Domestic comedy

[Coffee. ]

“It’s really good.”

“I know it’s good. It has [reading ] ‘smooth, sweet caramel notes’ and a ‘refreshing citrus-like finish.’”

Related reading
All OCA domestic comedy posts (Pinboard)

A clever c(l)ue

The Newsday Saturday Stumper is a wonderful crossword, harder on average, I think, than the Saturday New York Times puzzle. Here from today’s Stumper is a beautifully tricky clue. 61-Across, eight letters: “Cue for the tenor, perhaps.” No spoilers: the answer is in the comments.

Today’s Stumper is by Brad Wilber, the co-constructor of a puzzle whose TORME left me more than slightly exasperated a while back. (I still suspect though that the inapt clue for that answer was Will Shortz’s work.)

A related post
Newsday ’s Saturday Stumper

“Floss, Floss, Floss!”

It is August in Biarritz. Vladimir is ten. Colette is nine.


Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory (1966).

Very Proustian, this interlude at the beach.

Related reading
All OCA Nabokov posts (Pinboard)

Force of Evil

Force of Evil (dir. Abraham Polonsky, 1948) stars John Garfield as an attorney involved in a scheme to take over the numbers (policy) rackets in New York City. Martin Scorsese, who introduces the film on DVD, thinks of it as a neglected noir masterpiece. I’m not sure I agree: the scheme and the romantic subplot are not exactly convincing. But George Barnes’s cinematography is aces. And the film has something for everyone, or at least for me. Click any image for a larger view.


[A Phi Beta Kappa key.]


[A locked drawer. Holding what?]


[A private line.]


[A Dixon Ticonderoga.]


[A Chemex coffeemaker. That’s Beatrice Pearson with Garfield. She worked mainly in the theater and appeared in just two films.]


[A pocket notebook. A “bank” is a numbers operation. Check.]


[A telephone booth, as seen from a lunch counter.]


[The same telephone booth and Beatrice Pearson. That’s her white glove above.]


[A notebook in a key case. (Huh?) Left , right , left , right : the combination for a safe.]


[A bakery, open late.]


[Mr. Hooper, moonlighting. This is the second time I’ve seen Will Lee as a bit player.]


[More Ticonderogas!]

Related reading
More Ticonderogas: Bells Are Ringing : Harry Truman : Lassie : The Dick Van Dyke Show : The House on 92nd Street

More notebook sightings: Angels with Dirty Faces : Cat People : Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne : Dragnet : Extras : Foreign Correspondent : Home Town Story : The House on 92nd Street : Journal d’un curé de campagne : The Lodger : Murder at the Vanities : Murder, Inc. : The Mystery of the Wax Museum : Naked City : The Palm Beach Story : Pickpocket : Pickup on South Street : Quai des Orfèvres : Railroaded! : Red-Headed Woman : Rififi : Route 66 : The Sopranos : Spellbound : State Fair : T-Men : Union Station : The Woman in the Window

Word of the day: guarantor

I went online to make a co-pay for my yearly physical and found a form that asked for "guarantor's name." Were they asking about my HMO? No. After seeing, a few lines later, a request for the guarantor's birthdate, I could guess that the guarantor was me.

A guarantor is “one that gives a guaranty” or “one that guarantees.” And a guaranty is “an undertaking to answer for the payment of a debt or the performance of a duty of another in case of the other's default or miscarriage.”

Perhaps guarantor is a fit word for one who makes a co-pay. Yes, I have to pay, and I’m good for it. But this form’s language is unnecessarily obscure. What’s wrong with patient ?

The “gutticles of the percha”

Mr. Cummings was Vladimir Nabokov’s drawing master:


Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory (1966).

Webster’s Second defines gutta-percha :

A substance resembling rubber but containing more resin, from the latex of several Malaysian trees of the genera Payena and Palaquium . It is nearly white to brown, hard and rather elastic, softens on heating, and can be vulcanized. It is used esp. as an electric insulator and in temporary fillings in teeth.

The word derives from the Malay. According to the Second : “gëtah gum + përcha the tree producing it.”

I cannot think of gutta-percha without thinking of James Joyce’s “The Dead”:

—Goloshes, Julia! exclaimed her sister. Goodness me, don’t you know what goloshes are? You wear them over your  . . . over your boots, Gretta, isn’t it?

—Yes, said Mrs Conroy. Guttapercha things. We both have a pair now. Gabriel says everyone wears them on the continent.

—O, on the continent, murmured Aunt Julia, nodding her head slowly.

Now when I think of gutta-percha, I’ll think of Speak, Memory, too.

Related reading, via Pinboard
All OCA Nabokov posts
Other words, other works of lit: Apoplexy, avatar, bandbox, heifer, sanguine, sempiternal : Artificer : Expiate : Ineluctable : Iridescent : Magnifico : Opusculum

[Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary gives a different etymology: “gĕtah sap, latex + pĕrcha scrap, rag.” The Oxford English Dictionary agrees with Webster’s Second (and Third ). Gutta owes something to the Latin gutta drop, also the source of the English word gutter .]

Undergrads and creative writing

From an episode of To the Best of Our Knowledge, “Writing for a Living.” The writer and editor Chad Harbach is talking about the explosion of graduate and undergraduate creative-writing programs. He calls undergrads “the bottom of the pyramid, if you will,” and goes on to describe the University of Virginia undergrads he taught while working on his MFA:

“Some of them were there because they really wanted to do this thing, and some of them had just heard that creative-writing classes were the easiest classes you could possibly take.” [Laughter .]

N.B.: Harbach does not dispute what those students believed.

Pyramid (as in scheme ) is a metaphor often applied to creative-writing programs. David Foster Wallace made the point, minus the metaphor, in “Fictional Futures and the Conspicuously Young” (1988):

Creative Writing Programs, while claiming in all good faith to train professional writers, in reality train more teachers of Creative Writing .

Who must of course have students.

[Harbach is the editor of MFA vs NYC: The Two Cultures of American Fiction (2014). A 2010 piece in Slate gives a shorter version of his argument: “MFA vs. NYC.”]

A teaching dream

I was teaching a college English class in my Brooklyn elementary school, in a corner classroom with a high ceiling, hanging light fixtures, and large windows and shades on two walls. We were reading a Hemingway novel; I don’t know which one. As I collected some in-class writing, we got onto the subject of regimentation and rules in high school. A great spontaneous discussion ensued, during which I realized that I had forgotten to bring my Hemingway. I kept that realization to myself. I mentioned two points about the novel as the time ran out and the room emptied. One point: a description of a tattooed character in Hemingway owed something to Djuna Barnes’s novel Nightwood . The other point I cannot remember.

All this time I was being, as they say in education, “observed”: a colleague was sitting in the back of the room watching me at work. When the class ended, his only suggestion was that I make greater use of the blackboard, a suggestion that seemed to me wildly irrelevant to what had just gone on (as of course it was). I explained that I had gotten away from using the blackboard in my teaching.

I can think of a number of elements that play a part in this dream: a recent New York Times feature on the first day of school in New York City, a letter to a friend that mentioned the debilitating effects of high school on new college students (who ask where they should write their name on in-class work), a fambly member’s student-teaching, and my liking for Nightwood , a novel I taught several times in lieu of The Sun Also Rises . My reasoning: students could read and make something of The Sun Also Rises on their own at any time. But they probably wouldn’t get another opportunity to read Nightwood , which offers another picture, and to my mind a much more compelling picture, of a lost generation.

Related reading, via Pinboard
All OCA dream posts
All OCA P.S. 131 posts
Smith going backward (from Nightwood)

[This dream marks my first classroom appearance since retiring.]

A plumbing tale

I came across a version of this story in an old textbook. (I like old textbooks.) The story circulates widely, but it’s new to me. Here is a telling that names a source, though not necessarily an origin:

Dr. William B. Bean, who in the Archives of Internal Medicine often tilted a lancet at the writing operations of his fellow healers, has passed on the story of a New York plumber who had cleaned out some drains with hydrochloric acid and then wrote to a chemical research bureau, inquiring, “Was there any possibility of harm?” As told by Dr. Bean, the story continues:

“The first answer was, ‘The efficacy of hydrochloric acid is indisputably established but the corrosive residue is incompatible with metallic permanence.’ The plumber was proud to get this and thanked the people for approving of his method. The dismayed research bureau rushed another letter to him saying, ‘We cannot assume responsibility for the production of a toxic and noxious residue with hydrochloric acid. We beg leave to suggest to you the employment of an alternative procedure.’ The plumber was more delighted than ever and wrote to thank them for reiterating their approval. By this time the bureau got worried about what might be happening to New York’s sewers and called in a third man, and older scientist, who wrote simply, ‘Don’t use hydrochloric acid. It eats hell out of pipes.’”

Theodore Bernstein, The Careful Writer (1965).

This post is for Fresca, who likes clarity.

[William Bennett Bean was described in 1974 as “a true renaissance man: an articulate clinician, a scholar of the classics, a masterful teller of tales, and a prodigious writer of stories.”]

Eleven years young

Orange Crate Art turns eleven later today. My daughter Rachel, eleven years ago:

“If you’re going to be this uptight and worried about it, you’re not going to be a very happy blogger. Just say ‘This is my new blog; I’m trying it out. Thanks to my son and daughter. I hope it works out.’”

Rachel was (and is) wise beyond her years.

What’s it like to be eleven? Well, there’s “growing maturity and confidence built on the experiences of earlier years,” along with “increasingly advanced cognitive skills and emotional maturity.” Yet one “may still be unsettled by major change.” (True, that.) Do “major bodily and hormonal changes” count as “major change”? I should think so.

As for being “acutely self-conscious in public,” Orange Crate Art has always been acutely self-conscious in public. No wonder: it’s never not been in public. And when it takes along an umbrella and there’s no rain, it feels like a jerk.

Thanks (again) to my fambly: to Rachel, for suggesting Orange Crate Art as a name; to Rachel and Ben, for showing me the basics of HTML; and to Elaine, whose sense of what’s appropriate is always appropriate. And thanks (again) to Van Dyke Parks, who was generous and enthusiastic about my use of his song’s title as this blog’s title.

And thank you, reader, old or new.

[Descriptions of a generic eleven-year-old from WebMD.]