Domestic comedy

“Did the museum send you the app for the subtitles?”

*

“Look at the color palette.”

Related reading
All OCA domestic comedy posts (Pinboard)

[People who wake up while watching TV say the darndest things. First item, during The Late Show. Second, Perry Mason.]

“Water of life”

From The Merriam-Webster New Book of Word Histories (1991):

Of the relatively few English words that have come from the Celtic languages, certainly one of the most common is whiskey. The Irish Gaelic uisce beathadh and Scots Gaelic uisge beatha, terms for certain distilled liquors made in those countries, can both be translated literally as “water of life.” Though whiskeybae and usquebaugh have both been used in English, the shorter whiskey (or whisky) is by far the most common form.

In sixteenth-century England aqua vitae, taken without change from the Medieval Latin phrase meaning “water of life,” first appears as a term for a distilled alcoholic drink, though as early as 1471 it had been used for medicinal alcohol. From the same Medieval Latin source comes Swedish, Danish, and Norwegian akvavit, which is used in English in the form aquavit as the name for a clear Scandinavian liquor flavored with caraway seeds. English has also borrowed the French translation of Latin aqua vitae in the font eau-de-vie as a term for brandy.

The name bourbon which designates some American whiskeys comes from the name of Bourbon County, Kentucky, where such whiskey was first made in the late eighteenth century.

Our household is three of four: we have aquavit (Aalborg, Linie), bourbon (Evan Williams, Traverse City), and Scotch (Ardbeg, Glenmorangie). And lots of wine. But no brandy. Scotch, by the way, is always whisky, no -e.

Our alcohol consumption has not increased since November 8, 2016, but our stockpiling has. Be Prepared.

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Whisky, hold the -e

[The Merriam-Webster New Book of Word Histories is wonderfully browsable.]

Victor Davis Hanson on Ajax, Achilles, and Trump

The New Yorker has an interview with Victor Davis Hanson, classicist, military historian, and Donald Trump supporter. The interview covers touches on many subjects in a short space: “anchor babies,” the travel ban, the statue-loving demonstrators in Charlottesville, Barack Obama’s birth certificate, and when it’s appropriate to mock a woman as unattractive: “There are certain women that may be homely,” Hanson declares. It’s like watching an interview from The Colbert Report.

And of course, Hanson talks about his forthcoming book, The Case for Trump, in which he likens Donald Trump, in passing, to the Greek heroes Achilles and Ajax. As he does in the interview:

“You have a neurotic hero [Ajax] who cannot get over the fact that he was by all standards the successor to Achilles and deserves Achilles’s armor, and yet he was outsmarted by this wily, lesser Odysseus, who rigged the contest and got the armor. All he does is say, ‘This wasn’t fair. I’m better. Doesn’t anybody know this?’ It’s true, but you want to say to Ajax, ‘Shut up and just take it.’ Achilles has elements of a tragic hero. He says, at the beginning of the Iliad, ‘I do all the work. I kill all the Trojans. But when it comes to assigning booty, you always give it to mediocrities — deep-state, administrative nothings.’ So he stalks off. And the gods tell him, ‘If you come back in, you will win fame, but you are going to end up dead.’ So he makes a tragic, heroic decision that he is going to do that.

“I think Trump really did think that there were certain problems and he had particular skills that he could solve. Maybe in a naïve fashion. But I think he understood, for all the emoluments-clause hysteria, that he wasn’t going to make a lot of money from it or be liked for it.”

These comparisons are bonkers. Let’s not forget: Trump, unlike Ajax, won the big prize, with, it seems, considerable help from outside actors who worked to rig the outcome — Russians, not Greeks. The Ajax of Sophocles’s tragedy Ajax (the work Hanson is referencing) does more than say “This wasn’t fair”: having planned to kill Agamemnon, Menelaus, and Odysseus, he is deluded by Athena into slaughtering cattle instead. And he then realizes what he has done: “Now I stand here / Disgraced.” What distinguishes Sophocles’s Ajax is his profound shame, an emotion Donald Trump seems incapable of feeling.

As for Achilles: he returns to battle out of a deep sense of loyalty to his beloved Patroclus, willing to sacrifice himself to avenge his comrade. Loyalty, self-sacrifice: further elements of human experience that seem foreign to Trump, except insofar as he demands them of others.

If Trump resembles anyone in the Iliad, it’s Agamemnon, the leader who is at a loss in a true crisis and claims Achilles’s prize of war (the enslaved Briseis) to assert his own greater authority. It’s the preening, self-aggrandizing Agamemnon who complains of fake news, dismissing the prophet Calchas’s explanation of a plague: “Not a single favorable omen ever!”

And it must be said: Ajax, Achilles, and even Agamemnon fight valiantly. None of them claimed to have bone spurs. The best comparison there would be to Odysseus, who feigned madness to avoid conscription. But once at Troy, he too fought valiantly.

In 2017 I wrote a post about Trump, Agamemnon, Oedipus, and Creon: We three kings. Or, really, one king and two tyrants.

Other related reading
All OCA Homer posts (Pinboard)

[Amazon’s Look Inside feature lets me see that the references to Ajax and Achilles are as cursory in Hanson’s book as they are in this interview. I’ve quoted from Peter Meineck’s translation of Ajax, in Four Tragedies (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2007), and Stanley Lombardo’s translation of the Iliad (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1997).]

“The niece of a department store”

George Stroud works in the magazine business. He and his wife Georgette are attending at a party at the residence of his boss Earl Janoth:


Kenneth Fearing, The Big Clock. 1946. (New York: New York Review Books, 2006).

Forty-two pages in, I’ll vouch for The Big Clock.

[George and Georgette’s daughter: Georgia. They all call each other George: “George said you’d tell me a story, George.” Just a tad surreal.]

A Mongol sighting

[Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? (dir. Robert Aldrich, 1962). Click for a larger view.]

Anna Lee, as the next-door neighbor Mrs. Bates, holds a Mongol pencil. The ferrule is the tell-tale sign.

From childhood’s hour, the Mongol has been my favorite pencil.

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All OCA Mongol posts (Pinboard)

Distances

”You’ll laugh, you’ll be moved, and you’ll come away with new ways to approach your work and put research into practice. You’ll meet people who can help your career thrive”: from a website for a conference about (so-called) distance learning. There are many such conferences.

Strange that those who extol distance learning should extol the benefits of meeting in real space to talk shop. For students: online classes. For us: travel money and conferences. Let them eat Internets!

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Haircuts, the gold standard, and everyone else

Frozen heads

Lately our deck has been dry, sodden, or covered in snow. But this morning: frozen nailheads.

“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.]