On Tuesday, The New York Times took a quick look at the Eberhard Faber Company building in Greenpernt. And NPR answered the question “How is pencil lead made?” I wrote in an e-mail:
I was going to say that it appears that the pencil is “having a moment,” but it’s always pencil time.Related reading
[Zippy , October 12, 2016.]
Henry speaks! As he did in a 1935 cartoon appearance. But this time he sounds mean.
Related reading
All OCA Henry and Zippyposts (Pinboard)
Joseph Joubert:
It is better to be concerned with being than with nothingness. Dream therefore of what you still have rather than of what you have lost.I’m reminded of what Harold Russell wrote: “It is not what you have lost but what you have left that counts.”
The Notebooks of Joseph Joubert: A Selection , trans. Paul Auster (New York: New York Review Books, 2005).
The New York Times Book Review feature “By the Book” always begins with the same question: “What books are currently on your night stand?” I wish that just once an interviewee would reply, “What night stand? I don’t have a night stand. What’s with ‘night stand’? Why do you assume that that’s where everyone keeps their books?”
Reader, do you have a night stand? And is it made of two words, or one?
[Mark Trail , October 11, 2016.]
Mark Trail has come to an uninhabited island to meet up with the USDA’s Abbey Powell and look for red imported fire ants. Mark has come by helicopter. His pilot, Theodore “TC” Calvin, is waiting now on this very island. From the September 26 strip:
“Look, Mark, I brought you out here, but I’m not ready to go searching through the jungle looking for ants . . . I’ll wait here at the helicopter!”Did you catch that last sentence? We know that Mark did, because he replied, “Okay, Cal, we shouldn’t be gone too long!”
“Every worldly bed is an imperfect copy of the Ideal Bed.”
— Plato, as summarized in a textbook
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“She had some kind of magic something.”
— From a documentary on Shirley Temple
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“Don’t expect me to get involved in this vulgar circus,” the designer, Constantine Raitzey, shouted. “I quit!”
— From review of a book of Thomas Hoving, New York Times Book Review , January 3, 1993
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“I’m meditating the bitter wisdom
of the philosopher and poet.”
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You can lead a horse to water
but a pencil must be lead.
— Stan Laurel
Also from this notebook
Alfalfa, Ted Berrigan, Jack Kerouac, metaphors
Beauty and the Beast and kid talk
John Ashbery and Kenneth Koch
[Stan Laurel did say that.]
In 2016 the helmet is made of hair.
I said in a letter to a friend today that Donald Trump has reinvented American presidential politics as neo-fascist entertainment. It is for anyone to just say no , as loudly and as often as possible.
“The next number will be ‘I’m in the Mood for Love,’ sung by a member of the Eagles Club.”
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“Chases Dirt” — motto of Old Dutch Cleanser, in poem by Ted Berrigan, “Smashed Ashcan Lid.”
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I am only a jolly storyteller and have nothing to do with politics or schemes and my only plan is the old Chinese Way of the Tao: “avoid the authorities.”
Jack Kerouac, “Biographical Resume, Fall 1957,” in Heaven & Other Poems (Bolinas, CA: Grey Fox Press, 1977).
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skyscraper, air port
faded metaphors
Sky Harbor
name of an airport somewhere, acc. to Norman
From the same notebook
Beauty and the Beast and kid talk
John Ashbery and Kenneth Koch
[From February 1992. The club member was — who else? — Alfalfa. The Ted Berrigan poem is here. Sky Harbor International Airport is in Phoenix, Arizona. Hi, Norman!]
John Ashbery and Kenneth Koch, discussing Ashbery’s poem “Europe” :
Koch: There’s no key to understanding the poem, of course, no hidden meaning?Related reading
Ashbery: No, it’s just a bunch of impressions.
Koch: Why is the idea of keys and hidden meanings not appealing to you?
Ashbery: Because somebody might find them out and then the poem would no longer be mysterious.
“A Conversation,” in Out of This World: An Anthology of the St. Mark’s Poetry Project, 1966–1991 , ed. Anne Waldman. (New York: Crown, 1991). The conversation appears to date from 1966.
Are full-body chills & nausea the normal symptoms of a Presidential debate?
— emily nussbaum (@emilynussbaum) October 10, 2016
