Robert Walser: thinking while working

Simon Tanner is describing his daily routine:


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

Related reading
All OCA Robert Walser posts (Pinboard)

Mr. Hyphen and e-mail

The Washington Post is dropping the hyphen from e-mail . Bill Walsh, who calls himself “the keeper, more or less, of The Post’s style manual,” isn’t happy about having to make the change. I find his reasoning sound:

While it’s true that commonly used two-word or hyphenated compounds often solidify into single words over time, that had never before happened with a compound based on a single letter. We had T-shirts and X-rays for a long time before electronic mail showed up, but we still aren’t writing about tshirts and xrays .

For whatever reason, though, e-mail quickly became email as America went online.

I started walking through the alphabet: A- and B-list , C-clamp , D-Day , F-hole , G-spot, H-bomb. And, of course, e- words, all hyphenated: e-book , e-commerce , e-reader , e-tail , e-zine . Keeping the hyphen in e-mail seems a logical choice.

The title of the most popular post on this blog, How to e-mail a professor, has always had a hyphen. It’s old school.

Related posts
Bad hyphens, unhelpful abbreviations : “Every generation hyphenates the way it wants to” : Got hyphens? : The Hammacher Schlemmer crazy making hyphen shortage problem : Living on hyphens : Mr. Hyphen and Mr. Faulkner : One more from Mr. Hyphen : Phrasal-adjective punctuation

[Mr. Hyphen: protagonist of Edward N. Teall’s Meet Mr. Hyphen (And Put Him in His Place) (New York: Funk & Wagnalls, 1937), the subject of several of these hyphen-centric posts.]

WRONG?

[Mini Puzzle, The New York Times, December 15, 2015.]

It’s difficult to say that this clue-and-answer pairing is plainly wrong. Merriam-Webster’s discussion of disinterested notes that the word was first used to mean “not having the mind or feelings engaged, not interested” and that this meaning reappeared in the early twentieth century:

The revival has since been under frequent attack as an illiteracy and a blurring or loss of a useful distinction. Actual usage shows otherwise.

Garner’s Modern American Usage thinks a distinction between uninterested and disinterested is

still best recognized and followed because disinterested captures a nuance that no other word quite does. . . .

A disinterested observer is not merely “impartial” but has nothing to gain from taking a stand on the issue in question.

I like (and honor) the distinction. If disinterested describes an observer with nothing to gain, why use the word in place of a word that has a much wider application?

But there’s a Higher Authority that has a bearing on this clue-and-answer. “The New York Times” Manual of Style and Usage (2015) distinguishes between disinterested and uninterested: “Disinterested means unbiased or impartial; uninterested means bored or indifferent.”

So by Times standards, clueing BORED with disinterested is

At the Queen Street Police Station

[O Canada! Click for a much larger view.]

Elaine and I both loved this glimpse of office life from Niagara (dir. Henry Hathaway, 1953). Map. Advertising calendar, I think. Rolling chair. Outgoing Mail. And those file drawers. The desk may be a shared one: there’s a framed picture facing away from Sam. Yes, his name is Sam. He’s played by Sean McClory (uncredited), whom I know as Mr. Grace in John Huston’s The Dead (1987).

Niagara is a gripping film, even if its trajectory is easy to foresee. Vacationers George and Rose Loomis (Joseph Cotten and Marilyn Monroe) are a horribly mismatched, tragically fated couple. Fellow vacationers Polly and Ray Cutler (Jean Peters and Max Showalter) are all daylight, laughter, and healthy sexuality. I think of Cotten as a cool, composed presence on screen: but not so here. The early scene in which he pauses in his model-car building to finger an empty Chesterfield pack (as Monroe showers) speaks volumes.

Thanks to Chris at Dreamers Rise for mentioning Niagara .

Domestic comedy

[Elaine observed that this Christmas season has been her busiest as a musician .]

“Is that all Christmas is to you? A great big dollar sign atop a tree?”

Related reading
All OCA domestic comedy posts (Pinboard)

[Elaine too has succumbed to the fatal attraction of Hallmark. So she immediately understood what I was up to with this bit of fake indignation.]

#finals

Checking Twitter for the various acronymic hashtags that go with the life of my university, I see things I’d rather not see. A case in point: a house-party announcement with the slogan Fuck Finals . Finals week starts tomorrow.

As a student, I found finals a source of tremendous stress, never having any idea what they’d look like. I always secretly anticipated that a final might take the form of a single trivia question: What is the name of the third courtier in act 3, scene 2? So I can understand not liking finals. I can understand hating finals. But I can’t understand conspiring to make a travesty of your own educational endeavor.

I used to tell my students: When you tweet to proclaim how stupid your classes are or how drunk you are or to show someone passed out on a floor, you cheapen your degree and the degree of every student from our school. When you add a university-related hashtag, it’s worse.

Related posts
Homeric blindess in colledge (Stupidity and social media)
How to do well on a final exam
How to do horribly on a final exam

“Sunday”

Listening to Frank Sinatra’s 1954 recording of “Sunday,” I was slightly startled to realize that the song depicts American life before the institution of the weekend. Here is my transcription of the lyric, from the first recording, by Jean Goldkette:

I’m blue every Monday, thinking over
    Sunday
That one day when I’m with you
It seems that I sigh all day Tuesday
I cry all day Wednesday
Oh my, how I long for you

And then comes Thursday
Gee it’s long, it never goes by
Friday makes me feel
Like I’m gonna die

But after pay day, that’s my fun day
I shine all day Sunday
That one day when I’m with you

See? Saturday is pay day, the end of the workweek.

Wikipedia has a brief account of the development of the American two-day weekend, which began with a New England mill in 1908. The first union contract with a five-day workweek was negotiated in 1929. But “it was not until 1940, when a provision of the 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act mandating a maximum 40 hour workweek went into effect, that the two-day weekend was adopted nationwide.” “Sunday,” by Ned Miller, Chester Conn, Jule Styne, and Bennie Kreuger, comes from the 1926 revue The Merry World.

Related reading
All OCA Frank Sinatra posts (Pinboard)

[Why Goldkette? Sinatra takes liberties with the lyrics here and there.]

Recently updated

A small press v. the Salinger estate Now with more details.

Here’s a good way to reduce a college classroom to rapt silence

Post title from experience — and it was a classroom in which no student had ever heard the song, by anyone. The guitarist is Tony Mottola.

Related reading
All OCA Frank Sinatra posts (Pinboard)

Mark Trail revised

[Mark Trail , December 12, 2015.]


[Mark Trail revised, December 12, 2015.]

At least Frank would be home more often.

Related reading (via Pinboard)
All OCA Mark Trail posts
All OCA Frank Sinatra posts

[Now playing: “I Won’t Dance.”]