Smoke and ink

Walter Benjamin:

If the smoke from the tip of my cigarette and the ink from the nib of my pen flowed with equal ease, I would be in the Arcadia of my writing.

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

Other Walter Benjamin posts
Benjamin on collectors : Handwriting and typing : Metaphors for writing : On readers and writers : On writing materials

Zippy pens

[Zippy , August 12, 2016.]

Seminar then moves on to mechanical pencils. He prefers them to wooden pencils. Does Softlite? “I guess so . . Now get your hand off of my thigh.” By the third panel, they’re married, with two children. It turned out so right, for strangers on a train.

Related reading
All OCA Zippy posts (Pinboard)

[The saddest writing-instrument sight: a cup of uncapped ball-points next to a cash register.]

Green beans, from an old family recipe, such as it is, or was, or may have been, remembered and recreated long after the fact

Elaine and I have been tending to a friend’s garden. Thus we have an embarrassment of green beans on our hands, or in our refrigerator. And so I remembered a dish that my mom used to make, green beans in tomato sauce. Very simple:

Chop an onion and brown in olive oil.

Add tomato sauce and oregano.

Add cooked beans and let them simmer for a while.

Thus green beans are made not only edible but delicious. The oregano is the secret. Exact proportions? Who knows? One 15 oz. can of tomato sauce and two or three teaspoons of dried oregano will take care of a good number of beans. I use no-salt-added sauce and add pepper and just a little salt.

I have always associated this dish with Brooklyn’s Hamilton House, a wonderful restaurant of my childhood. (London broil, anyone?) I always thought that my mom was recreating the Hamilton House dish. But no: as she told me a couple of days ago, she was making a dish that her mother made.

If you search for green beans tomato sauce , you can find much more complicated recipes. Perhaps something is missing from my ingredient list, but I don’t think so: my grandmother leaned to recipes with a handful of ingredients.

If you, too, are beset by an embarrassment of green beans, tomato sauce and oregano might be of help.

[Embarrassment is the collective noun that applies to green beans. Embarrassment : green beans :: gaggle : geese.]

Some sardines run through it

A fish fight! Norman and Paul Maclean (Craif Sheffer and Brad Pitt) comes to blows over sardines in A River Runs Through It (dir. Robert Redford, 1992).

I know the name Skeezix from the comic strip Gasoline Alley . And now I know why he has that name: skeezicks means rascal. The word skeezicks is older than Skeezix.

Back to fish.

Related reading
All OCA sardine posts (Pinboard)

Names and things

Winona LaDuke, founder of the White Earth Land Recovery Project and two-time Green Party vice-presidential candidate:

“Julius Caesar’s calendar is something that belongs to one culture, and I always have this problem with naming large things after small white men. Like, you know, who was that guy? Why do we have one whole system of time named after him?”

*

“I don’t mean to repeat this, but I have a problem with the naming thing — big mountains after small men. This whole continent is badly named.”

From the Kitchen Sisters’ podcast Fugitive Waves , episode no. 51, “Harvest on Big Rice Lake.”

Fitzcarraldo in Vermont

From Vermont Public Radio:

A nearly 200-year-old schoolhouse has been moved back to its original site in the Orleans County town of Brownington. . . .

Thousands of Vermonters cheered as 44 oxen pulled the two-story Orleans County Grammar schoolhouse up a hill nearly half a mile.

[George Bodmer let me know that the real Carlos Fermín Fitzcarrald appears in a recent New Yorker article. Thanks, George.]

Chrome changes

I was wondering about Chrome this morning: the Back and Forward and Reload arrows looked thinner, and the Omnibox’s drop-down list of URLs had entries in blue. What? Yes, Chrome had changed. The new design is flatter; tabs are a bit taller and have sharper corners, and then there are those blue URLs. Chrome does updates automatically: thus these changes may catch the user (or me) unawares.

It’s easy to get the old look back, at least for now: Type chrome:// flags in the Omnibox and look for “Material Design in the browser’s top chrome.” Select Non-material from the drop-down menu and relaunch.

If you choose to make further changes on the flags page, leave a trail of breadcrumbs as you do. In other words, write down what you’re doing so that you can undo easily if something goes wrong.

Things to like in today’s Zits

[Zits , August 9, 2016. Click for a larger view.]

Left to right: Adolescent sprawl and self-absorption. Speech balloon and arm breaking panel wall. Comic-strip furnishings: vase, stand, painting. Charlie-Brown-shirt zigzag pattern on vase. (That pattern shows up everywhere in Zits .) Speech balloon and arm breaking another panel wall. Stylized but immediately recognizable Tide bottle. Comic-strip laundry basket. Speech balloon and arm breaking yet another panel wall. Middle-aged sag.

But especially the laundry basket, which follows some unnamed principle of comics: a pattern is best suggested, not worked out in its entirety. Consider the clapboards and bricks in the first three Nancy panels on this page.


[The line of Jeremy’s arm makes this little scene a panel in itself.]

Related reading
All OCA comics posts (Pinboard)

From One of Ours

Willa Cather, One of Ours (1922).

Related reading
All OCA Cather posts (Pinboard)

NPR, sheesh

From an All Things Considered story about Olympic athletes who are already done: “While her U.S. teammates are angsting about their events, she’s free to chill.”

Elaine reacted to the sentence before I did.

Related reading
All OCA sheesh posts (Pinboard)

[The NPR text-version: “While her U.S. teammates are full of angst about their events, she’s free to chill.” The story as broadcast has angsting .]