David Shields and Shane Salerno’s execrable biography Salinger (2013) made the claim that five new Salinger books would appear “between 2015 and 2020.” Now a New York Times reporter asks a reasonable question: “So Where Are the New J.D. Salinger Books We Were Promised?”
Related reading
All OCA Salinger posts (Pinboard)
Wednesday, October 25, 2017
More Salinger?
Goodbye, Smart Trend by Sunglow
[2 7/8" × 1 15/16".]
Goodbye, Smart Trend by Sunglow dresser, a mid-century modern dresser that long outlived its time, traveling from Elaine’s parents’ bedroom to Elaine’s childhood bedroom, to her first and second apartments, to a house we rented, to an apartment we rented, to another house we rented, to the house we now live in and own, to the furniture store that brought us a new dresser yesterday. Packing tape could do only so much to keep the split boards in place.
I have determined that the name for this kind of label (woven cloth, glued to the inside of a drawer) is the disappointingly obvious “furniture label.”
Tuesday, October 24, 2017
Not “normal”
In a speech announcing his decision to leave the Senate, Jeff Flake (R-Arizona), spoke today of “the new normal”:
We must never regard as “normal” the regular and casual undermining of our democratic norms and ideals. We must never meekly accept the daily sundering of our country — the personal attacks, the threats against principles, freedoms, and institutions, the flagrant disregard for truth or decency, the reckless provocations, most often for the pettiest and most personal reasons, reasons having nothing whatsoever to do with the fortunes of the people that we have all been elected to serve.Amen. Jeff Flake and I would agree about very little in the way of policy. But on this point we would agree. Something I wrote in a February post: “Nothing about this presidency is normal. And nothing about this presidency is for getting used to.”
None of these appalling features of our current politics should ever be regarded as normal.
MSNBC, sheesh
Dear Craig Melvin and Andrea Mitchell,
Whatever it was you were talking about: it doesn’t beg the question; it raises the question.
Sincerely,
A concerned viewer, one of no doubt many
From Garner’s Modern English Usage (2016):
the use of beg the question to mean raise another question is so ubiquitous that the new sense has been recognized by most dictionaries and sanctioned by descriptive observers of language. Still, though it is true that the new sense may be understood by most people, many will consider it sloppy.Related reading
All OCA sheesh posts (Pinboard)
“Making Progress”
[“Making Progress,” xkcd, October 23, 2017.]
Don’t miss the mouseover text. See also this post about making slow progress.
[I just realized that xkcd almost certainly owes something to Rudolf Modley’s pictorial symbols.]
Dick Cavett’s Vietnam
Tonight, on many PBS stations: Dick Cavett’s Vietnam, with excerpts from episodes of The Dick Cavett Show, period footage, and new interviews.
“Really too small for an atelier”
K. has called on Titorelli, a court painter who turns out portraits of judges:
Franz Kafka, The Trial, trans. Breon Mitchell (New York: Schocken, 1998).
Related reading
All OCA Kafka posts (Pinboard)
Monday, October 23, 2017
Close reading
“While Trump has disputed the story [of what happened in his phone call to Myeshia Johnson] — even claiming to have still-yet-to-be-produced “proof” to back it up — the White House has largely seemed to confirm that he said the things he has been accused of saying”: a good example of close reading, from Aaron Blake of The Washington Post.
I suspect that close reading will at some point extend to the “is” of “There is no collusion.” And notice that it’s always “no collusion with Russia” or “no collusion with the Russian government,” omitting reference to interested individuals.
Proust at auction
On October 30 Sotheby’s will auction an extremely rare copy of Du côté de chez Swann, one of five first-edition copies printed on Japanese paper. The book carries this inscription:
A Monsieur Louis BrunEstimated price: €400,000–600,000. Must start saving up!
Ce livre qui passé à la N[ouve]lle Revue française n’a pas oublié son amitié première pour Grasset
Affectueux souvenir
Marcel Proust
Related reading
All OCA Proust posts (Pinboard)
[Sotheby’s translation: “To Mr. Louis Brun: this book, which is moving over to the Nouvelle Revue Française, has not forgotten its first friendship for Grasset. With affectionate memories, Marcel Proust.” Brun worked for Bernard Grasset, whose eponymous publishing house brought out Du côté de chez Swann in 1913. In 1916 Proust changed publishers, from Grasset to Gaston Gallimard and Éditions de la Nouvelle Revue Française.]
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