Beginning to draw

Esi Edugyan, Washington Black (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2018).

Our son Ben recommended this novel to us. (Thank you, Ben!) Washington Black draws upon slave narratives, the Bildungsroman, magical realism, Charles Dickens, Jules Verne, Mark Twain, Ralph Ellison, and Toni Morrison to create a story of self-discovery, of scientific discovery, of friendship and the limits of friendship. George Washington Black, Wash, the novel’s narrator, begins life as an enslaved child on a plantation in Barbados. Christopher Wilde, Titch, inventor and naturalist, is the plantation owner’s brother.

For me, the novel’s one weakness is its reliance upon figures of speech that seem out of place in a nineteenth-century narrative: “like a thread of music,” “like thread on the landscape,” “like a thread of poison poured into a well,” And so on. Those figures will just disappear when Washington Black is adapted for television.

It is, by the way, great fun to read a novel, say it should become a movie, and then learn that it will. Get me Sir Ian McKellen’s agent on the phone. I see McKellen as Titch’s father James.

*

11:05 a.m.: Elaine mentioned “orange.” How did I forget “orange”? “The weak orange light,” “the orange light of the lantern,” “a low orange glow,” “a smoky orange warmth.” And so on. Here’s where an editor could point out that such repetitions might weaken the prose by distracting the reader.

Long-distance access codes

My mom was puzzled: she usually uses a cellphone, and when she tried to call us on her landline she heard a recorded message telling her that she needed a long-distance access code. Strange, especially because she can use her landline to call other numbers that require an area code, but not our number.

Explanation: the other numbers are neither local nor long-distance. They’re “regional.”

But what’s a long-distance access code? The Internets, too, have asked this question. I searched the phone company’s website — no answer.

So I volunteered to call the phone company in search of an access code. The person I spoke with had no idea what I was asking about. But while on hold I found a useful page: Long-distance carrier identification code search. It turns out that long-distance access codes are seven digits long and begin with “101.” You can search by company for an appropriate code.

An unlimited long-distance calling plan for a landline makes no economic sense, so it’s good to know that it’s still possible, when necessary, to make a one-off landline call with an access code. And it’s telling, I think, that this much-sought-after information is missing from the phone company’s website. Just sign up for the unlimited plan, right?

[“The phone company”: yes, straight out of the dowdy world.]

From A.H. Sidgwick

Elaine and I were both struck by this passage, describing the look and feel of clothes and gear during and after a several-days walk:

Boots have grown limp: clothes have settled into natural skin-like rumples: the stick is warm and smooth to our touch: the map slips easily in and out of the pocket, lucubrated by dog’s-ears: every article in the knapsack has found its natural place, and the whole has settled on to our shoulders as its home. The equipment is no longer an external armour of which we are conscious: it is part of ourselves that has come through the combat with us, and is indissolubly linked with its memories. At the start this coat was a glorious thing to face the world in: now it is merely an outer skin. At the start this stick was mine: now it is myself.

When it is all over the coat will go back to the cupboard and the curved suspensor, and the shirts and stockings will go to the wash, to resume conventional form and texture, and take their place in the humdrum world. But the stick will stand in the corner unchanged, with mellowed memories of the miles we went together, with every dent upon it recalling the austerities of the high hills, and every tear in its bark reminding me of the rocks of the Gable and Bowfell. And in the darkest hours of urban depression I will sometimes take out that dog’s-eared map and dream awhile of more spacious days; and perhaps a dried blade of grass will fall out of it to remind me that once I was a free man on the hills, and sang the Seventh Symphony to the sheep on Wetherlam.

A.H. Sidgwick, “Walking Equipment,” in Walking Essays (London: Edward Arnold, 1912).

We found a shorter, carelessly transcribed version of this passage in Beneath My Feet: Writers on Walking, ed. Duncan Minshull (Cumbria: Notting Hill Editions, 2018). That led us to the original, available from the Internet Archive.

Here is a brief biography of Arthur Hugh Sidgwick (1882–1917). And here is what Elaine has written about this passage.

Related reading
All OCA walking posts (Pinboard)

[“Curved suspensor”: my guess is a hanger. The Gable, Bowfell, Wetherlam: hills in England’s Lake District.]

“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.

Related reading
All OCA Zippy posts (Pinboard)

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.

Related reading
All OCA Nancy posts (Pinboard)

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.”

Related posts
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.”