Make it known

John D’Agata’s The Making of the American Essay (2016) has a witty sequence of epigraphs from Walt Whitman, Ezra Pound, and John Ashbery, one epigraph to a page: “Make it plain.” “Make it new.” “Make it sweet again.”

D’Agata does not identify sources. If there is a source for Whitman, I’m unable to find it. Two children’s biographies of Whitman have him writing these words:

“Make it plain,” he wrote. “Lumber the writing with nothing — let it go as lightly as a bird flies,” &c.

Catherine Reef, Walt Whitman (1995).

“Make it plain,“ he advised himself. “Lumber the writing with nothing — let it go as lightly as a bird flies,” &c.

Milton Meltzer, Walt Whitman: A Biography (2002).

But the relevant passage from Whitman’s prose is missing “Make it plain”:

Make no quotations, and no references to any other writers.—

Lumber the writing with nothing, — let it go as lightly as a bird flies in the air — or a fish swims in the sea.

Selected Poems, 1855–1892, ed. Gary Schmidgall (1999).

There are various accounts of Whitman using the words “make it plain” in conversation. He is reported to have said, in speaking of slavery, “I never lost any opportunity to make it plain where I stood.” But I can find nothing that suggests a Whitmanic imperative related to writing.

Pound’s imperative “Make It New” (properly capitalized) long ago became a motto of literary modernism. Here is a fine account of the imperative’s history.

Ashbery’s words, followed by an exclamation point, end the poem “But What Is the Reader to Make of This?” (A Wave, 1984):



And what is the reader to make of “it”? Is “it” “the general life”? Or the mood? These lines give us Ashbery in Romantic mode, with the hope of recovering something lost (as in Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan”) and with echoes of Shelley (“Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass”) and Stevens (“Alas, that they should wear our colors there, / The silken weavings of our afternoons”). But Ashbery’s words are hardly a precept for writing.

What most surprised me in looking into these epigraphs is that they have appeared together before, in Douglas Crase’s introduction to Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Essays: First and Second Series (1990):



No one owns these words, of course. But it’s clear that Crase got there first. I still don’t know what to make of “Make it plain.”

*

January 19, 2017: A source for “make it plain,” from a Whitman notebook page:

Rule in all addresses — and poems and other writings, etc. — Do not undertake to say any thing however plain to you, unless you are positive are making it perfectly plain to those who hear or read. — Make it plain.

Notebooks and Unpublished Prose Manuscripts, ed. Edward F. Grier, vol. 1, Family Notes and Autobiography, Brooklyn and New York (New York: New York University Press, 1984).

“[Y]ou are positive are making it”: not a typo. Grier dates the materials on this notebook page to “probably before and shortly after 1855.” “Make it plain” seems to have first seen print in Paul Zweig’s Walt Whitman: The Making of the Poet (New York: Basic Books, 1984). Thanks to the reader who pointed me to these sources.

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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.

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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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