“That’s better”

We might still think of Wi-Fi as fracturing family life, with each member of the group off in front of a screen. Here’s an earlier story of improved technology and one family’s response. Ben Logan (1920–2014) recounts what happened when his father bought an Aladdin kerosene lamp for the dining-room table. “The new lamp gave more light,” Logan writes, “opening up the corners of the dining room, letting us scatter away from the little circle we’d always formed around the old Rayo.” And then one night Logan’s mother announced, “‘I’m not sure I like that new lamp’”:

Father was at his usual place at the table. “Why not? Burns less kerosene.”

“Look where everyone is.”

We were scattered. There was even enough light to read by on the far side of the stove.

“We’re all here,” Father said.

“Not like we used to be.”

Father looked at the empty chairs around the table. “Want to go back to the old lamp?”

“I don’t think it’s the lamp. I think it’s us. Does a new lamp have to change where we sit at night?”

Ben Logan, The Land Remembers: The Story of a Farm and Its People. 1975. (Minnetonka, MN: NorthWord Press, 1999).

“I don’t think it’s the lamp. I think it’s us”: exactly. As I’ve written more than once in these pages, technology makes it possible to do things, not necessary to do them. Logan describes what followed in his family’s farmhouse:

Father’s eyes found us, one by one. Then he made a little motion with his head. We came out of our corners and slid into our old places at the table, smiling at each other, a little embarrassed to be hearing this talk.

Mother sat down with us and nodded. “That’s better.”

[Thanks to Chris at Dreamers Rise for pointing me to The Land Remembers.]

“The man that hath no music in himself”

Not long after watching our president’s half-throated attempt to sing “The Star-Spangled Banner,” I turned to Nuccio Ordine’s book The Usefulness of the Useless (2017) and found these lines from The Merchant of Venice (5.1). Lorenzo speaks:

The man that hath no music in himself,
Nor is not moved with concord of sweet
    sounds,
Is fit for treasons, stratagems, and spoils;
The motions of his spirit are dull as night
And his affections dark as Erebus:
Let no such man be trusted. Mark the music.

Aye, mark.

Knowing the words to “The Star-Spangled” is of course not proof that one is “moved with concord of sweet sounds.” And one could have a deep feeling for music without knowing the words to this song. But “treasons, stratagems, and spoils” — I rest my case.

Maurice Peress (1930–2017)

The conductor Maurice Peress has died at the age of eighty-seven. The New York Times has an obituary. Peress was known especially for his work with Leonard Bernstein and Duke Ellington. In 2007 Elaine had the good fortune to play under Peress’s baton in an orchestra performing several of Ellington’s longer works. And I had the good fortune to be a member of the audience.

One Kafka sentence

Frieda is asking the schoolboy Hans Brunswick some questions:


Franz Kafka, The Castle, trans. Mark Harman (New York: Schocken, 1998).

In a preface to this translation, Mark Harman cites a passage from Kafka’s diaries:

Omission of the period. In general the spoken sentence starts off in a large capital letter with the speaker, bends out in its course as far as it can towards the listeners and with the period returns to the speaker. But if the period is omitted, then the sentence is no longer constrained and blows its entire breath at the listener.

Related reading
All OCA Kafka posts (Pinboard)

Domestic comedy

[In a store. A security guard was headed in our direction.]

“I was afraid they thought you looked suspicious.”

“I thought I looked fetching.”

“Suspiciously fetching.”

Related reading
All OCA domestic comedy posts (Pinboard)

Failsonry ?

Oprah is black, a woman, unabashed, loved, genuinely self-made as opposed to the product of intergenerational failsonry & legitimately rich. In other words, abt as close to the anti-Trump as you get. Everything that threatens him. His response will be quavering, angry and ugly.

— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) January 8, 2018

Failsonry ? This word appears to exist only in Josh Marshall’s tweet and subsequent retweets. Any idea what he meant to type? Or, if he meant failsonry, what he means by it?

*

January 11: Some smart OCA readers figured it out, or at least I think so. “Intergenerational failsonry” seems to be meant to suggest the International Order of Freemasonry. Thanks, Fresca and Chris, for seeing a masonry and Masonry connection. And thanks to everyone who suggested a meaning. The full story is in the comments.

A Google search for trump and freemasonry suggests to me that Josh Marshall might have done better to skip the pun.

[Josh Marshall is the editor and publisher of Talking Points Memo.]

LA to Vegas (representing)

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!

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.]

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.