“Tea Peps You Up!”

[Life, July 24, 1939. Click for a larger view.]

I like the clutter of this advertisement. But it isn’t clutter, really; it’s just more and more stuff to delight the reader. I like imagining the woman’s words aloud: she sounds like she’s on a jag. I like suspecting that the man is picnicking on liverwurst. (It sure looks like liverwurst.) I like the little Bayeux Tapestry at the bottom of the page. I especially like the treatment of the word TEA, a treatment usually reserved for ICE itself.

And speaking of ice, here’s Mr. Cube, larger, cleaner, colder:



Words often attributed to William Gladstone: “If you are cold, tea will warm you. If you are heated, it will cool you. If you are depressed, it will cheer you. If you are excited, it will calm you.” If you try to track down a source for these sentences, you will be disappointed. Here, have some tea.

Related reading
All OCA tea posts (Pinboard)

[I used the free Mac app Paparazzi! to grab the large ad. I used the Mac Preview alpha tool to clean up Mr. Cube.]

“Tea Answers America’s Call to Pep!”

[Life, December 9, 1940.]

Notice that this advertisement has a cameo by Mr. T. Pott, whose acquaintance I made last night. Pott was known on both sides of the Atlantic. On this side he appears without top hat, which makes a certain sense: he’s already wearing a lid. Besides, us Americans don’t have much truck with no fancy ways.

Here, for no practical purpose, is a neater, brighter, larger Pott:


[Life, February 12, 1940.]

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All OCA tea posts (Pinboard)

[I used the free Mac app Paparazzi! to grab the large ad. I used the Mac Preview alpha tool to clean up Mr. Pott.]

Joyeux anniversaire, M. Proust

He was born on this day in 1871.

In reading, friendship is suddenly brought back to its original purity. There is no false amiability with books. If we spend the evening with these friends, it is because we genuinely want to. We often take leave of them, at least, only with regret. And once we have left them, none of those thoughts that spoil friendship: ‘What did they think of us?’ ‘Were we not tactless?’ ‘Did they like us?’ or the fear of being forgotten in favour of someone else. All these qualms of friendship expire on the threshold of the pure and peaceable form of it that is reading.

Marcel Proust, “Days of Reading,” in Days of Reading, translated by John Sturrock (London: Penguin, 2008).

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[Days of Reading, from the third series of Penguin’s Great Ideas paperbacks, reprints five short pieces from Against Saint-Beuve and Other Essays (London: Penguin, 1988), now out of print.]

Rhymes with “Boops”

I know that tea is better for you than water. I know that, like chocolate and wine, it enhances cognitive performance. (Science!) I know too that it tastes swell, gives vitality, and makes you go “Boops.” (Advertising!) And I know that tea pairs well with madeleines, especially when Marcel Proust’s birthday is just a day away. (Literature!) But I did not know about the droops.


[“Tea Drives Away the Droops.” Poster by Edward McKnight Kauffer, 1936. Click for a larger view.]

This poster, a product of the International Tea Market Expansion Board, is Cooper Hewitt’s Object of the Day. Geoffrey Ripert describes the poster as “an early and particularly representative example of globalization in advertising, speaking directly to the consumer as an individual, ‘sensual’ being.” A being with droops.

Related reading
All OCA tea posts

TWA, JFK

The photographer Max Tuohey tours the Trans World Flight Center, aka the TWA terminal at John F. Kennedy International Airport. Those stairs! I was there in boyhood, but I didn’t know it until I saw these photographs.

[Via Daring Fireball.]

Fifty blog description lines

The first words of Van Dyke Parks’s song “Orange Crate Art” — “Orange crate art was a place to start” — long appeared on this blog as what Blogger calls a blog description line. (Right below the blog title above.) In May 2010, I began to vary the line, keeping the quotation marks for fun. I never stopped. I’ll quote what I wrote in a post that collected the first two hundred: “These lines now look like bits of found language, detached from contexts, amusing, banal, evocative, opaque. I like that.” And I still do. Here are the fifty that have followed the first two hundred:

“Caffeinated, mildly so”
“One part zot ”
“A name I’ve grown to trust”
“I’m not like that!”
“Thanks, Pete”
“1½ HOUR FREE PARKING”
“Doing what, exactly?”
“As it is, unadorned”
“As its writer intended”
“Ink-thrifty”
“Such a monkey”
“Turned out nice again”
“More powerful than a Coke and a slice”
“It’s very hard to be yourself, but it’s the best
    possible thing”
“A mistaken detail from me”
“Good usage isn’t nearly as fluid as you’re
    suggesting”
“Undivided attention to the most unimportant
    things”
“As if!”
“Not a Vermeer”
“Kinda haphazard”
“That’s me — or is it I?”
“We’re — or is it I’m?”
“Pretty much actual size”
“All that is the case”
“In the traditional manner”
“Pithy, brisk, prosaic”
“Only all palaver”
“Plenty to think about”
“Just plain wrong about some things”
“Echoes and clunkinesses”
“It’s study hour again”
“Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo
    Buffalo buffalo.”
“Bad advice and misinformation”
“A mere smidgen”
“With your permission and all of that”
“Sigh”
“Gullible pup”
“Plain enough”
“Received task, will do later”
“The crank and fuss”
“More readable”
”Naturally roundabout”
“Filled with language”
“Artisan grilled”
“More than slightly in a trance”
“You don’t have to be Frank Sinatra”
“Bits and pieces learned along the way”
“Increasingly unalphabetical”
“Pre-Code”
“Full of meaning”

To be continued.

Melville and Frost

Ishamel ponders whiteness, “the intensifying agent in things most appalling to mankind”:


Herman Melville, Moby-Dick (1851)

In a poem from 1936, Robert Frost, too, ponders “a dumb blankness, full of meaning, in a wide landscape of snows”:



Frost’s poem also suggests Blaise Pascal: “Le silence éternel de ces espaces infinis m’effraie” [The eternal silence of these infinite spaces frightens me]. Frost’s better-known “Design” depicts a scene in white and white and white, a design, if it is a design, “of darkness to appall.”

Appalling whiteness, of the whale and other things, seems like a good note on which to end these Moby-Dick posts.

Also from Moby-Dick
“Nothing exists in itself” : Nantucket ≠ Illinois : Quoggy : “Round the world!” : Gam : On “true method” : “A certain semi-visible steam” : Ishmael, dictionary user : A Sheffield contrivance

“Every generation hyphenates the way it wants to”

From The Simpsons episode “The Bart of War” (May 18, 2003), aired again (again) last night. Bart and Milhouse are in trouble:

Bart: Please, don’t call our parents.

Chief Wiggum: I’m afraid I have to for hijinks like these. Heh. Hijinks. Funny word. Three dotted letters in a row.

Eddie: Is it hyphenated?

Chief Wiggum: It used to be. Back in the bad old days, you know. Of course every generation hyphenates the way it wants to. Then there’s ★NSYNC. Hah. What the hell is that? Jump in any time, Eddie, these are good topics.

I don’t know how Chief Wiggum spells ★NSYNC, but I know how ★NSYNC spells ★NSYNC. (I looked it up.) But I am unwilling to ruin line spacing by superscripting the star. Like so:

^★NSYNC

I also don’t know if Chief Wiggum italicizes words used as words. But I do.

Related reading
All OCA punctuation posts (Pinboard)
The Hammacher Schlemmer crazy making hyphen shortage problem
Living on hyphens
Mr. Hyphen and Mr. Faulkner
One more from Mr. Hyphen

[Mary Norris’s Between You & Me (2015) and Edward N. Teall’s Meet Mr. Hyphen (1937) got me noticing hyphens and talk of hyphens.]

“Rich kids” and English

Linkbait from The Atlantic : “Rich Kids Study English,” complete with a stock photo of an oh-so-white, oh-so languid young woman, shades on, shoes off, reading, sort of, supine on the grass. The more temperate claim that the writer advances: “Kids [kids ?] from lower-income families tend toward ‘useful’ majors, such as computer science, math, and physics. Those whose parents make more money flock to history, English, and performing arts.”

I am skeptical about this claim. It’s not clear how much statistical evidence supports it: all we’re told is “National Center for Education Statistics data.” The graph presenting this evidence seems far from conclusive: “Associate’s Degree only” goes with an average parental household income of $56,636 ± $41,496. English goes with $99,533 ± $59,856. Of all majors listed, the greatest range in parental household income goes with the English major, which would seem to suggest that its students come from all kinds of backgrounds.

Which I believe is the case. I’ve known countless students from decidedly unprivileged backgrounds who have chosen to major in English. (I was one such major too.) This Atlantic piece furthers the pernicious idea that traditional study in the humanities is for a privileged few, while more practical fields offer a proper path for the rest of us. I will quote from a previous post:

If powerful and moneyed interests now seeking to reshape higher education have their way, “college” will soon become a two-tier system, with the real thing for a privileged few  . . . and credits and credentials, haphazardly assembled, vocationally themed, for everyone else.

The idea that the humanities are for “rich kids” is one that any humanist must reject.

It’s still WCW’s wheelbarrow

The New York Times reports on Thaddeus Marshall, “the forgotten man behind William Carlos Williams’s ‘red wheelbarrow.’” Interesting, certainly. But the wheelbarrow of “The Red Wheelbarrow” has been abstracted — removed from its source, dissociated from its surroundings (save for some chickens), lifted into the zone of the imagination, whose work upon things is the focus of Spring and All, the 1923 volume in which the poem (known only as XXII, an exhibit number of sorts) first appeared. To say (as the Internets now say) that Mr. Marshall owned the wheelbarrow in Williams’s poem is to make a category mistake about the relation between life and art.

Williams’s poem, like so much modernist art, is above all a work of juxtaposition: of the made and the natural, the one and the many, the red and the white. As Hugh Kenner observes, the poem forms “an ideogram of the barnyard.” “The Red Wheelbarrow” has small surprises: the broken words “wheel / barrow” and “rain / water,” the mysterious word glazed, which turns the wheelbarrow, if only for a moment, into a work of art, glazed like, oh, say, a Grecian urn. And the poem has a haiku-like economy of form: four two-line stanazas, of four syllables and two, three and two, three and two, four and two. Reading the poem at Princeton University in 1952, Williams invoked the opening line of John Keats’s Endymion : “A thing of beauty is a joy forever.”

It’s good to know where things come from. (It was Hugh Kenner who discovered that “Prufock” was the name of a St. Louis furniture company.) But it’s also possible in English studies to contextualize a work into oblivion — in other words, to miss what’s most important about it . What’s most important about “The Red Wheelbarrow” is its presentation of an everyday, unpoetic reality as the material of poetry. Not a Grecian urn: a wheelbarrow. Not nightingales and skylarks: chickens.

Related reading
All OCA William Carlos Williams posts (Pinboard)