New Koch

The New York Times reports on Charles and David Koch’s efforts to promote fossil fuels by winning over minority voters: “The Kochs’ public relations drive takes a page from minority outreach by other industry lobbies, like those representing tobacco and soft drinks.” Cigarettes, soda, and fossil fuels: a winning combination for personal and planetary well-being. The Times quotes the director of a nonprofit group who describes the Koch strategy as “exploitative, sad and borderline racist.” Borderline?

It’s never too late to begin boycotting Koch products. No Brawny, no Dixie, no Georgia-Pacific, &c.

Recycle that kiss

 
[Mark Trail , December 12, 2015; January 7, 2017. Click for larger if not steamier views.]

Look closely: that kiss has been recycled. Telltale details in today’s strip: Cherry’s hair bumps, Mark’s ear, the missing pixel below the rear corner of Mark’s sideburn. Or did he cut himself shaving?

Related reading
All OCA Mark Trail posts (Pinboard)

[In the first panel of today’s strip, Mark attempts to placate Cherry: “Come on, baby, it’s not as though I plan on bad things happening!” Those words sound like a tender variation on Mark’s 2015 effort to placate his editor: “Ha! . . . That wasn’t exactly my fault!”]

“Standing outside your life”

Stefan Zweig, “Letter from an Unknown Woman.” 1922. The Collected Stories of Stefan Zweig. Trans. Anthea Bell (London: Pushkin Press, 2013).

Zweig’s stories are so conventional, so mannered in form, that today they seem almost avant-garde. Whatever: I’m so happy to have found my way to this writer.

Other Zweig posts
Destiny, out of one’s hands : Erasmus ekphrasis : Fanaticism and reason : Happy people, poor psychologists : Little world : “The safest shelter” : School v. city : “A tremendous desire for order” : Today’s weather : Urban pastoral, with stationery : “With no idea where he was going” : Zweig’s last address book

[Forget Calvin Klein: it’s Stefan Zweig who knows obsession.]

“Am I post-modern yet?”

[Zippy, January 6, 2017.]

That’s Ulul, the Zippy-verse’s Little Lulu. In the second panel of today’s strip (pre-cleaver), pieces of paper on the floor read “John Stanley was here” and “Irving Tripp was here.” Stanley and Tripp wrote and drew Little Lulu comic books. The character and strip were the creation of Marjorie Henderson Buell, Marge’s Little Lulu.

More Ulul here and here.

Related reading
All OCA Zippy posts (Pinboard)

Deep story, deep resentment

I recently made my way through Arlie Russell Hochschild’s Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right (New York: The New Press, 2016). In other words, I turned every page but read just here and there, lacking the patience to follow along with Hochschild’s investigator-on-a-journey approach and its predictable narrative markers: “As I take leave of the Arenos,” “as I take my leave,” “we climb back in his red truck,” “we climb into her tan SUV,” and so on. The core of the book may be found between pages 135 and 145, which present the “deep story” that informs the thinking of the Louisiana Tea Partiers whom Hochschild has sought to understand. You can also find the deep story in condensed form in this New York Times review.

Hochschild’s book helped me to understand something I have never understood: why it might be that so many people in my state-university-dependent town seem unfazed by and even gleeful about the effect of Illinois’s manufactured budget crisis on higher education — declining enrollment, hundreds of faculty and staff positions lost, maintenance and repairs left undone. “They need to live within their means,” “they need to work harder instead of protesting”: that’s the sort of stuff that shows up in comments in the local newspaper. It can’t be anti-intellectualism and distrust of academics alone that account for these attitudes: carpenters, clerical workers, electricians, groundskeepers, and janitors have also lost jobs in the absence of state funding.

I found a possible explanation of local attitudes in two of the “common impressions” shared by people Hochschild spoke with. One: ”A lot of people — maybe 40 percent — work for the federal and state government.” Two: “Public sector workers are way overpaid.” As Hochschild points out, these impressions have no foundation in reality. In 2014, she notes, “less than 17 percent of Americans worked for the government,” and that percentage includes all enlisted and reserve military personnel and all employees of federal, state, and local government, including teachers and hospital workers. Hochschild also points out that private-sector workers “earn 12 percent more than their public sector counterparts.”

A deep resentment of “government” and those it employs seems hard at work in my town. But it’s still remarkable to me that any resident of a town that depends upon a public university for its economic well-being would not be troubled to see that university in decline. It’s like cheering as your own house burns.

Separated at birth

 
[Karl Held and David Bowie.]

The actor Karl Held appeared in several Perry Mason episodes as David Gideon, young legal assistant to Mr. Mason. Young indeed: in the closing minutes of “The Case of the Malicious Mariner” (1961), he drinks a glass of milk while the grown-ups sip coffee.

Everyone knows David Bowie.

Also separated at birth
Nicholson Baker and Lawrence Ferlinghetti : Ted Berrigan and C. Everett Koop : John Davis Chandler and Steve Buscemi : Ray Collins and Mississippi John Hurt : Broderick Crawford and Vladimir Nabokov : Ted Cruz and Joe McCarthy : Benedict Cumberbatch and Michael Gough : Jacques Derrida, Peter Falk, and William Hopper : Elaine Hansen (of Davey and Goliath) and Blanche Lincoln : Harriet Sansom Harris and Phoebe Nicholls : Ton Koopman and Oliver Sacks : Steve Lacy and Myron McCormick : Fredric March and Tobey Maguire : Michael A. Monahan and William H. Macy : Molly Ringwald and Victoria Zinny

Tea Making Tips

From the Empire Tea Bureau, a short film: Tea Making Tips (1941). With six golden rules and countless helpful hints. For instance: “Do not store near to fruit, soap, cheese, spices, or disinfectant.”

It’s probably also best to store the fruit, cheese, and spices at some distance from the soap and disinfectant.

Related reading
All OCA tea posts (Pinboard)

Red lead

On January 3, 1888, Thomas Alva Edison wrote out a five-page list of “Things doing and to be done.” Among its items: “Red Lead pencils equal to graphite.”

As Henry Petroski notes in The Pencil: A History of Design and Circumstance (1989), Edison took his pencils seriously: “Edison’s pencils, which he ordered in lots of one thousand and always carried in his lower vest pocket, had very soft lead, were thicker than average, and were only about three inches long.” Graphite was one of the many materials Edison and his co-workers tested in the search for a suitable light-bulb filament.

I can find no evidence that Edison succeeded in his quest for a better red pencil. Not even an alchemist can turn wax into graphite.

Related reading
All OCA pencil posts (Pinboard)

Domestic comedy

“Quote-extra-unquote quote-virgin-unquote quote-olive-unquote oil.”

Related reading
All OCA domestic comedy posts (Pinboard)
Lemonade and lies

Today’s weather

Stefan Zweig, “Compulsion.” 1920. The Collected Stories of Stefan Zweig. Trans. Anthea Bell (London: Pushkin Press, 2013).

Other Zweig posts
Destiny, out of one’s hands : Erasmus ekphrasis : Fanaticism and reason : Happy people, poor psychologists : Little world : “The safest shelter” : School v. city : “A tremendous desire for order” : Urban pastoral, with stationery : “With no idea where he was going” : Zweig’s last address book