Mail chutes redux

Diane Schirf has updated a post about mail chutes. Beautiful technology, relying on nothing more than gravity and walls, and now made obsolete by the “lobby box,” which, I admit, also relies on nothing more than gravity and walls.

Chutes from both the make-believe and the real worlds have appeared in these pages. I, too, like mail chutes.

Donald Trump and Leona Helmsley

Donald Trump and the businesswoman and hotel magnate Leona Helmsley did not get along. From a New Yorker report on a musical in development, Queen of Mean: The Rise and Fall of Leona Helmsley :

After an initial friendship, they fell out over an Atlantic City property, and Trump was quoted in the Post as saying, “When God created Leona, the world received no favors.” He once claimed to have surreptitiously poured a bottle of red wine into the hood of her coat. In the nineties, Trump, in a bid to control the Empire State Building, said that the Helmsleys’ [Harry and Leona’s] management had turned it into a “high-rise slum”; they sued him for a hundred million dollars. Still, he seemed to recognize her as an equal. When she died, he told Fox News, “She added something to New York, in a very perverse way.”

A housekeeper famously claimed to have heard Leona Helmsley say that “Only the little people pay taxes.” So for all their differences, Helmsley and Trump found at least some common ground.

[The Washington Post reported on Trump’s “When God created Leona” comment in 1989. The “high-rise slum” comment and wine story appeared in The New York Times in 2001 and 2003. The Times reported today on Trump’s taxes. Small World Department: a relative’s close friend was Harry Helmsley’s Mr. Helmsley’s secretary. It was always “Mr. Helmsley.”]

Like hell

Re: micro-megalomania: I remember listening to someone propound a vision of undergraduate English study in which a student works toward a narrower and narrower focus, entering the senior year with some limited area of research specialization all worked out. I said in response that I found that vision too narrow, too constricting — too much like Dante’s hell. (I still do.)

As I remember it, my reference to Dante seemed not to register. That perhaps is what happens when things get a little too specialized.

A related post
One Dante simile (Written for my students)

[So much of what I now read and value I never even heard of as an undergraduate.]

Advice for academics

From Carl Cederström and Michael Marinetto, advice about “How to Live Less Anxiously in Academia” (The Chronicle of Higher Education ). The basics: “Kill your institutional aspirations.” “Be an amateur.” “Stop writing badly.” “Start teaching well.” All excellent advice, though unlikely to appeal to those whom Cederström and Marinetto call “micro-megalomaniacs.”

[Cederström and Marinetto borrow “micro-megalomaniac” from Christopher Hitchens. I found an explanation in Hitch-22: A Memoir (2010): “Later in life I came up with the term ‘micro-megalomaniac’ to describe those who are content to maintain absolute domination of a small sphere.” Cederström and Marinetto apply the word to certain research-centered types: “They have carved out a small and distinct place for themselves, over which they rule uninhibitedly.“]

The color of blue

William H. Gass:


On Being Blue: A Philosophical Inquiry . 1976. (New York: New York Review Books, 2014).

The Awkward Party

“A Library for Artist Books”: Words Matter. George Bodmer, who draws Oscar’s Day, has work there now: The Awkward Party . And from 2015: Turnfast and Place Settings .

The Elements of Strunk

Behold The Elements of Strunk , created by a predictive text emulator working with the 1918 edition of The Elements of Style . The project is the work of Jamie Brew.

The prose of The Elements of Strunk often has an oracular Steinian beauty. Five discontinous samples:

In spring summer or winter sentences should be avoided.

*

The paragraph is the only allowable variation of the sentence.

*

Each paragraph is a man or an old mansion.

*

By itself, a comma is a portrait of a guitar. This is entirely correct.

*

A sentence must be feminine or better.

I learned about The Elements of Strunk from a post by a well-known hater of The Elements of Style . No matter: The Elements of Strunk can appeal to those who love or loathe Strunk and White, or to those (like me) whose responses are mixed.

*

10:40 a.m.: Oh, wait — there’s also a Twitter account.

*

10:53 a.m.: Oh, wait — Brew (and the hater) identify The Elements of Strunk as made from the 1918 text of The Elements of Style, but that text has no guitar. Not does it have other distinctive Elements of Strunk elements: Coleridge, Harper’s Magazine , Trafalgar, and so on. Brew must have used a later edition of The Elements of Style as revised by E. B. White. The fourth edition has Coleridge, Harper’s , and Trafalgar, with a guitar in the glossary of grammatical terms.

Related reading
All OCA Strunk and White posts (Pinboard)

[Steinian: as in Gertrude.]

A Neuman tattoo

We went to our soon-to-close Staples for what was probably the last time. Behind us in line at the register, a sixty-something man with a tattoo of Alfred E. Neuman on his arm. No caption, just the famous face.

“I like your tattoo,” I said. “Did you get it during the glory days of Mad?”

If I had thought for another few seconds before asking, I would have realized that the ink was far too bright and sharp to have dated from the glory days of Mad . But in that case I wouldn’t have heard his explanation:

“I got it when I turned fifty. I decided that I was taking things too seriously. It goes with me everywhere.”

Biro’s birthday

[Google Doodle, September 29, 2016.]

As The Crow pointed out in a comment this morning, today is the birthday of László Bíró, later Ladislao José Biro (1899–1985), the creator of the ballpoint pen. Thus today’s Google Doodle. The name Biro is still Britspeak for a ballpoint.

I much prefer to write with a fountain pen, but I have no hostility toward the ballpoint, and I think that reports of its role in the decline of handwriting have been greatly exaggerated. (All I have to do is think of my parents’ beautiful ballpoint handwriting.) My favorite ballpoint is the Parker T-Ball Jotter.

Thanks, Martha, for the heads up.

Related reading
All OCA pen posts (Pinboard)

“Fountain pens, pencil, and pipe”

Walter Benjamin, One-Way Street , trans. Edmund Jephcott (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2016).

Edmund Jephcott has made several small changes from his earlier translation in Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, and Autobiographical Writings , a 1978 collection of Benjamin’s work. The best one: meditation becomes observation , a more medical word.

Other Walter Benjamin posts
Advertising v. criticism : Benjamin on collectors : Handwriting and typing : Metaphors for writing : On happiness : On readers and writers : On writing materials : “Pencils of light” : Smoke and ink