Coffee-and

Balzac’s writing equipment:

Without coffee he could not work, or at least he could not have worked in the way he did. In addition to paper and pens he took with him everywhere as an indispensable article of equipment the coffee-machine, which was no less important to him than his little table or his white robe. He allowed nobody else to prepare his coffee, since nobody else would have prepared the stimulating poison in such strength and blackness. And just as in a sort of superstitious fetishism he would use only a particular kind of paper and a certain type of pen, so he mixed his coffee according to a special recipe, which has been recorded by one of his friends: “This coffee was composed of three different varieties of bean — Bourbon, Martinique, and Mocha. He bought the Bourbon in the rue de Montblanc, the Martinique in the rue des Vieilles Audriettes, and the Mocha in the Fauborg Saint-Germain from a dealer in the rue de l’Université, whose name I have forgotten though I repeatedly accompanied Balzac on his shopping expeditions. Each time it involved half-a-day’s journey right across Paris, but to Balzac good coffee was worth the trouble.”

Stefan Zweig, Balzac, trans. William and Dorothy Rose (London: Casell, 1947).

The paper: “of a special size and shape, of a slightly bluish tinge so as not to dazzle or tire the eyes, and with a particularly smooth surface.” The pens: ravens’ quills. Supplies, supplies, supplies.

Related reading
Balzac’s hair-raising essay “The Pleasures and Pains of Coffee”
All OCA Balzac, coffee, and Zweig posts (Pinboard)

[Coffee-and is an old-timey way of saying “coffee and doughnuts.”]

Ambiguous headline

[The New York Times, June 12, 2017.]

That’s from the online front page. The article does better: “Friend Says Trump Is Considering Firing Mueller as Special Counsel.” The procedure can get ugly fast:

Under Justice Department rules, Mr. Trump would seemingly have to order Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein to rescind department regulations protecting a special counsel from being fired for no good reason, and then to fire Mr. Mueller. If Mr. Rosenstein refused, Mr. Trump could fire him, too — a series of events that would recall the “Saturday Night Massacre” during Watergate, when President Richard M. Nixon sought to dismiss a special prosecutor, Archibald Cox.

O ye gods.

Coffee and other grandest things

[Life, December 15, 1941. Click for a larger view.]

Yes, as the advertisement says, Mother’s taste is superb. I like the swanky living room, though it seems a little short on seating materials.

Is daughter home from college? And has she picked up a tiny coffee habit while away? And why is everyone exchanging presents already? It’s only December 20. And why is the Christmas tree out in the front yard? I need a tiny cup of A&P coffee to clear my head.

What most caught my eye (while it was looking for something else: grandest. I think of Marty (dir. Delbert Mann, 1955), when Marty describes his kid brother’s wedding: “I never saw anything so grand in my life.” And of 42nd Street (dir. Lloyd Bacon, 1933), when Peggy Sawyer’s character exclaims, “Jim! They didn’t tell me you were here! It was grand of you to come.” But most of all, I think of older relatives and the Irish-American grand. How are you feeling? Oh, just grand, thank you.

The December 15, 1941 issue of Life has a young actress on its cover, Patricia Peardon, who was appearing in the Broadway show Junior Miss. The United States was not yet at war when that issue went to press. On the December 22 cover: an American flag.

Related reading
All OCA coffee posts (Pinboard)
The Irish “grand”

Aldi on the move

Groceries in the news: “Low-cost grocery chain Aldi says it plans to add more stores in the U.S. over the next five years, meaning more competition for traditional grocers, Walmart and organics-focused chains like Whole Foods.” Now: 1,650 stores. By the end of 2018: 2,000. By the end of 2022: 2,500.

Aldi is a great source for all manner of grocery items. The prices are low and the quality is high. Avocados: sometimes a dollar less than other stores. Kalamata olives: a couple of dollars cheaper than other stores, and just as good. Pistachios: way cheaper than elsewhere. The store sometimes has great, inexpensive surprises in wine — those bottles disappear quickly. And you get to use a “trolley coin” every time you shop.

If you’re squeamish about shopping in a store-brand supermarket, you can tell yourself that Aldi Nord, owner of Trader Joe’s, and Aldi Süd, owner of Aldi, are sister companies. Which is the truth.

On hope

What James Comey says Donald Trump said: “I hope you can see your way clear to letting this go, to letting Flynn go. He is a good guy. I hope you can let this go.”

Andrew Storm on bosses’ hopes:

In a 1995 case, KNTV, Inc., the company president had a private meeting with a reporter where the president told the reporter, “I hope you won’t continue to be an agitator or antagonize the people in the newsroom.” The [National Labor Relations Board] found that the statement was coercive in large part because it was made by the company’s highest ranking official and it was made in a meeting that the reporter was required to attend alone. Sound familiar?

In other words, the expert agency that regularly adjudicates disputes about whether particular statements by an employer rise to the level of coercion has held that when the president of an organization expresses his “hopes” in a private conversation with a worker, those comments will likely have a “chilling effect” on the employee.

As Mark Liberman observes, it’s common sense to recognize that Trump’s “I hope you can let this go” was meant to be heard as a directive.

My academic example: Imagine a chair or dean, after a meeting has ended, asking for a private word with a faculty member who suspects plagiarism in the work of some favored student: “I hope you can see your way clear to letting this go, to letting Biff go. He is a good guy. I hope you can let this go.” There’s no question that in such a setting, “I hope” is a directive, one that you disregard at your own risk.

See also Anthony Lane on Trump and Comey and hope.

Roscoe Mitchell at Mills

The composer and multi-instrumentalist Roscoe Mitchell is one of eleven Mills College faculty members slated for dismissal. Mitchell is the Darius Milhaud Professor of Music at Mills. The firing of faculty is part of Mills’s camel-cased “vision” for the future, MillsNext.

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June 30: Mitchell’s position is safe. From a statement posted to Facebook:

Mills College has decided not to terminate my current three-year contract. . . .

I consider myself incredibly fortunate to have had the support of teachers, students, musicians, music lovers, and all others who spoke out to defend the value of creative music and the arts at-large. That said, I would like to acknowledge those of my fellow professors who Mills chose to let go, in spite of the outpouring of support for them and alternate plans proposed by dedicated individuals seeking a more favorable outcome.

Related reading
Other OCA Roscoe Mitchell posts

“Hysteria over hyphens”

Email, or e-mail? Archrival, or arch-rival? The Economist addresses “Hysteria over hyphens” and finds one thing certain:

Fortunately, this is one rule that need not drive anyone mad: a group of words used as a single modifier should be hyphenated. Any other approach to hyphenation really should receive zero tolerance.

Related posts
Bad hyphens, unhelpful abbreviations : “Every generation hyphenates the way it wants to” : Got hyphens? : The Hammacher Schlemmer crazy making hyphen shortage problem : Living on hyphens : Mr. Hyphen and e-mail : Mr. Hyphen and Mr. Faulkner : One more from Mr. Hyphen : Phrasal-adjective punctuation

[Like The Economist, I prefer e-mail to email. “Zero tolerance” is a swipe at Lynne Truss, whose best-selling and lousy book about punctuation is missing a hyphen from its subtitle: The Zero[-]Tolerance Approach to Punctuation.]

Two photographs

[Chris Sippel and me.]


[Chris Sippel. Both photographs from Spring 1970.]

I found a stash of photographs from the eighth-grade class trip to Washington, D.C. (funded by sales of Claxton fruitcake). Girls in dresses, boys in jackets and ties, and sometimes trenchcoats. Ladies and gentlemen, sort of. I don’t know whose idea it was to pose the second photograph.

A related post
Chris Sippel (1956–2017)

Chris Sippel (1956–2017)

Chris and I were best friends in junior high. We’d meet and take the bus to Hackensack, New Jersey, and go to the Relic Rack and Hackensack Record King. Records, all the way. Chris was big on doo-wop. I was just discovering blues. We spent hours on the telephone at night, seeking out ridiculous clip art in the Yellow Pages: “Go to 318!” We found the Mothers of Invention LP Absolutely Free in a cut-out bin in the same drugstore where we discovered the National Lampoon. When Chris and his family went away for the summer, we exchanged letters, with many drawings — the Bowery Boys, three-toed sloths, all sorts of surreal comedy. Chris was a brilliant cartoonist and a big fan of Leo Gorcey, whom he drew in profile. (When Gorcey died, Chris sent a sympathy card to his widow.) We had a thing about three-toed sloths and imagined a world in which our algebra teacher kept a sloth named Lothar as a pet.

Chris and I drifted apart when he went off to attend a Catholic high school. I was happy to reconnect with him in 2008 after someone noticed his name in a blog post I wrote (about Hackensack's Main Street) and got in touch with me and then with him. We talked on the phone several times, and I was amazed that our interests in literature had developed in such similar ways — Chris was even, like me, a fan of the poet Gilbert Sorrentino, not exactly a household name. I was happy to learn that Chris still had Absolutely Free, which it turns out I’d given to him after tiring of it. We tried to figure out why we had drifted apart, something he said had happened with people at every time of transition in his life. And we agreed, yes, we should meet up. But it never happened. I remember leaving several messages — “We’re heading east this summer” — and never getting a return call.

I’m sorry to learn now that Chris’s life has ended. He was an incredibly creative, funny, smart guy, and that’s how I’ll remember him. I wish that I’d known him better, and for more than a handful of his sixty-one years.

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June 10: I’ve posted two photographs from our eight-grade class trip to Washington, D.C.

Into the frying pan

[“Supercharged Sardines.” Field and Stream, October 2004.]

A little heat brings out and mellows the flavor. Lemon juice adds zing. A few red-pepper flakes wouldn’t hurt either.

Related reading
All OCA sardine posts (Pinboard)