The End of the Evening

A board game by the poet Kenneth Koch, The End of the Evening.

Related reading
All OCA Kenneth Koch posts (Pinboard)

積ん読, Berlin

Much taken with Jason Lutes’s graphic novel Jar of Fools (2003), I bought the first volume of Lutes’s trilogy Berlin when it appeared in 2004. I put it on a shelf, thinking I’d wait for the other volumes. Years passed. I’d check Amazon every so often. The second volume of Berlin appeared in 2008. In 2009 I found out, bought a copy, and put it on a shelf. Years passed. And now the third volume has appeared. It’s time to read Berlin. I’m five chapters into the first volume, with the other two stacked on the floor. And it’s lucky that I waited: reading Stefan Zweig over the last two years has given me a much better sense of Weimar Germany than I would have had in 2004. And having read Alfred Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz, I can see right away that novel’s influence on Lutes’s storytelling (montage, quick shifts in perspective).

積ん読 [tsundoku]: “the act of leaving a book unread after buying it, typically piled up together with such other unread books.”

[All three volumes of Berlin are also now available as a single hardcover volume.]

“Only those regions”

Franz Kafka, Letter to the Father, trans. Ernst Kaiser and Eithne Wilkins (New York: Schocken Books, 1966).

Related reading
All OCA Kafka posts (Pinboard)

FilmStruck recommendations

New York Times editors and reporters have suggested twelve movies to watch before FilmStruck disppears. I’ve seen three (and heard of only two of the others). I have some viewing to do.

Santayana Zerbina

[Zippy, October 31, 2018.]

In today’s Zippy, Zippy and Zerbina have (again) been transformed into 1950s romance-comics characters. “It’s not so bad, Zippy!” says Zerbina. “Maybe we’ll be happier living our lives in th’ 1950s!” Zippy isn’t so sure.

Like Zerbina, I have the George Santayana aphorism in my head in the form of learn from and doomed. But what Santayana wrote: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

Related reading
All OCA Zippy posts (Pinboard)

A 1950s pumpkin

[“Alger Hiss at Princeton.” Photograph by Ralph Morse. N.d. From the Life Photo Archive.]

I went looking for a pumpkin last night and found this photograph. The description “Alger Hiss at Princeton” baffled me.

The Life feature “A Look at the World’s Week” (May 7, 1956) reported Alger Hiss’s visit to Princeton University, where he spoke before the American Whig-Cliosophic Society. (Which still exists.) From Life: “There was opposition to his appearance and paper pumpkins were strewn around the campus.” And then I remembered a little history.

[The Life Photo Archive seems unsearchable this morning.]

Complete sentences

From The Washington Post: “James ‘Whitey’ Bulger, whose bloody reign in the Boston underworld was aided by crooked FBI agents in the 1980s and who later went on the lam for 16 years, living incognito by the California seashore, was found dead this morning while completing the first of his two life sentences.”

Sounds to me like he just completed both sentences. I can’t decide if the Post is being witty or not. Whatcha think?

More Washington Post sentences
Antecedent trouble : Parallelism trouble

“Trump’s caravan hysteria”

In The Atlantic, Adam Serwer writes about “Trump’s caravan hysteria” and its consequences:

Ordinarily, a politician cannot be held responsible for the actions of a deranged follower. But ordinarily, politicians don’t praise supporters who have mercilessly beaten a Latino man as “very passionate.” Ordinarily, they don’t offer to pay supporters’ legal bills if they assault protesters on the other side. They don’t praise acts of violence against the media. They don’t defend neo-Nazi rioters as “fine people.” They don’t justify sending bombs to their critics by blaming the media for airing criticism. Ordinarily, there is no historic surge in anti-Semitism, much of it targeted at Jewish critics, coinciding with a politician’s rise. And ordinarily, presidents do not blatantly exploit their authority in an effort to terrify white Americans into voting for their party. For the past few decades, most American politicians, Republican and Democrat alike, have been careful not to urge their supporters to take matters into their own hands. Trump did everything he could to fan the flames, and nothing to restrain those who might take him at his word. . . .

The apparent spark for the worst anti-Semitic massacre in American history was a racist hoax inflamed by a U.S. president seeking to help his party win a midterm election. There is no political gesture, no public statement, and no alteration in rhetoric or behavior that will change this fact. The shooter might have found a different reason to act on a different day. But he chose to act on Saturday, and he apparently chose to act in response to a political fiction that the president himself chose to spread and that his followers chose to amplify.

As for those who aided the president in his propaganda campaign, who enabled him to prey on racist fears to fabricate a national emergency, who said to themselves, “This is the play”? Every single one of them bears some responsibility for what followed. Their condemnations of anti-Semitism are meaningless. Their thoughts and prayers are worthless. Their condolences are irrelevant. They can never undo what they have done, and what they have done will never be forgotten.

[Found via Dreamers Rise.]

“Sully” Sullenberger casts a vote

Chesley B. “Sully” Sullenberger III, writing in The Washington Post:

For the first 85 percent of my adult life, I was a registered Republican. But I have always voted as an American. And this critical Election Day, I will do so by voting for leaders committed to rebuilding our common values and not pandering to our basest impulses. . . .

We cannot wait for someone to save us. We must do it ourselves. This Election Day is a crucial opportunity to again demonstrate the best in each of us by doing our duty and voting for leaders who are committed to the values that will unite and protect us. Years from now, when our grandchildren learn about this critical time in our nation’s history, they may ask if we got involved, if we made our voices heard. I know what my answer will be. I hope yours will be “yes.”

Rusty, recycled

 
 
[Mark Trail, October 26, 27, 29, 30, 2018. Click any image for a larger view.]

Rusty Trail is Mark and Cherry’s son. Like his parents and everyone else in the Mark Trail world, he can be cut and pasted. And like a witness facing jail time, he can be flipped. But four strips in a row?

The effort here reminds me of the crudest cartoon animation, the kind in which only eyebrows and mouths move. The lightning bolts in Rusty’s hair might change shape, his teeth might whiten, his eyes might get bluer, but he’s the same Rusty, recycled. The surest way to tell that these four images are the same image, lightly revised: look to the ear.

James Allen/Semaj Nella, like his predecessor Jack Elrod, is a dedicated recycler. Evidence: here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.

Related reading
All OCA Mark Trail posts (Pinboard)

[My row excludes Sunday, which always drops the tedious storyline of the moment for a nature lesson.]