Twin State Typewriter

“He had a Remington, a Royal. And he loved this place”: in White River Junction, Vermont, Twin State Typewriter is closing. The Remington and Royal owner was J.D. Salinger, who went to Twin State for ribbons and repairs.

Related reading
All OCA typewriter posts (Pinboard)

Sliding pond

I heard the term while listening to an episode of A Way with Words not long ago: sliding pond. It brought me back to my Brooklyn childhood.

A sliding pond (or sliding pon) is what most English-speaking United States residents would call a slide or, less commonly, a sliding board or sliding plank. A wonderful article by David L. Gold, “Three New-York-Cityisms: Sliding Pond, Potsy, and Akey” suggests three possible origins of sliding pond : 1. Sliding on a frozen pond or on a slide built at the edge of a frozen pond. 2. The Dutch glijbaan or German Rutschbahn, each of which means “slide,” with baan or bahn morphing into pahn. 3. An “indigenous creation,” deriving from slide-upon or sliding-upon. Gold leans to a “partial loan translation” of glijbaan as the most plausible explanation.

All I know is that I hadn’t thought of a sliding pond in ages. And all of a sudden, there one was, all metallic and blazing hot, right in the playground at New Utrecht and 43rd.

[“Three New-York-Cityisms: Sliding Pond, Potsy, and Akey” appeared in American Speech 56, no. 1 (1981).]

“Extended controlled inundation”

From an episode of the podcast Reveal, about families separated by government and by storms: “This subdivision [in Houston] is adjacent to Barker reservoir and is subject to extended controlled inundation.” That’s an Orwellian way of saying that you’re living in a reservoir, that the land on which your house sits can be flooded, under the auspices of the United States Army Corp of Engineers. And the text is in very fine print. And it’s not the most disheartening part of the episode.

Misquoting from memory

I’m glad that I reread Yeats’s “Easter, 1916” before spoofing one of its lines in a post yesterday. Writing from memory, I had “The stone’s in the midst of it all.” That’s how I’ve had the line in my head since I was an undergrad. But no. Yeats’s poem reads, “The stone’s in the midst of all.” There is no it, not in the variorum text of Yeats’s poems, not elsewhere. I must have turned the last five words of the line into a pair of anapests: x x / x x /, in the MIDST of it ALL. Yeats’s anapest and iamb make a more oracular sound: x x / x /, in the MIDST of ALL.

The curious thing, as I’ve discovered, is that I’m not alone in my mistake. Here’s a lit-crit it from 1953. Here’s one from 2000. And here’s Harper’s in 2008, adding an it not to a quotation but to the poem itself.

Now I’m wondering what else I’ve misquoted from memory. July is the cruellest month.


[A Yeats typescript. From the Huntington Digital Library.]

On Proust’s birthday

Marcel Proust was born on July 10, 1871.

I don’t know whether I have told you that this book is a novel. At least it deviates least from the novel form. There is a Monsieur who narrates and who says “I”; there are a great many characters; in the first volume they are “prepared” in such a way that what they do in the second is exactly the opposite of what one would expect from the first. From the publisher’s point of view, unfortunately, this first volume is much less narrative than the second. And from the point of view of composition, it is so complex that it will not be clear until much later when all the “themes” have begun to be combined. You see, there is nothing very engaging about all this. But under the conditions we have discussed, it seems to me that M. Grasset cannot lose anything, and, literarily speaking, I do not think that he will be “déclassé ” because of it.

Marcel Proust, in a letter to René Blum, February 24, 1913. From Letters of Marcel Proust, translated by Mina Curtiss (New York: Helen Marx Books / Books & Co., 2006).

René Blum arranged for the publisher Bernard Grasset to publish “this first volume,” Du côté de chez Swann, at Proust’s expense. Blum (1878–1942) was a journalist, art collector, and ballet impresario. He died in Auschwitz.

Related reading
All OCA Proust posts (Pinboard)

Double articles

Grammarphobia offers everything you always wanted to know about double articles, as in “the El Niño effect.” Which reminds me of the El Phoenix Room. Gone but not forgotten.

I have the strongest of suspicions that the El Phoenix is the model for The Unexamined Life, a Boston bar in David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest. Notice the capitalized article in the bar’s name. In the El Phoenix’s place stands Harry’s Bar & Grill, unless something has already taken its place.

A related post
Infinite Jest, “night-noises”

Life before air-conditioning

“Broadway had open trolleys with no side walls, in which you at least caught the breeze, hot though it was, so that desperate people, unable to endure their apartments, would simply pay a nickel and ride around aimlessly for a couple of hours to cool off”: in 1998, Arthur Miller wrote for The New Yorker about life before air-conditioning.

See also 99% Invisible on “thermal delight.”

A coffee quiz

[Life, October 31, 1938. Click for a slightly larger view.]

Insomniacs drinking coffee — sounds like homeopathy. Football teams drinking coffee at halftime — I wouldn’t know. Regular habits — like golf? No, not golf. “The gentle wave-like motion” — my inner twelve-year-old is snickering. Hangovers — my inner twenty-four-year-old is thinking that coffee cures them.

So many claims, such “oceans of notions” — and, as William Butler Yeats might have put it, “The coffee cup’s in the midst of all.” Yes, where there’s life — there’s coffee! I like that dowdy cup, steam rising, message written in cream by an exceedingly skilled barista. Oh, wait: it’s 1938. No barista.

Related reading
All OCA coffee posts (Pinboard)

Trump vs. breast-feeding

“The intensity of the [Trump] administration’s opposition to the breast-feeding resolution stunned public health officials and foreign diplomats, who described it as a marked contrast to the Obama administration, which largely supported [the World Health Organization’s] longstanding policy of encouraging breast-feeding”: “U.S. Opposition to Breast-Feeding Resolution Stuns World Health Officials” (The New York Times).

For someone like Donald Trump, women’s breasts have but one purpose, no?

And even in this story, there’s a Russia connection.

Domestic comedy

[While watching 90 Day Fiancé. It was very late.]

“It’s like Jerry Springer.”

“In houses.”

Related reading
All OCA domestic comedy posts (Pinboard)