“John Ashbery’s last poem, handwritten at his home in Hudson, New York, on August 25, 2017. Ashbery died on September 3”: “Climate Correction” (Harper’s).
Related reading
All OCA Ashbery posts (Pinboard)
Thursday, August 9, 2018
John Ashbery’s last poem
“What time was all that?”
From a memoir by Luisa Ferber (née Lanzberg), written between 1939 and 1941, as it became clear that obtaining a visa to leave Germany was impossible. Before being “deported” with her husband Fritz in November 1941, Luisa Ferber sent the memoir to her son Max in England:
W.G. Sebald, The Emigrants, trans. Michael Hulse (New York: New Directions, 1996).
Related reading
All OCA Sebald posts (Pinboard)
[The line between fiction and historical reality is blurry here. Max Ferber is modeled on the painter Frank Auerbach. Sebald said in an interview that he used a manuscript by Auerbach’s aunt as the basis for Luisa Ferber’s memoir.]
Wednesday, August 8, 2018
Small town, car, screen
One way to know you’re living in a small town: you recognize your neighbor’s little sports car in a TV commercial for a local auto shop.
*
August 14: Our neighbor knows about the commercial. But the car isn’t his. Someone else in town has the same little sports car, and my neighbor knows who. Further proof that I’m living in a small town.
Tuesday, August 7, 2018
Found: a Roman library
“Built about 150 years after the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest, its walls recently reemerged after centuries of darkness during the construction of a new community center next to the city of Cologne’s famous cathedral”: “Long-lost Roman library reemerges in Germany after 2,000 years in darkness” (The Washington Post).
A perpetual calendar
I found it while looking for something else:
[Webster’s Second International Dictionary (1934).]
One major difference between Webster’s Second and Third is the disappearance of encyclopedic or nonlexical content: proper names (people, places, things, events, organizations), epithets, proverbs, titles of literary works, in short, the material that made W2 an all-purpose home reference. As Herbert C. Morton points out, Philip Gove, W3’s editor, was not charting a new direction in lexicography in removing the nonlexical: he was following in a tradition established by Johnson’s Dictionary and the Oxford English Dictionary.
I wonder what debate the W2 entry for perpetual calendar might have sparked in the W3 editorial conferences. Clearly, the calendar itself is a nonlexical item. But as the preface to W3 says about cutting nonlexical material, “Selection is guided by usefulness.” Without a perpetual calendar, how might the layperson answer a what-day-of-the-week question? I like to imagine a Merriam-Webster editor shuddering at the thought of a dictionary user having to head out to a newsstand or supermarket in search of an almanac.
For whatever reason, the calendar stayed for W3. But the differences between the W2 and W3 entries are revealing. W3 makes no mention of the Gregorian and Julian calendars and omits the fairly tedious presentation of calendar mathematics. Will a W3 reader wonder why the calendar begins with 1753? Apparently not: all 1961 wants to know is how to find out what-day-of-the-week.
[Webster’s Third New International Dictionary (1961).]
Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate (2004) has no calendar, only a definition:
n (1895) : a table for finding the day of the week for any one of a wide array of datesOf course. Calculate-the-date websites and calendar apps have made a printed perpetual calendar obsolete. The Calendar app on my Mac is reported to run well past the year 200,000.
Related reading
All OCA dictionary posts (Pinboard)
Review: The Story of Ain’t: America, Its Language, and the Most Controversial Dictionary Ever Published
[Herbert C. Morton’s The Story of “Webster’s Third”: Philip Gove’s Controversial Dictionary and Its Critics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994) gives a careful inventory of the materials removed from or reduced in W3.]
Monday, August 6, 2018
Hotdish
I’ve had it only once before, at a potluck, where I wondered, “Are those Tater Tots on top?” Yes, they were. Huh.
Elaine made hotdish tonight, chicken pot hotdish, following a recipe from Molly Yeh, daughter of Elaine’s Juilliard pal John Bruce Yeh, and host of the Food Network’s Girl Meets Farm.
OMG: hotdish is so good. Good enough to make me forget about al pastor and panang curry, at least for a while. A culinary world has opened to us.
Here, from 2013, is a short, highly informative film by Maria Bartholdi: Minnesota Hotdish: A Love Story.
Like father, like daughter
Over the weekend, my daughter Rachel read a piece of journalism that she deemed poorly written. She texted me a link. I read and concurred. I copied and pasted a terrible sentence to send back, but then thought, “It’s not bad enough.” Then another, but again I thought, “It’s not bad enough.” And then I hit the right sentence. I copied and pasted and wrote, “Especially this sentence.” And Rachel replied that it was when she hit that sentence that she decided to send the link.
Dad, i.m.
My dad, James Leddy, died three years ago today, a day that feels both recent and distant. Yesterday, while Elaine and I were watching Three Identical Strangers, I thought about how fortunate I am to have had the father I had. And have. He’s an example, always, of how to be a father.
Here’s what I wrote after he died.
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