Block that metaphor

On CNN this afternoon:

“They’re trying to find the middle ground where they can straddle this awkward situation.”

Related reading
All OCA metaphor posts (Pinboard)
Further awkward straddling

Doing something well

Joseph Joubert:

I can do something well only slowly and with great effort.

Our moments of light are all moments of happiness. When it is bright in our mind, the weather is good.

The Notebooks of Joseph Joubert: A Selection  , trans. Paul Auster (New York: New York Review Books, 2005).

This post is for Matt Thomas.

Also from Joseph Joubert
Another world : Being and nothingness : Brevity : “Everything is new” : Form and content : Irrelevancies and solid objects : Justified enthusiasm : Lives and writings : New books, old books : ’Nuff said (1) : ’Nuff said (2) : Politeness : Resignation and courage : Ruins v. reconstructions : Self-love and truth : Thinking and writing : Wine

Positively Oslo

I trust my first response as an honest one: when I read this morning that Bob Dylan has won the Nobel Prize in Literature, I let out an involuntary oh my God , an exclamation not of delighted surprise but of bewildered dismay.

Likening Dylan to Homer and Sappho, as the secretary of the Swedish Academy does, is, for me, not especially convincing. What’s wrong with speaking of Dylan in relation to, say, Woody Guthrie? Isn’t Dylan better viewed in the company of American singers and songwriters? Oh — but this is the Nobel Prize in Literature. And Dylan is “poetic.” Like, uh, Homer and Sappho.

Comparisons aside, this award suggests to me that the Swedish Academy’s choice is a bid for popular relevance, something of a stunt, as when the Oxford English Dictionary announces that it’s added moobs and YOLO to its word hoard. The language of the Academy’s brief Dylan biography suggests a preoccupation with celebrity and media culture: “Dylan has the status of an icon.” That’s about the dumbest thing one might say to characterize someone working in the realm of the imagination. But the Academy’s choice at least means that fewer people will be greeting the announcement of the year’s laureate by asking “Who?”

For me the real news in this year’s announcement is that the Swedish Academy has again passed John Ashbery by. He’s now eighty-nine.

[A close second to icon : living legend .]

Pencil time

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
All OCA pencil posts (Pinboard)

Henry and Zippy

[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)

Being and nothingness

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.

The Notebooks of Joseph Joubert: A Selection  , trans. Paul Auster (New York: New York Review Books, 2005).

I’m reminded of what Harold Russell wrote: “It is not what you have lost but what you have left that counts.”

Also from Joseph Joubert
Another world : Brevity : “Everything is new” : Form and content : Irrelevancies and solid objects : Justified enthusiasm : Lives and writings : New books, old books : ’Nuff said (1) : ’Nuff said (2) : Politeness : Resignation and courage : Ruins v. reconstructions : Self-love and truth : Thinking and writing : Wine

[Thank goodness this post wasn’t Sartre’s Being and Nothingness .]

One or more night stands

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?

Height of stupidity

[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!”

So with an at-the-ready helicopter to take Mark and Abbey around the island, Mark chooses to endanger his life and hers by crossing the ravine. Mark has confirmed that the log bridge (is it really a bridge, Mark?) is, as Abbey feared, “a little shaky.” What next?

Related reading
All OCA Mark Trail posts (Pinboard)

From an old notebook

“Every worldly bed is an imperfect copy of the Ideal Bed.”
— Plato, as summarized in a textbook

*

“She had some kind of magic something.”
— From a documentary on Shirley Temple

*

“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
*

“I’m meditating the bitter wisdom
of the philosopher and poet.”

*

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.]

Duce redux

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.