From a Van Gogh letter

Vincent van Gogh to his brother Theo, October 22, 1882:

At the moment, I can see a splendid effect out of my studio window. The city, with its towers and roofs and smoking chimneys, is outlined as a dark, sombre silhouette against a horizon of light. This light is, however, no more than a broad streak over which hangs a heavy raincloud, more concentrated below, torn above by the autumn wind into large shreds & lumps that are being chased away. But that streak of light is making the wet roofs glisten here & there in the dark mass of the city (on a drawing one would achieve this with a stroke of body colour), so that although the mass has a single tone one can still distinguish between red tiles & slates. The Schenkweg runs through the foreground like a glistening streak through the wetness, the poplars have yellow leaves, the banks of the ditches & the meadows are a deep green, the little figures are black. I would have drawn it, or rather tried to draw it, had I not been working hard all afternoon on figures of peat-carriers, which are still too much on my mind to allow room for anything new, and should be allowed to linger.

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

As I discovered just yesterday (via Open Culture), Van Gogh’s letters are available online from the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam: original texts, facsimiles, and English translations. Odd to discover that the Penguin text combines three paragraphs into the one paragraph above.

If I were teaching the art of description, I would ask my students to read some of Van Gogh’s letters.

Also from Van Gogh’s letters
“Admire as much as you can”
“It was a bright autumn day and a beautiful walk”
“Lately, during the dark days before Christmas”
“So you must picture me sitting at my attic window”

[The Schenkweg? Wikipedia explains.]

Lives and writings

Joseph Joubert:

We must treat our lives as we treat our writings, put them in accord, give harmony to the middle, the end, and the beginning. In order to do this we must make many erasures.

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

I’m reminded of what William Faulkner said about peace.

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

Henry’s New Math

[Henry , April 8, 2016.]

Today’s Henry is strong evidence that the strip’s twenty-first-century reruns date from no earlier than the 1960s. Yes, the world of the New Math. Tom Lehrer provides a wonderful introduction to the subject in a song. I just listened for the first time in many years, and it’s still hilariously good. (As an irreverent teenager, I borrowed Lehrer’s That Was the Year That Was from the library, repeatedly, repeatedly.)

Wikipedia notes that in 1965 the New Math was the subject of several Peanuts strips: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5.

Related reading
All OCA Henry posts (Pinboard)

Backward e-mail

David Sparks of MacSparky explains backward e-mail. I can’t imagine starting without an addressee and a subject line, but whatever works, works. Sparks’s logic is undeniably logical.

Related reading
All OCA e-mail posts (Pinboard)

NPR, sheesh

“Both her and Bernie Sanders broke essentially evenly . . .”

“The remains . . . is reuniting a family . . .”

Related reading
All OCA NPR posts (Pinboard)

Recently updated

Is change possible? Now with words from Myles Horton.

A spelling of the future

[As seen in print.]

A spelling of the future, as I’ve defined it: “a misspelling so strange that it must be traveling backward in time to give us a foretaste of our language’s evolution.” Feels eerie, even.

Eary is indeed a word, now obsolete: “producing or bearing ears (of wheat or other cereal)” (Oxford English Dictionary ). So perhaps eary for eerie has been traveling forward in time, a spelling of the future past.

This post is beginning to make my head hurt.

Other spellings of the future
Aww : Bard-wired fence : Bud : Now : Off : Our : Poke-a-dots : Self-confidance : Where

[At some point spelling it the way it sounds (absolutely appropriate for young writers) should give way to looking it up and spelling it as it’s spelled.]

TextExpander, aText

I learned from Taking Note Now that the latest version of the Mac app TextExpander will be available by subscription only, $4.95 a month (less with a year-long subscription).

I used TextExpander for many years before switching to aText in 2013, when OS X Mavericks made life with TextExpander difficult. I thought I’d use aText as a temporary replacement, but when TextExpander updates became increasingly expensive, I chose to stay with aText. The price, then and now: $4.99. Not $4.99 a month, just $4.99. Fewer features, true: aText won’t, for instance, remind me when I could have typed an abbreviation. But for my purposes, the app is fine. I recommend it with enthusiasm.

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April 12: SmileOnMyMac has lowered the subscription price for TextExpander and will continue to sell and support the app in its stand-alone form. Details here.

A related post
aText (With a nifty example of what the app can do)

[If you want to try aText, download the trial version from the developer’s website. The App Store version will not work with OS X El Capitan. I would have learned about TextExpander’s subscription pricing from an e-mail, but as I just realized, I deleted the announcement unread.]

Is change possible?

Mindy Fullilove is a psychiatrist and the author of Root Shock: How Urban Renewal Destroys Entire Communities (One World/Ballantine Books, 2005) and Urban Alchemy: Restoring Joy in America’s Sorted-Out Cities (New Village Press, 2013). Here, in a To the Best of Our Knowledge episode about eviction, “Kicked Out in America,” Fullilove tells an interviewer why she refuses to give in to the belief that “real change” is impossible:

“I know that real change is possible. Much of the real change I’m seeing is negative, but it’s real change, and it’s driven by people. So for example, I’m seeing global warming. That’s a real change. And I’m seeing growing inequality, and that’s a real change. So I know change can happen. The trick is how do I get it to happen in a way that I think will be better for the health of most people.”

Fullilove goes on to cite Myles Horton, cofounder of the Highlander Folk School, who advised setting a goal for your life that you will not accomplish in your lifetime. Rosa Parks, as Fullilove points out, attended a workshop at the Highlander School in 1955, not long before she refused to give up her seat on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama.

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April 6: What did Myles Horton say or write about goals? The Internets have several versions, none of which have a clear source:

If you believe that you have a goal you can reach in your lifetime, then it’s the wrong goal.

If you believe that you have a goal that you can reach in your lifetime, then it’s the wrong goal.

If you have chosen a goal that is achievable in your lifetime, then it is the wrong goal.

If you have chosen a goal that is achievable in your lifetime, then it is the wrong goal. Choose the highest vision, and then just hack away at it.

“If . . . goal . . . , then . . . wrong goal” is memorable phrasing. But I can find no evidence that it comes from Myles Horton. The closest approximation that I have found:

Your vision will grow, but you will never be able to achieve your goals as you envision them. My vision cannot be achieved by me. You may save the whales, but the dream must push beyond that. It’s a dream which I can’t even dream. Other people will pick it up and go beyond. To put it in a simpler way, I once said that I was going to start on a life’s work. It had to be big enough to last all my life. And since I didn’t want to have to rethink and start over again, I needed to have a goal that would at least take my lifetime. After making that decision, I never thought of doing anything else, because I knew that I could just hack away on it, and what little I could do would take my lifetime.

Myles Horton, The Long Haul: An Autobiography , with Judith Kohl and Herbert Kohl (Teachers College Press, 1998).

This passage appears on page 228 of The Long Haul . An academic paper references this very page as a source for its version of the “wrong goal” aphorism. But the words aren’t there.

Trumpet futures

PBS’s revival of Ken Burns’s Jazz made me recall this quip attributed to the trumpeter Lester Bowie:

“If Clifford Brown were alive today, I’d be working in the post office . . . and Miles would be my supervisor.”

My question now: where might Wynton Marsalis fit in this picture? Would he be the president of the post office? Or would he be working alongside Bowie (and filing grievances against him and their supervisor)? I’m not sure what fits.

If you’ve never heard Clifford Brown, try “Daahoud,” or “I Get a Kick Out of You.”

[I can find no authoritative source for the quip. A 1983 interview with the magazine Musician may be the source. As you can guess, I’m not a fan of Ken Burns’s Jazz or the Stanley Crouch-Wynton Marsalis idea of jazz.]