A day at the museums

Elaine and I played Museum yesterday. Or Museums — three museums, four visits. First the DuSable Museum of African American History, for Freedom First, a large exhibit about Chicago’s Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, with photographs, posters, instruments, artifacts, and video. Then the Art Institute of Chicago, where we spent much time looking at European engravings and paintings. Then the Chicago Cultural Center (which we’ve again and again agreed we should visit), where we found paintings by Archibald Motley and the great surprise of the day, Love for Sale, an exhibit devoted to labels and advertising for Valmor Products, a Chicago company that sold perfume, cosmetics, and good-luck products to African-American communities. We had a quick and very early dinner at Cafecito and returned to the Art Institute for Whistler and Roussel: Linked Visions.

As Elaine observed, the Art Institute is turning us into curmudgeons: every time we’ve visited recently, the museum’s special exhibits of The New leave us cold. One tiny etching by James McNeill Whistler or Theodore Roussel outshines them all.

A paragraph about marriage

The next-to-last paragraph of the majority opinion in Obergefell v. Hodges might prompt any number of already-married people to take their marriages a little more seriously. I can imagine the first two sentences being read by a wedding officiant:

No union is more profound than marriage, for it embodies the highest ideals of love, fidelity, devotion, sacrifice, and family. In forming a marital union, two people become something greater than once they were. As some of the petitioners in these cases demonstrate, marriage embodies a love that may endure even past death. It would misunderstand these men and women to say they disrespect the idea of marriage. Their plea is that they do respect it, respect it so deeply that they seek to find its fulfillment for themselves. Their hope is not to be condemned to live in loneliness, excluded from one of civilization’s oldest institutions. They ask for equal dignity in the eyes of the law. The Constitution grants them that right.

The final paragraph: “The judgment of the Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit is reversed.” A PDF of the ruling and the dissenting opinions is available from the Supreme Court website.

[What most strikes me from quick browsing: Antonin Scalia’s conception of marriage as an institution that limits rather than expands human freedom, diminishing one’s possibilities for (ahem) intimacy and requiring constant vigilance about what one says. Sigh.]

Doing the right thing

Amid so much bad news, this decision is cause for much happiness. Here is the New York Times article whose headline I’ve borrowed.

Andrew Sullivan said it best in 2004:

When people talk about gay marriage, they miss the point. This isn’t about gay marriage. It’s about marriage. It’s about family. It’s about love.

And from Justice Anthony Kennedy, writing for the majority: “No union is more profound than marriage.”

On “true method”

There are some enterprises in which a careful disorderliness is the true method.

Herman Melville, Moby-Dick (1851).

Also from Moby-Dick
“Nothing exists in itself”
Nantucket ≠ Illinois
Quoggy
“Round the world!”
Gam

Inside Out

Inside Out (2015, dir. Pete Docter) is likely to turn any adult viewer into a tear-stained, nose-running mess. I write as a member of an audience this afternoon. Whether the film will have that effect on children and teenagers may be less certain. I write as an observer of the rest of the audience.

Inside Out earns its tears by legitimate means. The story is deeply, genuinely γλυκύπικρον, glukopikron, sweet-bitter. What I loved most was the film’s insistence on the rightful place of sadness, or Sadness, in human character. If I say more, I’ll begin to explain too much.

Best line: “Where’s Joy?”

[The word γλυκύπικρον is strongly associated with the poetry of Sappho, in which it describes ἔρος, eros. Inside Out isn’t about eros though. Riley, the protagonist, is eleven.]

Geoffrey Hill, pencil user

The British poet Geoffrey Hill, writing with a Staedtler Noris pencil, as seen in this 2011 interview. You can see the Noris at 1:40.

What prompted me to look for Hill on YouTube: just the remembrance of things past. I was once quite keen on his poetry. How remarkable that this poet, whom I knew from a single book-jacket photograph in my undergrad days, should now be, as we say, so accessible.

Related reading
All OCA pencil posts (Pinboard)
Geoffrey Hill on difficulty

Separated at birth

[Fredric March and Tobey Maguire.]

A recent pre-Code spree gave Elaine and me the chance to see a young Fredric March in Merrily We Go to Hell (dir. Dorothy Arzner, 1932). We agreed: March and Tobey Maguire were separated at birth. It’s the corners of the mouth that make the resemblance so striking.

Merrily We Go to Hell is a frank depiction of alcoholism and adultery in the pre-Code world. The film is available in a 3-DVD set, Universal’s Pre-Code Hollywood Collection. Thank you, library.

Also separated at birth
Nicholson Baker and Lawrence Ferlinghetti : Ted Berrigan and C. Everett Koop : John Davis Chandler and Steve Buscemi : Ray Collins and Mississippi John Hurt : Broderick Crawford and Vladimir Nabokov : Ted Cruz and Joe McCarthy : Jacques Derrida, Peter Falk, and William Hopper : Elaine Hansen (of Davey and Goliath) and Blanche Lincoln : Harriet Sansom Harris and Phoebe Nicholls : Ton Koopman and Oliver Sacks : Steve Lacy and Myron McCormick : Michael A. Monahan and William H. Macy

Other pre-Code posts
Baby Face : Lady Killer : The Little Giant : The Mystery of the Wax Museum : Other Men’s Women : Red-Headed Woman : Search for Beauty

[Photographs from the Internets. The photograph of March has no connection to Merrily We Go to Hell.]

aText

For many years I used the handy Mac app TextExpander. I was loyal, very. When OS X Mavericks made life with TextExpander (temporarily) difficult, I bought aText, and sad to say, I never went back to TextExpander.

A simple explanation of aText: “aText accelerates your typing by replacing abbreviations with frequently used phrases you define.” It can get much more complicated and much more wonderful than that. A fairly simple example: I’ve created an abbreviation to make a hyperlink, ,paste. (The abbreviation could be anything; I find that the less cryptic, the better.) The content that goes with this abbreviation:

<a href="[clipboard]">[|]</>

After copying a URL to the clipboard, I type ,paste. The result:

<a href="http://somelink.com">|</a>

with the cursor (|) positioned for adding text. The app makes HTML so easy that I’ve never felt any great need for Markdown.

TextExpander now sells for $44.95. The price for aText: $4.95. Seeing the price for the latest update to TextExpander ($19.95) prompted me to write this post. I know which app I’d buy if I were starting out.

Both apps remind me of early adventures with MacroWorks, a Beagle Bros program that modified AppleWorks. MacroWorks gave me my first practice in getting a computer to do things my way.

A tenuously related post
Beagle Bros disk-care warnings

NYT quizzes

Test your knowledge of punctuation and verb tenses with The New York Times. Beware of the robotic dogs.

A colon followed by a dash

Is there a name for an older habit of punctation, the semicolon followed a dash? An entry in Webster’s Second made me wonder. I think the answer is no . But that’s a provisional think.

There is, however, a name, rarely used, for another older habit of punctuation, the colon followed by a dash. I associate that habit, always, with Willa Cather:

His daughter Kathleen, who had done several successful studies of him in water-colour, had once said:—“The thing that really makes Papa handsome is the modelling of his head between the top of his ear and his crown; it is quite the best thing about him.” The Professor’s House, 1925.

Of course she regretted Tennessee, though she would never admit it to Mrs. Rosen:—the old neighbours, the yard and garden she had worked in all her life, the apple trees she had planted, the lilac arbour, tall enough to walk in, which she had clipped and shaped so many years. “Old Mrs. Harris.” In Obscure Destinies, 1932.

When I searched for colon followed by a dash , Google returned this page, and I went straightaway to the Oxford English Dictionary.¹ The colon-and-dash is known as dog’s bollocks, or dog’s ballocks. The OED labels it Brit. coarse slang and rare :

Typogr. a colon followed by a dash, regarded as forming a shape resembling the male sexual organs.

The only citation is from the third (1949) edition of Eric Partridge’s A Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English : “Dog’s ballocks , the typographical colon-dash (:—).”

The OED gives a later meaning, c. 1986 (with the ): ”the very best, the acme of excellence.” An OED citation: “Yeah, Jon Bon Jovi is the dog’s bollocks.” Someone had fun getting that in the Dictionary.

The OED is also the dog’s bollocks, especially now that I know that it’s possible to search for text in definitions. But Willa Cather is not the dog’s bollocks. She is just the very best, the acme of excellence, especially in The Professor’s House. James Schuyler: “Willa Cather alone is worth / The price of admission to the horrors of civilization.”

¹ The page at the link gets it wrong: dog’s bollocks, not the dog’s bollocks, is the typographical slang.

Related reading
All OCA punctuation posts (Pinboard)
All OCA Willa Cather posts (Pinboard)