From “Before Breakfast”

Henry Grenfell, a business man, is preparing for a solitary retreat to an island off the coast of Nova Scotia, “a bit of wooded rock in the sea.” His son Harrison, “a distinguished physicist at thirty,” enters as Grenfell is packing.


Willa Cather, “Before Breakfast,” in The Old Beauty and Others (1948).

Such a slight story, and yet it contains so many elements of Cather’s fiction: a desire for permanence set against the inevitability of change, human finitude measured against cosmic time, a clash of cultures (humanist and scientific), and the drama of “the double life,” as Cather calls it elsewhere:

One realizes that human relationships are the tragic necessity of human life; that they can never be wholly satisfactory, that every ego is half the time greedily seeking them, and half the time pulling away from them.

Right now Grenfell is pulling away, moving toward his “private, personal, non-family life.” Like Godfrey St. Peter in The Professor’s House (1925), Henry Grenfell is outward bound.

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xkcd survey

The latest installment of xkcd takes the reader to “a search for weird correlations.” It’s fun.

Word of the day: zucchini

[Shrouded in mystery.]

This file-folder label recently appeared in the breezeway between our house and garage. The label is almost certainly ours. It probably found its freedom during a recent garage-decluttering spree.

The Oxford English Dictionary traces zucchini to the Italian: “plural of zucchino (small) marrow, diminutive of zucca gourd.” The Dictionary calls zucchini “The usual word for the vegetable in N. America and Australia.” In British English, the vegetable is the courgette , from the French: “diminutive of courge gourd.”

As for marrow:

(Chiefly Brit .) any of various kinds of squash or gourd which are chiefly the fruits of varieties of Cucurbita pepo , eaten as a vegetable; esp . one of the larger round or cylindrical kinds with green, white, or striped skins and greenish-white or (occas.) yellowish pulpy flesh; (also) the plant producing these, a trailing or sometimes bushlike annual with deep yellow flowers.

So that explains the curious term vegetable marrow . The Dictionary says of this use of marrow that “It is unclear . . . whether the primary sense is ‘pith, inner pulp’ . . . or ‘richness (as of bone marrow).’”

What did the label label? I have no idea, but I am hoping that one of the younger members of the fambly might remember what this zucchini is all about. Note the backward z .

Idealists and ridicule

Willa Cather, “The Best Years,” in The Old Beauty and Others (1948).

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A Metropolis wink

[Brigitte Helm as the Maschinenmensch, the machine-human, the false Maria, in Metropolis (dir. Fritz Lang, 1927).]

Wikipedia lists various Metropolis elements in pop music. I begin to wonder, at least semi-seriously, if Miley Cyrus’s wink isn’t one more bit of Metropolis.

The 2010 restoration of Metropolis , which I’ve finally gotten around to watching, is dazzling. Unlike, say, Miley Cyrus.

[The musical Miley of interest to me is Bubber.]

Hi and Lois watch

[Hi and Lois, September 1, 2015.]

It’s the dreaded wrong-way window-writing glitch. Sometimes Hi-Lo Amalgamated gets it right. Sometimes. But again and again things go wrong. And again. In Beetle Bailey, too. Am I looking at a meme, or at evidence of carelessness? I think it’s carelessness — as in “I could care less,” which is a careless way of putting it.

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Word of the day: coster

As Cherry Beamish, Mrs. Allison was a music-hall performer. From Willa Cather’s “The Old Beauty” (1948):

“Remember her in that coster song, Mother? It went round the world, that did.”

The Oxford English Dictionary explains: coster is short for costermonger , from costard , “an apple,” and monger , “dealer, trader”: “orig. An apple-seller, a fruiterer; esp. one that sold his fruit in the open street”; “Now, in London, a man who sells fruit, vegetables, fish, etc. in the street from a barrow.” The Dictionary lists several compound words with coster : coster-boy , coster-ditty , coster-girl , coster-song . An 1892 citation mentions Albert Chevalier: “Long before the days of Mr. Chevalier and his excellent songs, there was a coster-ditty, which,” &c.

Google Books gives further help. A 1905 item from The Ludgate Monthly, “Albert Chevalier and His Songs: A Chat with His Publisher,” by Ernest Alfieri, quotes music publisher R. W. Reynolds:

“Before ‘The Future Mrs. ’Awkins’ came out, ‘Knocked ’em in the Old Kent Road’ had had the largest sale, closely followed by ‘The Coster’s Serenade’; but ‘My Old Dutch,’ which is not a coster song — it belongs to the genus cockney, of which the purely coster song is only a species — bids fair to outrival them all.”

So a coster song is a kind of Cockney song. I’d like to know though how one tells the difference.

You can hear, courtesy of YouTube, two recordings of Albert Chevalier singing “My Old Dutch,”: 1, 2. Also at YouTube, versions by Peter Sellers and Herman’s Hermits. It’s easy to imagine the Beatles trying this song in the Get Back sessions.

Some other Chevalier songs: “The ’Armonic Club,” “The Coster’s Courtship,” “The Nipper,” “Wot cher!,” “Wot’s the Good of Hanyfink? Why, Nuffink.”

“[M]erely everyday life”

Willa Cather, “The Old Beauty,” in The Old Beauty and Others (1948).

Related reading
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Oliver Sacks (1933–2015)

There is a paradox here — a delicious one — which I cannot resolve: if there is indeed a fundamental distinction between experience and description, between direct and mediated knowledge of the world, how is it that language can be so powerful? Language, that most human invention, can enable what, in principle, should not be possible. It can allow all of us, even the congenitally blind, to see with another person’s eyes.

“The Mind’s Eye,” in The Mind’s Eye (New York: Knopf, 2010).

The New York Times has an obituary. Sacks’s three recent pieces for the Times : “My Own Life,” “My Periodic Table,” and “Sabbath.”

Did ballpoints kill cursive?

Did the ballpoint pen really kill cursive, as Josh Giesbrecht suggests in a piece at The Atlantic ? Giesbrecht finds the strongest support for this claim in the work of handwriting expert Rosemary Sassoon:

She explains that the type of pen grip taught in contemporary grade school is the same grip that’s been used for generations, long before everyone wrote with ballpoints. However, writing with ballpoints and other modern pens requires that they be placed at a greater, more upright angle to the paper — a position that’s generally uncomfortable with a traditional pen hold.

Certainly strain is possible when one writes with a ballpoint — or with a fountain pen, if one writes for a long enough time. But I’m not persuaded by the argument from angles. I just photographed myself writing with a Bic, a T-Ball Jotter, and a Cross fountain pen, and I see virtually no difference between the ballpoints and the fountain pen. If anything, I hold the ballpoints slightly less upright.

I think that declining ability in cursive might be better explained as a matter of writers’ lack of interest in, or lack of care for, the handwritten word.

A sidenote: in the short film The Art of Hermann Zapf , Zapf does calligraphy with a ballpoint pen (at 14:38). Says Zapf, “Maybe I am going a little too far away from calligraphy with a broad-edged pen. But the ballpoint is also a good tool if it is used in the right way.” He goes on to produce some Spencerian script with his ballpoint.

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Ballpoints, not for writing?
Five pens (My life in five pens)
All OCA handwriting posts (Pinboard)
All OCA pen posts (Pinboard)