Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory (1966).
An especially beautiful and startling element in Speak, Memory is the sudden and unexplained direct address of a “you.” That would be Vera Nabokov, Vladimir’s wife.
In Odes 2.14, Horace describes years as fleeting, gliding away. The poem addresses Postumus (identity unknown) and repeats his name: “Eheu fugaces, Postume, Postume / labuntur anni” [Alas, O Postumus, Postumus, the years glide swiftly by]. Postume, Postume: thus posthaste , posthaste , Paestum, Paestum. Paestum: “a major ancient Greek city.” Postumus, by the way, does not signify posthumous , no matter how well the meaning fits here.
Related reading
All OCA Nabokov posts (Pinboard)
[The text of Horace is from Odes and Epodes , trans. C. F. Bennett (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1914). Lumber : “To heap together in disorder” (Webster’s Second .)]
Tuesday, October 13, 2015
Nabokov to Nabokov
Overheard
“I used to be a former FBI agent”: a one-time former FBI agent, speaking on CNN.
Related reading
All OCA “overheard” posts (Pinboard)
[The television was on for “warmth.”]
Monday, October 12, 2015
“What kind of thinker are you?”
A three-question quiz from The Guardian: “What kind of thinker are you?”
Me, analytical.
Review: Bill Griffith’s Invisible Ink
Bill Griffith, Invisible Ink: My Mother’s Secret Love Affair with a Famous Cartoonist. Seattle: Fantagraphics, 2015. $29.99.
In one of the most inspired images in Invisible Ink (whose subtitle reveals just one family secret), Bill Griffith imagines generations of voices calling to him from the ruins of Mesa Verde’s Cliff Palace:
“I’m your grandfather!” “I’m your great-grandfather!” “I’m your third cousin, twice removed!” “I’m your great-great-grandfather!” “I’m your mother! Come home for supper!”“My emotional attachment to all these people is tenuous at best,” Griffith writes. “I mean, I’m free of their influence. They’re all gone, long gone. Then why won’t they shut up?” Because, one could say, we are born with the dead, trailing clouds, or dragging chains, of familial inheritance.
Working from conversations with an uncle, a box of memorabilia (that another relative declined), library special collections, Internet resources, and a cache of his mother’s writing (including an unpublished novel), Griffith (the creator of the comic strip Zippy the Pinhead) works to understand the mysteries of his parents’ lives: his father James’s never-spoken-of childhood and angry adulthood; his mother Barbara’s painful childhood and claustrophobic life as a wife, mother, and aspiring writer in suburbia; and the difficult marriage that ended with James’s death. And through sixteen years of that marriage, Barbara’s love affair with her employer Lawrence Lariar, a cartoonist and mystery writer. He too was married. An especially disturbing detail: a signed self-caricature of Lariar looked down on the Griffiths from their bedroom wall.
Though Lariar admired Klee and Picasso and Rothko, his own work was anything but high art. His long career takes the reader back to a thriving low- and middle-brow print culture, with an endless array of humor magazines, men’s magazines, and paperback originals. (Sample Lariar titles: Golf and Be Damned , How Green Was My Sex Life , Oh! Dr. Kinsey! ) Lariar’s formulaic approach to drawing and writing, always with an eye to “the sale,” is the occasion for a strange scenario about the anxiety of influence: what would have become of Bill Griffith had Lariar stepped in as stepfather and mentor? We see the imagined result in a set of hilariously un-Griffith-like Zippy strips.
Invisible Ink is brilliantly drawn, with hand-rendered reproductions of photographs and Lariar’s work, beautiful scenes of mid-century American life, and lots of crosshatching (a technique Lariar deemed passé). From Lariar’s Cartooning for Everybody : “The modern cartoonist needn’t be a master pen and ink craftsman to sell his work.” Needn’t be, no. But Bill Griffith is.
Related reading
All OCA Zippy posts (Pinboard)
[The cover image is from Fantagraphics. I have removed two exclamation points that do not appear on the cover of the book as published. William Henry Jackson, Griffith’s great-grandfather, took the first photographs of Mesa Verde. “We are born with the dead”: from T. S. Eliot’s Little Gidding,” given a different meaning here. “Trailing clouds”: from William Wordsworth, “Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood.” Just one example of Griffith’s technique: page 106, bottom right, a beautiful rendering of a Naked City street scene, one that also caught my eye.]
Sunday, October 11, 2015
iOS 9, uppercase, lowercase
Illustration of my issue with displaying caps state on the keys... pic.twitter.com/LXwaml0t2Z
— Zack Isaacs (@Endosage) September 16, 2015I went looking for some comment on iOS 9’s lowercase keyboard and found these images. Thank you, Zack Isaacs. I like the look of the lowercase keyboard, I really do, but switching from lowercase to uppercase via the Shift key is jarring, as I noticed every time I typed a capital letter. Switching between the lowercase and numeric keyboards is also jarring — like using the iPhone on a bouncing bus, with everything moving around. The problem: uppercase letters and numbers are uniform in size; lowercase letters are not. I switched back to the always-uppercase keyboard shortly after updating to iOS 9.
Handwriting in the news
News from New Zealand: “Drug dealers trying to send morphine through the mail have seen their brazen smuggling attempt go wrong — thanks to bad handwriting.”
Neatness counts.
Related reading
All OCA handwriting posts (Pinboard)
Saturday, October 10, 2015
A petition to protect higher education in Illinois
Reader, if you live in Illinois, please consider signing a petition to protect higher education in our state. As the Illinois budget impasse continues, the situation for public universities and community colleges is growing worse and worse.
Friday, October 9, 2015
OS X El Capitan
Yesterday I updated my Mac to OS X 10.11, El Capitan, and I’m impressed by its speed and apparent sturdiness. Things haven’t felt this good on my Mac since 10.8 (Mountain Lion).
Major glitch: an endlessly spinning beach ball while installing. I held down the power button, restarted, and all was well. Minor glitches: getting cDock to work and reinstalling the Safari extension Disconnect. I gave up on replacing Apple’s new system font (San Francisco) with Lucida Grande. Trying to make the change, at least for now, brings a host of complications, including squashed text in the Finder and in browser tabs. So I’m convincing myself that I’m happy with San Francisco, which itself is a clear (pun intended) improvement over Helvetica Neue.
I’m a little saddened to see that the sempervirens bug, a problem I first noticed in OS X 10.10, is still present, having persisted through 10.10.1, 10.10.2, 10.10.3, 10.10.4, and 10.10.5. Sempervirens isn’t present on every Mac, but a tech-support person reproduced the bug when I called about it in 2014, and a higher-level person filed a report. And the bug is still here. I guess I didn’t call it semper for nothing.
Itr’s always smart to check that crucial apps and hardware will work with a system update. I waited until I knew that aText was working in 10.11. Elaine has to wait until the music-writing app Finale works in 10.11. That’s supposed to happen “by the end of November 2015.” Sigh.
The criminal subjunctive
The Lineup (dir. Don Siegel, 1958) is a fine bit of black-and-white filmmaking, a police procedural (not noir, no matter what the DVD claims) in which two detectives pursue two criminals who pursue three travelers who have unwittingly brought heroin-filled keepsakes back to the States. With San Francisco scenery, a chase on an unfinished freeway, and a terrific script by Stirling Silliphant, who would soon create the television series Naked City and Route 66 .
Here, our criminals, Dancer (Eli Wallach) and Julian (Robert Keith), discuss a point of grammar on their way to work.
I wondered if this scene, complete with a “little book,” might be a nod to The Elements of Style. But no, I suppose not. The film was released in June 1958. The Elements of Style was published in April 1959. Grammar and usage as the keys to self-improvement have a long history in American culture. Sherwin Cody, anyone?
My amusing (I hope) explanation of “if I was” and “if I were” is one of the most popular posts on Orange Crate Art. It’s nice to know that speakers and writers want to get it right.
[Is it my imagination, or does Julian strongly resemble Walter White of Breaking Bad ?]
