“The Reliable Parker Jotter”

[Life , March 22, 1963. Click for a larger view.]

I like this advertisement, mainly because I like the Parker T-Ball Jotter, but also because I have done what Mrs. Beatrice Sopot did, albeit with cold water and without bleach. The Jotter and the shirt came through undamaged.

The Jotter was my first real (non-disposable) pen. I started using one again in 2012. It’s my favorite (and only) ballpoint.

Other T-Ball Jotter posts
Five pens (My life in five pens)
Last-minute shopping (1964 Jotter ad)
“Make My Jotter Quit!” (1971 Jotter ad)
Thomas Merton, T-Ball Jotter user
Watch, lighter, pen (1963 Jotter ad)

Evangeline and me

Lines recited by a character in Willa Cather’s One of Ours (1922) brought me back to eighth-grade English:

Ever thicker, thicker, thicker,
Froze the ice on lake and river;
Ever deeper, deeper, deeper,
Fell the snow o’er all the landscape.

I didn’t recognize the words. But that meter: it’s Longfellow. These lines in trochaic tetrameter are from Henry Wadsworth’s Longfellow’s 1855 poem The Song of Hiawatha .

And now I’m back in eighth-grade English, where we read Longfellow’s Evangeline: A Tale of Acadie (1847), all of it, in dactylic hexameter. That really was the forest primeval, and we were stuck in it. I remember how old the little hardcover looked in my young, irreverent hands.

A question: what would you regard as the strangest or most inappropriate or most sadly dated assigned reading of your elementary or high-school education? This post gives my answer: hands down, Evangeline .

Pocket notebook sighting

[From Mr. Holmes , (dir. Bill Condon, 2015). Click either image for a larger view.]

Sherlock Holmes’s doctor has given him a datebook and has asked him to make a dot every time he is unable to remember the name of a person or place. The filmmakers have been thoughtful enough to create a two-days-per-page datebook — to my mind, the dowdiest of formats. Yet they’ve been careless enough to leave out the red lines that should border each date. They’re missing from the first two dates in the first shot and from the first three dates in the second. These shots fill the screen: did no one notice? Bewildering.

I think Holmes is supposed to be writing with a miniature mechanical pencil or leadholder, though it looks more like a ball-point refill.

*

9:22 a.m.: Could it be that red borders are for Saturdays and Sundays only? I have never seen a datebook, old or new, that marks off dates in that way.

More notebook sightings
Angels with Dirty Faces : Ball of Fire : Cat People : City Girl : Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne : Dragnet : Extras : Foreign Correspondent : Homicide : The Honeymooners : The House on 92nd Street : Journal d’un curé de campagne : The Last Laugh : 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 : Where the Sidewalk Ends : The Woman in the Window

Domestic comedy

[In the voice of Jim Nabors, or Gomer Pyle. ]

“Shiraz, shiraz, shiraz!”

Related reading
All OCA domestic comedy posts (Pinboard)

[If you’re puzzled, see here.]

A PBS qua

Heard this evening on the PBS NewsHour , a reference to David Petraeus sharing classified information with “his mistress qua biographer.” An arresting characterization, one that I doubt I’ll ever hear repeated.

Bryan Garner has an excellent discussion of qua (meaning “in the capacity of; as; in the role of”), a word he characterizes as “often misused” and “little needed.” Garner quotes H. W. Fowler’s Modern English Usage (1926):

The real occasion for the use of qua occurs when a person or thing spoken of can be regarded from more than one point of view or as the holder of various coexistent functions, and a statement about him (or it) is to be limited to him in one of these aspects.

That’s it exactly: Petraeus was sharing information with his lover in her role as his biographer. Here, I think, qua works well. Garner’s recommended alternative — as , as in “his mistress as biographer” — would not work nearly as well here.

Of course, not having a mistress and not sharing classified information would work even better.

Black inks

Jet Pens compares black inks for fountain pens.

I long used Pelikan ink before switching to Aurora, which Jet Pens ranks as one of the four darkest blacks.

Boo

From the Los Angeles Times: “At one point, boos erupted when Sanders told the Democrats ‘the goal is not to win elections,’ but to ‘transform America.’”

Because who would want to change the status quo?

[There’s some debate about whether there were boos. The straight-facedness of the quoted sentence is what prompted me to post it.]

“The innervation of commanding fingers”

Walter Benjamin on handwriting and the typewriter:

The typewriter will alienate the hand of the man of letters from the pen only when the precision of typographic forms has directly entered the conception of his books. One might suppose that new systems with more variable typefaces would then be needed. They will replace the pliancy of the hand with the innervation of commanding fingers.

“Teaching Aid,” in One-Way Street , trans. Edmund Jephcott (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2016).

Commanding fingers: more prescient than Benjamin could have imagined. ⌘P.

Related reading
All OCA handwriting posts (Pinboard)
Benjamin on collectors : Metaphors for writing : On readers and writers : On writing materials

Footnotes

Barbara has agreed to type a few pages of Rosemary’s paper “Plato: Teacher and Theorist.” There are lots of footnotes, because professors like footnotes, Rosemary explains, especially if they’re in French or German. Rosemary’s, alas, are in English.


Beverly Cleary, Sister of the Bride (1963).

A show of hands: who remembers working out footnotes with a typewriter? I did it with at least one undergrad paper, after making the mistake of asking the professor whether he preferred endnotes or footnotes. The trick, as I remember it, was to count the number of characters and spaces in the text of the note, turn that number into lines, and measure up from the bottom margin. It was all very approximate. I must have ended up retyping one or more pages.

Related reading
All OCA Beverly Cleary posts (Pinboard)

[Don’t boo me: I was out in the hallway when I asked the question, not in class. There was never a directive to the class, and I never again made the mistake of asking.]

Typography terms, A–Z

The A–Z of typographic terms, by Phil Garnham, is available as a free PDF from Fontsmith. Did you know gadzook as a typography term? Me neither.

Related reading
All OCA typography posts (Pinboard)