Nora Johnson (1933–2017)

The writer Nora Johnson has died at the age of eighty-four. Johnson is best known for the novel The World of Henry Orient (1958). She and her father Nunnally Johnson co-wrote the screenplay for the 1964 film adaptation.

I read The World of Henry Orient for the first time in 2011 and wrote to Nora Johnson to tell her how much I liked it. In her reply she said that she thought the novel “would go stale very fast — but seems I was wrong.” The novel now feels like a sweet, sad evocation of a lost New York.

Related posts
An excerpt from the novel
Elizabeth T. Walker speaks (The film’s Val)
Nora Johnson on falling in love at seventy-one

David Brooks and SNOOTs

Writing in The New York Times today about a forthcoming book by Alan Jacobs, David Brooks mentions David Foster Wallace:

Jacobs notices that when somebody uses “in other words” to summarize another’s argument, what follows is almost invariably a ridiculous caricature of that argument, in order to win favor with the team. David Foster Wallace once called such people Snoots. Their motto is, “We Are the Few, the Proud, the More or Less Constantly Appalled at Everyone Else.”

No, Mr. Brooks, no.

In the essay “Authority and American Usage,” Wallace glosses SNOOT (all caps) as his “nuclear family’s nickname for a really extreme usage fanatic.” The acronym stands for “Sprachgefühl Necessitates Our Ongoing Tendance” or “Syntax Nudniks Of Our Time.” SNOOT has nothing to do with caricaturing other people’s arguments and winning favor with a team. The acronym applies to those who obsess over matters of grammar and usage, those who know how to hyphenate phrasal adjectives and who sneer at “10 ITEMS OR LESS.” As Wallace points out in the essay, “the word may be slightly self-mocking.” Wallace identified as a SNOOT, and his spoof of the USMC slogan (“the Few, the Proud, the More or Less Constantly Appalled at Everyone Else”) is further evidence of self-mockery. He wasn’t calling other people SNOOTs. He was writing about himself.

And as Wallace said in a radio interview, “to be a SNOOT is a lonely, stressful way to be.”

Related reading
All OCA David Foster Wallace posts (Pinboard)

[“Authority and American Usage” appears in Consider the Lobster and Other Essays (New York: Little, Brown, 2005). The essay appeared in a shorter form in Harper’s as “Tense Present: Democracy, English, and the Wars over Usage.” The examples concerning phrasal adjectives and supermarket signage are from the essay. Using Amazon’s Look Inside tool to search How to Think returns no results for david foster wallace or snoot, so I’m ascribing the error to Brooks. And yes, I’m sending a correction to the Times.]

OOP

When one reads online, it’s so easy to miss something that’s plainly there. Replying to a comment this morning, I made up an acronym for this phenomenon: OOPS, Online Oversight in Processing Syndrome. And then I improved it: OOP, Oversight in Online Processing.

OOP, not OOPS, because the S is missing.

[Inspired by a discussion of TLAs (three-letter acronyms) in the “Technobabble” episode of Helen Zaltzman’s podcast The Allusionist.]

Thelonious Monk centennial

[A helpful label. My son Ben made it when he was five or six or so. Explanation here.]

Thelonious Sphere Monk was born in Rocky Mount, North Carolina, one hundred years ago today. Forty-odd years ago, as a commuting college student, I heard a radio newscaster mention Double Ten Day, and I thought, “Oh, yeah, Thelonious Monk’s birthday.”

Here are my favorite Monk compositions, as performed by the composer and his colleagues:

“Crepescule with Nellie” : “Monk’s Mood” : “Pannonica” : “Reflections” : “Ruby, My Dear” : “Ugly Beauty”

I can play four of these tunes passably well on the piano. The other two, someday.

Other Monk posts
T. MONK’S ADVICE (1960) : Thelonious Monk and John Coltrane : Thelonious Monk in Weehawken : Thelonious Monk, off-balance : Thelonious Monk plays Duke Ellington

[“Ruby, My Dear” has Coleman Hawkins, not John Coltrane, on tenor.]

Hi and Lois SWODNIW

[Hi and Lois, October 10, 2017.]

There must be a new trainee on the Hi-Lo Amalgamated assembly line. Yesterday, a a color fail. Today, wrong-way window-writing is back. These strips will be receiving recall notices.

Sometimes Hi-Lo gets windows right. Here, for instance, and here, and here. But again and again, passersby in this comic-strip world see signs for ECNARUSNI, ETATSE LAER, and KCIUQ TRAM. And in Beetle Bailey, NUB N’ NUR. Sheesh, guys, DAERFOORP!

Related reading
All OCA Hi and Lois posts (Pinboard)

[ETATSE LAER runs across one line of lettering; KCIUQ TRAM and NUB N’ NUR are split up. You read LAER before ETATSE but KCIUQ before TRAM and NUB before N’ and NUR. I am beginning to like these “words.”]

Josef K. in motion

Franz Kafka, The Trial, trans. Breon Mitchell (New York: Schocken, 1998).

So cinematic. It’s so easy to imagine such a scene as the stuff of silent film.

When I was in high school, Borges and Kafka were my passports to real literature. How I found my way to their work, I’ll never know. What I didn’t understand back then: Kafka is funny. I’m glad to have figured that out.

Related reading
All OCA Kafka posts (Pinboard)

Hi and Lois watch

Dot Flagston has just wished that it were possible to celebrate “the holidays” earlier. Because right now the world is a carousel of color, sort of:


[Hi and Lois, October 9, 2017.]

Today’s Hi and Lois makes me think of the first sentence of a poem I made from remarks of my then-very-young daughter Rachel: “The colors are / broken.” They are, indeed. And I’m certainly not going to take the time to fix them. Tinkering with what’s in the balloon makes things dumber and funnier:


[Hi and Lois, altered, October 9, 2017.]

Related reading
All OCA Hi and Lois posts (Pinboard)

Good cop, bad cop

This metaphor for a Tillerson–Trump North Korea strategy is, let’s say, faulty. And not merely because there is no evidence of a coordinated strategy. The metaphor is faulty because it doesn’t fit the circumstances. Good cop–bad cop works, when it works, because the options available to a person being held for interrogation are few. Those options, typically, do not include the use of nuclear weapons.

Domestic comedy

[Talking about roads not taken.]

“That program? It would have been like galley slaves, but with grading instead of oars.”

Related reading
All OCA domestic comedy posts (Pinboard)

[I finally got it right, or wrong: I thought I’d said “freshman papers” and “oars,” or “grading” and “rowing.” But no, it was “grading” and “oars,” not parallel, I know.]

Recently updated

 

The figure on the left is from Rudolf Modley’s Handbook of Pictorial Symbols (New York: Dover, 1976). I removed the hat, lampshade, and typewriter and added a laptop to make the image on the right. For a faux-industrial coffeehouse look, you could always put the lampshade back in.

[I draw a line at the hat. No hats indoors.]