Another Cento

Here is another Cento, one that’s usually in our cabinet of canned goods. I use Cento Tomato Puree when I make sauce — so easy to do, and the result is better than anything that comes from a jar. I have it on good authority that only the finest lines from the poets of il dolce stil novo — Guinizelli, Cavalcanti, Dante — go into Cento Tomato Puree.

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Coppola/“Godfather” sauce
A sauce recipe
Word of the day: cento

[Image borrowed from Cento Fine Foods.]

Word of the day: cento

A.Word.A.Day’s Word of the Day is cento:

noun : A literary work, especially a poem, composed of parts taken from works of other authors.

The cento is dear to readers of modern and postmodern poetry. From a page I gave my students earlier this fall, as we skipped lightly through T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land:

One way to enter into the spirit of Eliot’s mosaic-like poem is to make a cento, a poem made of lines from other poems. (Cento—pronounced “sen-toh”—comes from the Latin word for “patchwork.”) Making a cento is not a matter of plagiarism: the sources are meant to be recognized as such. A cento is not the way to make a reputation as a poet; it’s more a matter of game a poet might play, ranging among the works of ancestors and bringing unexpected tones and textures into a poem: “Come, Shepherd, and again renew the quest.” (!)

The preëminent cento-maker of our time is John Ashbery. Here are three of his centos: “The Dong with the Luminous Nose,” “They Knew What They Wanted,” and “To a Waterfowl.” The line above, from Matthew Arnold’s “The Scholar-Gipsy,” turns up in the first of these centos.

[Yes, centos: “Originally with Latin plural centones ; afterwards centoes , now usually centos  the French and Italian forms of the singular have also been used” (Oxford English Dictionary ).]

Telephone booths

[“Busy telephone booths during an airline strike.” Photograph by Robert W. Kelley. Chicago, 1961. From the Life Photo Archive. Click for a larger view.]

Notice the Western Union sign too.

See also Diane Schirf’s meditation on phone booths.

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“Dowdy world” love story With phone booth
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Wooden phone booths

Another Mark Trail improvement

[Mark Trail revised, March 10, 2015.]

Now with needless words really, really omitted.

A related post
How to improve writing (no. 55) Today’s strip, improved

A skeptical thought about Apple Watch

Once upon a time, people, many of them, wore watches. And then smartphones replaced watches, many of them. And now we’re presented with a watch that depends upon the smartphone that replaced — a watch.

[I know there’s more to Apple Watch than my skepticism about yet-another-device. But my skepticism is all I’ve got. Apple refers to the watch without the article the .]

How to improve writing (no. 55)

[Mark Trail, March 10, 2015.]

It is well known that Mark Trail recycles old storylines and old art. (An intrepid reader known as The Foo Bird traced the just-ended moose story and its art to 1952.) Today’s strip shows a different kind of recycling: repurposing the previous day’s tiny portion of narrative.

Yesterday: “Not far from Lost Forest, the instincts of a young beaver tell him that it’s time to leave the colony in order to go out and start a family of his own.”

Today: “Now, however, his instincts are telling him that it is time to leave the safety of his lodge and venture out into the wild to find a mate and start a colony of his own.”

I can imagine tomorrow’s strip: “But now the young beaver knows that the time has come for him to leave the comforts of childhood and begin a family, not to mention a colony, of his very own.”

It’s possible to improve today’s strip, like yesterday’s, with thoughtful editing:


[Mark Trail revised, March 10, 2015.]

But that’s too thoughtful, really. Better:


[Mark Trail revised, March 10, 2015. William Strunk Jr.: “Omit needless words! Omit needless words! Omit needless words!”]

Where will this storyline go? I suspect something along these lines: Beaver homestead frustrates local developer’s plans for river. Developer makes ready with traps — or dynamite. Mark Trail to the rescue. It’s been done, more or less, in an episode of Lassie.

Related reading
All OCA How to improve writing posts (Pinboard)

[This post is no. 55 in a series, “How to improve writing,” dedicated to improving stray bits of public prose.]

How to improve writing (no. 54)

[Mark Trail, March 9, 2015.]

It’s not the instincts that are “not far from Lost Forest”; it’s the beaver himself. And “leave the colony in order to go out” is cumbersome phrasing.


[Mark Trail revised, March 9, 2015.]

From forty syllables to thirty, from thirty-two words to twenty-three. Big savings. Fare forward, young family-man, and best of luck to you in the Trail world.

Mark Trail has provided material for two other “How to improve writing” posts, nos. 44 and 46.

Related reading
All OCA How to improve writing posts (Pinboard)

[This post is no. 54 in a series, “How to improve writing,” dedicated to improving stray bits of public prose.]

From The Noun Project

The Noun Project aims to create “a visual language of icons anyone can understand.” Looking at the work therein offers chance after chance to think about what’s sufficient to make an intelligible image. If you want to say books, spines and a tilt, I think, will do it.

As some libraries move toward booklessness, it’s reassuring that a search at the Noun Project for library still leads to books.

A joke in the traditional manner

Here is the punchline: A Golden Retriever.

No spoilers. The setup is in the comments.

More jokes in the traditional manner
How did Bela Lugosi know what to expect?
How did Samuel Clemens do all his long-distance traveling?
What did the plumber do when embarrassed?
Which member of the orchestra was best at handling money?
Why did the doctor spend his time helping injured squirrels?
Why did Oliver Hardy attempt a solo career in movies?
Why was Santa Claus wandering the East Side of Manhattan?

[“In the traditional manner”: by or à la my dad. He must take credit for all but the doctor and Santa Claus.]

Daniel Berkeley Updike on style

Daniel Berkeley Updike (1860–1941) was a printer and historian of typography. Marianne Moore quotes him in her 1948 talk “Humility, Concentration, and Gusto,” given to the Grolier Club:

Daniel Berkeley Updike has always seemed to me a phenomenon of eloquence because of the quiet objectiveness of his writing. And what he says of printing applies equally to poetry. It is true, is it not, that “style does not depend upon decoration, but rather on proportion and simplicity”? Nor can we dignify confusion by calling it baroque. Here, I may say, I am preaching to myself, since, when I am as complete as I like to be, I seem unable to get an effect plain enough.

Here is the Updike passage from which Moore quotes, from In the Day’s Work (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1924):

Any one can place a great red decorated initial upon a page to dazzle the beholder into a momentary liking for the effect. But to produce an agreeable and pleasing page simply by proportion of margins, type, etc., is a matter which requires study, experience, and taste. It appears, therefore, that, as some of the most beautiful books are without decoration, style does not depend upon decoration, but rather on proportion and simplicity.

Updike, as I now know, printed some Grolier Club publications. And the Grolier Club is now exhibiting books printed by Aldus Manutius, one of Updike’s favorite printers. From In the Day’s Work:

The earliest printers were often learned men, and yet perhaps their contemporaries thought that they took themselves too seriously. But what they took seriously was not themselves, but their work. They were educated enough and independent enough to hold to certain ideals. If Aldus had watered down his manner of printing and continually varied his types to suit other people’s views, he would never have been heard of. None the less, the heads of contemporary Italian uncles and aunts were sadly shaken, perhaps, and friends of the family were seriously distressed. We remember the types and books of Aldus still; but the names of these “wise and prudent” are forgotten.

“Aldine” was the joking adjective that described my great friend Aldo Carrasco. As English majors and part-time residents of the Renaissance, Aldo and other friends and I knew of course about Aldus and the Aldine Press. I referred to “the Aldine approach to friendship” in a post reproducing one of Aldo’s telexes. So: Moore to Updike to Grolier to Aldus to Aldo. It sounds like a complex triple play. And Moore was a Brooklyn Dodgers fan. See? Everything connects.

[Thanks, interlibrary loan.]