Long overdue

The New York Times reports that a copy of Gone with the Wind has been returned to the library, fifty-seven years late.

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A 2017 calendar

Free for the downloading: a 2017 calendar, by me, in Gill Sans, three months per page, rather dowdy in appearance. I’ve kept the traditional black and dark red (licorice and cayenne, as Apple would have it) and added hints of green (clover) and orange (tangerine). Right-click the link above to download a copy.

And for anyone who’d like to try Dropbox (where I’ve stashed a copy of the calendar for downloading), here’s a referral link, which gets you (and me) 500 MB extra storage. But you don’t need Dropbox to get the calendar.

Not from The Onion

[The New York Times, December 19, 2016.]

I suppose that a genuine Onion headline would have Stallone agreeing to chair the National Endowment for the Arts.

In other news, the Times introduced an error in subject-verb agreement in reporting this story:

[Trump] later said that an education in critical thinking, reading, writing and math are “the keys to economic success,” but he added that “a holistic education that includes literature and the arts is just as critical to creating good citizens.”

In the Washington Post article that the Times is quoting, Trump (or whoever wrote his responses) got the subject and verb right:

Critical thinking skills, the ability to read, write and do basic math are still the keys to economic success.

It’s possible to read the Times sentence as making “an education in critical thinking” the first item in a series, followed by “reading, writing and math,” but I think that’s a stretch. “An education in [four things]” is the sensible way to read the sentence.

Back in our lead story: the Times also reports that Stallone thinks “he would be more effective in helping military veterans.”

Man, oh man

From a November New York Times book review:

Man has sped up his own response times. It now takes us only 10-15 years to get used to the sort of technological changes that we used to absorb in a couple of generations.

But the response time of that sentence isn’t anything like adequate. “Man has sped up”: that language stands out as painfully dated. The Times’s Manual of Style and Usage has cautioned against the language of man since 1999 (and perhaps earlier):

Expressions built on man or mankind strike many readers as a slight to the role of women through history. In a few cases, those expressions may result unavoidably from idiom or a literary allusion. But the writer and editor should weigh the graceful alternatives: humanity, perhaps, or human race or people.

I like humankind, which always takes me back to T. S. Eliot’s Burnt Norton: “Go, go, go, said the bird: human kind / Cannot bear very much reality.”

Scott Pelley of the CBS Evening News has the man problem too. And yes, in 2016 it’s a problem.

[How did “Man has sped up” get past an editor?]

“Tremendous”

Vladimir Putin dropped in (literally) on Donald Trump last night to tell of Russia’s joy about Trump’s election:

“We think you are the best candidate—”

“Sure.”

“The smartest candidate—”

“No doubt.”

“The Manchurian candidate.”

“I don’t know what that means, but it sounds tremendous.”

The last two lines drew significant laughs. Good on the SNL audience for getting the joke. Richard Condon’s 1959 novel The Manchurian Candidate was made into a film in 1962 and 2004. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to miss the joke.

Crafted

The vitamin and mineral supplement Airborne is “crafted.” In fact (or in adspeak), it’s “specially crafted.” I am reassured to know that the powder in those little packets isn’t made of random ingredients. Can Emergen-C make that claim?

Elaine caught crafted last night, when I wasn’t paying attention to a commercial. Thanks, Elaine.

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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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