If Homer’s poems were television channels

Iliad: History.

Odyssey: Food Network.

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Football : baseball :: Iliad : Odyssey

[Yes, The History Channel is now History.]

Zippy at the Summit Diner

[Zippy, March 13, 2015.]

I am thrilled to see Zippy visiting the Summit Diner in Somerset, Pennsylvania. In years past, our family stopped for dinner there many times when schlepping eastward on the Pennsylvania Turnpike. Now, no Turnpike, no diner.

The Summit Diner had — and perhaps still has — postcards. It also had jukeboxes. And a phone booth outside.


[Click for a larger view.]

On the other side of the postcard:

The Summit Diner, located at 791 N. Center Ave., Somerset, PA, 15501, just off Pennsylvania Turnpike Exit 10. Phone 814–445–7154. Open 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.

The Summit now closes at 10:00 p.m.

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Hi and Lois watch

[Hi and Lois, March 13, 2013.]

Those socks. Those feet. Or are they cloven hooves?

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Jack DeJohnette on Muhal Richard Abrams

Jack DeJohnette on Muhal Richard Abrams:

“He was always telling us, ‘Go to the library.’ Practicing every day wasn’t enough; he wanted us to be serious. ‘Go get books — you don’t need a lot of money,’ he told us. He’d already taught himself orchestration and how to play clarinet; he had studied all the piano players. And yet he still has the child-like attitude toward things — he was full of wonder. Around the piano, even today, you get the sense that he’s still a kid.”

Quoted in the liner notes for the ECM disc Made in Chicago, the recording of an August 2013 Chicago Jazz Festival concert by DeJohnette’s Special Legends Edition Chicago: Muhal Richard Abrams, Larry Gray, Roscoe Mitchell, and Henry Threadgill. I wrote about the concert in 2013. The recording was released this week, and it’s a killer.

Here, from ECM, is a short film about Made in Chicago.

[“Still a kid”: In August 2013, Muhal Richard Abrams was almost eighty-three.]

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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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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Another Mark Trail improvement

[Mark Trail revised, March 10, 2015.]

Now with needless words really, really omitted.

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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.

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