Homer and Cain

I was teaching the Odyssey. Odysseus was with the Phaeacians, and the students were skeptical about him, and lively in expressing their skepticism. It was Odysseus as Trump: an ancient who’ll tell any lie to get what he wants and who always displaces blame.

I had forgotten to introduce the epithet πολύτροπος [polytropos], “of many twists and turns,” from the poem’s first line, so I asked the students to turn back to the beginning of the poem. I quoted Robert Fitzgerald’s version of the epithet, “skilled in all ways of contending,” but I couldn’t find the words on the page. This translation began with a long prose passage, with the first lines of poetry appearing at the bottom of the second page. Was I using something other than Fitzgerald?

The class was supposed to end at 11:50, and it was now 12:10. No matter. No one was knocking at the door to get in, and no one in class showed any urgency to leave. But I had to get to another class.

But first Fred MacMurray came up to talk to me. He wouldn’t be in my next class today because he had to study for a grammar test, after which he wanted to talk to me about his dissertation. “Sure. Come by my office after my class,” I told him.

I walked to my next class, a small seminar, carrying a tall stack of books that included Roland Barthes’s Mythologies (the older orange-covered paperback). I was teaching a James M. Cain novel in this class, but which one? My copy had a binder clip marking where we had left off the week before. I hadn’t looked at the book since then, and now I was surprised to see that we had only four or five pages left. How was I going to get a class’s worth of discussion from that? I looked at the text but still couldn’t figure out which Cain novel I was teaching. I didn’t think to look at the cover.

A group of older women walked in, single file, to observe the class. One woman was blind and held the shoulder of the woman in front of her. The women all took seats in a long row at a table against the far wall. They wore dark suits and white blouses with high collars. They looked like members of a women’s organization from the 1930s. I still hadn’t figured out what novel I was supposed to be teaching.

[Some sources for this dream: seeing Fred MacMurray in The Caine Mutiny, thinking about books as armor, seeing Dorothy Neumann in an episode of Lassie. This is the fifteenth teaching-related dream I’ve had since retiring. The others: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, and 14.]

Books as armor

As a striving student in the late 1970s, I would take the 166 bus from New Jersey to Manhattan, walk downtown to the Strand Book Store, and make my way back to the Port Authority with two big shopping bags of books. The Strand then was mostly remainders and “review copies.” I found all kinds of academic remainders on the sale tables: a collection of essays on the metaphysical poets, studies of John Dryden, an anthology of selections from The Spectator (the 1711–1712 version). Shorter Novels: Elizabethan for $1.49? Sold!

In a post about an old Strand bookmark, I characterized this buying as a matter of Accumulation Mode. I realize now that it would be more accurate to say that I was in Armoring Mode: I was accumulating books as armor, as protection, as certification that I belonged in the academic world I aspired to enter. I didn’t wear my armor: it just sat on shelves at home, where it could come in handy as needed.

Of course I made no use of many of the odds and ends I bought at the Strand. But then again, I did.

Are books-as-armor a common experience for aspiring academics? For aspiring academics from working-class backgrounds? Asking for a friend.

[“Review copies”: widely understood to be a euphemism, as many were sold by enterprising editorial assistants on their lunch hour.]

Waving realism

[Nancy, November 9, 1949. Click for a larger view.]

I like the realism in today’s yesteryear’s Nancy. Earlier in the strip, a bottle of Hair Waving Lotion (For an Instant Wave) stood close to the edge of a living-room table. The bottle crashed and splashed when the cat’s tail hit it. In this final panel, we see the result. We all know that Hair Waving Lotion could never alter the appearance of tables, lamps, frames, vases, sills. But fringe, electrical cords, picture wire, tails, stems, shade pulls: why not?

Related reading
All OCA Nancy posts (Pinboard)

“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.]