Pocket notebook sightings

Fresca pointed me to Where the Sidewalk Ends (dir. Otto Preminger, 1950) as a film rich in stationery supplies. Yes. I’d seen the film years ago but had little memory of it — until it began. And then the plot and its people kicked in. And the supplies.

Detective Sergeant Mark Dixon (Dana Andrews) carries a pocket notebook. Bad guy Tommy Scalise (Gary Merrill) carries what must be Benzedrine inhalers. That’s Karl Malden as Dixon’s boss, Detective Lieutenant Thomas.


[Click any image for a larger view.]

Dixon’s partner Detective Sergeant Paul Klein (Bert Freed) also carries a notebook. Useful when interviewing Morgan Taylor (Gene Tierney).



Then there’s a wonderful scene that Fresca mentioned, in which Scalise spells things out for small-time hood Willie Bender (Don Appell): “Take out a pencil and write this down.” Willie’s in a phone booth, the perfect place to take dictation with his no-name pencil.



Mark Dixon sits at a desk to write a letter to be opened in the event of his death. I think he’s using a military-clip Sheaffer.



I’d forgotten how much our household liked this film. Six years after Laura , it’s a Preminger-Andrews-Tierney reunion, with supplies. Thanks, Fresca, for recommending it.

More notebook sightings
Angels with Dirty Faces : Cat People : Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne : Dragnet : Extras : Foreign Correspondent : The Honeymooners : The House on 92nd Street : Journal d’un curé de campagne : The Lodger : Murder at the Vanities : Murder, Inc. : The Mystery of the Wax Museum : Naked City : The Palm Beach Story : Pickpocket : Pickup on South Street : Pushover : Quai des Orfèvres : Railroaded! : Red-Headed Woman : Rififi : Route 66 : The Sopranos : Spellbound : State Fair : T-Men : Union Station : The Woman in the Window

[Where does the sidewalk end? As the opening credits make clear, in the gutter.]

“Rocket surgery”

[Dustin , March 7, 2016. Click for a larger view.]

Dustin is a witty comic strip. Nicely punctuated, too.

I just reached the discussion of overworked metaphors in Sir Ernest Gowers’s The Complete Plain Words. On the danger of “falling into incongruity”:

Nothing is easier to do; almost all writers fall occasionally into this trap. But it is worth while to take great pains to avoid doing so, because a reader who notices it will deride you. So we should not speak of increasing or waiving a ceiling, or say that it is beginning to bite. Possibilities more unpleasant than the writer can have intended are suggested by the warning to Civil Defence Workers that many persons who experienced a nuclear explosion will have diarrhoea and vomiting and should not be allowed to swamp the medical services.

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

More metaphors in trouble
A-Rod’s medicine : Carpetbagging beaver and drunken horse, tired as dogs : Chipping away at a heel : Cliffs and goalposts : Dripping and sketching : End-of-day lunch : Force-feeding and dog-earing : From a back-pocket beacon to a cog : Harvesting : Heels and hackles : Icarus : The nation’s midsection : Plates and juggling : Prongs and platforms : Race, gun battle, prizefight : Resurrection : The sides of the spectrum : Tackling and dissecting : “With the cliff behind us”

And: Too many to list here.

Rev. Robert Palladino (1932–2016)

Robert Palladino, once a Trappist, later a priest, taught calligraphy at Reed College. Steve Jobs sat in, and what he learned about letterforms turned out to be useful when he went to work on the Mac.

From the New York Times obituary:

Though Father Palladino demonstrably influenced Mr. Jobs, the converse cannot be said. To the end of his life, Father Palladino never owned, or even once used, a computer.

“I have my hand,” he would say, “and I have my pen. That’s it.”

A related post
Steve Jobs on connecting the dots

Crosswords, copied

From FiveThirtyEight: “A group of eagle-eyed puzzlers, using digital tools, has uncovered a pattern of copying in the professional crossword-puzzle world that has led to accusations of plagiarism and false identity.”

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March 8: From FiveThirtyEight: “The longtime editor of two major crossword puzzle series is temporarily stepping away from his editorial role, the puzzles’ publishers announced Monday, three days after FiveThirtyEight published an investigation into accusations of plagiarism against him.”

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April 29: From FiveThirtyEight: “Universal Uclick, a syndicator of puzzles to newspapers and other publications, says it has confirmed some of the allegations of plagiarism that have been leveled against the editor of its popular Universal Crossword puzzle.” The plagiarizing editor, Timothy Parker, will be returning to his position.

As I wrote in 2009 about a scandal in academia: “plagiarism seems to be governed by a sliding scale, with consequences lessening as the wrongdoer’s status rises.”

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May 9: FiveThirtyEight reports Parker’s puzzles will no longer appear in USA Today or other Gannett Company newspapers.

Domestic comedy

[Late-night television .]

“Watching people do curling is as strange as watching bugs having sex.”

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“It’s like assisted shuffleboard.”

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“There’s a pinball component to it too. Because the thingies bounce off the sides.”

Related reading
All OCA domestic comedy posts (Pinboard)

Important-ly

In a New Yorker video, Mary Norris explains why she disapproves of beginning a sentence with the phrase most importantly :

“It should be most important because it’s short for what is most important . When you say most importantly , it sounds really pompous.”

In Garner’s Modern American Usage (2009), Bryan Garner offers three arguments for the legitimacy of beginning with more importantly or most importantly : 1. the word importantly by itself can begin a sentence; 2. similar phrases require -ly (more interestingly , more notably ), 3. more important or most important becomes unidiomatic if the phrase is placed later in a sentence. His conclusion:

The criticism of more importantly and most importantly has always been rather muted and obscure, and today it has dwindled to something less than muted and obscure. So writers needn’t fear any criticism for using the -ly forms; if they encounter any, it’s easily dismissed as picayunish pedantry.

Searching Orange Crate Art, I find just three sentences beginning with more importantly or most importantly:

More importantly, I’ve reorganized the jumble of sentences into three paragraphs.

Most importantly, it's the work of the only Brian Wilson we have.

“And most importantly, it has the colors we’ve been trying to put together now for what must be two whole years — check.”

And two sentences beginning with more important :

More important: there appears to be no evidence that Ellington had any particular attachment to the Blackwing pencil, or to any writing instrument.

More important: a curve applies only to students who have done the work.

I suspect that the little man in my head who takes care of these matters has drawn a distinction between the sentence adverb importantly and the elliptical important (for what is more important , followed by a colon).

To each their own.

Related reading
All OCA Bryan Garner posts (Pinboard)
A review of Mary Norris’s Between You & Me

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4:53 p.m.: Now the link for Mary Norris’s video goes to the video.

[For anyone who watches the video: H. W. Fowler’s A Dictionary of Modern English Usage (1926) has nothing to say about massive . Sir Ernest Gowers wrote about the word for the book’s second (1965) edition. About the little man: the poet Ted Berrigan says somewhere that a little man in a poet’s head takes care of rhyme and meter.]

Winter and spring

Sounds to me like Heraclitus:


Verlyn Klinkenborg, “March,” The Rural Life (Boston: Back Bay Books, 2002).

Related reading
All OCA Verlyn Klinkenborg posts (Pinboard)

Kristol, Palin, Trump

In The New York Times this morning, news that William Kristol is among those planning for an “‘independent Republican’ ticket” if Donald Trump gets the Republican nomination. Such a ticket would, in Kristol’s words, “allow voters to correct the temporary mistake (if they make it) of nominating Trump.”

So the prospect of President Trump is too crazy for William Kristol — the same William Kristol largely responsible for Sarah Palin’s presence on the 2008 Republican ticket. William Kristol knows best! But Palin 2008 helped to make Trump 2016 possible: he’s another example of a colorfully packaged know-nothingism. The chickens have come home to roost, and now they’re running amok, all over William Kristol’s house. The carpets are ruined.

Is know-nothingism ever anything but amok?

[Merriam-Webster defines know-nothingism : often capitalized K&N :  a mid-20th century political attitude characterized by anti-intellectualism, exaggerated patriotism, and fear of foreign subversive influences.” The original Know Nothings were a nineteenth-century phenomenon.]

Resignation and courage

Joseph Joubert:

Resignation is a hundred times easier than courage, for it has a motive outside of us and courage does not. If both diminish evils, let us use the one that diminishes it the most. (Outside us, that is to say beyond our will.)

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

Also from Joseph Joubert: Thinking and writing.

[It helped to look up motive : “That within the individual, rather than without, which incites him to action; any idea, need, emotion, or organic state that prompts to an action.” But also: “That which moves; a mover; instigator.” And: “A cause.” Definitions from Webster’s Second .]

A as in Dante

Another visit to the chain bookstore, another visit leaving empty-handed. One sad touch that makes a visit to a Barnes and Noble a little sadder still: in the small poetry section, Dante appears under A , as in Alighieri .

Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled.