James Ward’s supplies

“James Ward keeps his collection of office supplies at his mother’s house outside London because his flat in Brixton, which he shares with a roommate, is too small. He says his mother, a former librarian, has ‘come to terms’ with the arrangement”: “A Collector Sees the Potential in a Humble Paper Clip” (The New York Times).
*

September 7: I just hit page 114 in Marie Kondo’s The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up : “Your parents’ home is not a haven for mementos.” And one page later: “Even if the house is large with rooms to spare, it is not some infinitely expanding fourth dimension.” Mr. Ward, heed Ms. Kondo’s words. Send your supplies to me.

Related reading
All OCA supplies posts (Pinboard)
Tidy?

[James Ward is the author of The Perfection of the Paper Clip: Curious Tales of Invention, Accidental Genius, and Stationery Obsession (2015).]

Big fish, little fish

[Field and Stream, May 1977. Click for a larger view.]

This advertisement makes me think of a novel I read this summer. Moby -something.

The thought of eating fish while fishing seems a little odd to me. But the thought of carrying sardines around in shirt pockets is a thought I am willing to entertain.

Time for lunch.

Related reading
All OCA sardine posts (Pinboard)

A Nabokov pencil

Vladimir is sick in bed, suffering from one of his “numerous childhood illnesses.” His mother has gone out to buy the daily present that went with illness. He visualizes her traveling down the street by sleigh and stopping at Treumann’s “(writing implements, bronze baubles, playing cards).” She leaves the shop, still in his mind’s eye, with her footman, who carries what appears to be a pencil. Why is she making the man carry a thing so small? And now she returns, and it turns out that the present had been, in Vladimir’s mind’s eye, “greatly reduced in size — perhaps, because I subliminally corrected what logic warned me might still be the dreaded remnants of delirium’s dilating world.”


Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory (1966).

Related reading, via Pinboard
All OCA Nabokov posts
All OCA pencil posts
All OCA Nabokov and pencils posts

Abdul-Jabbar on Sanders and Trump

An essay by Kareem Abdul-Jabbar: “This is the difference between Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders” (The Washington Post). And Trump’s reply.

Word of the day: Waldeinsamkeit

Ella Frances Sanders, Lost in Translation: An Illustrated Compendium of Untranslatable Words from Around the World (Berkeley: Ten Speed Press, 2014). Click for larger woods.

I wanted to post something from this book (thank you, Elaine), and this word seems to go well with today’s post about man-going-off-to-wooded-island. You can find ten more Sanders-illustrated words here.

Lost in Translation is a charming and imagination-provoking book, though its scholarship is sometimes amiss: at least one of its words has been called non-existent. Waldeinsamkeit is, of course, real. Ralph Waldo Emerson even wrote a poem about it. But if I hadn’t looked up the word elsewhere, I wouldn’t have known to capitalize it. (Sanders draws all words in all caps.) Lower-case lettering would be helpful, as would a pronunciation guide.

A related post
積ん読 [tsundoku]

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.

Related reading
All OCA Cather posts (Pinboard)

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).

Related reading
All OCA Cather posts (Pinboard)

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.]