Robert Walser: “Ah, how lovely”

Robert Walser, “The Metropolitan Street,” in Berlin Stories , trans. Susan Bernofsky (New York: New York Review Books, 2012).

Related reading
All OCA Robert Walser posts (Pinboard)

[Shades of Frank O’Hara.]

New directions in housing

An NPR commentator: “We lived in a two-story house in the basement.”

That must have been some basement.

A possible revision: “We lived in the basement of a two-story house.”

Related reading
All OCA NPR posts (Pinboard)

Hallmark ex machina

“Guys, guys, guys, okay, listen to this. My trusted producer Monica just gave me the most amazing news in the world. Apparently, while we were broadcasting, affiliates across the country were inundated with phone calls from people who want to donate to the Arts Center. Monica set up a Kickstarter fund, and we have raised $264,000 and counting. And they want to know where they can buy your paintings. It’s unbelievable. Apex has met its match. We're going to keep the Arts Center!”

“That’s awesome!”

Awesome and unbelievable, which might be the same thing. Dialogue from The Christmas Parade (dir. Jonathan Wright, 2014). It’s at YouTube, at least for a little while, which saved me from having to wait until tomorrow to watch again and record this bit of dialogue. Yes, I am a prisoner of Hallmark Movies and Mysteries. Seek help I shall — but not before Christmas.

[“And they want to know where they can buy your paintings”: that is, the hunky guy’s paintings.]

Robert Walser: “nothing less than ghastly”

Robert Walser’s first novel The Tanners (1907) begins with Simon Tanner entering a bookstore and pleading for the chance to work there. The bookseller gives him a one-week trial. That’s long enough for Simon to make up his mind:


Robert Walser, The Tanners , trans. Susan Bernofsky (New York: New Directions, 2009).

The Tanners is a deliriously funny and odd novel. Walser’s prose takes on a special strangeness in an extended narrative: characters speechify for pages on end; they undertake difficult, interminable walks; crucial events come out of nowhere and pass with no further mention. It’s something like reading a novel that has lost the ability to remember its narrative line from chapter to chapter. I love it.

I count Robert Walser and David Schubert as two great lucky finds in my life of reading. In other words, writers whose names might prompt a “Who?” (Though Walser was and is now far better known than Schubert.)

Related reading
All OCA Robert Walser posts (Pinboard)

Phrases to confuse

From Oxford Dictionaries, a quiz: American phrases to confuse Brits. For example (and note the single quotation marks):

If something ‘jumped the shark’, then it:
○ Escaped from a dangerous situation
○ Began a period of inexorable decline in
    quality or popularity
○ Avoided payment of overdue loans
○ Went down to Florida for the winter

There’s also an Oxford quiz with British phrases to confuse Americans. That quiz is more difficult, objectively speaking.

Willa Cather on light and shade

The sky for the past few days has been grey or white. This morning it’s blue, with sharp low sun, as if a desk lamp were shining on the streets. The only grey and white today are faint clouds on the horizon, the prairie version of mountains. Out on a walk, I thought of Willa Cather:

Nobody can paint the sun, or sunlight. He can only paint the tricks that shadows play with it, or what it does to forms. He cannot even paint those relations of light and shade — he can only paint some emotion they give him, some man-made arrangement of them that happens to give him personal delight — a conception of clouds over distant mesas (or over the towers of St. Sulpice) that makes one nerve in him thrill and tremble. At bottom all he can give you is the thrill of his own poor little nerve — the projection in paint of a fleeting pleasure in a certain combination of form and colour, as temporary and almost as physical as a taste on the tongue.

“Light on Adobe Walls,” in Willa Cather on Writing: Critical Studies of Writing as an Art . 1920. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1988. First published 1920.

Related reading
All OCA Cather posts (Pinboard)

William Maxwell on his habit of work

From his 1982 Paris Review interview:

I like to work in my bathrobe and pajamas, after breakfast, until I suddenly perceive, from what’s on the page in the typewriter, that I’ve lost my judgment. And then I stop. It’s usually about twelve thirty. But I hate getting dressed. The cleaning woman (who may not approve of it, though she’s never said), my family, the elevator men, the delivery boy from Gristedes — all of them are used to seeing me in this unkempt condition. What it means to me is probably symbolic — you can have me after I’ve got my trousers on, but not before. When I retired from The New Yorker they offered me an office, which was very generous of them because they’re shy on space, but I thought, “What would I do with an office at The New Yorker ? I would have to put my trousers on and ride the subway downtown to my typewriter. No good.”

Other William Maxwell posts
On childhood and familiar objects : On “the greatest pleasure there is” : On Melville and Cather : On sentences

[Gristedes: a New York supermarket chain.]

Trump, go home

In today’s New York Times, a reporter travels to Donald Trump’s old neighborhood in Queens :

“People always ask, ‘Where are the moderate Muslims?’” Ali Najmi, 31, a defense lawyer and a co-founder of the Muslim Democratic Club of New York, said during a discussion after prayers at the Arafa Islamic Center. “We’re right here; we’re right in Donald Trump’s neighborhood. He needs to come back home.”

In a little corner of my imagination, I sometimes wonder whether Trump’s candidacy is an elaborate thought-experiment, something like Jane Elliott’s blue eyes–brown eyes classroom exercise. But I know I’m just imagining things.

The pompous style in Nancy

[Nancy , April 18, 1966. Via Random Acts of Nancy .]

He must be an Honors student.

“The pompous style” is a key term in Michael Harvey’s The Nuts and Bolts of College Writing (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2013):

So accustomed are we to the pompous style as the voice of authority that students can’t be blamed for thinking it the way they should write in school. Indeed, our educational institutions — ahem, schools — do much to encourage this belief. Children learn to read and write short, plain sentences — “See Spot run” — then grow older and begin to write as if “Observe Spot in the process of running” were somehow an improvement. By the time they arrive at college, almost all revere formality in and of itself as the mark of good writing. And by and large they learn to write like George Eliot’s self-important man of business, Borthrop Trumbull, talked: “Things never began with Mr. Trumbull: they always commenced.”

A related post
A wrongheaded “dead words” movement

[The Nuts and Bolts of College Writing was my favorite book for teaching college writing: small, inexpensive, beautifully written, sane. I recommend it to all students and teachers.]

I am a prisoner of Hallmark Movies and Mysteries

[A plucky young mom is about to be evicted, or fired, or something. ]

“But it’s Christmas Eve!”

Of course it’s Christmas Eve, you fool. But what were you expecting — a drop of human kindness? Forget it: you’re on the Hallmark Movies and Mysteries Channel. But all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well, in another ninety minutes or so.

I am a prisoner of Hallmark Movies and Mysteries, and I’m not proud of it. The blame though rests with my daughter Rachel: it was her enthusiasm that got me started. We both love the awfulness.

HMM: for those times when you don’t want to think very hard. Or at all.

[With apologies to Julian of Norwich.]