The Clearview exit

Henry Petroski laments the coming disappearance of the typeface Clearview, used on United States highway signs since 2004: “Easy-Reading Road Signs Head to the Offramp” (The New York Times ).

Henry Petroski is the author of The Pencil: A History of Design and Circumstance (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1990) and other (also excellent) books. I corresponded with him c. 1990 and still have his letters, written in — yes, pencil.

[The Times can do what it wants, but offramp ? No hyphen?]

Wonders of Netflix

I pay only occasional attention to our Netflix queue, which leads to surprises, both pleasant and un-. In today’s mail, Ball of Fire (dir. Howard Hawks, 1941). The Netflix description:

Gary Cooper plays a serious but lovable English professor working with his colleagues on a dictionary of American slang. When a red-hot nightclub singer on the run from the mob takes refuge in their house, she also finds a place in their hearts.

Barbara Stanwyck plays the singer. And S. Z. Sakall plays one of Cooper’s colleagues. For a couple of hours tonight, all will be well. O wonders of Netflix!

Battery life

I hope everything therein is accurate: “Tips and Myths About Extending Smartphone Battery Life” (The New York Times ). The one I need to think on is “battery-saving myth” no. 1, about closing unused apps. I swipe apps away, again and again, daily. It’s the same thinking that had me cleaning the registry and removing junk files in Windows days. But an iPhone is not Windows.

From a Van Gogh letter

The religious fervor and sermonizing of Van Gogh’s early letters is occasionally interrupted by a passage of perfect description. Or better: composition. From a letter to brother Theo, October 31, 1876:

It was a bright autumn day and a beautiful walk from here to Richmond along the Thames, in which were mirrored the tall chestnut trees with their burden of yellow leaves and the bright blue sky, and through the tops of those trees the part of Richmond that lies on the hill, the houses with their red roofs and uncurtained windows and green gardens and the grey spire above them, and below, the great grey bridge, with the tall poplars on either side, over which the people could be seen going by as small black figures.

The Letters of Vincent van Gogh , ed. Ronald de Leeuw, trans. Arnold Pomerans (New York: Penguin, 1997).

In 1876, Van Gogh had not yet begun to paint.

Also from a Van Gogh letter
“Admire as much as you can”

School closures closings

On the radio today, phrasing that got my attention: someone read a long list of “school closures.” I’m not sure I’d ever heard the word closures in relation to weather-related closings.

I looked at several sources to find something relevant. “The New York Times” Manual of Style and Usage (2015) had it:

In references to shutdowns (of airports, businesses, streets, etc.), use closing(s) rather than the stilted closure(s).

That sounds right to me. A school closing might be for a day or two. Closure carries a stronger sense of finality: people are always looking for it. They want to be done .

This short post has now achieved closure.

Franny and Zippy

[Zippy , February 24, 2016.]

Zippy stands outside the Windsor Diner, 135 Main Street, Windsor, Vermont. J. D. Salinger ate lunch there, alone.

Related reading
All OCA Salinger and Zippy posts (Pinboard)

[Where’s Franny? Not in the diner. She’s in New York, talking with her brother. But I couldn’t resist this post’s title. Now I’ll wait for the power to go out again.]

Scene from a marriage

[Nancy, January 20, 1951.]

I’m the one on the right. Logic: if the gods had wanted us to shovel snow, they would not have given us such a big driveway. But shovel we must — after the blizzard gets done.

When did you last hear someone say “Naw”?

Related reading
All OCA Nancy posts (Pinboard)
All OCA snow posts

Robert Walser: a metropolis

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

Related reading
All OCA Robert Walser posts (Pinboard)

Thinking and writing (2)

Joseph Joubert:

Writing is closer to thinking than to speaking.

The Notebooks of Joseph Joubert: A Selection, trans. Paul Auster (New York: New York Review Books, 2005).

Paul Auster describes the French writer Joseph Joubert (1754–1824) as “a man of letters without portfolio,” “a writer who spent his whole life preparing himself for a work that ever came to be written, a writer of the highest rank who paradoxically never produced a book.” Joubert wrote, for forty years, in notebooks — aphorisms, observations, phrases. His work will be of interest to any reader who values the fragmentary, the provisional, the unfinished.

On my bookshelf, this book will go next to the NYRB edition of Georg Christoph Lichtenberg’s The Waste Books .

Thinking and writing (1)

Sir Ernest Gowers:

Clear thinking is hard work, but loose thinking is bound to produce loose writing. And clear thinking takes time, but time that has to be given to a job to avoid making a mess of it cannot be time wasted and may in the end be time saved.

The Complete Plain Words , rev. Sidney Greenbaum and Janet Whitcut (Boston: David R. Godine, 1988).

I love the plainness of “making a mess of it.”

Sir Ernest Gowers (1880–1966), a British civil servant, wrote Plain Words (1948) and The ABC of Plain Words (1951), books meant to foster clarity and humanity in official English. He combined the two books to make The Complete Plain Words (1954). Gowers also edited the second edition of H. W. Fowler’s A Dictionary of Modern English Usage (1965). The Complete Plain Words has been revised by Bruce Fraser (1973), by Greenbaum and Whitcut (1986), and by Rebecca Gowers, Sir Ernest’s great-granddaughter (2014). I’ve had the 1988 American paperback on a shelf for five or six years. And now I’m reading it.