Domestic comedy

“Oh — Groundhog Day is on again.”

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All OCA domestic comedy posts (Pinboard)

||: ALL-ONE! :||

The Dr. Bronner soap label received an “Old & Improved” redesign in 2015. If you buy your Bronner several bottles at a time, you may not have yet noticed.

Here’s a PDF showing the evolution of the Dr. Bronner label from 1973 to 2015. The 1984–2015 labels are also available as individual PDFs. (The pamphlet The Moral ABC is also available as a PDF .) A recent development: as of September 2016, the label carries a call for a higher minimum wage.

Something I noticed and wondered about: the 1984–2015 label appears to have room for everything but “32 FL. OZ.”

||: 32 FL. OZ.! :||

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Dr. Bronner, productivity guru

[The ||: and :||? Repeat, &c.]

Bookstore-less Bronx

“We are just as interested in knowledge and reading as anybody else. We just don’t have the access to the things that the rest of New Yorkers do”: The New York Times reports that the Bronx is about to lose a Barnes & Noble, the borough’s lone general-interest bookstore. The reason: impossibly high rent. Saks Off 5th will replace the bookstore.

This browsable map, from the organization Unite for Literacy, shows where books are and aren’t across the United States. The Bronx already appears to qualify as a book desert.

At what point do those in positions of power recognize that bookstores (like record stores before them) are cultural resources worth protecting?

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.”

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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?”

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All OCA domestic comedy posts (Pinboard)