“Hourglasses, maps, eighteenth-century typefaces”

An excerpt:


Jorge Luis Borges, “Borges and I,” in Collected Fictions, trans. Andrew Hurley (New York: Penguin, 1998).

Related posts
Borges manuscript found : Borges on reading : A sentence from “The Aleph”

Domestic comedy

“I thought you said ‘Help yourself.’”

“No, I said ‘Laurel.’”

Related reading
All OCA domestic comedy posts (Pinboard)

[If you’re lost: yanny or laurel.]

Separated at birth

 
[Steven Isserlis, cellist; Pat Metheny, guitarist.]

Thanks to OCA reader Steven for suggesting this pairing and sending links to the pictures.

Also separated at birth
Nicholson Baker and Lawrence Ferlinghetti : Bérénice Bejo and Paula Beer : Ted Berrigan and C. Everett Koop : David Bowie and Karl Held : Victor Buono and Dan Seymour : Ernie Bushmiller and Red Rodney : John Davis Chandler and Steve Buscemi : Ray Collins and Mississippi John Hurt : Broderick Crawford and Vladimir Nabokov : Ted Cruz and Joe McCarthy : Benedict Cumberbatch and Michael Gough : Henry Daniell and Anthony Wiener : Jacques Derrida, Peter Falk, and William Hopper : Elaine Hansen (of Davey and Goliath) and Blanche Lincoln : Barbara Hale and Vivien Leigh : Harriet Sansom Harris and Phoebe Nicholls : Ton Koopman and Oliver Sacks : Steve Lacy and Myron McCormick : Don Lake and Andrew Tombes : William H. Macy and Michael A. Monahan : Fredric March and Tobey Maguire : Jean Renoir and Steve Wozniak : Molly Ringwald and Victoria Zinny

[Steven Pinker, charter member of the Luxuriant Flowing Hair Club for Scientists, would make for triplets. But Pinker’s hair has prompted sufficient attention and comparisons already.]

FSRC: annual report

The Four Seasons Reading Club, our household’s two-person adventure in reading, just finished its third year. The FSRC year runs from May to May. (The club began after I retired from teaching.) In our third year we read twenty-three books. In non-chronological order:

James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time

Honoré de Balzac, Eugénie Grandet, Père Goriot

Jorge Luis Borges, Collected Fictions

Thomas Browne, Urne-Buriall, The Garden of Cyrus

Truman Capote, “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” and Three Stories

Alfred Döblin, Bright Magic: Stories

Shirley Jackson, The Road Through the Wall

Franz Kafka, Amerika (The Man Who Disappeared), The Complete Stories, The Trial

Guy de Maupassant, Collected Stories, Like Death

Alice Munro, Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage; Runaway

Nuccio Ordine, The Usefulness of the Useless

Eleanor Roosevelt, You Learn by Living

W.G. Sebald, Austerlitz

Stefan Zweig, Balzac, Beware of Pity, The Burning Secret, Fear

Credit to the translators whose work gave us access to the world beyond English: Anthea Bell, Phyllis and Trevor Blewitt, E.K. Brown, M. Walter Dunne, Andrew Hurley, Michael Hoffman, Richard Howard, Ernst Kaiser and Eithne Wilkins, Alastair McEwen, Breon Mitchell, Willa and Edwin Muir, William and Dorothy Rose, Damion Searls, Jonathan Sturges, Tania and James Stern, Dorothea Walter and John Watkins.

Here are the reports for 2016 and 2017.

Shakespeare’s and snails’

From The Guardian:

In a new study, researchers claim to have made headway in understanding the simplest kind of memory a mollusc might form, and, with a swift injection, managed to transfer such a memory from one sea snail to another.

Key word: claim.

The reason this item caught my attention: yesterday I read Jorge Luis Borges’s story “Shakespeare’s Memory,” in which Shakespeare’s memory is given by one person to another. That is, the contents of Shakespeare’s memory: Anne Hathaway, lines from Chaucer, Ben Jonson’s teasing.

One Borges sentence

Down in the cellar, there’s “a small iridescent sphere,” “two or three centimeters in diameter,” the Aleph. Looking into it, one sees everything:


Jorge Luis Borges, “The Aleph,” in Collected Fictions, trans. Andrew Hurley (New York: Penguin, 1998).

Borges was one of the first writers I discovered on my own, all the way back in high school. I am immensely happy to have now read the Collected Fictions.

Related posts
Borges manuscript found : Borges on reading

[Idle speculation: might this catalogue of things seen have influenced Bob Dylan’s “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall”? I’m not the first reader to see a resemblance.]

How to improve writing (no. 76)

From a David Brooks column in The New York Times:

In these places if you become successful, it is expected that you will become active in town life.

Rearranging the elements of the sentence would give proper emphasis to “if you become successful”:

If you become successful in these places, it is expected that you will become active in town life.

But the sentence still feels cumbersome to me, especially when I hear it: If, become, in, it, is, become, in. And then there’s the dire it is expected that. A possible revision:

In these places, people expect those who are successful to participate in town life.

Or:

People in these places expect those who are successful to participate in town life.

I didn’t go looking for a sentence to improve this morning: this one presented itself as needing immediate help.

Related reading
All OCA “How to improve writing” posts (Pinboard) : David Brooks and SNOOTs : PBS, sheesh : WHAT?

[This post is no. 76 in a series, dedicated to improving stray bits of public prose.]

From my dad’s CDs

I’m closing in on the end of the recorded alphabet: Julian “Cannonball” Adderley, Ivie Anderson, Louis Armstrong, Fred Astaire, Mildred Bailey, Count Basie, Tony Bennett, Art Blakey, Ruby Braff and Ellis Larkins, Clifford Brown, Dave Brubeck, Joe Bushkin, Hoagy Carmichael, Betty Carter, Ray Charles, Charlie Christian, Rosemary Clooney, Nat “King” Cole, John Coltrane, Bing Crosby, Miles Davis, Matt Dennis, Doris Day, Blossom Dearie, Paul Desmond, Tommy Dorsey, Billy Eckstine, Duke Ellington, Bill Evans, Gil Evans, Ella Fitzgerald, Judy Garland, Erroll Garner, Stan Getz, Dizzy Gillespie, Benny Goodman, Stéphane Grappelli, Bobby Hackett, Coleman Hawkins, Woody Herman, Earl Hines, Billie Holiday, Lena Horne, Dick Hyman, Harry James, Hank Jones, Louis Jordan, Stan Kenton, Barney Kessel, Lambert, Hendricks, and Ross, Peggy Lee, Mary Ann McCall, Susannah McCorkle, Dave McKenna, Ray McKinley, Marian McPartland, Johnny Mercer, Helen Merrill, Glenn Miller, the Modern Jazz Quartet, Thelonious Monk, Wes Montgomery, Gerry Mulligan, Red Norvo, Anita O’Day, Charlie Parker, Joe Pass, Art Pepper, Oscar Peterson, Bud Powell, Boyd Raeburn, Django Reinhardt, Marcus Roberts, Sonny Rollins, Jimmy Rushing, Catherine Russell, the Sauter-Finegan Orchestra, Artie Shaw, George Shearing, Horace Silver, Frank Sinatra, Paul Smith, Jeri Southern, Jo Stafford, Art Tatum, Claude Thornhill, Mel Tormé, McCoy Tyner, Sarah Vaughan, Joe Venuti, and now, composer, pianist, organist, singer, and bandleader Thomas “Fats” Waller. Here is Waller the composer and pianist, in two unembeddable piano solos. I think of these recordings as music to rejoice to. From the George Blood collection of 78s:

“Smashing Thirds” (Waller), recorded in New York City, September 11, 1929.

“African Ripples” (Waller), recorded in New York City, November 16, 1934.

I’ve been listening to these recordings for years via the 2-LP set Fats Waller Piano Solos: 1929-1941 (Bluebird). My dad had these recordings in the 2-CD set Turn On the Heat: Fats Waller Piano Solos (Bluebird), now out of print. I have plenty of other recordings of Waller and his small group (“His Rhythm”), mostly on LP. But listening to my dad’s CDs prompted me to get everything, via JSP’s 6-volume, 25-CD edition of Waller’s studio recordings. Inexpensive (about $6 a CD) and built to last.

I wanted to end this post by suggesting a gateway Waller collection, but I’m not sure I can recommend anything now in print. If you can find it, the Proper Records 4-CD set Handful of Keys would be a good choice.

Also from my dad’s CDs
Mildred Bailey : Tony Bennett : Charlie Christian : Blossom Dearie : Duke Ellington : Coleman Hawkins : Billie Holiday : Louis Jordan : Charlie Parker : Jimmy Rushing : Artie Shaw : Frank Sinatra : Art Tatum : Mel Tormé : Sarah Vaughan : Joe Venuti

And one more related post
Fats Waller’s “Yes!”

Fritzi Ritz is back

[Nancy, May 14, 2018.]

Nancy’s aunt Fritzi Ritz makes her first appearance in Olivia Jaimes’s Nancy. Fritzi hasn’t yet been given lines to speak. If you want to know why musical notes dance around Nancy’s teacher, you’ll have to read today’s strip.

Today’s Fritzi is a decidedly understated version of Bushmiller’s original, who sought to look glamorous even when reading a newspaper.


[Nancy, August 3, 1953.]

Related reading
All OCA Nancy posts (Pinboard)

Occam’s knife

Scott Goldsmith is the owner of S. Feldman Housewares, our favorite housewares store. I was happy to see him quoted in an New York Times article, “All Those Kitchen Gadgets, But a Sharp Knife Just Might Do”:

Mr. Goldsmith’s long retail career spans decades of gadgetry — including truffle shavers and cherry pitters, Salad Shooters and spiralizers — and traces a history of ingenuity, optimism and sheer whimsy. If the invention of defoliating devices for cruciferous vegetables causes you to think the makers of kitchen gadgets have finally and collectively lost their minds, Mr. Goldsmith will remind you that his store has been in business since 1929.

“Between you and me,” he said, “most of these things you can do with a knife.”