Inopportune, opportune

In late April, when Representative John Shimkus (R, Illinois-15) scheduled time for a staff member to meet with voters, no one could have foreseen that the meeting would be taking place the day after Shimkus voted to repeal the Affordable Care Act.

It should be an interesting morning.

A regular reader may recall that Rep. Shimkus does not do town halls.

Related reading
All OCA Shimkus posts

Mosaic Records

Mosaic Records, a label devoted to limited-edition jazz releases, sent out an e-mail today reporting that the label is in financial difficulty. An excerpt:

We are not certain how Mosaic Records will continue going forward or how many more sets we will be able to create and release. We’ve got a lot of great plans but few resources.

And: “If you are thinking about acquiring a certain set, now's the time.”

At a time when major labels handle the music in their vaults with indifference, or even contempt, every Mosaic release, with its extensive documentation, serves an act of cultural preservation, as if to say: these musicians and what they created will not be forgotten.

[I have five Mosaic box sets on my shelves (forty CDs): Bix Beiderbecke, Duke Ellington, Charles Mingus, Joe Venuti and Eddie Lang. I should order at least one more, don’t you think?]

Pocket notebooks FTW

James Lileks: “Writing by hand is making a comeback. Notebooks are fashionable again.” Again? Did they ever really go away? With attention to Field Notes and Moleskine.

And in the May 8 New Yorker, a cartoon by Harry Bliss. Two servers eye a guy standing at the bar, a man purse satchel over his shoulder: “Twenty bucks says he pulls out a Moleskine.”

Related reading
All OCA notebook posts (Pinboard)

Word of the day: nixie

The Oxford English Dictionary Word of the Day is the noun nixie:

U.S. Post which cannot be forwarded by the postal services because it is illegibly or incorrectly addressed. Freq. attrib.

The first citation, an entry in the Century Dictionary, dates from 1890. Here’s a 1929 citation that provides food for thought:

The similarity in appearance of the letters N.Y. and N.J. . . . is responsible for many letters reaching the “Nixie” division.

So yay for ZIP codes!

A page-ninety test

I bought the book a few years ago and never got around to reading it. So I took it from a shelf this week and began. I lasted six or seven pages before deciding to do a page-ninety test. It’s a Ford Madox Ford practice: turn to page ninety, choose the first paragraph of any real length, and read it to gauge the quality of the writer’s prose:

This is another of the ironies of the melancholy existence. In feeling fractured and fragmented, isolated and bereft, one actually comes to experience wholeness and unity. To suffer melancholy is also to understand its polar opposite, joy. Lacking joy, one broods on it more deeply than when one possesses this state. Contemplating this condition, one eventually comes to understand it more profoundly than one would if one were actually experiencing joy. In vacillating between sorrow and joy, one grasps the secret harmony between these two antinomies. Doing so, one apprehends the rhythms of the whole cosmos, itself a dynamic interplay between opposites. To get this fact is to move close to the core of the world, to become acquainted with how the universe works and breathes and is. In such moments as this — those instants when we feel connected to the whole — we return, in a strange way, to innocence.

Or we return the book to the shelf — or better, we bring the book to the nearest library sale or used-book store. In its redundancies (“fractured and fragmented,” ”isolated and bereft,” “polar opposite,” “whole cosmos,” “moments” and “instants”), inelegant variations (“this condition” for “this state,” “opposites” for “antinomies”), slackness (“actually” twice, “this — those”), and vague pseudo-profundities (“wholeness and unity,” “the rhythms of the whole cosmos,” “a dynamic interplay,” “the core of the world,” “the whole,” “in a strange way,” “innocence”), this writer’s prose is, for me, unreadable. I wish I’d figured that out before buying the book.

Related reading
Ford Madox Ford’s page-ninety test
My Salinger Year, a page-ninety test
Nature and music, a page-ninety test
The history of handwriting, a page-ninety test

[The book’s writer is a professor of English, or as he describes himself, “a literary humanist searching for a deeper life.” Though it’s not clear from this passage, he makes a sharp distinction between melancholia and depression. Still, “polar” is an unfortunate choice in this territory. And the whole passage strikes me very wishful thinking.]

In other news

In other news: rain. Keeps rainin’. All the time.

Jeez, rain — cease!

A related post
Armstrong and Arlen, blues and weather

Zweig on “the technological spirit”

Sefan Zweig, from a lecture given in 1932:

The technological spirit working today towards the unification of the world is more about a way of thinking than anything to do with humanity. This spirit has no country, no home, no human language; it thinks in formulae, reckons in figures and it creates machines which, in their turn, create us, almost against our will, in an exterior form which is more and more identical.

“European Thought in Its Historical Development,” in Messages from a Lost World: Europe on the Brink, trans. Will Stone (London: Pushkin Press, 2016).

At so many points in these essays, Zweig is eerily relevant to our times.

Related reading
All OCA Stefan Zweig posts (Pinboard)

“A French garden in Hamilton”

Godfrey St. Peter, professor, historian, writer of an eight-volume Spanish Adventurers in North America, is something of a conquerer in his own midwestern town:


Willa Cather, The Professor’s House (1925).

Elaine and I just finished reading The Professor’s House, and we’ve now read, aside from a handful of uncollected stories, all of Willa Cather’s fiction. Elaine was reading the novel for the second time; I was reading it for perhaps the twentieth time (still finding new things to notice). I’ve been trying to decide upon a passage that might interest a reader, and this paragraph is the best I can do. If the professor seems like a mock version of his — it’s a telling word — “adventurers,” imposing a foreign order upon a place, well, he is. But set against that mockery are the generous descriptions of the garden’s delights: slender poplars, geraniums dripping over a wall. Tom Outland’s name at the end of the paragraph, the first reference to him in the novel, adds a note of mystery.

To my mind, The Professor’s House is Cather’s greatest novel and one of the greatest American novels. It’s an experiment in form (with lapidary, musical, and painterly analogies to account for its three-part structure), an exploration of cultures modern and ancient, and an examination of what Cather calls “the double life” of human connection and utter aloneness. The novel has haunted me from the time I first read it. I was younger than Tom Outland then, and older that Godfrey St. Peter now.

Related reading
All OCA Cather posts (Pinboard)

Commitment

A Republican political analyst opines:

Taken as a package, the 100 Days interviews sound like evidence submitted in an involuntary commitment hearing to a mental institution.

— Rick Wilson (@TheRickWilson) May 2, 2017

“Broom Clean Daily”

[While stopped at a red light.]

I like this sign, whose rules, for the most part, might apply to any workplace: “Work Safe / Hardhats Required / Broom Clean Daily / No Smoking / Fine: $250.00.”