Committee life

Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities. 1930–1943. Trans. Sophie Wilkins (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995).

Related reading
All OCA Robert Musil posts (Pinboard)

Fake rocks

[“Bushmiller in the Side Pocket.” July 10, 2019.]

Zippy tests these wannabes by asking them if his shoes are styrofoam or penny loafers. One responds by asking Zippy if he wants to play pool. And another admits, “You got us, Zippy! We’re just fake news!”

Venn reading
All OCA Nancy posts : Nancy and Zippy posts : Zippy posts (Pinboard)

[You can read Bill Griffith’s Zippy every day at Comics Kingdom or Seattlepi.com. Or read both and compare!]

E.B. Proust

E.B. White’s observations on style in writing are remarkably close to Marcel Proust’s. White, in The Elements of Style (1959):

Young writers often suppose that style is a garnish for the meat of prose, a sauce by which a dull dish is made palatable. Style has no such separate entity; it is nondetachable, unfilterable.

Not an embellishment, says Proust. Not a garnish, says White.

On Proust’s birthday

Marcel Proust was born on July 10, 1871.

“Style is not at all an embellishment as certain people think, it is not even a matter of technique, it is — like colour with painters — a quality of vision, the revelation of the private universe that each one of us can see and which others cannot see. The pleasure an artist affords us is to introduce us to one universe the more.”

“Swann Explained by Proust.” 1913. In Days of Reading, trans. John Sturrock (New York: Penguin, 2008).

Related reading
All OCA Proust posts (Pinboard)

“Patently deficient”

From The Washington Post: “A federal judge in New York on Tuesday denied a bid from the Justice Department to replace the team of lawyers on the case about the census citizenship question, writing that its request to do so was ‘patently deficient.’”

Patently Deficient : a book title of the future?

Not “home”

It’s startling to see a The New York Times article refer to Jeffrey Epstein’s 71st Street mansion as a “home.” Just one sample:

The townhouse where the financier Jeffrey Epstein is accused of engaging in sex acts with underage girls is one of the largest private homes in Manhattan, a short walk from Central Park.

No, it’s one of the largest private residences in Manhattan. The article I’ve quoted from calls this building a “home” ten times. The article also calls Epstein’s residence in Palm Beach a “home.”

As Garner’s Modern English Usage notes, “In the best usage, the structure is always called a house.” And: “The word home connotes familial ties.” To apply the word to a structure is a tacky realtor move. To apply the word to structures given over to sexual exploitation and trafficking is beyond grotesque.

Epstein is now living in a new “home,” larger but also much smaller than 9 E. 71st Street. If he’s denied bail and found guilty, he’ll be in that new “home” (aka “the big house”) for quite some time. Here’s hoping.

Related posts
Houses, homes, legs, limbs : “Nine homes”

Word of the day: obbligato

The word of the day, or of my day, because I just learned all about the word’s origins, is obbligato.

As an adjective, used as a direction in music: “not to be omitted : obligatory.” As a noun: “an elaborate especially melodic part accompanying a solo or principal melody and usually played by a single instrument.” The adjective came first, in 1740: “borrowed from Italian, ‘obligatory, essential to a musical composition,’ from past participle of obbligare “to require (someone to do something), oblige,” going back to the Latin obligāre. The noun came along in 1825.

An obbligato is not ad libitum, “omissible according to a performer's wishes.” A performer has an obligation to the obbligato. And who knew that ad lib is a short form of ad libitum, an adverb (1606) and adjective (1786) meaning (as it did in medieval Latin) “in accordance with one’s wishes.” The idea of spontaneous performance came later, in the adjective ad-lib (1819) and the verb ad lib (1910).

Not all obbligatos are a matter of obedience to notation. In improvised music, an obbligato — say, a Lester Young obbligato behind Bille Holiday — might very well be ad libbed. And beautiful.

[Definitions and etymologies from Merriam-Webster. “A Sailboat in the Moonlight” (Carmen Lombardo–John Jacob Loeb): Billie Holiday and Her Orchestra: Buck Clayton, trumpet; Edmond Hall, clarinet; Lester Young, tenor sax; James Sherman, piano; Freddie Green, guitar; Walter Page, bass; Jo Jones, drums. Recorded in New York, June 15, 1937.]

Pocket notebook sighting

[Click for a much larger view.]

From “Chapter Four: The Sauna Test,” the fourth episode of the new third season of Stranger Things. Joyce Byers (Winona Ryder) consults her pocket notebook as she and Jim Hopper (David Harbour) check out several properties. No spoiler in that sentence, honest.

More notebook sightings
Angels with Dirty Faces : Ball of Fire : The Big Clock : The Brasher Doubloon : Cat People : City Girl : Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne : Dead End : Dragnet : Extras : Eyes in the Night : Foreign Correspondent : Fury : Homicide : The Honeymooners : The House on 92nd Street : Journal d’un curé de campagne : Kid Glove Killer : The Last Laugh : Le Million : The Lodger : Ministry of Fear : Mr. Holmes : Murder at the Vanities : Murder by Contract : Murder, Inc. : The Mystery of the Wax Museum : Naked City : The Naked Edge : The Palm Beach Story : Perry Mason : Pickpocket : Pickup on South Street : Pushover : Quai des Orfèvres : The Racket : Railroaded! : Red-Headed Woman : Rififi : La roue : Route 66 : The Small Back Room : The Sopranos : Spellbound : Stage Fright : State Fair : A Stranger in Town : Time Table : T-Men : 20th Century Women : Union Station : Walk East on Beacon! : Where the Sidewalk Ends : The Woman in the Window : You Only Live Once

Chock full o’Things

[Click for a much larger view.]

Maxwell House, sure. But a can of Chock full o’Nuts in small-town Indiana? In 1985? Well, maybe. This can appears in “Chapter One: Suzie, Do You Copy,” the opening episode of the new (third) season of Stranger Things. The can sits on a shelf in Joyce Byers’s house.

Stranger Things is Chock full o’Things. It is utterly satisfying television — that is, if a streaming series counts as “television.”

Previously on Stranger Things: the World Book Encyclopedia.

Puzzled about nepenthe

An answer in this morning’s Weekend Edition Sunday Puzzle, “Power of the Pen,” started me thinking. Will Shortz’s puzzle asked for words containing the accented syllable pen. Terrific? StuPENdous. Got it.

The word that started me thinking: nepenthe, which Shortz clued as “drug of forgetfulness in the Odyssey.” The word in the Odyssey is νηπενθής [nēpenthes] which means “banishing pain and sorrow.” The word joins νη- [nē-], meaning “not,” and πένθος [penthos], meaning “grief, sorrow.” The word νηπενθής appears in Odyssey 4, line 221, where it describes a substance that Helen places in the wine as her husband Menelaus, Odysseus’s son Telemachus, and Nestor’s son Peisistratus weep for the lives lost in the Trojan War. What Helen places in the wine though is a drug: a φάρμακον [pharmakon].

Today’s contestant, who said he’d read the Odyssey, did not know nepenthe. Nor did it come to my mind as the name of a substance. The drugs named in the Odyssey are magical plants: lotus and moly. None of the Big Four translations of the Odyssey include nepenthe as a name:

Robert Fitzgerald (1961): Helen drops into the wine “an anodyne, mild magic of forgetfulness.”

Richmond Lattimore (1967): Helen casts into the wine “a medicine / of heartsease, free of gall, to make one forget all sorrows.” (Hearts ease, or heart’s ease, is a traditional medicinal flower.)

Robert Fagles (1996): Helen slips in “a drug, heart’s-ease, dissolving anger, / magic to make us forget all our pains.”

Stanley Lombardo (2000): Helen throws into the wine “a drug / That stilled all pain, quieted all anger, / And brought forgetfulness of every ill.”

How did nepenthe make its way into today’s Sunday Puzzle? My guess is that Will Shortz has many lists of words, searchable in many ways, and thus found this word. I suspect that what’s at work here is the kind of out-of-one’s-element moment that turned Mel Tormé into a “cool jazz pioneer.” I doubt that someone better acquainted with the Odyssey would have chosen nepenthe for today’s puzzle. But I could be wrong.

Related reading
All OCA Homer posts (Pinboard)

[The Big Four: my term for recent American translators of both the Iliad and the Odyssey. I’ll add that nepenthe does not appear in Peter Green’s and Emily Wilson’s 2018 translations of the Odyssey. In writing this post I relied upon the Perseus Digital Library’s text of Lidell and Scott’s A Greek–English Lexicon.]