Ouch

H. L. Mencken:

In the American colleges and high-schools there is no faculty so weak as the English faculty. It is the common catch-all for aspirants to the birch who are too lazy or too feeble in intelligence to acquire any sort of exact knowledge, and the professional incompetence of its typical ornament is matched only by his hollow cocksureness.

H. L. Mencken, The American Language: An Inquiry into the Development of English in the United States, 4th ed. (New York: Alred A. Knopf, 1936).

Also from The American Language
The American v. the Englishman
“There are words enough already”

Zinsser, the Pro’s Choice

[“Quality since 1849.”]

The writer William Zinsser was a great-grandson of a William Zinsser who began a shellac business in New York City in 1849. Zinsser the writer gives some of the family history in a 2011 piece, “Hold the Emotion!”

When we needed a can of primer last week, I noticed the Zinsser brand in our Ace Hardware. What else could I buy? Zinsser: the pro’s choice and the choice for prose.

Related reading
All OCA William Zinsser posts (Pinboard)

Tea cakes and lemonade

From a New York Times article about publicity for the new, not-new Harper Lee novel Go Set a Watchman:

“Everyone is curious as to whether it’s going to be anything like To Kill a Mockingbird, because that’s such a part of our culture,” said Liza Bernard, co-owner of Norwich Bookstore in Norwich, Vt., which will serve Mockingbird-inspired snacks, like tea cakes and lemonade, on July 14.

File under stuff white people do.

Here, from a defunct blog of that name, are macon d’s thoughts about Harper Lee’s other novel.

Lucky Lulu

A label for Lucky Lulu Frozen Perfume, as seen at the Chicago Cultural Center exhibit Love for Sale: The Graphic Art of Valmor Products. I photographed a poster-sized enlargement of a Valmor label. The original labels (many of which are also on display) are postage-stamp-sized. Tiny labels for tiny bottles. I’m surprised by how little is online concerning Valmor Products. Consider this post an addition to what’s available.

[Frozen perfume? Because its manufacture involves freezing? Because it gives a cooling feeling? Because it immobilizes Lulu’s prey?]

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