A Henry insult

[Henry, June 17, 2017.]

“Stingy tightwad”: now there’s a childhood insult that stings. “Blimp” though is just the guy’s name.

Related reading
All OCA Henry posts (Pinboard)

Woodstock TV

[Peanuts, June 20, 1970, and repeated today.]

Woodstock has just exited the doghouse. He joins Henry, Linus van Pelt, and Nancy Ritz in having sat too close to the television.

Related reading
All OCA Peanuts posts (Pinboard)

Word of the night: owl-hoot

The Oxford English Dictionary word of the day is owl-hoot. The word means “the hooting sound made by an owl; a sound imitating or resembling this.”

A later meaning, “esp. in the language of Wild West fiction, etc.”: ”a fugitive, an outlaw. Hence: a worthless or contemptible person.” That’s an owlhoot, without the hyphen. Cowboys got no time for hyphens.

But the earliest meaning of owl-hoot, now archaic and rare: “dusk, nightfall.”

It is 8:55 p.m.: owl-hoot.

Lost Ulysses

[From the Lost episode “316,” February 18, 2009.]

Benjamin Linus reads Ulysses. “How can you read?” Jack asks. “My mother taught me,” Ben replies.

[No spoilers, please.]

Bloomsday 2017

It is Bloomsday. James Joyce’s novel Ulysses (1922) begins on June 16, 1904, and ends in the early hours of the following day. Here is a passage from “Ithaca,” the novel’s penultimate episode, and my favorite. (Episodes, not chapters: like the Odyssey .) Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus are walking.



Other Bloomsday posts
2007 (The first page)
2008 (“Love’s Old Sweet Song”)
2009 (Marilyn Monroe reading Ulysses)
2010 (Leopold Bloom, “water lover”)
2011 (“[T]he creature cocoa”)
2012 (Plumtree’s Potted Meat)
2013, 2013 (Bloom and fatherhood)
2014 (Bloom, Stephen, their respective ages)
2015 (Stephen and company, very drunk)
2016 (“I dont like books with a Molly in them”)

WWRZS

Last night I tried to imagine what my friend Rob Zseleczky might have said about about the traces of CliffsNotes and SparkNotes in Bob Dylan’s Nobel Prize lecture. “He’s an outlaw, Michael,” I imagined Rob saying. “He doesn’t care what you think of him.” And then I imagined Rob laughing helplessly: “CliffsNotes!”

Dylan, Homer, and Cliff

Andrea Pitzer wonders: does Bob Dylan’s Nobel lecture borrow from the SparkNotes for Moby-Dick? The phrasings themselves — for instance, “encounters other whaling vessels” — are not always especially distinctive. It’s their number and their sequence (in twenty of the seventy-eight sentences that Dylan devotes to Melville’s novel) that are reason for suspicion. To my eye, it’s plagiarism, of an especially pathetic sort. Dylan is plagiarizing a plot summary.

I began to wonder about Dylan’s Nobel commentary on the Odyssey. His summary of the poem’s action is loose and inaccurate, and I see nothing there to suggest a source. But look at this passage from the CliffsNotes for Book 11:

More controversial is Achilles’ appearance because it contradicts the heroic ideal of death with honor, resulting in some form of glorious immortality. Here, Achilles' attitude is that death is death; he would rather be a living slave to a tenant farmer than king of the dead. His only solace is to hear that his son fares well in life.

And look again at Dylan’s one extended comment on the poem, which cheered me when I read it earlier this month:

When Odysseus in The Odyssey visits the famed warrior Achilles in the underworld — Achilles, who traded a long life full of peace and contentment for a short one full of honor and glory — tells Odysseus it was all a mistake. “I just died, that’s all.” There was no honor. No immortality. And that if he could, he would choose to go back and be a lowly slave to a tenant farmer on Earth rather than be what he is — a king in the land of the dead — that whatever his struggles of life were, they were preferable to being here in this dead place.

Cliff: “he would rather be a living slave to a tenant farmer than king of the dead.”

Dylan: “he would choose to go back and be a lowly slave to a tenant farmer on Earth rather than be what he is — a king in the land of the dead.”

I thought that “tenant farmer” must have come from Robert Fagles’s translation. But no, CliffsNotes are the unmistakable source for that phrase, “king,” and “of the dead.” Dammit, it’s plagiarism.

You read it here first.

La Quiberonnaise sardines

[La Quiberonnaise sardines in extra-virgin olive oil and lemon.]

My friend Jim Koper gave me a can of La Quiberonnaise sardines to try. The can describes them as millésimées, “vintage.” They are the product of a company that has been canning since 1921. And they’re expensive: $9-something a can here in the States, which means that they cost three or four times as much as everyday sardines. They’re excellent. But are they three or four times better than everyday sardines? Not to my taste. Nor to Jim’s. La Quiberonnaise seems to be a case (or can) of diminished returns. But a beautiful can.

Thanks, Jim.

Related reading
La Quiberonnaise website
All OCA sardine posts (Pinboard)

[Why “three or four times as much” and not “three or four times more”? Because usage.]

Time travel

Discovering a great-grandfather’s pipe:

Papa Joe’s pipe had been tucked away in a drawer somewhere for years, and was in good condition when I found it. I ran a pipe cleaner through it, filled it with some tobacco I had on hand, and settled down to read and smoke. After a couple of minutes, the most wonderful and foreign blend of smells began wafting from the pipe. All the various tobaccos that Papa Joe had tried at one time or another in his life, all the different occasions when he had lit his pipe, all the different places he had been that I will never know — all had been locked up in that pipe and now poured out into the room. I was vaguely aware that something had got delightfully twisted in time for a moment, skipped upward on the page. There is a kind of time travel to be had, if you don’t insist on how it happens.

Alan Lightman, “Time Travel and Papa Joe’s Pipe,” in Dance for Two: Selected Essays (New York: Pantheon, 1996).

See also David Owens on Old Spice and other smells of childhood. See also that Proust guy.

Thanks to Stefan Hagemann, who recommended Alan Lightman to me.

Milk as safe

[Life, October 18, 1954.]

Next bottle?

A related post
Milk bottles

[Post title with apologies to Captain Beefheart.]