Defending Brooklyn

“We particularly resent the picturization of a Brooklynite as a dumbbell and a fellow who says dese , dem , and dose ”: from WYNC, a 1948 interview with Sidney H. Ascher, president of the Society to Prevent Disparaging Remarks about Brooklyn. Scroll down for the original broadcast.

YouTube has a soundless version of Brooklyn, U.S.A. , the 1947 film mentioned in the interview. Mr. Ascher appears therein. A 1999 newspaper article and an Amazon page for Sid Ascher’s World of Trivia and More! have more on his life (and, I suspect, legend).

I’m happy to be from “the garden spot of the world, Brooklyn, U.S.A.” Extra credit if you know which Brooklyn resident called the borough that.

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All OCA Brooklyn posts (Pinboard)

Still life with coffee and laundry

[As seen in east-central Illinois. Click for a larger view.]

America’s Cup Coffee, “The Cup That Cheers,” was produced in Peoria, Illinois. That’s the America’s Cup trophy painted on the brick.

I had to make sure that I was reading the words at the top correctly: White Front Auto Laundry / Service Station? Yes. Webster’s Second defines auto laundry : “a place where, or device with which, automobiles are washed.” The term is not found in Webster’s Third , though one can still subscribe to the Auto Laundry News.

American a

The pronunciation of a :

In the years before the Civil War the plain people converted the a of care into the a of car in bear , dare , hair , and where , into a short i in the verb can , into a short e in catch , and into a long e in care , scarce and chair, thus producing bar , dar , har , whar , kin , ketch , keer , skeerce and cheer.

H. L. Mencken, The American Language: An Inquiry into the Development of English in the United States, 4th ed. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1936).

Rachel and Ben, do you remember “Bounce, ketch?” (And the Galápagos?)

Also from The American Language
The American v. the Englishman : “Are you a speed-cop?” : B.V.D. : English American English : “[N]o faculty so weak as the English faculty” : On professor : Playing policy : “There are words enough already” : The -thon , dancing and walking : The verb to contact

[“Bounce, ketch” rang a distant bell for Rachel and Ben. It and the Galápagos are from an old VHS tape for kids.]

Nabokov to Nabokov

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.

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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 .)]

Overheard

“I used to be a former FBI agent”: a one-time former FBI agent, speaking on CNN.

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All OCA “overheard” posts (Pinboard)

[The television was on for “warmth.”]

“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.]

iOS 9, uppercase, lowercase

Illustration of my issue with displaying caps state on the keys... pic.twitter.com/LXwaml0t2Z

— Zack Isaacs (@Endosage) September 16, 2015

I 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.

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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.