Word of the day: sympathist

I know what prompted me to choose the word sympathist to describe my regard for the Chicago Cubs: the ways in which the word sympathizer has long been associated with hateful and fanatic causes.

The Oxford English Dictionary defines sympathist thusly: “One who sympathizes, a sympathizer.” And sympathizer : “One who or that which sympathizes; esp. one disposed to agree with or approve a party, cause, etc.; a backer-up.” So one can sympathize without being a sympathizer.

What makes me happy about having chosen sympathist : as I now know, the OED traces the word to Samuel Taylor Coleridge. The full Coleridge sentence that the OED abbreviates:

The knowledge, — the unthought of consciousness, — the sensation of human auditors — of flesh and blood sympathists — acts as a support and a stimulation a tergo, while the front of the mind, the whole consciousness of the speaker, is filled, yea, absorbed by the apparition.

What makes me happier still — take note, Stefan Hagemann — is that Coleridge is writing about Hamlet .

[A tergo : Latin, “from behind.”]

Baseball and silence

[Hamlet , from a 1611 text in the Bodleian Library.]

As I just told a friend in a letter, I have watched more baseball in the past few weeks than in the past many years. I was hugely happy to see the Cubs win a pennant and a World Series. I am sympathist rather than diehard fan, loyal to those close to me who are loyal to the Cubs.

Whichever way a game went, I found the announcers’ incessant chatter incessantly annoying, particularly when they were swapping statistics that only algorithms could have produced. “Only two catchers have ever,” “The last time a team,” “In 1911 and 1953,” that kind of thing. I know very little about baseball, but it seems to me that the game invites contemplation — watching and waiting and thinking. Joe Buck and company, but especially Buck, sucked all the silence out of the game.

“I gotta use words when I talk to you,” says T. S. Eliot’s Sweeney, but you don’t have to talk all the time . At times I hit Mute.

8–7

[The Chicago Cubs over the Cleveland Indians, 8–7, in ten innings. The Cubs have won the World Series.]

Masonic Ticonderoga

[From the Perry Mason episode “The Case of the Wayward Wife,” first aired January 23, 1960. Click for a larger view.]

Tools of the writer’s trade: a Dixon Ticonderoga, a cigarette, in the hands of Arthur Poe (Marshall Thompson). Several anonymous pencils lie in waiting.

Related reading
All OCA pencil posts (Pinboard)
All OCA Perry Mason posts

Jay Tarses on the small screen

Funny stuff: Dave Simonds’s Free Advice from an Old Guy , five very short films starring Jay Tarses, television writer and producer, and creator of The Days and Nights of Molly Dodd , for which he has our household’s abiding gratitude (and he knows it).

My favorite line: “Death is gonna happen, probably, to most of us.”

Related reading
All OCA Molly Dodd posts (Pinboard)

Keillor and Niedecker

Garrison Keillor:

The radio audience is not the devout sisterhood you find at poetry readings, leaning forward, lips pursed, hanky in hand; it’s more like a high school cafeteria. People listen to poems while they’re frying eggs and sausage and reading the paper and reasoning with their offspring, so I find it wise to stay away from stuff that is too airy or that refers off-handedly to the poet Li-Po or relies on your familiarity with butterflies or Spanish or Monet.

Good Poems (New York: Viking Penguin, 2002).

Keillor’s sexism aside: on what planet does this “devout sisterhood” exist? I’ve never encountered it at a poetry reading.

A faux-folksy insistence that an audience need not know things, an aversion to “stuff” that mentions Chinese poets, insects, foreign languages, or painters (and what else?) would keep Keillor from reading this beautiful (untitled) Lorine Niedecker poem on the air — that is, if he even knows Niedecker’s work:



I love the ideogram-like assemblage “marsh frog-clatter peace,” signifying spring. I’ll leave everything else in the poem for your inspection.

In her later years, when she worked as a cleaning woman in a hospital, Niedecker rose at 5:00 and left for work at 6:15: “dawn’s 40-watt moon” indeed. Clearly she saw no conflict between doing morning chores and thinking of Li Po — and making poetry. Her work has never appeared on Keillor’s radio program The Writer’s Almanac .

Related reading
All OCA poetry posts (Pinboard)
Four poems made from The Writer’s Almanac : 1, 2, 3, 4

[Details of Niedecker’s morning routine from Margot Peters’s Lorine Niedecker: A Poet’s Life (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2011).]

Domestic comedy

“‘The devil’s spawn’: isn’t that a little extreme?”

Related reading
All OCA domestic comedy posts (Pinboard)

Into the frying pan

[Field and Stream , November 2004.]

Yes, it’s a good way to eat sardines. And a few red-pepper flakes wouldn’t hurt.

Related reading
All OCA sardines posts (Pinboard)

From an old notebook

“A man will always promenade whatever lady is with him at the time of the call to his home position.”

*

“How many poems do you write a week?”

“Only one a week, but I’ve had over three hundred and forty poems published.”

[Heard on a poetry program on public radio.]

*

“I had something Tibetan going.”

[Heard on a poetry program on public radio.]

*

A terrific blank settled in,
its name was Introduction to Literary Criticism.

*

This, gentlemen, is the icing on the cake of confidence.

[From a student essay on “To His Coy Mistress.”]

*

“One more slang expression and you’re grounded!”

Also from an old notebook
Alfalfa, Ted Berrigan, Jack Kerouac, metaphors : Alfred Appel Jr. on twentieth-century art and literature : Barney : Beauty and the Beast and kid talk : Eleanor Roosevelt : John Ashbery and Kenneth Koch : Plato, Shirley Temple, vulgarity, wisdom, Stan Laurel

Stale candy

[“Penny Candy.” Photograph by Eliot Elisofon. No date. From the Life Photo Archive. Click for the jumbo assortment.]

Trick-or-treating seems to be a fading tradition in our neighborhood. Last year we went all out for Halloween, and the leftover candy lasted through mid-April. The candy in the photograph above is older still, and it’s the only candy on hand for this year’s Halloween.