“In the dark like ourselves”

Willa Cather, Shadows on the Rock (1931).

Related reading
All OCA Cather posts (Pinboard)

Mark Penn, “senior strategist”

Oh New York Times , you can be so decorous:

During the 2008 Democratic contest, Mrs. Clinton’s senior strategist at one point pondered, in an internal memo that was later leaked, the ways in which Mr. Obama’s personal background differed from many Americans’. But contrary to Mr. Trump’s assertion, neither Mrs. Clinton nor her campaign ever publicly questioned Mr. Obama’s citizenship or birthplace, in Hawaii.

Credit where it’s due: the unnamed “senior strategist” was Mark Penn. And Penn didn’t merely ponder ways in which Barack Obama’s background “differed.” (Doesn’t everyone’s?) In a memo to Hillary Clinton (March 19, 2007), Penn wrote about what he called “a very strong weakness” for Obama, his “lack of American roots”:

his roots to basic American values and culture are at best limited. I cannot imagine America electing a president during a time of war who is not at his center fundamentally American in his thinking and in his values.

True, nothing in those sentences questions Barack Obama’s birthplace. But the charge is clear: according to Penn, Obama was “not at his center fundamentally American in his thinking and in his values.”

I loathe Mark Penn. I loathe too the Times ’s unwillingless to acknowledge facts that are awkward and embarrassing for Hillary Clinton’s campaign.

[How did I get to that memo so quickly? I made a post about it in 2008. And if there’s any doubt: I loathe Donald Trump.]

Fritzi’s whom

[Nancy , September 16, 1949.]

You’re right, Fritzi Ritz: whom . Today’s yesterday’s Nancy teaches us that there is no conflict between good usage and good cartooning.

Related reading
All OCA Nancy posts (Pinboard)

[This post is tongue-in-cheek: I’d say who . Wouldn’t you?]

“One made life”

Willa Cather, Shadows on the Rock (1931).

Related reading
All OCA Cather posts (Pinboard)

[Copper : “chiefly British : a large boiler (as for cooking).” Clout : “dial chiefly British : a piece of cloth or leather : RAG.” Definitions from Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary .]

Anti-MLA Handbook

Dallas Liddle hates the new edition of the MLA Handbook :

To prepare for the new semester I have been studying the altered form of my own professional discourse laid out in the eighth edition of the MLA Handbook and feeling something close to despair about where, on its evidence, the scholarly study of language and literature must be headed. Based on this new edition, what does my own beloved discipline of English know and value?

Not nearly what it used to.

Read it all: “Why I Hate the New MLA Handbook” (The Chronicle of Higher Education ).

I have long preferred Chicago style, which seems to me more logical, more readable, and better able to answer tricky questions. MLA8 has one welcome change: the dumb identifiers Print and Web are gone from Works Cited entries. But so are the names of cities of publication. And the ugly abbreviation pp. is back. And in the name of a university press, University and Press are still reduced to U and P . And source materials now come to us in “containers.” A magazine is a container. So is a television series. So is Netflix. So an episode of Stranger Things has two containers. O brave new world.

For sample citations with MLA seventh- and eighth-edition styles, see here and here.

Tenuously related posts
Bad news from the MLA : Leadbelly at the MLA

“Layers and layers of shelter”

Willa Cather, Shadows on the Rock (1931).

Very Joycean, this passage: it could appear in Dubliners or, with pronoun changed, in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man . Also very Catherian.

Related reading
All OCA Cather posts (Pinboard)

Link woes

The New York Times reports that the Link, meant to replace the public telephone in New York City, isn’t working out so well:

The Wi-Fi kiosks were designed to replace phone booths and allow users to consult maps, maybe check the weather or charge their phones. But they have also attracted people who linger for hours, sometimes drinking and doing drugs and, sometimes, boldly watching pornography on the sidewalks.

A related post
New York’s public telephones

Dr. Watson’s sardines

[From The Hound of the Baskervilles (dir. Sidney Lanfield, 1939).]

“Here, try some of these sardines”: Sherlock Holmes (Basil Rathbone) offers Dr. Watson (Nigel Bruce) a bite to eat. These sardines have cinematic reality only: there are no sardines in the novel’s stone hut, only tinned peaches and tongue.

Related reading
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Dr. Watson’s prose, however

Dr. Watson’s prose, however

[The Hound of the Baskervilles (dir. Sidney Lanfield, 1939).]

Doctor John H. Watson is writing to Sherlock Holmes:

There is something about this fellow Stapleton I don’t like. However, his charming step-sister has invited us to dine with them at their house, across the moor.

Bryan Garner’s Garner’s Modern English Usage (2016) on however :

It seems everyone has heard that sentences should not begin with this word — not, that is, when a contrast is intended. But doing so isn’t a grammatical error; it’s merely a stylistic lapse, the word But or Yet ordinarily being much preferable. . . . The reason is that However — three syllables followed by a comma — is a ponderous way of introducing a contrast, and it leads to unemphatic sentences.

Garner cites varied authorities on the wisdom of not leading with however . Better to begin with but or place however later in a sentence. A beautiful explanation from Sheridan Baker: “But is for the quick turn; the inlaid however for the more elegant sweep.” In a recent tweet Garner says that a sentence starting with however

shows something useful: you’re reading someone of only middling skill. It’s a shortcut litmus test. Truly.

Middling skill: that seems to describe Watson, or at least the Watson who appears in this film. The stuffiness of however suits him. Place the word later in the sentence and the difference is slight:

There is something about this fellow Stapleton I don’t like. His charming step-sister, however, has invited us to dine with them at their house, across the moor.

And because an inlaid however adds emphasis to whatever precedes it, Watson’s sentence may now carry an unintended implication: I don't like Stapleton, but his step-sister, wow. I will go to dinner because she will be there.

Change however to but  and the difference is sharp:

There is something about this fellow Stapleton I don’t like. But his charming step-sister has invited us to dine with them at their house, across the moor.

And now Watson’s meaning is once again clear: I don’t like this man, but duty and all that. I must go.

Dropping however at the start of sentences (and after semicolons) was, for me, a big step away from the ponderous habits of academic prose. Been there, did that. Done.

Related reading
All OCA Bryan Garner posts (Pinboard)

[As Garner points out, however at the start of a sentence is fine when it means “in whatever way” or “to whatever extent.”]

Twelve

Orange Crate Art turns twelve tonight tomorrow night, an age best described as “difficult.” Orange Crate Art will often seem very grown up, but may revert to childish behavior at times. It needs nine-and-a-half to ten hours of sleep every night and catches up on weekends. Its voice is deepening, but it sometimes comes up against a mismatch between expectations and actual capabilities. As I said, “difficult.”

But seriously: writing in these pages, day after day after day, gives me more pleasure than any other writing I’ve done. To everyone who’s reading: thank you.

*

12:14 p.m.: I goofed on the date. My blog turns twelve tomorrow.

[Twelve-year-old stuff found here.]