“FFWWOOOOSSSHHH”

[Mark Trail, February 19, 2019.]

On Harbour Island in the Bahamas, a man named Dirty is destroying a mannequin’s head with a flamethrower: “Man! This flamethrower is a blast!” The name, the weapon, the witless violence: might this man be a villain? If so, Mark will promptly be dispatching him, eight or nine months from now.

If you want to break the fourth wall, you must leave no wall behind. Olivia Jaimes can show you how it’s done. Also, don’t leave parts of clouds and infernos blank. “FFWWOOOOSSSHHH” must be comics-speak for “Dammit, I forgot to proofread.”

Related reading
All OCA Mark Trail posts (Pinboard) : BRATTATTATAT : KRAKABLAM : MEME : THIP, THUP, THK, SHUK : WHOOAA

FATZ and THASTY

[Click for a much larger view.]

Not quite FAT and SASSY, but still — what are the odds? Slim, I guess.

“The phrase fat and sassy has connoted robust good health for well over a century”: The Merriam-Webster New Book of Word Histories (1991). M-W cites an 1859 example: “The fryin-pan stunk with fat eels, and we all got fat and sassy.”

No TV for a week!

But it’s not a punishment. And in truth, it’s only cable news, not TV. It’s been no CNN or MSNBC for a week, and I feel fine.

I’ve tried it before: from November 8 to December 13, I watched no television news, save for an episode of the PBS NewsHour dedicated to Gwen Ifill. At some point the news went back on. I confess: I was a backslider, reading with CNN on in the background, watching The 11th Hour (at 10 Central) and feeling dread. And then I decided (again) — enough.

My eyes and ears are open and my head is nowhere near the sand: I am keeping up with the news by reading The New York Times and The Washington Post and listening to NPR. I’ve made the mistake of tuning in to cable news just twice, hitting 1-3-5 or 1-3-8 on the remote out of habit. Once I got someone saying “But it will never pass in the Senate.” And once I got a commercial. I don’t think I’ve missed much.

[I had already pretty much given up on the PBS NewsHour: it makes everything feel too normal.]

In extremis

Arthur Schnitzler, Fräulein Else. 1924. In Desire and Delusion: Three Novellas, trans. Margret Schaefer (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2003).

Schnitzler’s novella Lieutenant Gustl (1900) marks the first sustained use of interior monologue in European literature. Twenty-four years later, Fräulein Else takes the form of an interior monologue by a young woman who seeks to keep her debtor father from prison by approaching an old family friend for money. The friend has agreed, but has exacted a price.

Everything in this volume is desperation, suspicion, and madness. Highly recommended.

Also from Schnitzler
“Maestro!” : “A simple bourgeois home” : To Vienna by train

“Loser teachers”

In The Washington Post, three teachers, from Canada, the Netherlands, and the United States, respond to Donald Trump Jr.’s remarks about “loser teachers.” An excerpt:

In a stadium filled with people chanting “USA, USA,” the son of the president of the United States called for hostility toward teachers because of their so-called political leanings. This is a message you would expect in an authoritarian regime, not at a rally for the U.S. president. . . .

By working daily with young people, teachers are the stewards of the future. Whether Democratic or Republican, liberal or conservative, right, left, center, blue or red — seeing and reinforcing the value of a teacher should be a national pillar that rises high above partisan politics and cheap applause.

NYRB sale

New York Review Books has a half-off sale on selected books. I can vouch for Balzac, Gass, and Schnitzler.

Joe Friday and T.S.E.

From a New York Times review of Andrew McCabe’s The Threat: How the F.B.I. Protects America in the Age of Terror and Trump:

The first sentence demands to be read in the voice of Jack Webb from Dragnet: “Between the world of chaos and the world of order stands the rule of law.”

How about Joe Friday and T.S. Eliot? From “The Hollow Men”:

    Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow

[Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? The Shadow knows. And Robert Mueller.]

Today’s Saturday Stumper

Verb tenses are tricky with crosswords:

Today’s Newsday Saturday Stumper, by Brad Wilber, is difficult. There it is, sitting on the Newsday website.

Today’s Newsday Saturday Stumper, by Brad Wilber, was difficult. There it is, now solved.

My portal: 13-Down, nine letters, “What the UN overlooks.” And then I stumbled and stumbled, and stumbled some more.

Some excellent clues:

28-Across, twelve letters, “The bright orange tangor, for one.” A bird? No.

39-Across, five letters, “Big name in African dramatics.” I knew I knew it.

49-Across, four letters, “Pan’s close relative.” The answer baffled me up to the moment I typed the clue here.

33-Down, nine letters, “Learned.” Yep.

But I’m still baffled by the answer for 46-Down, six letters, “Indoor transportation system.” A little help?

No spoilers: the answers are in the comments.

An unexpected introduction

At a concert last night by Sinfonia da Camera, conducted by Ian Hobson, a man walked onstage to speak a bit about the composer John de Lacy Wooldridge (1919–1958). The orchestra was about to give the American premiere of Wooldridge’s Concerto for Orchestra and Oboe, with John Dee, soloist. The last words of the introduction:

“What you’re hearing is a young piece by a young man who happened to be my father.”

That introduction gave the music that followed — pastoral, sometimes playful — even greater emotional content.

[The speaker, who never gave his name, was Hugh Wooldridge.]

You don’t have to be a psychiatrist . . . .

Dunning-Kruger moment of the year, if you’re declaring a “national emergency”: “I didn’t need to do this.”