Museums, uh-oh

Beverly Cleary, Sister of the Bride (1963).

Museums: always a dangerous sign.

Sister of the Bride is my favorite novel in Beverly Cleary’s “First Love” series. The Luckiest Girl is in second place, followed by Fifteen and Jean and Johnny . I find that I can best enjoy these books by not thinking at all about my experience of high school. Wait, what’s a “high school”? Did I even attend one? I make no comparisons.

Sister of the Bride has many wonderful moments of gentle social satire. It’s in many ways a mid-century Bay Area version of Jane Austen. But: Rosemary MacLane and Greg Aldredge, students at UC Berkeley, are, as the novel makes clear, at least a tad counter-cultural. One more school year and they can participate in the Free Speech Movement as a nice, young married couple.

Related reading
Dowdy-world miracle (from Fifteen )
If my life were a Beverly Cleary novel
Jean Jarrett, dictionary user
Jean Jarrett, letter writer
Ramona Quimby and cursive
Ramona Quimby, stationery fan
Time, cyclical and linear (from Ellen Tebbits)

Six sonnets from NPR

From All Things Considered , six sonnets for your consideration: “Human or Machine: Can You Tell Who Wrote These Poems?” I guessed five of six correctly. The lines I liked best:

A thousand pictures on the kitchen floor,
Talked about a hundred years or more.

If my life were a Beverly Cleary novel

Related reading
Dowdy-world miracle (from Fifteen )
Jean Jarrett, dictionary user
Jean Jarrett, letter writer
Ramona Quimby and cursive
Ramona Quimby, stationery fan
Time, cyclical and linear (from Ellen Tebbits)

[Things missing: an alarm clock, a walk before breakfast to beat the heat, the heat, the humidity, &c. “When he could have”: I don’t think Beverly Cleary would use singular they . The novel would explain somewhere in chapter 1 that Elaine and I both kept our maiden names when we married.]

Bill Cunningham (1929–2016)

“Money’s the cheapest thing. Liberty and freedom is the most expensive”: the photographer Bill Cunningham, as quoted in the New York Times obituary.

I like these related words from the great documentary Bill Cunningham New York (dir. Richard Press, 2011):

“You see, if you don’t take money, they can’t tell you what to do, kid. That’s the key to the whole thing. Don’t touch money: it’s the worst thing you can do.”

A related post
Bill Cunningham New York

Overheard

[In the supermarket .]

“Apparently he gets hungry on beer.”

Does the speaker mean 1. that this fellow gets hungry when he drinks beer, or 2. that he gets hungry for beer?

The Internets return only one result for “hungry on beer,” a page from a food lover in Delhi NCR, who says in a restaurant review that he could not taste his food because he was “pretty hungry on beer (I think no one can go wrong in serving a beer).” I think that he means that he was more interested in the beer than the food. The restaurant’s name: Beeryani. Groan. (If you’re puzzled, see here.)

If “hungry on beer” is an Indian idiom, I think it would be better represented online. The person I overheard in the supermarket is an indigenous east-central Illinoisan, no question. So I will leave “hungry on beer” to stand as a small intercontinental mystery.

Related reading
All OCA “overheard” posts (Pinboard)

Back to school

I am living in Brighton, Massachusetts, as my own grown-up self, and attending Brookline High School. I board the T and ride down Commonwealth Avenue. As we approach the Harvard Avenue intersection, I see heavy traffic. I get out right before Harvard and walk, thinking I can get back on the trolley after the traffic clears. Logic, right? Sometimes a pedestrian can outpace a traffic jam. I dodge cars at the intersection like William Shatner in the Twilight Zone episode “Nick of Time”.

And then I stop into a bookstore, not Brookline Booksmith but a bookstore in a bright and airy old house with white walls. I find two hardcover books to buy. Their dust jackets remind me of E. H. Gombrich’s A Little History of the World: serif typefaces in black and red on white. I’m supposed to be at the high school at 9:00. The clock says 10:00, but I’m not worried, because I know they haven’t turned it back yet. At the front desk I talk with the owner about my having lived in Brookline in the 1980s. As we talk I realize that I have no idea where the high school is. But I’m not worried.

This is the fifth school-related dream I’ve had since retiring from teaching, and the second in which I’ve been a student. And here, I admit, not a very good student.

Related reading
All OCA dream posts (Pinboard)

From the Saturday Stumper

A wonderfully clever clue from today’s Newsday Saturday Stumper, 4-Down, seven letters: “Maker of belt loops.” No spoilers: the answer is in the comments.

Today’s puzzle is by Brad Wilber, whose Saturday Newsday work is the subject of an earlier OCA post. Finishing the Saturday Stumper is always cause for minor self-congratulation.

Ted Greenwald (1942–2016)

Ted Greenwald, “Breakout,” from the poem “I Hear a Step,” Common Sense (Kensington, CA: L Publications, 1978).

I pulled another Greenwald book from a shelf and found that it was dedicated to Bill Berkson. The two poets were friends. Bill Berkson died on June 16; Ted Greenwald, on June 17.

Related reading
Bill & Ted (Cuneiform Press)
Remembering Ted Greenwald (Poetry Foundation)

DFW on utilize

David Foster Wallace wrote notes about twenty-four words for the Oxford American Writer’s Thesaurus (2004). In 2011, Dave Madden announced his discovery that these notes, and other notes, from other writers, could be found in the thesaurus included with OS X’s Dictionary app — namely, the Oxford American Writer’s Thesaurus. Some of Wallace’s notes are still available in OS X El Capitan; some have disappeared. They all appear as “Twenty-Four Word Notes” in the posthumous Both Flesh and Not: Essays (2012).

The OAWT now titles these notes "Reflections.” You can hear Oxford University Press stepping away, in the manner of a The-views-expressed-do-not-necessarily-reflect disclaimer: “Conversational, opinionated, and idiomatic, these Word Notes are an opportunity to see a working writer’s perspective on a particular word or usage.” Wallace’s opinionated and idiomatic take on utilize appears to have been toned down. Here’s the 2008 OAWT note:



In the 2012 OAWT note (now in the Mac Dictionary app) the twit is gone:



There are other, smaller changes: rather is gone, you becomes he , and “I tell my students” prefaces the observation about pomposity and insecurity. It’s possible that Wallace himself revised this note in preparation for a later edition of the thesaurus. But in Both Flesh and Not: Essays the twit returns:



There are other changes: utilize is now called “noxious”; he becomes (an awkwardly self-conscious, avoiding-sexism) she ; smart becomes sophisticated; formal is uncapitalized. The double quotation marks replacing Wallace’s usual single marks are no doubt an editor’s work. Aside from the quotation marks, I suspect that the Both Flesh and Not version is Wallace’s entry as submitted to Oxford, with both noxious and twit merrily standing.

But all that aside: what I value in this entry is its final sentence: “‘formal writing’ does not mean gratuitously fancy writing; it means clean, clear, maximally considerate writing.” Listen up, students!

Related reading
All OCA DFW posts (Pinboard)

[There may be a legitimate use for utilize : The Merriam-Webster Dictionary of English Usage (1989) says that “More than use , it suggests a deliberate decision or effort to employ something (or someone) for a practical purpose.” But to my mind, utilize suggests a capitulation, deliberate or not, to the pompous style. I have seen and heard the word often enough to have made up my mind.]

From Lucy Gayheart

Willa Cather, Lucy Gayheart (1935).

Related reading
All OCA Cather posts (Pinboard)