“A night in October”

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

Musil’s style is built on metaphor. Here the tenor and vehicle, or ground and figure, switch places.

Related reading
All OCA Musil posts (Pinboard)

Branding amok

The Ohio State University has filed a trademark application for the word the.

Doublethink

Donald Trump has claimed, many times, that China is paying the United States “billions of dollars” in tariffs. But now, as reported by The New York Times:

The Trump administration on Tuesday narrowed the list of Chinese products it plans to impose new tariffs on as of Sept. 1, delaying levies on cellphones, laptop computers, toys and other goods to spare shoppers from higher prices during the back-to-school and holiday seasons. . . .

“We’re doing this for the Christmas season,” [Trump] told reporters around noon. “Just in case some of the tariffs would have an impact on U.S. customers.”

Just in case. So China pays tariffs, but tariffs need to be delayed because to impose them would raise prices for American consumers. So who’s paying tariffs?

A related post
Don’t know much about an economics book

Fifty blog-description lines

Google’s Blogger calls the line that sits below a blog title the “blog description line.” I’ve added a hyphen. For years, the first words of Van Dyke Parks’s “Orange Crate Art” were this blog’s line: “Orange crate art was a place to start.” In May 2010, I began to vary the line, using a word, phrase, or sentence from a recent post. And just for fun, I began keeping saving the lines. I think of them as little bits of found poetry. Here are the fifty most recent blog-description lines:

“To cause passers to stop in wonder”
“Goes with almost anything”
“Does anything really matter when you’re this small?”
“Whom are we kidding?”
“No barista”
“Principiis obsta”
“Not unaware”
“How did that happen?”
“Employees Only”
“I take refuge in prose”
“Are those Tater Tots on top?”
“What time was all that?”
“Small town, car, screen”
“This is a most involved subject”
“Herewith”
“Uh, no”
“‘I told you — I was in Las Vegas!’”
“Missing strawberries”
“Years of dependency of computers”
“All in there, in shorthand”
“Almost everything”
“Of great utility”
“Slow Reading”
“A home entertainment system”
“Kinda sorta maybe”
“More and less locally”
“Goodbye, FilmStruck”
“The how manyth time”
“Begins in delight and ends in __”
“Research and creative activity”
“Yay!”
“Non-careerist”
“No open refrigerators”
“BAGS TO RAGE”
“A whole cup of coffee for myself!”
“La vida es como la espuma, por eso hay que darse como el mar”
“Look at the color palette”
“It's automatic”
“Just scribble it all out and add a label”
“Involuntary memory meets the slot-car craze”
“With mustard!”
“You take yourself along”
“Shmoop-proof”
“Troublesome grounds”
“Bah bah, bah bah, bah bah bah”
“Onymous”
“As if a person had suddenly materialized”
“One small room, with minimal explanation”
“Carhartt pants, Carhartt hat, Carhartt logo front and bat”
“‘Actually,’ I said, ‘I’m a pretty serious person.’”

Collect them all!
Two hundred blog-description lines : Fifty more : And fifty more : But wait — there’s more : Another fifty

Dozer

Dozer, a free app for macOS, hides one or more or nearly all menu bar icons. (The Notifications icon doesn’t budge.) Follow the directions on the download page to select icons for hiding. Then click on the Dozer dot in the menu bar to show or hide icons. Yes, irony: an app designed to hide menu bar icons adds an icon of its own to the menu bar. You can also use a keyboard shortcut to show or hide.

In my experience, Dozer is solid — a much more reliable app than the free app Vanilla, which again and again makes parts of my Safari menu bar disappear. I give Dozer the Orange Crate Art seal of approval.

*

August 20: An update makes Dozer better still, with options to hide menu bar icons automatically, hide the Dozer menu bar icon, and show and hide less frequently used menu bar icons.

Thanks to Morten, the developer, for a great free app.

[I want to write menu-bar icons, but according to the Apple Style Guide, it’s menu bar icons.]

Nick Walusko (1960–2019)

Nick Walusko, aka Nicky Wonder, cofounder of the Wondermints and longtime guitarist with Brian Wilson, has died at the age of fifty-nine. Too soon. Too soon. Rolling Stone has a brief obituary.

I was fortunate to see Nicky Wonder with Brian Wilson in 1999 (the Pet Sounds tour) and 2004 (the Smile tour). The music of the spheres, or at least some of it. Here’s Wonder doing the guitar solo on “Pet Sounds.” And it’s Wonder, by the way, who, on “Heroes and Villains,” shouts “You’re under arrest!”

New Proust

Some Marcel Proust news in The Guardian:

Nine lost stories by Marcel Proust, which the revered French author is believed to have kept private because of their “audacity,” are due to be published for the first time this autumn.

Touching on themes of homosexuality, the stories were written by Proust during the 1890s, when he was in his 20s and putting together the collection of poems and short stories that would become Plaisirs et les jours [Pleasures and Days]. He decided not to include them.

The title of the forthcoming volume: Le Mystérieux Correspondant. A translation, I trust, will arrive.

Related reading
All OCA Proust posts (Pinboard)

[“Audacity” is a characterization offered by the volume’s editor.]

e-Salinger

Some J.D. Salinger news in The New York Times:

This week, in the first step of a broader revival that could reshape the world’s understanding of Salinger and his writing, Little, Brown is publishing digital editions of his four books, making him perhaps the last 20th-century literary icon to surrender to the digital revolution.

Related reading
All OCA Salinger posts (Pinboard)

Word of the day: flea-bane

Elaine and I went on a walk not long ago, following the paths through a ten-acre wildflower-covered prairie (“Savanna,” someone corrected) on the property of friends who live out in the country. Way out in the country. Our guide would pause every so often to point to and talk about a plant or tree or some change in the natural world. Many of the people on this walk are as knowledgeable as our guide is: they know the Latin and common names of countless species. I know a small number of flowers, mostly from literature — gentians, daffodils, sunflowers, Queen Anne’s lace, black-eyed Susans. I didn’t see any daffodils on our walk. I did see lots of Queen Anne’s lace. It occurred to me at one point that I must resemble a person for whom most of the paintings in a museum register only as “art” and “more art”: I saw mostly “flowers,” and “more flowers.” But I still found this walk through nature a beautiful, restorative experience. And because I asked about one tiny flower I’ve seen many times in town, I brought back a word: flea-bane. The Oxford English Dictionary defines it as

a name given to various plants: esp.

a. A book-name for the genus Inula (or Pulicaria), esp. Inula dysenterica and I. Pulicaria.

b. A book-name for the genus Erigeron, esp. E. acre (called also blue fleabane).

c. Applied to Plantago Psyllium (from the appearance of the seed).

The dictionary’s first citation for flea-bane is from William Turner’s Names of Herbes (1548): “Coniza maye be called in englishe Flebayne.” Yes, Conyza is yet another (Latin) name for flea-bane. And yes, Inula dysenterica was used to treat dysentery.

Out on the prairie, I was already wondering if flea-bane is trouble for fleas. And indeed, the dictionary’s second citation confirms it. From Thomas Hill’s Arte Gardening (1593): “The Gnats also be . . . chased away with the decoction of the herbe named Flebane, sprinckled on the beds.” And here’s a page of botanical lore that describes flea-bane being burned to repel fleas and other insects. Flea-bane, bane of fleas!

Back in the OED, the word flea has since 700 signified “a small wingless insect (or genus of insects, Pulex, the common flea being P. irritans), well known for its biting propensities and its agility in leaping; it feeds on the blood of man and of some other animals.” From Geoffrey Chaucer, The Manciple’s Prologue (c. 1386): “Hast thou had fleen al night or artow dronke?”

And sometime before 800, bane signified “a slayer or murderer; one who causes the death or destruction of another.” By 1398 the word meant “poison” and was joined to other words to name poisonous plants or substances. For instance, wolf’s bane or wolfbane. (As in vampire movies, right?)

I did not get a photograph of the prairie’s flea-bane: I was too busy seeing. But here’s a particularly good photograph of some other flea-bane, via Wikipedia.

And here, to provide a stately ending to this post, is an observation Elaine and I just encountered in a little anthology of writing about walking. From Richard Jeffries, Nature Near London (1905): “It is not only what you actually see along the path, but what you remember to have seen, that gives it its beauty.” I remember flea-bane.

See also Verlyn Klinkenborg’s account of “deep taxonomic yearning.” And thanks to Stefan Hagemann for reminding me of the Klinkenborg passage.

Further reading
Savanna vs. prairie

Imaginary Bedminster

It’s been many hours without a presidential tweet. I shall imagine the scene at Bedminster after yesterday’s NYT-North Korea-Maher-China-Clinton-Epstein-conspiracy-Biden-Mooch frenzy. A doctor (straight from central casting) turns to the First Lady:

“I’ve given him something that will help him sleep.”

The doctor picks up the presidential phone, walks to the far end of the bedroom, removes a decorative book or two from a shelf, places the phone in the gap, and returns the books to their places.

“He’ll never find it there.”