A Mark Trail retort

[Mark Trail, July 11, 2015.]

Mark needs a boat. His editor Bill Ellis points out that the last one the magazine paid for got blown to bits. Mark’s reply offers a joyous philosophy of life: “Ha! . . . That wasn’t exactly my fault!” I’m not sure about the ellipsis though. How long to pause? Must practice.

Related reading
All OCA Mark Trail posts (Pinboard)

A Mark Trail jackpot

  
[Mark Trail, July 4, 6, 10, 2015.]

Recycle, recycle, recycle.

Previous instances: here, here, here, and here.

Related reading
All OCA Mark Trail posts (Pinboard)

Beard Oil

A recommendation that may be useful to a subset of Orange Crate Art readers: Beard Oil, by Leven Rose. It’s a mixture of jojoba and argan oils, fragrance-free. It makes my beard softer and rulier. Your beard may vary. A few drops should go a long way.

What’s that? Yes, rulier. Having written softer, I had to find a way around more manageable, so as not to sound too much like a shampoo commercial.

Ishmael says that a man who uses hair oil for non-medicinal purposes “has probably got a quoggy spot in him somewhere.” But he doesn’t say anything about beard oil.

Related posts
Beards and Perfect Etiquette (1879)
Beards as signs of the times
Beard-trimming recommendation
Polyphemus, beard-wearer

[This recommendation, like every other OCA recommendation, is unsolicited.]

“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.]

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. 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).

Related reading
All OCA Proust posts (Pinboard)

[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