Tonight on Fox, 9:00 Eastern: LA to Vegas. The New York Times picks LA to Vegas as one of ten shows “we’ll be talking about in January” and describes it as a “snappy sitcom that’s part workplace comedy, part Love Boat-like compendium of travel anecdotes.” Last week’s first episode snapped, crackled, and popped. Fast and funny. Our son-in-law Seth is one of the show’s writers. Go Seth!
Tuesday, January 9, 2018
The Stool of Repentance
Another letter to the Junior Eagle Game Club. Little Gladys Banning must have been the toast of her block:
[The Brooklyn Daily Eagle, October 17, 1915.]
The Stool of Repentance should be familiar to any teacher who’s read through a packet of student evaluations.
See also the game of Tin-Tin.
[Thanks to the Brooklyn Public Library, whose Brooklyn Newsstand made this post possible.]
Tin-Tin
“You know how to play Tin-Tin?” So asks a character in Shirley Jackson’s novel The Road Through the Wall (1948), which has a long passage devoted to this game. The novel’s narrator says that Tin-Tin is “probably as old as children.” I managed to turn up exactly one description of Tin Tin (no hyphen) in a letter to the Junior Eagle Game Club, a feature of The Brooklyn Daily Eagle:
[The Brooklyn Daily Eagle, October 17, 1915.]
In Jackson’s novel the game is a bit different: the tin seller is “It”; the buyer is “Victim”; there’s no husband/wife element; and the name is “some familiar word or name or nonsense syllable.” Missing from this 1915 description, I think, is what gives the game, at least in Jackson’s novel, a point: the answer to every question must be the player’s assigned name. As for the game’s name, there seems to be no relation to Hergé’s Tintin, at least none that I can suss out.
As you might guess, every letter to “Aunt Jean” is signed by a “niece” or “nephew.” You want your name in the paper, kid, you play along with Aunt Jean, see?
[Thanks to the Brooklyn Public Library, whose Brooklyn Newsstand made this post possible.]
Monday, January 8, 2018
Tim Rollins (1955–2018)
A New York Times obituary describes Tim Rollins as “an artist and educator whose mural-like paintings inspired by literary classics brought 1980s art stardom to him and his collaborators — a shifting collective of at-risk South Bronx teenagers.” Together they were known as Tim Rollins + K.O.S., meaning Kids of Survival. The Times describes the way they worked:
It was a demanding process, which Mr. Rollins oversaw from beginning to end. The authors he selected were challenging and included Shakespeare, Daniel Defoe, Lewis Carroll and Malcolm X. Digesting their writings could take weeks, and arriving at a suitable motif, a process they called jammin’, could take months.Among the group’s other source materials: Franz Kafka’s Amerika and Duke Ellington’s The River: A Ballet Suite. Here are two samplings of the work of Tim Rollins + K.O.S.: one, two.
“A few days of living with K.”
In the schoolroom/gymnasium that doubles or triples as living quarters for K., who works as the school’s janitor, and Frieda:
Franz Kafka, The Castle, trans. Mark Harman (New York: Schocken, 1998).
Related reading
All OCA Kafka posts (Pinboard)
Sunday, January 7, 2018
Items in a series
Honesty. Integrity. Quality. Trust. Premium Onions.
[As seen on a bag of, yes, onions. I suppose that if onions are your everything, this series makes sense.]
Saturday, January 6, 2018
Stating the obvious
A “very stable genius” would not be tweeting in the pre-dawn. How do I know that? Because I’m, like, really smart.
A related post
Dunning K. Trump
[Context: here and here.]
From the Saturday Stumper
From today’s Newsday Saturday Stumper, not a tricky clue, but one I learned from. It’s 46-Across, eleven letters: “Word from the French for ‘stir up.’” No spoilers; the answer is in the comments.
Today’s puzzle, by Lester Ruff, is at least semi-tough. Either these puzzles are getting easier, or I’m getting better, or both.
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