Once more with feeling

One more time: lines from seven days of poetry from The Writer’s Almanac . This poem, like the one before it, is made of last lines, here moving backward through the week. I have taken small liberties with initial caps and end-of-line punctuation.

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Another poem from Keillorville

Another poem from Keillorville

Another poem made from a week’s worth of poems from The Writer’s Almanac . This one is made of last lines. I have taken small liberties with initial caps and end-of-line punctuation.

Is it just me, or does line six feel unwittingly creepy?

A related post
Here’s a poem for today

Help wanted

[Made by the Internets.]

Conserveira de Lisboa

“Cabral Ferreira likens tinned fish to wine, insisting that the flavors further develop after canning”: The New York Times reports on Lisbon’s Conserveira de Lisboa (est. 1930), a family-run store that sells nothing but canned fish. The store has a website, with great photographs.

Thanks to Matt Thomas, who reads the Sunday Times with exceeding care and posts the results at Submitted for Your Perusal.

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All OCA sardines posts (Pinboard)

September 11

[The Daytrippers , (dir. Greg Mottola, 1996).]

Here’s a poem for today

Here’s a poem for today by Garrison Keillor’s The Writer’s Almanac and me. I made this poem by collecting the first lines of this week’s offerings. The line from William Wordsworth is a moment of delight, but as for the other six: an anecdotal sameness sets in rather quickly. Keillor’s reading voice adds an extra element of sameness, covering everything in dreary piety. Everyone sounds alike, or at least like cousins.

If I were a novice in poetry, The Writer’s Almanac would probably convince me that poetry had very little to offer. Nothing to see here, folks. Move along. But putting these lines next to one another makes, I think, for greater interest. (Parataxis FTW!) The last stanza seems especially promising.

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All OCA poetry posts (Pinboard)

[Credit where it’s due: I have learned the publication date of On the Road from The Writer’s Almanac , which deepened my understanding of Nancy . And I have learned that “Be well, do good work, and keep in touch” is a registered trademark®.]

English teachers and spelling

From a series of exchanges concerning the spellings timpani and tympani , published in the Letters pages of The Atlantic in October 1986 and February 1987. These passages appear in the October issue. David Francis Urrows is taking issue with William Youngren’s use of the spelling tympani :

William H. Youngren, who teaches English at Boston College and writes about music for your journal, might take a few lessons in spelling from his colleagues.

Snarky, no? In his reply, Youngren says that Urrows is “quite wrong,” points to the presence of tympani in recent dictionaries, and looks at the history of tympany , tympanies , cetel  and drum in the Oxford English Dictionary . He adds that one Anglo-Saxon word for kettle drum was timpan or tympan. (See? There’s a y .) And then:

Finally, I wonder where Urrows got his curious idea that people who teach English are good at spelling. Most of us are actually pretty poor at it. But this disability has encouraged in us the useful habit of looking words up in the dictionary.

Take that!

Bill Youngren was a teacher of mine (a great one). He loved a good debate, and he didn’t hesitate to concede a point. But you had better have done your homework (so to speak) if you wanted to be persuasive.

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Bill and Virginia Youngren’s house

[“So to speak”: in graduate school there’s no such thing as “homework.”]

California Typewriter

California Typerwriter (dir. Doug Nichol, 2016) is a new documentary. From the film’s website:

California Typerwriter is a documentary portrait of artists, writers, and collectors who remain steadfastly loyal to the typewriter as a tool and muse, featuring Tom Hanks, John Mayer, David McCullough, Sam Shepard, and others.

It also movingly documents the struggles of California Typewriter, one of the last standing repair shops in America dedicated to keeping the aging machines clicking.

In the process, the film delivers a thought-provoking meditation on the changing dynamic between humans and machines, and encourages us to consider our own relationship with technology, old and new, as the digital age’s emphasis on speed and convenience redefines who’s serving whom, human or machine?

The first sentence makes me curious. The second sentence makes me want to see the film. (California Typewriter is a family-run shop in Berkeley.) The third sentence, not so much. The film’s trailer equates the typewriter with freedom and rebellion: there’s even a still on the film’s website of a typewriter bearing the (Woody Guthrie-inspired) words “THIS MACHINE KILLS FASCISTS.” That claim would come as news to the totalitarian regimes that documented their genocidal efforts in meticulous detail with typewriters. A machine can be put to any number of human purposes.

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William Weld’s reading

My friend Stefan Hagemann (who has written a great guest-post about how to answer a question in class) pointed me to an All Due Respect interview with William Weld, Libertarian candidate for vice president. Speaking about the books that have meant the most to him, Weld cites James Thomas Flexner’s biography of George Washington as his “favorite historical book.” And then:

“In literature, my two favorite authors are Jorge Luis Borges, Ficciones , Labyrinths , the Buenos Aires, the porteño, Argentinian, and Vladimir Nabokov, the Russian, probably my favorite author of all time. My favorite Nabokov book is Pale Fire .”

What?! Thank you, Stefan.

Elaine adds: “If only Gary Johnson knew what Aleppo is.”

Added strangeness: “That in Aleppo Once . . .” is the title of a Nabokov story.

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[If Gary Johnson is asked about his running mate’s literary tastes, he can respond in the Philip Larkin manner: “Who is Jorge Luis Borges?”]

And what is ...?

“And what is Aleppo?” Gary Johnson asks https://t.co/po7gg7UPWi pic.twitter.com/FnMf65IN6o

— POLITICO (@politico) September 8, 2016

But wait. Can we be sure that Gary Johnson was asking “And what is Aleppo?” Could he have been asking “And what is a leppo?” Either way, his response is sad and frightening beyond belief.

We are really in the Upside Down, or the total animal soup of time, or something even worse.

*

3:43 p.m.: See also: