People and their pencils

“They keep breaking”: artists, designers, a director and animator, a photographer, a writer, and their pencils, with photographs of the pencils (The Guardian).

Related reading
All OCA pencil posts (Pinboard)

Lassie do-overs

Taking a suggestion from bink, I’ve redone “The ’Clipse” and “The Poet” to make these Lassie fan-fiction posts easier to read on the screen. Does greater readability equal greater hokiness? You decide.

[Thanks, bink.]

DST

[“Functional furniture.” Photograph by Martha Holmes. December 1947. From the Life Photo Archive.]

Daylight-saving time begins tonight, or tomorrow morning. To my mind, it begins when you turn your clock back. Want to go to bed early? Turn your clock back at night. Want an early start in the morning? Turn your clock back after you wake up. So much for standardization. But be sure to turn just once.

Many people profess to hate daylight-saving time. But I’m confused: if you would prefer an extra hour of daylight on winter afternoons, as I would, what you really want is to be on daylight-saving time all year, no?

[Saving, or savings? Garner’s Modern English Usage: “the plural form is now extremely common in AmE,” but “in print sources, the singular form still appears twice as often as the plural.”]

A new Odyssey

In The New York Times Magazine, Wyatt Mason writes about the classicist Emily Wilson, the first woman to translate the Odyssey into English. I am happy to find that this article begins with a discussion of πολύτροπον [polutropon, much-turned, of many turns], the first word that describes the man who is the poem’s subject. I’m less happy about Wilson’s choice of the word complicated to carry πολύτροπον across into English (“Tell me about a complicated man”), though that word does recall James Joyce’s characterization of Odysseus as a “complete all-round character”: son, father, husband, lover, conscientious objector, warrior, inventor, gentleman. I very much like what Wilson does with Homer’s further directive to the muse: “Now goddess, child of Zeus, / tell the old story for our modern times. / Find the beginning.”

Related reading
All OCA Homer posts (Pinboard)

[Annette Meakin translated Odyssey 6 as Nausikaa (1926). Barbara Leonie Picard created “a retelling of the entire story for young people” (1952). The first word that names Odysseus is the poem’s first word, ἄνδρα [andra, man]: Odysseus is a man, god-like at times in his ability to dazzle, but thoroughly fallible and mortal. Joyce’s remarks on Odysseus are found in Frank Budgen’s James Joyce and the Making of “Ulysses” (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1960). Wilson’s Odyssey comes out next Tuesday, published by W.W. Norton.]

Pages ’09 spelling window fixed

[The spelling window, as seen with Sierra and High Sierra.]

I am amazed to see that the spelling and grammar window for Pages ’09, broken with macOS Sierra, works properly with macOS High Sierra. A welcome fix, as Pages ’09 (version 4.3) remains a better app than the newer Pages (version 6.3). There’s been no update to Pages ’09, so the fix must lie somewhere in the operating system’s management of windows.

In other news, High Sierra appears to have done away with the shadows that have long accompanied screenshots of Mac windows. I took a picture of the screen, not the spelling window, to match the shadow of my Sierra screenshot.

Honered is, of course, a Donald Trump misspelling. And Pages really is suggesting hone-red as a correction. There’s the danger of choosing whatever is at the top of a spellcheck list: the Cupertino effect.

*

A later discovery: a screenshot of a window made by using Shift-Command-4, followed by the Space bar, adds shadows. But Mac’s Grab tool take screenshots of windows without shadows. Go figure.

Related reading
All OCA spelling and misspelling posts (Pinboard)

Cypress (sp)

“Paul Manafort’s lawyers misspelled Cyprus throughout his bail memo.”

As, of course, Cypress.

Related reading
All OCA misspelling posts (Pinboard)

[Found via Language Log.]

Wrong mailbox

Junk mail:

We’re HelloFresh. And we have this crazy idea: Cooking can be fun.

We know, we know. Your days are as long as lines at the grocery store.

And so on. Jeez, did they mail the wrong household. We know, we know that cooking can be fun. We do it, we do it, almost every day. But what, what made them think that we were a good prospect?

Muhal Richard Abrams (1930–2017)

Muhal Richard Abrams, pianist, composer, bandleader, co-founder of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, has died at the age of eighty-seven. He was a giant of modern music. The Chicago Tribune and New York Times have obituaries.

Here via YouTube is a sampler of Abrams as pianist, composer, bandleader, and interpreter of tradition:

“Young at Heart” (1969) : “Maple Leaf Rag” (1976) : “Miss Richarda” (1987) : “Bermix” (1989) : “Blu Blu Blu” (1990) : Solo performance (2007) : “Improvisation for John” (2016) : The Trio (2017)

I am fortunate to have heard Abrams play in Chicago in 2009 and 2013.

Library slip (1934–1992)

See also this slip from a book borrowed just twice, in 1941 and again forty-one years later.

[There’s a watermark on this slip, not visible in the scan: DARD, missing, I assume the STAN.]

The Card Catalog

[A catalog card from The Card Catalog. Click for a larger view.]

From the Library of Congress: The Card Catalog: Books, Cards, and Literary Treasures (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 2017) is an illustrated history of the card catalog, from cuneiform days onward. With full-size photographs of more than 200 cards from the Library of Congress catalog.

Even if you prefer e-books, it’d be a mistake to buy this book in digital form. You’d miss out on the book pocket and circulation card affixed to the front pastedown (also known as the inside front cover). Not to mention the pastedown itself.

For more about card catalogs, see Nicholson Baker’s 1994 New Yorker essay “Discards.” And more recently, Tim Carmody’s “Card catalogs and the secret history of modernity” (kottke.org). Thanks to Gunther for the Carmody link.

See also this library slip (1941, 1992) and this one (filled with musicians’ signatures). And see also the Catalog Card Generator.