Orange Crate Art

Tuesday, April 5, 2016

Gum and ties

[Henry , April 5, 2016.]

O ye gods: give us back our mirrored gum machines. And while you’re at it, give us back our dashed lines of — wait, is that a line of vision, or a line of smell?

[Same.]

A gentleman does always wear a necktie. (The new waterproof models are great for showering and swimming.) I like the declaration in the window, but I especially like slight discontinuity of these two panels. It’s like a comic-strip Duchamp: Boy Entering a Tie Store . I’ll leave the punchline of today’s strip where I found it.

Related reading
All OCA Henry posts (Pinboard)
And more gum machines Henry : Henry : Henry : Perry Mason : Henry : Henry : Henry : Henry : Henry : Henry : What else? Henry

Word of the day: homework

Before there was homework, there was homework . The Oxford English Dictionary dates homework as school stuff to 1852: “schoolwork assigned to a pupil to be done outside lesson time (typically at home).” But homework (or home-work, or home work ) has been work of another kind since 1653: “work done at home, esp. as distinguished from work done in a factory.”

My mom came across a reference to the older kind of homework while reading, and it made her remember the homework of her childhood: carding bobby pins with her mother and grandmother during the Depression. I found a brief reference to such work via Google Books:

[Eileen Boris, Home to Work: Motherhood and the Politics of Industrial Homework in the United States (Cambridge University Press, 1994).]

The fashion trend: shorter hair.

And the work turns up in an alphabetical list of “most common types of industrial home work”:

[Robert Jenkins, Procedural History of the 1940 Census of Population and Housing (The Center for Demography and Ecology, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1983).]

Google Patents has a patent for a bobby-pin carding machine, filed in 1948 and published in 1953, by which time my relations were out of the business. And many other people soon would be.

A related post
Homework , not a good word for college

Monday, April 4, 2016

Politeness

Joseph Joubert:

Politeness is the art of being bored without boredom or (if you prefer) of bearing boredom without being bored.

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

Also from Joseph Joubert
Another world : Form and content : Resignation and courage : Self-love and truth : Thinking and writing

A Palm memo

For a few years in the early twenty-first century I used a Palm gadget. I began with a Zire and moved up to an m515 before going back to paper, which did a better job of holding a charge.

The ghosts of my Palms are still with me: I just discovered a text file on my Mac with the contents of Palm memos from way back when. Here is a memo consisting of random notes I made during a reading by a visiting poet in 2003:

This guy is nothing like Whitman

Was Vallejo Chilean?

Poem w/grandparents

pigs being castrated by his grandfather & being shot between the eyes

poem to his penis NARCiSSiST “God flowers in this nerve”

“I was very attached to my dog Lady”

I’ve omitted the poet’s name, which served as the note’s title. The name, if you want it, can be found by means of that godawful line of penile poetry.

I remember leaning over to a couple of extra-credit seekers who had come to this reading, notebooks and pens in hand. “There’s so much more to poetry than this,” I told them. Or “Please don’t think that all poetry is like this.” Or words to that effect. I might have been remembering how I had felt hearing my professor Jim Doyle speak frankly about the work of a visiting poet. It was a revelation to me: institutional acclaim for someone’s writing didn’t mean that it was good or that you had to like it.

Related reading
All OCA poetry posts (Pinboard)

[César Vallejo (1892–1938) wasn’t Chilean. He was a Peruvian poet. Drumming up an audience by offering “points”: one reason among many that I dislike the practice of extra credit.]

Saturday, April 2, 2016

xednI drawkcaB ehT

An analog-world tool: Merriam-Webster’s Backward Index, as explained by Peter Sokolowski.

Etiquette

“I like to eat with my hands. It gets me closer to the food.”

So says G-Man Bill Retz (Art Smith) in Ride the Pink Horse (dir. Robert Montgomery, 1947).

Friday, April 1, 2016

#Brooklynite

Earlier this week, a Hillary Clinton spokesman told reporters that Bernie Sanders would campaign “like a Brooklynite,” while Clinton would campaign “like a senator.”

Sanders’s comment on what it might mean to campaign like a “Brooklynite”:

“I haven’t the vaguest idea, to tell you the truth, but I do know I was born in Brooklyn, my wife was born in Brooklyn — we’re very proud of that. And if it means being aggressive, if it means being smart, if it means being tough, I accept that title.”

The Clinton campaign keeps thinking of new ways to lose this Brooklynite’s vote in a general election.

[I’ve repunctuated the Sanders comment to do a better job of it than Fox News did. Clinton campaign headquarters: 1 Pierrepont Plaza, Brooklyn, New York.]

Form and content

Joseph Joubert:

For the first form and idea of a work must be a space, a simple place where the material can be put, arranged, not a material to be put somewhere and arranged.

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

John Ashbery, striking a remarkably similar note:

[A] poem first presents itself to me as a somehow blank space which I then proceed to people with objects, events, and characters.

45 Contemporary Poems: The Creative Process , ed. Alberta Turner (New York: Longman, 1985).

In the manifesto “Projective Verse” (1959) Charles Olson famously declared that “FORM IS NEVER MORE THAN AN EXTENSION OF CONTENT.” Olson attributed this observation to Robert Creeley. (The SHOUTING is Olson.) For other writers, content is an extension of form. See above. Creeley later added that “content is never more than an extension of form.”

Related reading
All OCA John Ashbery posts (Pinboard)
Also from Joseph Joubert: Another world : Resignation and courage : Self-love and truth : Thinking and writing

[Robert Creeley: “form is never more than an extension of content,” in a letter to Charles Olson, June 5, 1950. For the last few weeks, I’ve been carrying Joubert’s name in my head as Jourbet . Wrong.]

Los Angeles palimpsest

[November 2012; June 2014; March 2016. Click on any image for a larger view.]

From the Webster’s Second entry for palimpsest :

A parchment, tablet, or other portion of writing material, which has been used twice or three times (double palimpsest ), the earlier writing having been erased; a manuscript in which one or or two earlier erased writings are found; a codex rescriptus. This double or triple use in early times of writing material was chiefly due to scarcity of such material.

This unassuming sign was the subject of posts in 2012 and 2014. The stickers visible in 2012 and 2014 are still visible in outline in 2016. Whatever material was behind the sign has been removed: now there’s just fence.