Whatever became of John Kidd?

“I started by contacting all the homeless shelters in Brookline”: in The New York Times, Jack Hiatt recounts his search for the James Joyce scholar John Kidd. Readers of a certain age may remember Kidd’s 1988 article “The Scandal of Ulysses” and the controversy surrounding Hans Walter Gabler’s 1984 edition of Joyce’s novel. And here is David Abel’s 2002 Boston Globe article about John Kidd, “A Plummet from Grace.”

I sold my copy of Gabler’s three-volume “critical and synoptic edition” some years ago. It had begun to feel like an artifact from someone else’s life.

[Two quarrels with Hiatt’s article: Kidd was not regarded as “the greatest James Joyce scholar.” And Leopold Bloom is not a “schlub.”]

“Sliding imperceptibly forward”

Alfred Döblin, Berlin Alexanderplatz. 1929. Trans. Michael Hoffman (New York: New York Review Books, 2018).

Related reading
All OCA Döblin posts (Pinboard)

Channeling Chandler

[Zippy, June 12, 2018.]

Zippy is channeling Raymond Chandler again. From the story “Red Wind” (1938):

There was a desert wind blowing that night. It was one of those hot dry Santa Anas that come down through the mountain passes and curl your hair and make your nerves jump and your skin itch.

Today’s strip borrows also from The Big Sleep (1939). Just doing my job here at S&A.

Related reading
All OCA Zippy posts (Pinboard)
Talking like a Raymond Chandler novel

[S&A: the Sources and Analogues Detective Agency.]

DKNK

Nicholas Kristof: “It’s breathtaking to see an American president emerge as a spokesman for the dictator of North Korea.”

And then there was this comment:

“They have great beaches. You see that whenever they’re exploding their cannons into the ocean, right? I said ‘Boy, look at that view. Wouldn’t that make a great condo behind?’ And I explained, I said, you know, instead of doing that you could have the best hotels in the world right there. Think of it from a real-estate perspective.”

As Elaine can attest, I thought that hotels were going to come into the discussion.

[DK: Dunning K. Trump. With apologies to DKNY. I have transcribed Trump’s remarks about beaches to add the behind and you know that the Times omitted.]

“Act an ASS”

“Use your voice. Take a risk. Act an ASS”: four screenshots worth reading and thinking about.

See also Timothy Snyder’s On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century: “Do not obey in advance.”

A mystery supply

[Actual size: 1¾″ tall.]

Our household likes to repurpose household objects: bakeware as a laptop stand, a cardboard box as a blog post (really), a cork and a doorstop as iPad stands, a dish drainer as a file tray, tea tins as index-card holders, a thermostat as a paperweight, tiles as paperweights.

The mystery item in this photograph is a household object of sorts that I turned into a “supply” — something at home in the world of stationery and office supplies. What is the object? And what might be its supply-side use? Leave your best guesses in a comment. I will add a hint if needed.

*

Chris identified the object: a stopper from a bottle of sparkling wine. Here’s a hint: this object’s supply life also involves liquid.

*

The mystery revealed: this stopper is the perfect accessory for filling a fountain pen when a bottle of ink is nearly empty. Pour some ink into the tube, insert the pen, and fill. It’s like filling the pen from a full bottle.

[This post is the nineteenth in a very occasional series, “From the Museum of Supplies.” The museum is imaginary. The supplies are real. Supplies is my word, and has become my family’s word, for all manner of stationery items.]

Other Museum of Supplies exhibits
C. & E.I. pencil : Dennison’s Gummed Labels No. 27 : Dr. Scat : Eagle Turquoise display case : Eagle Verithin display case : Esterbrook erasers : Faber-Castell Type Cleaner : Fineline erasers : Illinois Central Railroad Pencil : A Mad Men sort of man, sort of : Mongol No. 2 3/8 : Moore Metalhed Tacks : National’s “Fuse-Tex” Skytint : Pedigree Pencil : Pentel Quicker Clicker : Real Thin Leads : Rite-Rite Long Leads : Stanley carpenter’s rule

Tape

Politico reports on Dunning K. Trump’s “unofficial ‘filing system’”:

Under the Presidential Records Act, the White House must preserve all memos, letters, emails and papers that the president touches, sending them to the National Archives for safekeeping as historical records.

But White House aides realized early on that they were unable to stop Trump from ripping up paper after he was done with it and throwing it in the trash or on the floor, according to people familiar with the practice.

Impulse control? Self-restraint? Not much. This is a president with no respect for norms, even the most trivial ones. Thus federal employees have been assigned to tape back together the documents the president rips up.

Thanks, Elaine.

No science

From The New York Times:

Mr. Trump is the first president since 1941 not to name a science adviser, a position created during World War II to guide the Oval Office on technical matters ranging from nuclear warfare to global pandemics.

Keep reading; it gets worse.

Spelling in the news

The Verrazano-Narrows Bridge: missing a z.

Related reading
All OCA spelling and misspelling posts (Pinboard)

Bill Griffith’s Metamorphoses

[Zippy, June 9, 2018.]

Franz Kafka has awakened to discover that he has Zippy’s body: Kafka as Zippy as Gregor Samsa.

Venn reading
All OCA Kafka posts : Kafka and Zippy posts : Zippy posts

[You can read Zippy daily at Comics Kingdom.]