“Nearly everyone was”

Steve Hagen is trying to figure something out:


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

The movie (dir. John Farrow, 1948) is fun, but the novel is the real film noir.

Also from this novel
“The niece of a department store” : “Me? Dangerous?”

A joke in the traditional manner

This one’s from Elaine:

What’s the name of the Illinois town where dentists want to live?

No spoilers. The punchline is in the comments.

More jokes in the traditional manner
The Autobahn : Did you hear about the cow coloratura? : Did you hear about the thieving produce clerk? : Elementary school : A Golden Retriever : How did Bela Lugosi know what to expect? : How did Samuel Clemens do all his long-distance traveling? : How do amoebas communicate? : How do worms get to the supermarket? : Of all the songs in the Great American Songbook, which is the favorite of pirates? : What did the doctor tell his forgetful patient to do? : What did the plumber do when embarrassed? : What happens when a senior citizen visits a podiatrist? : What is the favorite toy of philosophers’ children? : What was the shepherd doing in the garden? : Where do amoebas golf? : Where does Paul Drake keep his hot tips? : Which member of the orchestra was best at handling money? : Why did the doctor spend his time helping injured squirrels? : Why did Oliver Hardy attempt a solo career in movies? : Why did the ophthalmologist and his wife split up? : Why does Marie Kondo never win at poker? : Why is the Fonz so cool? : Why was Santa Claus wandering the East Side of Manhattan?

[“In the traditional manner”: by or à la my dad. He gets credit for all but the cow coloratura, the produce clerk, the amoebas, the worms, the pirate song, the toy, the shepherd, Paul Drake, the squirrel-doctor, Marie Kondo, the Fonz, Santa Claus, and this one. My dad was making such jokes long before anyone called them “dad jokes.”]

“Me? Dangerous?”

George Stroud again. The beautiful stranger, who is no stranger, really, is Pauline Delos.


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

Also from this novel
“The niece of a department store”

Library history

“Today, even in an America that increasingly shuns all things public, people still love and need a good public library”: Ariel Aberg-Riger offers a short illustrated history of the American public library.

[Found via Fresca, l’astronave.]

No, it’s not a butter churn

At Oscar’s Day, George Bodmer dramatizes a supply-centric generation gap.

Stanley Donen (1924–2019)

Director of Royal Wedding and Funny Face and so many other films, co-director of On the Town and Singin’ in the Rain, Stanley Donen has died at the age of ninety-four. The New York Times has an obituary.

Our fambly was fortunate to see Stanley Donen with John Williams and the Boston Pops at Tanglewood some years ago. Donen introduced clips from his films, which played silently on a huge screen as the orchestra played the appropriate part of the score. We must have been at this 2005 concert, which also featured Josh Groban. I remember that there were many younger (and noisy) people in the audience.

Today’s Saturday Stumper

Today’s Newsday Saturday Stumper, by Matthew Sewell, has some fine pairs of clues and answers. Or at least fine by me:

31-Across, nine letters, “Dove.” You were thinking of birds, perhaps?

56-Across, ten letters, “They have defensive ends.”

11-Down, ten letters, “Bridge beam.” Thank you, Vertigo, for that answer.

13-Down, five letters, “Minor key.”

No spoilers: the answers are in the comments.

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.

A related post
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).]