World Book Things

[Mom holds the cat as Dustin tears out of the house. Click for a larger view.]

Five minutes into the first episode of the new season of Stranger Things, I was thrilled to see the World Book Encyclopedia, or at least a partial set, on a shelf in Dustin’s house. In this screenshot, the World Book volumes are at the top left. The white, green, and gold are recognizable anywhere, at least for a viewer of a certain age. Admirably fanatical care goes into set decoration for this show: the World Book is onscreen for mere seconds, just enough for someone to notice.

[I’m the proud child of a World Book family. See also this Atlantic piece.]

Little Luther

Reformation 500 Flat Luther with Lutheran Pastor Frederick Muhlenberg the first Speaker of the House of Representatives. pic.twitter.com/2Vu6qLSprg

— John Shimkus (@RepShimkus) October 26, 2017

It appears that my representative in Congress, John Shimkus (R, Illinois-15), likes to play with paper dolls. Okay. But it’s not okay to affix a paper doll to a painting that doesn’t belong to you. This 1881 painting of Frederick Muhlenberg hangs in the United States House of Representatives. Representative Shimkus has also shared a photograph of the doll nestled in the arm of a statue of John Peter Gabriel Muhlenberg. The 1889 statue stands in National Statuary Hall.

Related reading
All OCA John Shimkus posts

[Look closely and you’ll see that there’s no photoshopping involved. The doll is attached to the frame. The doll’s shadow falls on the wall.]

Shine on, Hallmark Channel

Our fambly has found reliable entertainment in the local cable company’s plot summaries of Hallmark Channel movies, summaries at least as good as the movies themselves. Here’s one for Harvest Moon:

A rich girl loses her wealth when her family goes bankrupt, so she heads to a pumpkin farm they own and uses her ingenuity to create a line of pumpkin skin care.

Thoughts:

~ It’s a good thing that even in bankruptcy, the family owns a pumpkin farm.

~ But wait: should that be owned?

~ Between the time I photographed the description and wrote this post, Harvest Moon seems to have come and gone. The Hallmark Channel has already moved on to Christmas movies. And it’s not even Thanksgiving. Or even Halloween.

~ As Elaine reminds me, Illinois is The Great Pumpkin State. If this movie didn’t take place in Illinois, well, it should have.

~ Skin care for pumpkins probably takes a lot of ingenuity.

Related posts
I am a prisoner of Hallmark Movies and Mysteries : Hallmark ex machina : The Bridge, continued

Two fine podcasts

Gastropod : Cynthia Graber and Nicola Twilley look at “food through the lens of science and history.” I’ve listened to the episodes about Fluff, seltzer, and tea.

Innovation Hub : Kara Miller and guests explore “new avenues in education, science, medicine, transportation, and more.” I’ve listened to the episodes about groupthink and obsession.

Both podcasts offer substantial content, no fluff (the lowercase variety).

Proust: “To love life today”

A question posed in the Paris newspaper L’Intransigeant, summer 1922:

An American scientist announces that the world will end, or at least that such a huge part of the continent will be destroyed, and in such a sudden way, that death will be the certain fate of hundreds of millions of people. If this prediction were confirmed, what do you think would be its effect on people between the time when they acquired the aforementioned certainty and the moment of cataclysm? Finally, as far as you’re concerned, what would you do in this last hour?

Marcel Proust responded in a letter:

I think that life would suddenly seem wonderful to us if we were threatened to die as you say. Just think of how many projects, travels, love affairs, studies, it — our life — hides from us, made invisible by our laziness which, certain of a future, delays them incessantly.

But let all this threaten to become impossible for ever, how beautiful it would become again! Ah! If only the cataclysm doesn’t happen this time, we won't miss visiting the new galleries of the Louvre, throwing ourselves at the feet of Miss X, making a trip to India.

The cataclysm doesn’t happen, we don’t do any of it, because we find ourselves back in the heart of normal life, where negligence deadens desire. And yet we shouldn’t have needed the cataclysm to love life today. It would have been enough to think that we are humans, and that death may come this evening.

The question and Proust’s answer are quoted in Alain de Botton’s How Proust Can Change Your Life (New York: Vintage, 1997). I’ve had these passages typed and waiting to be posted for — ahem — years.

What I would do if the world were to end in an hour: call my children, my mom, my brother, a few friends, and sit with Elaine and listen to music, if she’s agreeable. Maybe Bach? But Elaine just told that she’d rather play than listen. So we could play together. I’m assuming we’d be together.

What would you do?

Related reading
All OCA Proust posts (Pinboard)

[By the time I read de Botton, Proust had already changed my life. In other words, I read In Search of Lost Time first. I’m taking “this last hour” literally, as did at least some of those who responded in 1922.]

More Salinger?

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)

K., duh

Leni, nurse and perhaps mistress to the lawyer Huld, chastises Josef K.:


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

Related reading
All OCA Kafka posts (Pinboard)

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.”

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.

None of these appalling features of our current politics should ever be regarded as normal.

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.”

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)