninety-one, ninety-two, and ninety-three are about bills, student loans, and credit-card debt, respectively.) But I find nothing here that would make me want to read this book. The writing is sometimes wobbly: I don’t know what it would mean to regard someone “even more so” as a piece of furniture. “First started” should be ”started,” and “quotidian details of their lives” could just be “quotidian details” or “details of their lives,” no? What I find more offputting is a tone of self-regard (turning twenty-four “with little fanfare”) and faux-naïve surprise: “an odd name that sounded oddly familiar to me.” (That name would be Quintana, and it is difficult to imagine the name not being instantly recognizable to Rakoff, who tells us early on of her interest in Didion’s work.) And why the jolt anyway? When you’re working at a literary agency, it should be no surprise that people there might be close to a writer or two. This contrived scene smacks of something written for the movies (and yes, the rights have been sold). And speaking of the faux-naïve and contrived: it strains credibility to think that Rakoff had never ever read a word of Salinger before taking a job at the Agency and answering his fan mail.

Someone who comes to this book for its Salinger content will be disappointed: a few telephone conversations, one brief meeting. The Salinger who appears here is courteous, genial, fairly deaf. Someone who comes to this book for a picture of a dowdy work-world — IBM Selectrics and carbon paper — will likely be disappointed as well. A third of the way in, I ended up skimming for the scant Salinger details, pretty sure that I wouldn’t be missing much. Whoever this book’s intended reader might be, it wasn’t me.

And yes, it is page-ninety, not ninety-nine. The first paragraph on page ninety-nine of My Salinger Year is an inventory of credit-card debt.

[Thanks, interlibrary loan.]

AdBlock Plus and corporate money

Another reason to use µBlock: Google, Microsoft, and Amazon are paying to get around Adblock Plus (The Verge).

There’s nothing wrong with creating an adblocking extension that whitelists advertisers of the coder’s choice. But charging companies to get on that whitelist is another matter. John Gruber likens AdBlock Plus’s business model to an extortion racket.

[AdBlock Plus does give the user the choice to block all ads. But the whitelist is on by default.]

Hank and Lois watch

[Hi and Lois, February 3, 2015.]

Context: Thirsty just bought Hi a beer.

The only person I can think of who would call a glass of wine “a wine” is Charles Bukowski: “Back at my place, I undressed, climbed onto my cot, leaned against the wall, lit a cigarette and poured a wine.” “I walked back to my room and poured myself a wine.” “I walked over and sat in a chair, poured a wine.” “We sat down and had a wine.”

Sunday’s trip to the “bowling alley” seems to be ending up in the gutter.

Related reading
All OCA Hi and Lois posts (Pinboard)
Read Charles Bukowski 4 what?
Zippy and Bukowski

[Henry Charles Bukowski went by “Hank.”]

New Yorker singular and plural forms

A sentence from an article in The New Yorker:

On test days, I sat next to Bob Isner or Bruce Gelfand or Ted Chapman or Donny Chamberlain — smart boys whose handwriting I could read — and divided my attention between his desk and the teacher’s eyes.

There are four singular nouns (Bob, Bruce, Ted, Donny), a plural appositive (smart boys whose handwriting I could read), and a singular pronoun (his). Because the antecedent of his seems, if only for a moment, to be boys, the sentence is mildly confusing. (Confusing enough that I read it again and again and decided to write this post.)

Can a singular appositive help? Not really:

On test days, I sat next to Bob Isner or Bruce Gelfand or Ted Chapman or Donny Chamberlain — a smart boy whose handwriting I could read — and divided my attention between his desk and the teacher’s eyes.

The sentence still sounds off, and now it might seem that smart boy refers only to Donny. Better would be a slight rewriting:

On test days, I sat next to Bob Isner or Bruce Gelfand or Ted Chapman or Donny Chamberlain — any smart boy whose handwriting I could read — and divided my attention between his desk and the teacher’s eyes.

Any avoids the plural while making it clear that all four boys were worthy assistants. Problem solved.

In college there was a guy who had me pegged as one of the “smart boys.” He would sit behind me and nudge and nudge. I would inch my desk forward and hunch over my exam booklet, thinking Leave me the . . . .

[By the way, the article, about a mathematician, is worth reading.]