Today’s Saturday Stumper

Today’s Newsday Saturday Stumper, by Brad Wilber, is difficult. At first I thought it’d be a breeze. 1-Down, six letters: ”Supervisor of deck hands”? Kid stuff! But then I moved on.

The clue that broke the puzzle open for me: 38-Down, seven letters: “Made just for you in London.” Most fiendish clue of all: 16-Across, four letters: “Cap conclusion.” ITAL? TAIN? No. As always, no spoilers: the answers are in the comments.

Oliver Sacks’s marginalia

Bill Hayes, Oliver Sacks’s partner in the last six years of Sacks’s life, is posting photographs of Sacks’s marginalia.

Related reading
All OCA Oliver Sacks posts (Pinboard)

A “fluid plane”

J.W. Dunne, An Experiment with Time, 3rd. ed. (London: Faber and Faber, 1958).

J.W. Dunne’s An Experiment with Time, first published in 1927 and widely read in its day, advances a theory of dreaming as a form of precognition. In a post about Insomniac Dreams, the recently published book that collects Vladimir Nabokov’s experiments with Dunne’s theory, I mentioned in passing that Dunne seems to be a figure straight from the Museum of Jurassic Technology.

I have now turned the pages of An Experiment with Time (thank you, interlibrary loan) and am excited to see a number of baffling diagrams. This one is my favorite. And now I strongly suspect that Dunne’s work helped to inspire the MJT’s Geoffrey Sonnabend and his theory of obliscence. Consider this diagram, which appears on an MJT T-shirt, or this one, which appears on the cover of a pamphlet summarizing Sonnabend’s work.

I’m a longtime fan of the Museum of Jurassic Technology, and yes, I have both the T-shirt and the pamphlet. Lawrence Weschler’s Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonder (1995) is an excellent introduction to the museum and its work. I visited in 2012 and was lucky to meet David Wilson, who happened to walk by as we stood in the rooftop garden. Right place, right time.

Working with Avital Ronell

At The Chronicle of Higher Education, Andrea Long Chu writes about working as one of Avital Ronell’s teaching assistants. Chu believes the allegations against Ronell: “It is simply no secret to anyone within a mile of the German or comp-lit departments at NYU that Avital is abusive.” An excerpt:

A culture of critics in name only, where genuine criticism is undertaken at the risk of ostracism, marginalization, retribution — this is where abuses like Avital’s grow like moss, or mold. Graduate students know this intuitively; it is written on their bones.

Yes. I remember the joking self-characterization of my school days: “I am a lowly graduate student.” That should never have been a joke.

Related posts
The Avital Ronell story : Prestigious signatures : Derrida’s archives

What Biden was paraphrasing

What Joe Biden was paraphrasing in his eulogy for John McCain:

’A was a man, take him for all in all,
I shall not look upon his like again.

That’s from Hamlet, I.2, Hamlet speaking of his father to Horatio. Biden’s paraphrase: “We shall not see his like again.”

[I don’t think there’s yet a transcript of the eulogy. Biden’s words about grief and mourning, reprised from 2012, are online and well worth reading.]

Nancy pop corn

[Nancy, n.d.]

Today’s installment of yesterday’s Nancy prompts the question: Was popcorn once spelled as two words? Yes. The Oxford English Dictionary has citations for the variety of maize and the snack with pop corn, pop-corn, and popcorn. The earliest citations with the solid spelling: 1893 for the maize, 1922 for the snack. But pop corn soldiered and soldiers on. Look:


[Life, December 25, 1950.]

Today the Jolly Time website uses both pop corn and popcorn: “He grew popcorn.” “Popcorn is the perfect snack.” “Butter, sea salt, pop corn & oil.”

Oh — popcorn machines first appeared in movie theaters in 1938. My mom and I were wondering about that recently.

Related reading
All OCA Nancy posts (Pinboard)

Oliver Sacks and words

In The New York Times, Bill Hayes writes about Oliver Sacks’s love of words:

Even if he had never written a single one, I am sure Oliver would still have been that funny fellow who took giant dictionaries to bed for light reading (aided by a magnifying glass). He delighted in etymology, synonyms and antonyms, slang, swear words, palindromes, anatomical terms, neologisms (but objected, in principle, to contractions). He could joyfully parse the difference between homonyms and homophones, not to mention homographs, in dinner table conversation. (He also relished saying those three words — that breathy “H” alliteration — in his distinctive British accent.)

If you, like me, are fumbling to articulate the difference between homonyms and homphones, not to mention homographs: look here. (Not hear.)

Related reading
All OCA Oliver Sacks posts (Pinboard)

“An idiosyncrasy peculiar to the herring”

W.G. Sebald, The Rings of Saturn, trans. Michael Hulse (New York: New Directions, 1998).

Donald S. Murray’s Herring Tales: How the Silver Darlings Shaped Human Taste and History (London: Bloomsbury, 2015) says that there is “no evidence” that the effort to illuminate cities with fishy phosphorescence was successful:

The failure of the “eccentric undertaking” described by Sebald was so great that it left little of lasting legacy. It is tempting to conclude that the author’s odd choice of names for his scientists — Herrington and Lightbown — is a quirky invention, one of his own “red herrings,” sending the reader off on every bit as much a wrong scent as the fox in that ancient practice, when that strong-smelling fish was employed to trick the hounds from following in their quarry’s tracks. For all that the practice of generating light from herring occurred in the late nineteenth century, there does not appear to be a record of the existence of any two English scientists with their names.

Related reading
All OCA Sebald posts (Pinboard)

Falltime

One way to know you’re now in your sixties: at a yearly physical, the first question from both nurse and doctor is “Have you fallen in the last year?”

Uh, no.

Deb Larson-Venable talks about David Foster Wallace

I found it by chance: a 2014 recording of Deb Larson-Venable talking with Christopher Lydon about David Foster Wallace. Deb is the executive director of Granada House, the halfway house where Wallace got sober. Lydon asks,

“He wrote that he did this under a death sentence — that it was either get into recovery or you’re dead in two years. That concentrates the mind, and maybe that propels you willy-nilly toward community. Are there other ways to get there?”

And Deb’s answer: “You mean from — ? No.”

Deb, a Granada House resident who stayed on, appears in Infinite Jest as Pat Montesian. Deb’s story of recovery appears at the Granada House website. As does Wallace’s, the first story on this page.

Why have I written Deb and not Larson-Venable? Because I met Deb Larson-Venable in 2010, on a trip to Boston, when Elaine and I went to Granada House to make a contribution.

A related post
DFW and Granada House

[Wallace’s history of cruelty and violence toward women was well known, at least in part, by 2014. It plays no part in the conversation.]