My uncle Perry

L—d! The Perry Mason episode “The Case of the Bogus Books” (first aired September 27, 1962) centers on a spurious first edition of Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy. And who reveals that he’s a Sterne fan? Mason himself.

Related reading
All OCA Sterne posts (Pinboard)

Poverty and college applications

In The New York Times, Enoch Jemmett, a senior at Queens College, writes about the difficulties of applying to college as a student living in poverty. An excerpt:

We all knew of the SAT, for instance, but had no concrete idea of how to prepare for it. We knew that you had to apply to college, and for financial aid, but didn’t know the necessary or “smart” steps. When you’re 17, and pretty much doing it all on your own, the sight of all the hurdles you have to jump can be demoralizing, even paralyzing.

Jemmett is one of three students profiled in a forthcoming documentary about students in poverty navigating college admissions, Personal Statement.

Brunswick Sardines

From the CBC series We Are the Best, the story of Brunswick Sardines. The French and the Portuguese might have something to say about the assertion that Canadian sardines are the best. But I have no skin (or skinless and boneless) in this game: the sardines I buy hail from Morocco.

Thanks to Martha, The Crow, fellow sardinista, for sharing this link.

Related reading All OCA sardine posts (Pinboard)

Ranking Roger (1963–2019)

Ranking Roger, Roger Charlery, singer with The Beat (aka The English Beat) and related groups, has died at the age of fifty-six. The New York Times has an obituary.

I was a big fan of The Beat in my youth. I swear — this past Tuesday, I wondered, out of nowhere, Whatever became of Ranking Roger? His death is a shock.

Three of my favorite Beat recordings: “Jackpot”, “The Limits We Set,” and “Whine & Grine / Stand Down Margaret.” And here’s a short set from the Beat in concert, September 26, 1980 at the Capitol Theatre in Passaic, New Jersey.

[I saw the Mahavishnu Orchestra at the Capitol Theatre in — 1974? Time blurs. Still the loudest music I’ve ever heard.]

Punctuation in the news

The Blast (whatever that is) reports that Olivia Jade Giannulli risks having her trademark applications rejected because of poor punctuation. “Proper punctuation in identifications is necessary to delineate explicitly each product or service within a list and to avoid ambiguity,” says the United States Patent and Trademark Office. And: “Commas, semicolons, and apostrophes are the only punctuation that should be used.”

But look at this sentence from The Blast itself:

Officials from the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office claim Olivia Jade’s applications for “make up kits” with “moisturizer” and “concealer” is too broad and needs to be specified.

Agr, I would have to scrawl in the margin. Or, if I were in a more expansive mood, s-v agr.

March 28: People has the problem-punctuation passage:

make up kits comprised of moisturizer, primer, concealer, foundation, make-up powder, make-up pencils, eye make-up, eyeshadow, eye liner, mascara, blush, highlighter, bronzer, make-up setting spray lipstick lip gloss, lip stains, make-up remover.

[Olivia Jade Giannulli: daughter of Lori Loughlin and Mossimo Giannulli, sister of Isabella Giannulli, all caught in the recent college-admissions scandal.]

No more Butcher’s Crossing

Our household’s two-person Four Seasons Reading Club sometimes finds it necessary to leave a book unfinished. So it is with John Williams’s 1960 novel Butcher’s Crossing. We never made it out of the third chapter. By page 24 I began to tire of Williams’s approach to narrative:

In the darkness he walked across his room to the small table, which was outlined dimly beside the window. He found a match on the table and lit the lamp beside the washbasin. In the mirror his face was a sharp contrast of yellow brightness and dark shadow. He put his hands in the lukewarm water of the basin and rinsed his face.

Hemingwayesque, perhaps, but these actions, unlike, say, those of Nick Adams in “Big Two-Hearted River,” are inconsequential. There’s nothing behind them, at least not that I can see: everything in the novel is described with the same tedious exactness. And the writing — dimly, sharp contrast, dark shadow, of the basin — is kinda slack.

By page 27, I was squirming at the description of a character’s skin as “slightly yellowed and cured like smooth leather.” Yep, they’re going to go after buffalo. But it was a passage on page 30 that made me quit:

The sight of the whisky had calmed Charley Hoge; he took the glass in his hand and drank rapidly, his head thrown back and his Adam’s apple running like a small animal beneath the gray fur of his bearded throat.

That overwrought simile. And the narrator refers to this character by both first and last names every time he’s mentioned. Elaine, too, reached her limit on page 30, with a bit of corny dialogue about “whores”:

“Some of them even get married; make right good wives, I hear, for them that want wives.”

Them that want right good reading might look to Williams’s Stoner. But this novel of life out west, where men are men, and women are whores, and Adam’s apples run like small animals, isn’t it.

[John Williams’s four novels are now all available from NYRB.]

“A worm in the cheese”

The rector of the Church of Sant’Anna is explaining things to Professor Laurana:


Leonardo Sciascia, To Each His Own. 1968. Trans. Adrienne Foulke. (New York: New York Review Books, 2000).

To Each His Own is the second work of Sciascia’s I’ve read. It’s a terrific novel, tracing the efforts of high-school teacher Paolo Laurana to piece together clues related to a death threat and double murder. Even when the killer’s identity begins to feel certain, the ultimate ending remains a surprise. The greatest pleasures of the novel come in its scenes of conversation, with commentary on aesthetics, ethics, literary history, philosophy, politics, religion, and Sicilian life. Another NYRB find!

A related post
From The Day of the Owl

‎Seashore at the App Store

Seashore, an excellent free image-editor for the Mac, has moved from SourceForge to the App Store. Now works with the most recent versions of macOS, including Mojave.

“Bill Barr’s Weasel Words”

“For now, all we have is the letter. And it doesn’t show that Trump is innocent of collusion or obstruction. It shows that collusion and obstruction were defined to exclude what he did”: from “Bill Barr’s Weasel Words,” a deft display of close reading by William Saletan (Slate).

Hudson Yards and the Grand Cosmo

Writing in The New Yorker, Alexandra Schwartz likens Manhattan’s Hudson Yards to “an amenity-stuffed Hotel California that its residents never have to leave. . . . The only thing that Hudson Yards is missing is its own weather.”

A Manhattan model for Hudson Yards can be found in Steven Millhauser’s novel Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American Dreamer. Starting as a boy working in his father’s cigar store, Martin rises “to a height of dreamlike good fortune” as a builder of hotels. His final achievement is the Grand Cosmo, which opens in 1905. It’s a strange place: “people didn't know exactly what it was.” Promoting it is a challenge, as Martin has placed a significant restriction on the work of his advertising genius Harwinton:


Steven Millhauser, Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American Dreamer (New York: Vintage, 1996).

“A complete and self-sufficient world”: Hudson Yards advertises itself as a place to live, shop, work, and dine. (Not eat.) There’s even, as Schwartz notes, a hot-dog stand in what the developer calls “the neighborhood of the future.” I suppose you can dine on hot dogs if you’re a tourist in the neighborhood.

I expect that someday I’ll visit New York and everything I love about the city will have been obliterated. All that will be left: a theme park whose price of admission I cannot — and would not want to be able to — afford.