James Allen speaks

From an interview with James Allen, who draws and writes Mark Trail: “It’s like I’m dreaming, making a living doing this.”

Yes, that sounds about right.

Related reading
All OCA Mark Trail posts (Pinboard)

Woodberry Poetry Room online

“This is Ted Berrigan reading today for the Poetry Room at the Lamont Library at Harvard College, Harvard University. And today’s date is August something or other. August 8th.” Online: selected recordings from Harvard University’s Woodberry Poetry Room. John Ashbery in 1951, a memorial service for Elizabeth Bishop, treasures galore. How amazing to hear, across so many years, what Robert Fitzgerald and Roman Jakobson sounded like. Copyright restrictions make some materials Harvard-only.

[And where’s T. S. Eliot?}

Tobias Frere-Jones explains

“[W]e read with our eyes, not with rulers, so the eye should win every time”: Tobias Frere-Jones is explaining how typefaces work: Typeface Mechanics: 001.

Strand bookmark

This bookmark is way before my time, or at least way before my bookbuying days. It must have been in the book when I bought it. Which book? I’m not sure. I pulled a few down from a shelf and was so spellbound by GRamercy that I forgot to make note of which book.

In my student days, I was a regular visitor to the Strand Book Store. I’d take the bus from New Jersey to the Port Authority, walk downtown, and schlep back with two enormous shopping bags full of books. Many of them used, many of them remainders, very cheap. I was in Accumulating Mode, which seems to still function well in young adults. Now that I’m deaccessioning, I realize that many of these finds have proved less than useful. That’s putting it mildly. But I’m happy to have the bookmark.

After extensive imagining, I have determined that this bookmark dates from November 1959. Ornette Coleman was playing at the Five Spot, half a mile from the Strand.

*

9:00 p.m.: November 1959 won’t work: my extensive imagining didn’t take the ZIP code into account. See the comments. And thanks, misterbagman.

A related post
Booksmith bookmark

[Did I really need three books on John Dryden? At one time I must have thought so.]

Overheard

“Evelyn, you got any money?”

“I ain’t got none. I don’t want none. I don’t need none.”

This exchange between girls has been stuck in my head since kidhood. I heard it in Brooklyn, outside my school, P.S. 131. Being nine or ten, I didn’t know about William Carlos Williams’s idea of a vernacular language, “the American idiom,” or here, the African-American idiom. I think I just thought wow.

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All “overheard” posts (Pinboard)

Some Rachs

From Sean at Contrapuntalism: Some Rachs.

“Some rocks”

[From James Sowerby‘s British Mineralogy: or coloured figures intended to elucidate the mineralogy of Great Britain (London: 1804). Made available through the British Library’s Flickr account. Click for a larger view.]

Amid architectural ornaments and decorative letters galore, the British Library’s Flickr has “some rocks.”

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All OCA “some” posts (Pinboard)

Some rock

[From Milano e il suo territorio, ed. Cesare Cantu (Milan, 1844). Made available through the British Library’s Flickr account. Click for a larger view.]

That’s some rock.

Related reading
All OCA “some” posts (Pinboard)

A Henry wall

[Henry, February 9, 2015.]

In the Henry world, all walls are lath and plaster. No drywall allowed.

Related reading
All OCA Henry posts (Pinboard)

College as vodka

From a New York Times article on Stephen Joel Trachtenberg and the rise of George Washington University:

Mr. Trachtenberg convinced people that George Washington was worth a lot more money by charging a lot more money. Unlike most college presidents, he was surprisingly candid about his strategy. College is like vodka, he liked to explain. Vodka is by definition a flavorless beverage. It all tastes the same. But people will spend $30 for a bottle of Absolut because of the brand. A Timex watch costs $20, a Rolex $10,000. They both tell the same time.

O brave new world.

[The Times notes that the article is adapted from a forthcoming book by Kevin Carey, The End of College: Creating the Future of Learning and the University of Everywhere. Sounds like an argument for MOOCs, alas.]