“My Review of Wine”

From The New Yorker: “My Review of Wine,” by Roz Chast.

Dry goods, &c.

A picture of retail past, in Ellettsville, Indiana:

Cort’s store is a leisurely place that sells a great many things, and nobody is urged to buy anything. There was an assortment of men’s and boys’ clothing, dry goods, hardware, kitchen equipment. A stack of milk buckets, tin pans, and small tools were displayed carelessly in the window. There were the red and black plaid caps that are standard equipment for farm men and boys; the soft, warm, brown gloves; the stiff canvas gloves; blue denim overall jackets; assorted boots and overshoes.

Rachel Peden, Rural Free: A Farmwife’s Almanac of Country Living (Bloomington, IN: Quarry Books, 2009).

What are dry goods anyway? The Oxford English Dictionary: “A name (chiefly in N. Amer.) for the class of merchandise comprising textile fabrics and related things; articles of drapery, mercery, and haberdashery (as opposed to groceries).” Merriam-Webster: “textiles, ready-to-wear clothing, and notions as distinguished especially from hardware and groceries.” First use: 1657. An OED citation: “Sellers and buyers of produce, hardware, dry goods and what-not.” I love the what-not, and its cousin, things of that nature.

This passage made me think of a store from my Brooklyn childhood, “the dry goods store,” the only name I have for it, on New Utrecht Avenue, a street in permanent semi-darkness under the elevated train line. I remember merchandise on tables and in boxes: household chemicals, kitchenware, and what I now know were dry goods — underwear and socks, the packages priced with a marker or grease pencil. No farm fashions though. Wrong universe.

Also from Rachel Peden
Against school consolidation

Sardines are in the air

Yes, they are. The Chicago Tribune says so. And The Boston Globe has recipes. (As if sardines need a recipe.) Boston has at least two tinned-fish restaurants, haley.henry and Saltie Girl.

I think that “the small oily fish” qualifies as an elegant or inelegant variation — like “elongated yellow fruit” for “banana.”

Related reading
All OCA sardine posts (Pinboard)

Misspelled words

From Oxford Dictionaries, a handy list of words commonly misspelled. One word that always confounds me, not that I have much reason to use it: pharaoh, because a certain tenor saxophonist, last name Sanders, spells his first name Pharoah.

Related reading
All OCA spelling and misspelling posts (Pinboard)

“Ah, coherent”

Franz Kafka, “The Hunter Gracchus: A Fragment,” in The Complete Stories, ed. Nahum N. Glatzer, trans. Tania and James Stern (New York: Schocken, 1971).

Related reading
All OCA Kafka posts (Pinboard)

Hi and Lois watch

[Hi and Lois, November 5, 2017.]

Today’s Peter Max-like display of color is a marked improvement over October’s brown and green. Dig the blue and lilac tree trunks.

Related reading
All OCA Hi and Lois posts (Pinboard)

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.]