“Fountain pen nostalgia”

[“Ink Piece.” Zippy, September 2, 2019.]

In today’s Zippy, Zippy and Griffy have been clicking their Bics. “What did people click before th’ Bic?” Zippy wants to know. And Griffy begins to explain fountain pens.

The Clic and Clic Stic are indeed Bic pens. I think though that flick, not click, is, or was, the more common (and vaguely lewd) rhyming verb — with Bic lighters, not pens.

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Nancy Valiant

[Nancy, September 2, 2019.]

In today’s Nancy, Olivia Jaimes explains that because it’s Labor Day, her editors have let her “take it easy” and create a strip in her “natural style.” I love it. Today’s strip tips the hat to both Prince Valiant and Ernie Bushmiller: Bushmiller had a number of strips in which he professed to be coasting — on New Year’s Day, 1949, for instance, he drew Nancy in a heavy snowstorm (white panel), Sluggo in a dark room (black panel), and Nancy and Sluggo in a dense fog (gray panel).

That’s an ice-cream cone, end bitten off, in Nancy’s hands. Her ice cream fell to the ground before today’s strip began.

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Labor Day

[“Locomotive lubrication chart in the laboratory of the Chicago and Northwestern Railroad. The laboratory assistant in foreground is working at a precision balance.” Photograph by Jack Delano. Chicago, Illinois, December 1942. From the Library of Congress Flickr pages. Click for a larger view.]

“What next?”

A young man prepares for a journey:


Adalbert Stifter, The Bachelors. 1850. Trans. from the German by David Bryer (London: Pushkin Press, 2008).

That dog is just one of the elements in this strange short novel that remind me of a silent movie. Moving from village life to a monastery on a remote island, The Bachelors is a Bildungsroman, a celebration of sublime nature, a story full of sentimentality and eerie melodrama. I can honestly say that I’ve never read anything like it. Out of print and highly recommended.

The war on spelling

“The president’s supporters don’t mind his linguistic slips, but lexicographers and grammarians worry about the permanent effect on language”: Bryan Garner and others offer their thoughts about the war on spelling (The New York Times).

But no one quoted in this piece mentions what seems to me to be obvious: that Donald Trump’s errors in spelling, grammar, and syntax suggest a lifetime as, to borrow Kanye West’s self-characterization, “a proud non-reader of books.”

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Donald Trump’s spelling : “Tapps” : When a “learning style” becomes an ignorance style

Today’s Saturday Stumper

Today’s Newsday Saturday Stumper, by Lester Ruff, looked difficult at first. I started with 50-A, seven letters, “Amadeus playwright,” which gave me a handful of words. And then I found myself reading clues that baffled: 19-A, six letters, “Tree-trunk descriptor”? 48-A, eight letters, “Eisenhower’s favorite author”? 66-A, five letters, “Word related to itself spelled backwards”? But a word here, a word there, and the puzzle proved to be not especially difficult, not especially rough. (Lester Ruff = less rough, at least usually.)

Three clues that I especially liked: 28-D, ten letters, “Collapsible?” 47-D, six letters, “Holler at home.” 64-A, eleven letters, “Makes waiters angry.” I don’t think I’ve heard the answer for that last clue since high school.

One awful pun — unless there’s a meaning I’ve missed: 3-D, four letters, “Man’s first name?” Man, that’s rough.

No spoilers: the answers are in the comments.

Valerie Harper (1939-2019)

The actress Valerie Harper, best known as the character Rhoda Morgenstern in The Mary Tyler Moore Show and Rhoda, has died at the age of eighty. The New York Times has an obituary.

I like what Harper is quoted as saying about Rhoda: “Rhoda, like most of us, was a victorious loser.”

Shimkus

My representative in Congress, John Shimkus (R, Illinois-15), has announced that he will not seek reelection. This is the same John Shimkus who has declared that we don’t need to worry about rising sea levels (because of a divine promise not to destroy the world with a flood), who has unwittingly — and favorably! — compared a Republican gubernatorial candidate to Benito Mussolini, who has wondered whether prenatal care should be part of the cost of men’s health insurance, who has called the separation of children from parents at the border an “unfortunate result” of a “broken immigration system,” whose response to a war of tariffs is to say “I’m just a legislator,” whose sole response to a mass shooting is to tweet that “Violence and hate are never the answer,” who fails to show up for debates, and who refuses to meet his constituents in town halls and advises fellow Republican members of Congress to do the same.

Good fucking riddance.

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[If you’re reading in a reader, you’ll most likely not see the point of the post title. There’s a line through the name: Shimkus.]

“Who takes what anyone says seriously anyway?”

His Grace the Imperial Liege-Count Leinsdorf is troubled by recent developments in the Parallel Campaign, the public-relations project to celebrate Austria and the Emperor Franz Joseph:


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

This dark passage is the last excerpt from The Man Without Qualities I’m posting. Now that our household has read what was published of the unfinished novel, we have twenty further chapters (withdrawn in galleys) and various drafts and fragments to go. Worth it? Yes.

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“What’s an ethos?”

General Stumm von Bordwehr just struggled with the idea of will. Now it’s ethos:


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

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