Yoda, n.

Yoda is a new addition to the Oxford English Dictionary: “A person who embodies the characteristics of Yoda, esp. in being wise; an elder, sage, or guru.”

Sardine disco balls

That is all ye need to know to want to know more: sardine disco balls.

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Martinis or cheap cigars

Henry Threadgill, on the importance of adjusting to the economic difficulties of life as an artist, filmmaker, musician, writer:

“You won’t feel like you’re being tossed around in life because, you know, you’re not able to have martinis every day at two. So stop it. Get a cheap cigar and be happy.” [Laughs.]

From a 2009 interview with Phoebe Legere for Roulette TV.

A related post
Henry Threadgill in a 1998 Dewar’s advertisement

From The Day of the Owl

Captain Bellodi is telling the story of a doctor in a Sicilian prison who decides to remove Mafia members from permanent residence in the prison hospital, where they enjoy preferential treatment. When the prison administrators ignore his directive, the doctor appeals to higher authorities:


Leonardo Sciascia, The Day of the Owl. 1961. Trans. Arcibald Colquhoun and Arthur Oliver (New York: New York Review Books, 2003).

The Day of the Owl an excellent novella (in an occasionally awkward translation): a chain of murders, an enigmatic investigator (no first name), and what the narrator calls “the problem of the South,” a criminal enterprise whose existence cannot be officially acknowledged.

I picked up this book in June at I AM Books, an Italian-American bookstore in Boston’s North End. The New York Review Books spine caught my eye. And now I want to read more of Leonardo Sciascia. And NYRB has four more Sciascia titles in print.

Truman Capote meets Willa Cather

“‘I ought to tell you —’ She paused; then, in a rushing voice, more or less whispered: ‘I wrote those books.’”

From an unfinished account that Truman Capote began writing the day before his death. It was published in Vanity Fair in 2006, but I discovered it just days ago.

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Griffith and Keane

[Zippy, December 14, 2016.]

Bil Griffith’s affection for The Family Circus is well known. But Did You Know that Bil Keane once collaborated with Griffith on a series of Zippy strips in which Zippy entered the world of Family Circus? And that Griffith on one occasion drew Zippy into a Family Circus panel? The collaborations appear in Griffith’s “Bil Keane: An Appreciation” (The Comics Journal).

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[Notice the text on the left border.]

No TV news

Daughter Number Three wrote a post about the idea of giving up television news and linked to a brief account from someone who’s done just that.

Elaine and I haven’t watched a minute of cable news since November 8. The only television news we have watched: the PBS NewsHour episode that paid tribute to Gwen Ifill. Our not watching benefits our mental health and serves as a private (and inefficacious) act of protest. CNN and company gave one presidential candidate scads of free airtime, treated another as an inevitable nominee, and utterly marginalized the campaign of a third. (I bet you can guess who’s who.) So include us out. There is plenty of news to be had from The New York Times and NPR and other sources in print and (motionless) pixels, minus hack pundits and false drama. I have in mind CNN’s disconcerting “Breaking news!” announcement, followed, almost always, by yet another rehash of an already reported story.

I realize only now how my weekdays had fallen into a pattern before the election: do things, various things, all day, and then put the news on in the late afternoon and feel besieged. I dread what the next four years might mean for my country, but I don’t need a television to know about it.

Reader, have your news habits changed since the election?

[Full disclosure: I will most likely go back to the PBS NewsHour, but not anytime soon.]

“This Week in Hate”

The third installment of a new New York Times feature: “This Week in Hate.” You can find all installments here.

BIZZ

[Henry, December 13, 2016.]

Trailing clouds of glory, Henry approaches a two-dimensional variety store. Today, “variety store” has become another name for a dollar store, but in earlier times, the variety store sold a great range of brand-name goods. In kidhood I bought Aurora and Revell model kits (cars, monsters, planes) at a variety store — Cheap Charlie’s, on Thirteenth Avenue in Brooklyn. A vivid memory: the shelves in the front-right corner of the store, dark wood, built into the wall, with Elmer’s Glue-All, LePage Mucilage, and unlined notepads. I always found mucilage a little horrifying — partly because of the nipple-like applicator cap, but mostly because of the word mucilage itself. I was eight or nine or ten, and we were an Elmer’s family.

There’s still a Cheap Charlie’s elsewhere in Brooklyn, perhaps a descendant, perhaps an unrelated Charlie. If the epithet fits. . . .

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Klinkenborg’s snow

Verlyn Klinkenborg:


“December,” The Rural Life (Boston: Back Bay Books, 2002).

The sane part of me thinks that snow is best appreciated not from the interior of a moving car but from an unmoving sofa or chair, with a thick layer of insulation — in other words, a house — between me and the weather. But another part of me sides with Klinkenborg. I know that feeling of driving into a vacuum, and I know that I like it, at least in retrospect. See also Robert Bly’s poem “Driving to Town Late to Mail a Letter.”

I’ve been waiting for snow to post this passage. It is snowing.

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[“Abyssal vacuum”: a pun on “a Bissell vacuum”? I hope not. But that’s what Mac Dictation thought I was saying.]