“Another”

Mike at brownstudy wrote last week: “I dread hearing the word ‘another.’” That’s how I feel.

Uni-ball Signo FTW

From an obituary for the cartoonist Michael Crawford, a recollection from his wife Carolita Johnson:

“When one of the doctors at the hospital was trying to assess Michael’s mental acuity she picked up some random pen and asked, ‘Mr. Crawford, what would you do with this?’” Ms. Johnson wrote. “And he replied ‘I wouldn’t do anything with that. I use a Uni-ball Signo.’”

[My favorite gel pen: the Uni-ball Signo RT.]

Van Gogh’s ear

The New York Times has a good article about Vincent van Gogh’s left ear. Unlike the Telegraph article that Arts & Letters Daily recently linked to, the Times article makes clear that there is still no consensus about just what Van Gogh did to his ear.

I must admit though that after reading 500+ pages of Van Gogh’s letters, it never occurred to me to wonder whether Van Gogh severed an ear or part of an ear. Is the second possibility really any less horrifying than the first?

Related reading
All OCA Van Gogh posts (Pinboard)

Cleary and the critics

[Endpaper. Beverly Cleary, Sister of the Bride (1963).]

It’s pleasure to open a library copy of a children’s book and find traces of previous readers — if only underlined words (“vocabulary words”) or passages marked off, perhaps for reading aloud. This library copy of Sister of the Bride though is exceptional:

A great book
         Yah!
            Yah!

The
    Grooviest!!
Goovrest

  Very
Groovy!

  A
Fab!
Wow!
Book

I suspect a Beatle influence in the first and last comments. Yeah, yeah, yeah!

Related reading
All OCA Beverly Cleary posts (Pinboard)

Roguish Gramma

Beverly Cleary, Sister of the Bride (1963).

There’s an occasional kiss in the Cleary First Love series, but nothing else like Gramma’s comment. I imagine that it prompted any number of young readers to look up roguishly , make a puzzled face, and keep reading.

Like Lady Elaine Fairchild’s “Here it is, my lovely can”, Gramma’s comment is a naughty speck in a chaste fictional universe.

Related reading
All OCA Beverly Cleary posts (Pinboard)

An apple name

Yes, Mr. McIntosh, there was a Granny Smith.

Mark Trail , all too doppelgänger-y

Mark Trail meanders along its bewildering way. Mark turned up in the Rio Grande on June 22 after a long journey through caverns measureless to man. And then the strip went back in time: “Two years ago, not far from Hawaii.” An insipid couple, whom we have come to know as Darling (he) and Honey (she) are sailing to New Zealand. “We’ll be in New Zealand soon!” says Darling. (Good luck with that.) Long story short: Darling and Honey take a break to sleep away the night on a tiny island, “not far from Hawaii.” While carrying firewood from the boat to shore, Darling is bitten by what will turn out to be a red imported fire ant. I’m guessing, but a later strip shows something that looks like an ant, and it’s bright red.

  
[Mark Trail , June 28, July 1, July 2, 2016. Click for larger views.]

Back in the present, Mark is planning a vacation with Cherry, just the two of them, to Hawaii. Today, however, we’re back on the tiny island. But look: that’s not Honey in a green hat and bikini, two years back in time. It’s Abbey Powell, a real person at the USDA who appeared in a Trail story in 2015. She’s back. Follow that bird!


[Mark Trail , July 13, 2016. Click for a larger view.]

James Allen has given considerable attention to the female form of late, first with Honey and now with Abbey Powell. (Browse for yourself.) It’s a pity that Allen’s artistic imagination allows only one color for bikinis and hats: that makes things unnecessarily confusing. At least Honey and Ms. Powell have been granted different hat bands. But still: it’s all too doppelgänger-y.

Allen has assured his readers in a comment on today’s strip that Abbey is going to tell us what happened to Darling and Honey. I assume that they got in big trouble with the red imported fire ant, aka RIFA, either by bringing ashore the firewood that introduced the invasive species to the tiny island or by being bitten to death, or both.

It’s enough to make someone say “uunngghh.” Cough. Cough.

Related reading
All OCA Mark Trail posts (Pinboard)

Shredded lunch

I took up Berit’s suggestion and made a Shredded lunch. I cut a Shredded Wheat biscuit along the seam and came away with two “nest-like fragile crackers,” just as Berit described them. I put three large pieces of avocado on each (about three-quarters of a large avocado) and added some salt, cracked pepper, and lemon juice, with a chunk of cheddar cheese on the side. Delicious! I plan to repeat this experiment, probably on Friday, by which time the next avocado will have ripened.

Thank you, Berit, for discovering New Directions in Shredded Wheat.

A related post
Shredded Wheat hack

[A truism of the Internets: no one cares what you had for lunch. Well, probably. But people do care about what they might want to make for their own next lunch.]

“How not to write”

Zachary Foster gives advice: “How not to write: 14 tips for aspiring humanities academics” (Times Higher Education). A sample:

The general rule of thumb is to complicate simple ideas. “Living together,” in the words of one scholar, “oscillates between the tone of practical serenity and tragic pathos, between philosophical wisdom and desperate anguish.” It is both “simple evidence and the promise of the inaccessible,” while it opens the possibility of a “unified self” and “synchronous time.” If only this were more widely known, so much domestic friction could be avoided.

Related posts (fake lit-crit)
“Metaphysics’ corrasable bond”
On Rebecca Black’s “Friday”

Not reading

Arthur Schopenhauer:

The art of not reading is a very important one. It consists in not taking an interest in whatever may be engaging the attention of the general public at any particular time. When some political or ecclesiastical pamphlet, or novel, or poem is making a great commotion, you should remember that he who writes for fools always finds a large public. A precondition for reading good books is not reading bad ones: for life is short.

Essays and Aphorisms (1851), trans. R. J. Hollingdale (1970).

[Bryan Garner tweeted a photograph of this passage. My best book of 2016: so far it’s Willa Cather’s The Song of the Lark (1915).]